Raven Chacon's Tiguex in - really in - Albuquerue, NM

Cover of the Tiguex catalogue published by the Tamarind Institute.

The week I moved to ABQ, the Tamarind Institute hosted a talk by Hammersley Resident Artist, R. Luke Dubois, at the Special Collections Library on Central Ave. I attended that talk and realized - without a doubt the move to this place was the right one for me. 

That sense of being optimally located was reinforced for me while sitting in the ABQ Museum auditorium listening to Raven Chacon's Hammersley talk on Aug 24th. 

Raven Chacon on stage with Dr. Ana Alonso-Minutti at the 

Albuquerque Museum on the occasion of his Fredrick Hammersley Resident Artist talk.

Raven used his talk as an opportunity to announce and detail the components of his city wide, day-long composition Tiguex which will be performed on Saturday, Sept 27. Tiguex is a piece consisting of 20 distinct movements, in as many different locations, from the peak of the Sandias to the Three Sister volcanos on the West Mesa, hundreds of performers, with a duration from sunrise to sunset and beyond, all conducted throughout the day from the beacon of KUNM (while you're here, take a moment to donate to this (or any public radio station) that is on the front line of the Amer-fascist attach on free speech and free information.)) The performance will be livestreamed by the city on its One Media Youtube Channel.

Tiguex is the Tewa word that describes this land between the Pueblos of Sandia and Isleta upon which Albuquerque has developed. The piece features and celebrates the overlay of multiple histories that have converged, collided and coalesced in this valley.  Having grown up here, these histories are also those of Raven. 

Chacon's residency at Tamarind was devoted to developing a visual score in the form of a map that plots the progression of the Tiguex composition, adding to the history/heritage from which it draws.

Details of the lithograph map and visual score created during his residency at Tamarind:

To be in a community where these kinds of dreams can be realized and such interactions can develop is a boon, and I'm all here for it. 

Tamarind hosted an open house earlier this month and Raven was on hand discussing his time in residence and the development of his print which is a a map and visual score for the Tiguex piece. 

On a recent episode of Bad at Sports, the critic Ben Davis laid out the most salient description I've heard yet of the quagmire social media has laid at our feet salient manner (at about 52 mins): 

....What has happened to culture in the social media era is a dramatic rupture in community. So you have things that feel like culture but no longer function as culture in the sense that they attach you to any sort of human community. 

My sense is Tiguex is an antidote to the detachment of our current state. It's very connected to place and humanity. It occurred to my last night that the very performance itself is a map describing a terrain and the life it has spawned. It's also a map to be experienced rather than read. (Naturally, this had already ocurred to Raven long ago as on the project website he describes the piece as a "temporal map")

Guiding Mantras at the Tamarind Institute.