Born in Havana, Cuba in 1958. MFA, Multimedia and Video Art Department, University of Iowa, 1992. Interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and scholar. He has exhibited his work at major galleries, art centers and museum around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Randolph Street Gallery-Chicago, Brisbane Powerhouse Art center, Australia, Video IN-Vancouver, Canada, Museo de Arte Actual, Bogotá, Colombia, Galeria Fort-Barcelona, Spain, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Centro de Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona, Spain and Museum of Contemporary Art (MACAY), Merida, Mexico. Ferrera-Balanquet is the executive curator of Arte Nuevo InteractivA, one of the leading new media and cotemporary exhibit in Latin America.

Abstract

Traveling Corners/Esquinas Rodantes

Cartodigital is an interdisciplinary project combining graphic arts, photography, video and new technologies to create proposals within latin american dispersion. Cartodigital has locations in Los Angeles, California, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. Their mission is to create solutions to the communication problems affecting latin american dispersion in an era of constant technological transformation. “Traveling Corners/Esquinas Rodantes” is a current project of Cartodigital. It is an informational cartography of a virtual territory where immigrants from Yucatan, Mexico work with a transnational US urban metropolitan enclave such as Los Angeles, while maintaining ties with their native territory. The project looks at how emergent Latinos Metropolis such as Los Angeles present a model of “Spanish Speaking” urban neighborhoods that are centered on the notion of transnational communities. The project maps the virtual territory of the “transnational urban community” as a space of flows that provides, via the database and material arrangements – the experimental organic history – that allows for simultaneity of social practices without physical territorial contiguity, it will present specific individual cases: an educated illegal man from Merida who speaks perfect English and has no problem finding jobs in Los Angeles, a group of native of Muna, a small town near Merida, Yucatan whose network has helped other natives to come to United States and the development of social programs in their city back in Mexico.