Rhumb Lines by Ana Mosquera Duran

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MFA THESIS EXHIBITION DC

Rhumb Lines

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Ana Mosquera Duran

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Overview

by Liam Machado

Speaking to the permeability of borders and the development of new communities in cyberspace, Ana Mosquera’s work charts a kind of topography in flux, partly in response to moments of social upheaval such as the ongoing political and economic crisis in Venezuela.

Proyecto migración por números aptly showcases the artist’s commitment to exploring how “cyber-territories” are elaborated and populated, and how they subsequently construct relations with one another through public platforms such as Facebook. In a process that Mosquera describes as “data mining” conducted manually, rather than by the opaque algorithms of tech and social media megacorporations, she joined a Facebook group catered toward displaced Venezuelan nationals abroad, particularly those based in Cúcuta, Colombia. Mosquera then methodically registered the names of every member in the group along with their possible destinations into Microsoft Excel, based upon their characteristics, public posts, and “other things we had in common.”

Major cities in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador where the group members were likely to pass through or end their migration were marked with an X: Cúcuta, Barranquilla, Lima, Quito, Guayaquil, and others are represented not as points on a map, but as rows in a spreadsheet, seemingly decontextualized networks of information—networks of people—that appear to diffuse outward into uncertain trajectories. Collating these names and destinations, Mosquera used a Jacquard loom to render her research into an Ikat-patterned textile: small white clusters of digital data manifesting uneasily onto a rusty red field. It does not resemble a map, in a traditional sense, yet these data points encapsulate the stories of hundreds of people—stories that Mosquera deliberately left unverified by the end of the project.

Imagined geographies, fraught journeys, and the transformative capacity of borders and border-relations are the affective pillars of Mosquera’s practice.

Through a combination of innovative textile work and sculptural materials, including Jacquard weaving, digitally-collected data and text—often taken from the online posts of migrants—her most recent works continue to explore the relationship between territories on the Internet and in physical space.

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Data Manifesto 1.- Online spaces are not (dis)embodied or placeless (Lingel, 2017) Therefore, the way we move on them is determined by who we are, where we are and how we exist.

2.- Places are often contingent, improvisational and in flux; a construct encompassing several contradictory things at once.

3.- Data can be collected to describe a place. In this case when I refer to data I am referring to a transducer (Neff & Nafus) that has kept only a few things that in the mind of the collector triggers reflection and allows for self - narrative 4.I am culturally more interested in exploring bottom - up rather than top-down tactics (Certeau) . This means I am interested in understanding how particular communities operate within existing mainstream social media.

5.- I am partially interested in creating tactics to describe digital places. I conceive the latter can be achieved by a living archive of tactics (like data tracking as a way to know where certain things or people are) or some other form of Anthology made out of objects that work in tandem with such tactical relations in the digital space.

6.- I believe the power of the collection resides on its shifting in meaning, in its capacity to improvise itself and renegotiate its logic. The porous nature of the collection holds within itself different levels of access to specific knowledge. I believe this is necessary as the power it is exercised over it forces it to exist this way.

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Venezuelans in (insert city here)

by Ana Mosquera

Since 2014, the world has become evermore digitized, for better or worse. For me, and for many Venezuelans leaving the country, that also meant digitizing our memories, relationships, and affects. As traditional networks of support dismantled, and we disperse to further geographical locations, many of us felt the need and the desire to craft a space where a sense of belonging could be

Nearly six years ago, a professor and I ran into each other in a corridor

exercised or at least asserted.

at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. We had made it there after navigating a series of barricades during the 2014 riots. In the middle of a deserted hallway, we landed on a conversation about the role of social media in daily life—particularly in the context of systematic social collapse. Such a thing felt natural. We had seen the rise of citizen digital journalism in Venezuela and heard so much about the contradictions and rupture between the in real life country and the desegregated construct of the Venezuelan Twittersphere.

In the midst of these desires, Facebook groups seem to have emerged as a proxy. Frequently under the name of Venezuelans in X (X being practically every city in the world where there is an expat Venezuelan community) they created a spontaneous decentralized network—host to a variety of entrepreneurial endeavours, informal economies, and practical advice. The groups are mostly independent from one another, but their commonalities lie in their potential to connect Venezuelans with one another, and in some cases, their ability to articulate political action. Such is the case of Venezuelans in

I was optimistic, and at least techno-ambivalent, though I must admit driving

Washington [D.C.], who actively participated in the expulsion of Code Pink

through barricades has the potential side effect of diminishing one’s sense

from the Venezuelan embassy in that city, or NGO Unión de Venezolanos en

of hope. My professor on the other hand, was not optimistic at all. He argued

Perú, who constantly negotiate migratory benefits for Venezuelans with the

that social media only had the capacity for entertainment, citing examples

Peruvian government.

such as the barricade/protest selfie developing on Instagram, or the ceaseless proliferation of porn and images of cute cats on the internet. How was that kind of information flow going to get us through social change?

