Martín Estrada Márquez is a Mexico based artist born in 1995. Graduated from Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila with a degree in sociology. He is currently attending the SOMA Academic Program. He also took part in the Programa de Fotografía Contemporánea 2018. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Germany, Argentina and the United States.
With his work, Estrada Márquez seeks to generate conceptual links between art and sociology taking this discipline as a theoretical framework and art as a means of his praxis. Living in the north of Mexico in a region of little more than 100 years old between the states of Coahuila and Durango, Estrada was not formed by an ancestral culture nor by ancient national traditions; his worldview is hybrid marked by a regional aspiration to want to belong to the gringo culture adapted by the mass media such as MTV and the internet’s "junk culture" of the early 2000's. In this way, his interests are always found in a parasitic relationship between the apparently global and the apparently local (glocal).
He addresses conceptual connections between society and globalization, in that way in his work he manifests a varied and complex analysis around ideological apparatuses and their technical, communicative and technological means, at the same time, he studies history as a document. His research shows approaches toward unitedstatian political and cultural hegemony, surveillance capitalism and post-truth. In his work, he explores materialities mainly from the possibilities of fiction in multimedia formats, sculptures, photography and installation.
Website: https://estradamarquez.net
Project:
I created a fake profile on Facebook fitting the stereotype of the classic far-right redneck from the very deep ideological spectrum of the United States to infiltrate alt-right groups of the same nature on that social network and thus be able to interact with its users. Dead Coyote (story of a confused love), is the animated sample of a conversation that took place in one of these groups, an alt-right group called "We, the people". The interaction takes place between my alter-ego, Jeff Steinbaum, and Dina Gipper, a user of the group. In the conversation Jeff has a depressive outbreak and, in his confusion, threatens to commit suicide. During the conversation, several sociopolitical aspects come to light reflecting what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call "Class Habitus" on behalf of the women, this being manifested from her supremacist expressions. However, during the conversation an empathic connection happened that would not be possible outside of Facebook as an intermediary since I am a brown mexican and the stereotype of all that she stands against. I am interested in addressing these contradictions and phenomena caused by "the masks" adapted to digital environments being displayed with humor and irony ("masks" as the social psychologist Erving Goffman proposes from symbolic interactionism). These phenomena are only reflections of the complexity regarding the political and cultural relationship between Mexico and the United States, blurring the territory by transferring it to the web, at the same time, political biases and postures are evaded, yet manifested, by me digitally performing as one of them; I became their "other" while they relate with me being them my "other". Somehow, this is a way for me to get in contact with the presence and the idea of a past object of desire since we, as northern mexicans, grow up in a culture which forms a way of seeing the "american ideal". Sharing time with that specific group of people online is a way to deconstruct that idea by getting to know the most extreme spectrum of their libertarian culture and, at the same time, being able to make affective bonds with my perfect ideological counterpart by performing what I once wished to be. In the end, the web has always been the perfect space to develop different personas that deeply reflect our own contradictions and desires; a place where anonymity and masks are identity cards for each of our own fantasies. That which we consider impossible IRL becomes the norm online.
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