Performances throughout the city of Berlin with Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Sebastian Gräfe, Valentina Jager, and Maureen Tsakiris.
Abraham Cruzvillegas is known for transforming everyday and found materials into multidimensional sculptures and installations. In his work, he reflects on the material and the socio-economic conditions specific to local contexts. For some years now, the artist has been working predominantly on a project called the Autoconstrucción (in English, “auto-construction” or “self-building”) which has manifestated in exhibitions, books, records, a film, and a theatrical play. Based on Cruzvillegas’s own experience in an unsettled and self-constructed, southern part of Mexico City, the Autoconstrucción project represents what is most important to the artist: the constructive power of raw materials, the courage of transformations, the vitality of an unstable identity, and the pure happiness of collective energy.
In Berlin, Cruzvillegas created a new series of performances titled The Self Builders’ Groove, in which the idea of the “self-construction” is both musically translated and integrated into the city’s spirit. In collaboration with Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Sebastian Gräfe, Valentina Jager, and Maureen Tsakiris, Cruzvillegas has chosen three places in Berlin for the performances that are “anchored in-between a punk three-chord strategy, sample dub tradition, rebajada’s slow motion earsplitting, hip-hop appropriation, and Tyrolese-Tibetan electro-digital tunes—which will be played with customized instruments, handmade amplified devices that produce sounds by striking, pinching, blowing or shaking them, while showing their builders’ crack” (Cruzvillegas).
Cruzvillegas’s songs refer to diverse stories related to the chosen spaces in which everything fits in: those non-exclusive areas of thinking, producing, and creating. The situations described in the songs evoke transformative situations for art, science, philosophy, and language, according to Cruzvillegas’s subjective, variable interests and utterly un-dogmatic way of working. In the name of a possible shift, these songs are not about borders or no-man’s-land, but about thresholds and everyone’s land, or, as the artist quoted Woody Guthrie: "This land is your land."
Happening parallel and sometimes simultaneously, this project will make something out of the junctions of the city’s walls: Berlin, a city squashed and devastated, always under reconstruction. The sounds, images, texts, and other forms produced for this project will find their final form in a music album, which will be distributed free on the internet and an artist book, with texts by Abraham Cruzvillegas, Kasha Bittner, and Armin Keller by the end of the year.
