Lordy Rodriguez: Discussion

Chagoya: For me the rules of my work are basically breaking every rule I can break.
But in terms of political boundaries I think mapping is an ideological construction and I like to sub the ideologies behind the maps.

Sometimes I change size or I change geographic boundaries just to insinuate that this is in our heads. When we travel across countries we don't see boundaries, we don't see the borders.

So for me maybe a rule is to actually ignore any borders, I try to mismatch things too. 
I like to mismatch faces with different bodies that are culturally from different times and places

My borders are actually, besides geographical, they are cultural or historical
I cross those borders all the time to pretty much denounce they are ideological borders, the images become like a language as well.

Lordy: how much of that by either political forces or issues of identity

They are both connected to each other usually its whatever goes through my head.

Lordy: same here.

Chagoya: that's how it goes

Lordy: Since I mostly work with appropriating visual language, whenever you're trying out something new, you look to people around you that are doing similar things, maybe not in the same way, one of the things I've always found interesting about your work is that you have the sense of appropriation of all these multiple imagery and the combination of these images create a language unique to yourself in the same way that I look at cartographic symbols,  it's almost the same way I feel that you look at cultural items and cultural imagery and I think we're playing with similar ideas. We approach them in totally different ways.
I have that special way of finding similarities between our work and then a lot of differences at the same time

Chagoya: Yeah, I totally I agree, I think the idea of using visual elements as language is what connects the work, because I really like on your work the fact that you're appropriation of the mapping styles and the drawing and presenting the rhetorical elements, it's a language with no words it's a language with no words.

In fact, mapping in general, it's more visual than verbal. Without a picture of a map we don't know where we are. You could use a thousand words and you don't know where we are. But also, I think what is very strong in your work is that you invent mapping and you invent an abstraction of an abstraction basically and that's, I think, very complex, in that sense you are using the language of mapping to address very abstract visual elements.

It's perhaps as difficult to talk about as it is difficult to talk about a symphony when nobody has even heard that symphony, how would you describe it?

The same thing happens with your work, visually it has developed its own language
In my case, I got my idea of using from pre-Columbian books, like the Mayans the Aztecs, they use mostly non verbal language and I decided to use it in that way

It's interesting to me that your work goes into another stage that is in a way, more abstract.