1）Objectives/areas of interest

The opportunity of spending a month in residence at AIT came through SOMA, an independent artist-run school in Mexico City with which I am quite involved.

Besides the impact that the residency would have on my personal process, the most important thing during the month that I spent in Tokyo was to try to understand the context and set the conditions that would allow for a steady residency exchange for artists between SOMA in Mexico and AIT in Japan.

2）Activities during your stay

During my residency I had the opportunity of visiting Kyoto to meet the people involved in Hanare (Social Kitchen), as well as undertaking independent travel to Nagasaki for research, where I visited Dejima and Gunkanjima to do extensive filming and photographic work for an upcoming project on the emotional impact of ruins.

Furthermore, I had the chance to spend time working directly with curator Yukiko Shikata on the preparation for the exhibition "Money after Money | Credit Game 2013," for which I participated in the project time/bank that took place in Tokyo a few months after I completed my residency.

3）'This is a Geography Lesson' Discussion and Workshop

Day 1: The purpose of the two day event was to have an exchange with Japanese artists and curators, leading towards the development of a potential residency exchange. It was quite interesting to see cultural tropes in operation during the conversation, and it gave us a chance to understand how the art system is structured in japan.

Day 2: The second day was less of a workshop, and more of an exchange. Laureana Toledo and myself had decided to cook a meal for a large group of people (approximately 20 guests) - the idea being that we would close off our residency in a rather informal way. There was something which I considered a very illuminating moment, which made very tangible the issues of cultural translation that we had tried to highlight in the previous day's conversation. In order to prepare guacamole, which is a typical Mexican dish, we needed to get some coriander, so Laureana went to the supermarket to buy some. She came back with a closed package containing an herb that looked exactly like coriander - but ended up being something entirely different: a distinctively Japanese ingredient, which in our eyes, looked like something distinctively Mexican.

4）Outcomes from your residency

At the moment, I am still processing the material that I gathered during the month I spent in Japan. I plan on including the photo and video recordings from Gunkanjima in an upcoming project.