Interview with the artist Paloma Ayala

As part of our course on urban processes and art, we had the opportunity to interview the Mexican artist Paloma Ayala on her piece Satire Taxis  (2017). Paloma Ayala’s works are site-specific and mainly address issues of communication within urban social, political and cultural structures. Many of her works involve participation with other artists and with non-artists. Paloma Ayala has lived in Switzerland since 2010 and she completed a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZhdK) in 2017. Her piece Satire Taxis, which addresses issues such as urban development, migration and social injustice, served as her final Master’s project.

Satire Taxis is a story centred on the very urban figure of the taxi driver. The story is set in a speculative world in which the district borders within the city of Zurich have been redefined, and motorised vehicles have to pay a tax every time they travel between districts. To evade this tax, people use the services of ‘pushers’, taxi drivers who manually push cars across the borders. Paloma Ayala’s piece consists of two videos which are played simultaneously. The left-hand video shows a slow-motion recording of men pushing a car across a fictional border in Zurich, while a woman’s voice reads a journalistic-style text describing the events and political circumstances related to the activities of the fictional ‘pushers’ as well as the backgrounds of a group of individuals doing this job. The right-hand video shows interviews with real taxi drivers in Zurich as well as clips of real television reports on current issues affecting taxi drivers in Switzerland. Additionally, an article was published in the WOZ newspaper including the fictional text that is read in the first video as well as a staged photograph of ‘pushers’. The publication is displayed next to the videos. (See an image of the original installation at the MFA Degree Show 2017 here).

The piece Satire Taxis is a part of Paloma Ayala’s Fictitious News, a series of works involving the creation of publications with fictional stories. It is based on the earlier work Monterrey Metrópoli, Diario de los Nuevos Distritos (2016/2017), which first introduced the idea of fictional district borders and ‘pushers’, but in the context of the city of Monterrey in Mexico. In our interview this May, Paloma Ayala talked about her work and answered our questions. She shared with us how she developed the project in Mexico and how she went about the difficult task of transposing it into the context of Zurich, where the socio-economic circumstances are vastly different from those in Monterrey. She also explained why she uses fiction and satire in her work, and she addressed some of the problems and questions she is dealing with as an artist relying on collaboration and working in different urban contexts. Watch our video of the interview below to find out more.

 

 

We would like to thank Paloma Ayala for sharing so openly with us the interesting details about her working process, her thoughts and experiences, and for bringing her videos and publications for us to look at. The Gotthard Bar and AY Mami in Zurich kindly allowed us to use their space during lunch hour.

Abb. 1: Fiktive Anzeige als Teil von Paloma Ayalas Satire Taxis, in: WOZ Die Wochenzeitung Nr. 35, 31. August 2017, Standbild aus Satire Taxis by Paloma Ayala. Interview with the artist, TC 00:01:54.