Artist Victor Cartagena collaborated with MACLA to create A Body Parted/Un Cuerpo Partido, an interdisciplinary work incorporating performance, installation, and digital murals that took a multi-layered look at immigration and border crossing. A Body Parted related immigrants’ stories through a rich combination of imagery, performances, and a soundscape.
Victor Cartagena is part of the San Francisco-based collective Secos & Mojados, whose work focuses on the immigrant experience. In developing A Body Parted/Un Cuerpo Partido, he worked closely with MACLA to try to collect stories from immigrants living in the William/Reed Corridor area of downtown San Jose, and with members of Secos & Mojados to develop a multi-disciplinary performance informed by that research.
Salvadoran-born visual artist Victor Cartagena has been making art in the San Francisco Bay Area since the late 1980s, shifting in focus from his memories of the violence in El Salvador and his experience of relocating to the United States to a range of issues, including consumer culture, homelessness, material waste, immigration, exile, identity perception, capital punishment, and uses of power.
MACLA is an inclusive contemporary arts space grounded in the Chicano/Latino experience that incubates new visual, literary, and performing arts in order to engage people in civic dialogue and community transformation. MACLA was founded in 1989 as the result of a community mobilization in San Jose and nationwide on behalf of multicultural arts.