For the Artist Residency at MOMENTUM-LAGOS Berlin, Laura Valencia Lozada collects stories from women living or working in Kreuzberg, a neighbourhood located in the central part of Berlin, and home of the MOMENTUM-LAGOS Residency in the historic Kuntsquartier Bethanien Art Center.

The idea is to add stories to Lozada’s ongoing project, the SILO / Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolcas archive, which is currently exploring the construction of memories of women living or working in neighbourhoods where social movements and spaces of resistance against patriarchy, colonisation or capitalism have taken place. The aim is to create an intergenerational dialogue between the participants and a reading of their memories from a non-linear time.

How are individual and collective memories created?

Who writes the history of our places, of our objects, of our encounters?

In the course of this Residency, Lozada proposes to initiate a dialogue between Tlatelolco and Kreuzberg, a district in the city of Berlin that was founded more than 100 years ago, and despite being much younger than Tlatelolco, they coincide and reflect each other, as Kreuzberg has a long history of social, labour, occupy, feminist and anti-racist movements. It also has a strong multicultural life with very large communities of Turkish origin and countercultural and artistic movements that have brought together artists creating collectives and self-managed their own spaces. Despite all this history, Kreuzberg is currently suffering from serious problems of gentrification, especially affecting housing due to property speculation, rising rents and the displacement of the district’s original inhabitants and neighbours. By constructing this paradigm of parallels between Kreuzberg and Tlatelolco, Lozada aims to draw on the context and knowledge of the city of Berlin, which has been the nerve center of a profound reflection on the study of memories and its relationship between memory and the city, art and creation.

CODEX – A Story of Conquest

“My Artist Residency at MOMENTUM-LAGOS continues the research I began in Mexico and Paris as a preparatory study for the elaboration of a codex that seeks the representation of a group of Tlatelolca women who participated in the last confrontation of the Mexica against the Spanish on August 13, 1521.

As part of my research in the Tlatelolca Biennial and the SILO/Semillera de memoria oral project, I found a first account told by the Tlatelolcas themselves about living in this place, it is a manuscript called “el Relato de la Conquista”, written by an anonymous Tlatelolca, which describes how women participate in the emblematic fall of the Mexica/Tlatelolcas on August 13, 1521.

From the analysis of the manuscript in a facsimile copy in the National Library of Mexico, it is evident that it was written by several authors, since you can see the calligraphic variations in the document, which led me to ask: Is it possible that a woman wrote this fragment? Can history or archaeological objects be read with a gender perspective as a manuscript written by pre-Hispanic authors? In addition, in the iconographic research, there are no images that describe them, which led me to propose in an exercise of imagination and creation of contemporary memories, and to propose the creation of a codex in which these women, their costumes, weapons, and insignia are represented.

Laura Valencia Lozada is a Visual Artist educated at the Faculty of Arts and Design, UNAM, Mexico City. In Berlin is is affiliated with the Art In Context Masters Program at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UDK). Lozada specialized in art practices in context and participation by the Seminario de Medios Múltiples, FAD – UNAM. Lozada was part of the 2013-2014 class of the School of Peace and activisms J’Tatic Samuel Ruiz, Serapaz, Mexico City, and in 2017- 2018 she studied at the Independent Studies Program at MACBA in Barcelona. Her artistic practice focuses on the study of memory, artistic activism, participatory art and expanded graphics. In parallel, since 2003, Lozada has worked as a printer, and in collective projects of independent graphics.

Lozada’s work has been presented in venues such as: Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Museo Nacional de la Estampa in Mexico City, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Visual Arts Gallery at the University of Texas at El Paso Texas, Espai D’Art Contemporani de Castelló – EACC in Valencia and Schweizerisches Architektur-Museum – SAM, Basel. Her exhibitions include: Carta Codex-escritura colectiva de mujeres buscadoras, Performatividades de la búsqueda, Galería Metropolitana UAM, Mexico City, 2022-2023. SILO/Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolcas, Centro de Interpretación Xaltilolli, CCUT, Mexico City, 2021. Video CUENDA. Crónicas-Resonancias, SBC-Gallery, Montreal, 2021-2022. SILO/Semillera de Memorias Tlatelolcas, Bienal Tlatelolca, Central de Maquetas, Mexico City, 2021. Habitat, exposición colectiva en Greengallery, 2019. Cuinar un Guateque, Paella de pedres, KGG, Stripart Festival, Guinardó, Barcelona, 2019. Encuentros en librerías feministas, libertarias y cooperativas, 21 Personae, Raqs Media Collective MACBA, Barcelona, 2018.

My artistic practice has been taking the form of a membrane, a flexible fabric that in constant movement, contracts and expands towards different directions, a sensitive interface made of living matter.

Inwardly, it begins in the personal, in actions close to a simple craft, made with common forms and materials such as a gelatin, a rope, an oral story or my own body. Movement that uses tools such as drawing, cutting, engraving or microhistories.