Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero
a virtual exhibit of work by the 2020 MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute Fellows
Raul’s Co-created Self Portrait 
Fernanda’s co-created self-portrait 
Centerpiece 
Container Sketch 
Album Sketch
Kipi recordante/ Recording Kipi is the continuation of work on a series titled Memory Transmission Containers. This edition will have particular ritual characteristics related to time/space or Pacha. The object is meant to be sowed this year and be harvested by our 8 nieces and nephews when each turns 18 years old. Kipi is a word from Quechua languages for the action of carrying something, but it can also be the actual bag or luggage you carry on your back. This kipi will enclose an album containing an array of visual and aural languages, including portraits of ourselves and a record of our lived experience interwoven with interpretations of our current times. The Kipi will have directions of engagement intended to be followed by our future audience as a sort of rite of passage, including space for each of them to add something before sowing it back to its place for the next person.
With this piece, we are considering the importance of this time/space shift and of our responsibility to pass on knowledge and belonging to the next generation focusing on the humans we feel the most accountable to. It is important for us to reflect on our dystopian present and provide memory and perspective to our future people. While transmission has been a central theme to CC 1/19’s work, pandemic times have brought this value full circle and it has allowed us the opportunity to engage with it through our own voices and lineages.
is a wandering art and oral history collaboration committed to generating spaces that document and circulate the voices at the margins of colonial grammar. As a multidisciplinary project, our call is to intervene spaces through memories that are born in orality and seldom make it to circulation beyond geopolitical, epistemic, ontological, and embodied borders. We recognize the different ways of communication and aesthetics that were oppressed and excluded by the colonial enterprise. To us, that means imagining realities through centering the experience, knowledge, and ways of those navigating from the margins and practicing listening, care, and beauty. Instagram @cc_1_19
Fernanda Espinosa
Co-founder and Collaborator of CC 1/19
She is an oral history-based practitioner and cultural organizer based in New York/New Jersey and Ecuador and originally from the Andes. Fernanda approaches storytelling as one of the many ways of transmitting knowledge and her analysis and practice are deeply embedded in interrogating colonial standards, including story forms. She has been generating, listening to, and interpreting oral histories to inform public interventions that aspire to act as platforms for resistance and dialogue. Fernanda holds a degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where her thesis was awarded the 2018 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. From 2014-2017 she was a member of People’s Collective Arts, in 2016 she was an Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Fellow, and most recently she worked leading national community partnerships with StoryCorps. Currently, she is an interviewer for Columbia University’s NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Archive and for the Pandemic Project at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Raul Ayala
Co-founder and Collaborator of CC 1/19
Visual artist and educator focused on mural production, drawing, and public art. His work questions normative historical parameters and coloniality through a juxtaposition of a broad spectrum of primary sources, usually aiming for a collaborative and co-creative process. Ayala was the recipient of the 2014 NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artist, the 2015 Create Change Commissions Artist award of The Laundromat Project, the 2016 Rauschenberg Residency with People’s Collective Arts. From 2018-2020 Raul had a full merit scholarship in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where he was awarded his Master of Fine Art degree and was a Part Time Lecturer. www.raulayala.net
Work of the Fellows * Work of the Institute * Exhibition Description
