Left to right: Jo Ying Peng (photo by Kim Jakobsen To), Chantal Peñalosa Fong (photo by Lazarillo)
Jo Ying Peng, curator and Director of the Vernacular Institute in Mexico City, Mexico, will host a conversation with Chantal Peñalosa Fong, a NYC-based Mexican artist whose practice engages deeply with questions of labor, and the border between America and Mexico. They will discuss working as diasporic artists abroad, and the contemporary politics affecting artists, curators, and academics based in the USA.
Part I: Ecological Entanglements in the Shadow of the Capital
1. panósmico
I will reflect on my 2022 collaboration with panósmico, which involved fieldwork in Hidalgo, a neighboring state north of Mexico State — one of the poorest and most polluted in the region. Their long-term research focuses on the capital’s “black water” infrastructure, specifically how pharmaceutical-rich wastewater is expelled untreated into the Mezquital Valley. Over decades, this toxic water has paradoxically transformed arid lands into fertile commercial farms — a phenomenon that panósmico uses to map the extractive relationship between the capital’s pharmaceutical consumption and the rural periphery’s burden. Their work positions wastewater irrigation as both ecological mutation and public health emergency, revealing the structural inequalities embedded in Mexico City’s hydropolitics.
2. colectivo amasijo
amasijo is a feminist collective composed of women from various disciplines and generations, working across art, cooking, and land-based pedagogy. In Spring 2022, I joined artists Carmen Serra and Martina Manterola for field visits in Milpa Alta — the southernmost borough of Mexico City, with a largely Nahuatl-speaking Indigenous population. Together we documented community seed distribution systems, informal irrigation networks in cactus fields, and shared meals in farmers’ homes.
amasijo’s approach centers on collaborative cooking and agriculture as forms of resistance and land regeneration. Their practice insists on care, circular knowledge, and embodied time — challenging extractive logics through feminist, decolonial methodologies. Milpa Alta itself is historically significant for its land justice movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s, resisting urban expansion and asserting Indigenous land rights through legal, communal, and pedagogical means.
Both projects take place in sites marginalized by Mexico City’s centralization — Hidalgo to the north, and Milpa Alta to the south. Both involve Indigenous communities impacted by urban resource extraction and postcolonial forms of ecological violence.
This segment will address extended key questions such as:
- Who bears the cost of urban development and water politics?
- How can local, land-based knowledge systems counteract climate colonialism?
- What does regeneration look like at the edges of modernity?
panósmico’s work exemplifies environmental geopolitics through research and speculative design, while amasijo weaves together Indigenous knowledge, feminism, and culinary ritual as acts of slow resistance.
Part II: Border Ecologies and the Politics of Time
The second part of the talk will be led by artist Chantal Peñalosa, whose practice turns toward another form of environmental crisis: the U.S.–Mexico border. Here, landscape is shaped by militarization, precarity, and invisible regimes of labor and time.
Peñalosa’s work centers on the concept of “waiting” — everyday temporalities that emerge from inhabiting the border itself. Through video and performance, she examines how bodies absorb the violence of surveillance, exhaustion, and temporal suspension. At the border, time itself becomes a resource extracted, wasted, or weaponized.
This section will approach the border as another kind of ecological site — what Peñalosa herself calls a landscape of latency — and introduce a “border consciousness” grounded in embodied resistance and spectral violence. I’ll also reference Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism, which argues that violence is not an accidental side effect of capitalism but a mode of accumulation itself — a critical lens through which I’ve approached the slow violence of border landscapes in my recent research.
Jo Ying Peng Jo Ying Peng is a Taiwanese curator based in Mexico City, where she runs the Vernacular Institute—an independent art space that generates, presents, and exchanges ideas beyond institutional discourse. Her practice spans curatorial and editorial forms, investigating agency through experimental production methods rooted in performative and interdisciplinary approaches. Through the Vernacular Institute, Peng fosters a resonant platform weaving embodied encounters into shifting constellations of dialogue between Latin America and Asia, engaging critically with urgent socio-political concerns, with resistance as both anchor and horizon. Recent selected writing and editorial works: A Preface of Cloud : Written before Reflection (published by MARCO Museum in the exhibition El revés de la sombra no es el reflejo en el agua, Monterey, 2023), punctuation, onomatopoeia, and IKEA catalogue (published by KUA＃2: Displacement, London, 2023), šśhèëêēé (published by ARIEL in the exhibition Fear and Fauna, Copenhagen, 2023), A promised day? (Published by diSONARE, Mexico City, 2022), A Script for Untitled Age (published by Colector in the exhibition At the window, staring, Monterey, 2022), guest editor for TERREMOTO: Planetary Solidarity (Mexico City, 2021), and co-wrote and co-edited the book Compass Encompass (published by Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, 2021).
Chantal Peñalosa Fong studied for a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Tijuana campus, and the University of Sao Paulo, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her solo exhibitions include: Otros Cuentos Fantasmas, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2024); Atlas Western, CEINA, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Ghost Stories/Cuentos de fantasmas, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2023); Another Million Moments, Centro de las Artes Nave Generadores, Monterrey, N.L. (2022); Mujeres en un jardín, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2021); Atlas Western, MUAC, Mexico City (2021); There's Something About the Weather In This Place, Best Practice, San Diego, California, United States (2021). She has also been part of group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Venice (2023); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021); M HKA, Antwerp (2019), among others. Her work has appeared in publications such as Prime: Art’s Next Generation, Phaidon, 2022; Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023; Chantal Peñalosa: A Universe On The Line, ESPAC, 2024, among others. She is currently part of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York.
Image description: Two headshots, left to right. (1) A woman in a turquoise shirt and brown pants squatting on the ground in a brightly lit room (2) A woman with brown bangs and glasses standing in a gallery space