RRD is an independent project, an effort of five artists from Mexico City (Anuar Portugal, Joel Castro, Sergio Torres, María José Cruz and Bruno Ruiz). RRD is a platform for the production and distribution of printed and audiovisual content. This project is supported by a production studio and a magazine stand located in Mexico City. The RRD booth serves as a public meeting place, where artists, independent publishers and pedestrians exchange and present multidisciplinary site-specific projects.
We propose alternative modes of information dissemination and encourage the distribution of counter-information. We have dedicated ourselves to building a network between artists and non-artists in the context of Mexico City. Since opening in 2016, our activities have included collaborations to produce books, publications, magazines, videos, installations and kiosk presentations.
Pacific Pirate is an international collaboration between Writing FACTory (Taiwan) and RRD collective. Considering piracy as a democratic mode of knowledge production and distribution, this project takes the theme as a point of departure and object of analysis. The project starts with an open call for videos of all formats such as shorts, animation, and experimental films, from Mexico, Taiwan, and Thailand. After RRD exhibits and screens the pirated copies of the videos in the RRD’s newsstand, it joins Writing FACTory in Taiwan to exhibit the research process at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan).
Invited by the Carillo Gil Art Museum to intervene its fence, RRD proposed Rebusk2, an interpretation of a mural painting that combines the pastime activity known as “sopa de letras” (word search puzzle), and the “rebus,” an ideogram resembling visual riddles. Embracing the techniques commonly used in the street such as free signage, sign painting (a traditional craft in Mexico) and graffiti, Rebusk2 attracted passerby with both the mysterious enigma and the familiarity of shared popular culture. As such, the wall that previously acted as a blockade between the public and the private became a porous barrier that invites the public to intervene the intervention itself.
Funded and supported by PAC (Patron of Contemporary Art), Sitac XV is a 3-day symposium whose theme, “El Fin” or “The End,” revolves around the relationship and interplay between death and images, along with their interpretations. In collaboration with Rubén Ortiz Torres and Jesse Lerner, RRD works on this year’s reader, conceptualizing, and relating to the selected texts with their visual imagination. RRD also enters and intervenes the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City with its replica of the newsstand, within which the collective holds a performance as part of the distribution of the reader.
Crochet Coral Reef RRD is part of the RRD programme, interventions 21. During a series of crochet workshops, coordinated by Haydeé Rovirosa, friends and collaborators were invited to create a crocheted coral reef that builds on the project of Margaret and Christine Wertheim. The pieces produced at these workshops form the installation exhibited in the RRD stand. In addition to this, an antology of texts from various collaborators of the project was published by RRD.
