María José Crespo (Mexico/Holland)

María José Crespo’s artistic research looks into how the porous space between territory, language, limits, and the body can be understood by amplifying gestures in different materialities. By questioning how she inhabits certain boundaries as a woman, she is interested in studying remains and traces that administrative powers leave behind in unclear territories.

During her residency at Malt AIR María José Crespo will continue to develop her new project “Aviso: female flickers over built environments”. She will enable an encounter between different female figures and their communication practices at the border between México and the United States. During the Mexican Revolution, Avisadores (signalers) were sending avisos with mirrors flickering a blinding flashlight notifying the whereabouts of the border patrol and other Mexican secrets. Few know about this communication method, but even less is known about women’s activity. In this context, her research will explore the untold female perspective of the avisadores and how the avisos along with other informal gestures, allowed acts of autonomy in an environment of industrial and surveillance excess, reverberating this into a migratory current context.

María José Crespo will, during her residency, experiment with the form of speech and its multiple ways of understanding it nowadays through multimedia possibilities and settings to be performed or displayed. By using her voice to probe fiction, orality will be explored through enunciations in sound, making words stretch into sculpture, like malleable scripts looking for their materiality to take form on the different structures and spaces.