Art in Action interview - Artist Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba in Mexico City

Free City Radio

On this edition of the Art in Action interview series Mexico City based artist Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba's speaks about contributions to a collective exhibition at Biqini Wax ESP during art week in Mexico, 2024. Daniel's work explores ideas and expressions through frenetic drawings and sketches that are shaped by understandings of the world and humanity as an experience of multitudes not a world shaped by a universal framework of conception. Biqini Wax ESP is a collectively run art space in Navate district in Mexico City that has long explored the creative intersections of art and activism within the space in both militant and playful modes. This interview explores, in conversation, Daniel's work as relating to the realities of the survival of pre colonial cultural narratives and artistic landscapes that continue to shape Mexico. The cultural multiplicity that exists in Mexico that can been understood as standing as an existing challenge to the sustaining dominant frameworks of universalism that continue to define the major narrative arcs of mainstream artistic practice in western Europe and North America. Daniel specifically speaks about Mexican cultural modes that challenge the notion of death as shaped by dark forces, while articulating reflections about alternative cultural vantage points of looking to death as a pathway to listen to the voices and heritages of the past, of ancestors, a cultural framework within which death can be best understood a bridge that connect you to eternities. The accompanying artwork is by Daniel, photos taken by Stefan. Music on this program is "Passage" by Anarchist Mountains. Stefan produces this monthly artist interview series, Art in Action, that broadcasts monthly on Radio AlHara in regular programming on the first Friday of each month at 4:30pm in Bethlehem, Palestine and 9:30am eastern time. This series also airs on the third Friday of each month at 11am on CKUT in Montreal (ckut.ca) and on the second Thursday of each month on CJLO 1690 AM at 8am also in Montreal.