Guillermo Estrada

Guillermo Estrada's practice combines a series of Mexican and North-American pop-cultural references with Kumeyaay and Christian mythological elements into a series of cosmic, auto-historia, trans-dimensional, multimedia objects and live music and stage act performances. These stem from an understanding of tradition as an ongoing process as opposed to a static form. In this sense, Estrada's work follows what modernist music composer Gustav Mahler said: "tradition is the handing on of fire and not the worship of ashes,” and both reinvigorates and actualizes these cultural traits simultaneously, opening up possibility for an active dialogue of mutable, shared understandings across cultures, geographic regions, space, and time. For Estrada, this is an alternative way to grapple with the experience of living in the region of Campo/Tecate, Calexico/Mexicali and San Diego/ Tijuana, a practice that he refers to as "Aliendigenismo," that is, to be in more that one side of geographical, mental, and cosmic limits, all at the same time. This mythology is equally as important as the factual components of traditional understandings of the history of the region. Through this practice, Estrada hopes that others may be able to recognize aspects of Aliendigenas in themselves and their personal and ancestral histories.