The Venezuelan diaspora network in Facebook presents an opportunity to study everyday uses of technology, and how those everyday uses can and do complicate the narratives we create around digital tools. We tend to think of

I must admit, it is difficult to argue against the idea that commercial corporate

online spaces as beholders of virtual potency incapable of real action, or as

media can produce significant social change, or refute the prevalent presence

a space where social interactions necessarily fades in mediation, to give way

of cats/dogs and porn online. It seems clear to me that social media alone,

to an obscure relationship with the other (Baudrillard 1987, 7) On these terms,

can never be the sole catalyst for social reform, but it is also miopic not to

online spaces are an echo—a deterritorialized something where nothing

recognize that it is humans and not tools, who define how technology is used—this is how we can exercise agency. Historically, we have found more than one way to use and politicize a tool. Ultimately, even the ubiquitous and rather frivolous barricade/protest selfie can also be understood as a social marker of a particular community, in a given time and geographical space.

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is ever truly attached to any particular person, place or time. However, this narrative anuls the possibility of other forms of everyday renegotiation with that same technology, and underestimates human creativity.

Methodology - Phase 1

I then organize the groups by city, summing together the members of groups operating on the same city. I did this because I wanted to

My research into the Venezuelan Facebook groups started in 2016, when I became a member of NGO Venezolanos en Perú. At the time, I was moving from Caracas to Lima, and I used the group to get information about the

observe the relationships of users according to the route of migration, rather than to observe the dynamics between groups within the same city.

Peruvian migration system. The group was useful to me because it posted important updates, as well as the know-how to obtain a temporary residency permit (PTP). Even after I was granted the permit, I decided to stay a member, as the group also posted information on local Venezuelan news, events, and products.

Over time, I noticed there were people in the group that I already knew in real life, and would occasionally meet people who were mutual friends of an acquaintance, but whom I had never met. I am often curious about who populate these groups and about the posts they write. Some people share their life stories, others ask for help. Some share their businesses or offer shady opportunities. Sometimes they support each other and other times they tear each other apart with their comments. I became curious as to whether these dynamics were reflected across all Facebook groups and to what extent these groups were mirroring Venezuelan culture, or performing as some sort of dinner table in an online home.

For the purpose of research, I joined 82 Facebook groups run by the Venezuelan diaspora and started to look through the members in each group.

I wanted to know who was joining which groups and created a list (Img. 1), accounting for the number of members in each group.

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The information above was then compared to online activity to check the groups relevance on to the community. This comparison was made based on the frequency of post and what kind of information was being posted. This operation narrowed down the groups to twenty five (25). It was also observed that overall there was more interest in groups that encompassed information for an entire country, and that some users tended to niche to a particular group according to their final destination.

The twenty-five groups were then mined to create single lists of members, which were individually annotated to showcase what other groups its members had joined according to Facebook. The process was done manually and accounted for a maximum of twenty- five (25) members per group, an amount selected arbitrarily. The process consisted of writing the name of the user and checking which the groups they had joined. For Example, if a user had joined Venezuelans in Peru and also Venezuelans in Cucuta and Quito, I marked that on a chart. The records registered a primitive network analysis, marking possible trajectories undertaken by users online, and how they could have possibly navigated their geographical movement using the platform.

(Img.1)

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At this point I consolidated a single list of members per city. Once the lists

One of the users with the highest degree of centrality was Tomas Paez,

were created they were studied using network analysis with a bipartite

a sociologist and scholar from Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

network graph, this determined the high betweenness centrality per group

He was at the center of the network because he was a member of all

member. This way it was established who held the highest centrality in the

the groups on the study. Although Paez refuse to comment anything

network to assest how they were using it.

for this paper or provide an interview, it is public knowledge that he wrote a book about the global phenomena of Venezuelan Migration called The voice of the Venezuelan Diaspora. In his book he explores the global impact of Venezuelan migration, and promotes the idea of a global platform to foster trade and exchange among venezuelans living abroad. According to Paez most migrants are entrepreneurs or own a small business, his bases his assertions on a series of focus groups made in Madrid, as well as hundreds of interviews conducted worldwide, which led him to believe that there is a unique opportunity to develop a single umbrella to host such a project.

This study found similar results based on the analysis of central members. I found several examples of small businesses, such as Romarca envios, Toco y Me voy (Rafael Carrero) Reuben Morales Comedian or Yosmar Sanchez Construction Materials.

Once the members with the highest degree of centrality were determined, their profiles were crossed reference to determine what they were posting and what kind of activities they were doing on the groups. From this process I found a tendency to use the network to promote small businesses or find occasional work.

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I also found many members engaged in selling and buying occasional goods (D) Selling homemade food (I) Creating political art of protest (E) or fostering new relations to dance (B)

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