Postcommodity (Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist) is an interdisciplinary arts collective based in the Southwest United States. The group’s art functions as “a shared indigenous lens to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial, and multiethnic colonizing force defining the 21st century through ever-increasing velocities and complex forms of violence.” Works include Repellent Fence (2015), a community engaged land artwork in which replica “scare-eye” balloons were installed at the US/Mexico border. Extending away from the border fence for a mile in each direction, the project both reclaimed the open-eye symbol’s native roots and aimed to serve as a “suture,” ceremonially knitting together the communities of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. The collective has exhibited internationally, including at the Biennial of the Moving Image in Belgium and the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. Their work will be included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the solo show Coyotaje at Art in General in Brooklyn (2017), documenta 14, and in Sam Wainwright Douglas’s documentary Through the Repellent Fence: A Land Art Film (2017). In 2018, Postcommodity will unveil a new commission at the San Francisco Art Institute.
New Postcommodity Codex Investigates Land, Systemic Violence, and Minnesota History
Taking its title from the GPS coordinates for Bdote, the birthplace of the Dakota people, Postcommodity’s newest artwork is a codex, a pictographic story, examining the Twin Cities’s past and present in terms of its relationship to migration, violence to the land, and Indigenous sovereignty.
