A Conversation With
César García-Alvarez

interview JORGE PEREZCHICA

Born in Mexico and based in LA, César García-Alvarez is the Founder and current Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room (TMR)—LA’s international non-profit contemporary art space. In 2020, García-Alvarez joins returning Artistic Director Neville Wakefield as co-curator for the third edition of Desert X in the Coachella Valley. The international art exhibition will activate California’s desert landscape through site-responsive installations by renowned international contemporary artists.

The biennial exhibition, which is free and open to all, has garnered international and critical acclaim. In 2019, Desert X attracted a global audience who made site visits totaling more than 400,000. 

Ahead of the opening, Coachella Magazine connected with García-Alvarez to discuss an array of topics from planing to meeting artists, conveying Coachella Valley’s history, art in a post COVID-19 world and more.

Tell us about your experience researching the desert region for Desert X 2021.
I love the Coachella Valley. It is such a special place and that is largely because of the people who call it home. Over the past few months I’ve been committed to doing mostly one  thing—listen. I have been meeting with artists, art institutions, community organizations, and as many residents and stakeholders as I can in order to gain a deeper understanding of the Valley and all of its complexities. These conversations have been more than informational, they’ve been inspiring and at times even challenging but that is the nature of organizing an exhibition like Desert X. What the team, my co-curator and I are doing is reflecting on how the next edition of Desert X can be more meaningfully connected to the context in which it happens while also being responsive to our global moment and that is an exciting process.

Is there anything specific about the desert’s history and local art scene that attracted you to Desert X?
I was born in Mexicali and grew up visiting family that still lives in the Coachella Valley. This region is more than a natural landscape, it is a series of overlapping histories, cultures, and communities. It is first and foremost tribal land and acknowledging that as we work on this project is very important to us. It is also a border region that for many immigrants, like myself, is bound to stories of displacement and generational trauma. It is a focal point in the history of modernist architecture, a locale of retreat and retirement, a space of healing, but also a terrain of economic inequality and marginalization for many, particularly, people of color. The desert is many things, and that attracted me to this project, because I want to make sure that we can convey that and move beyond the few specific perceptions of this place that most people have.

How is Desert X different from other work that you’ve done in the past?
I’ve always gravitated toward unconventional contexts and platforms. My career started at an alternative art space where I got to develop a public art program and then I went on to organize exhibitions and large-scale projects in Egypt, Mexico, the Pacific, and Europe that tried to push what an exhibition could be. That’s the connecting thread in a lot of my work. What is different about Desert X in relationship to my previous work is that its audience is vastly different. On the one hand, you have artists and art enthusiasts but also a broad, diverse general public that perhaps is not as tuned into the contemporary art scene. So there is a populist dimension to the project that makes this an interesting challenge—trying to commission works that speak in tongues in a way; that can communicate to a multiplicity of viewers.

What can you tell us about the upcoming portfolio reviews with members of the Desert X curatorial team
These portfolio reviews are part of our ongoing research to try to get better acquainted with the cultural scene of the Coachella Valley. In casting a wider net and inviting people to sign up for reviews, we hope to perhaps begin to tease out common areas of interest among artists and cultural makers in the region that give us more of an understanding of what is happening creatively here. I’m very much looking forward to meeting more artists from the Coachella Valley.

For local artists interested in participating in Desert X 2021, what are some qualities you look for?
There’s no rubric of qualities that I look for. What I can say is that I’m interested in practices that have a sense of being both from/of a place and worldly at once. Finding that balance between the local and the global or the personal and universal is something I believe to be important in an artist’s practice. Mostly because it keeps you constantly in dialogue with something bigger than yourself, while also staying true to who you are.

What shifts do you see in a post-COVID-19 world?
This is a tough question because I’m still recovering from COVID-19 myself and so I’ve been processing and reflecting on this a bit. If you look at pandemics historically, you’ll see how each one has transformed how we exist in the world. They have inspired artistic movements, changed architecture and the way we build cities, and shaped how we think about illness and healing. Broadly, I think this moment is going to change our relationship to intimacy and community. We will have to re-imagine what it means to gather, to hold space with one another, to organize. I think that will be particularly challenging for historically marginalized communities whose agency and advocacy is deeply rooted in these practices. I also think this is instigating some very existential questions for art institutions and curators because we now have to think about what it means to curate beyond physical space and the bodily presence of an audience. Right now, I’ve seen most institutions scrambling to try to replicate their spaces or programs with the use of technology and I’m not sure if that’s where we need to go. That’s just an attempt to recreate the way we do things but now in an online platform. I think we have to pivot and reflect on curating as a space-making practice. We need to invest more thinking into how we generate new modalities of space altogether rather than just nostalgically hold on to what we know how to do as we attempt to translate that into platforms that weren’t built for it.

What conversations do you want to have with audiences  for the third edition of Desert X in 2021?
Organizing Desert X 2021 has definitely become a different kind of curatorial project now. My hope is that this will be an opportunity to create new ways to experience art. Rather than approaching these projects as just physical installations to be conditioned for a site, we will be asking what kind of conditions potential projects need to be best mediated to audiences. Then, we’ll go try to build the spaces that accommodate them.

*The third edition of Desert X will open March 12-May 16, 2021 in the Coachella Valley, California.  

web: desert.org