The site for the intervention was an empty lot in Mexicali’s Independencia neighbourhood. The barren plot of land used to be central to community life when it hosted a bustling market. The market, the Tianguis, had been around for more than two decades. But when financial speculators bought it with the intention to use it in a practice known as “asset flipping”, the market was razed to the ground overnight, leaving only a few piles of rubbish behind. This had happened some three weeks before we arrived in order to stage an intervention. Over a weekend in September 2019 we sought to engage with the community in a ceremony of play and mourning in order to call out such despicable financial speculation and to raise awareness about the devastation they leave behind.

This weekend was documented in T. V. Altheimer’s 12 mins single-channel, looped video installation, Tianguis Independencia, while a structure was built in conjunction to the visuals. This space held objects and assemblages made by Alejandro Zacarias, alongside a textual representation of the story of the market and a conceptual presentation of the practices we undertook with the public, as well as a theoretical engagement, which contextualised the forces at play in the spatial configuration of the community vis-a-vis the abstract fluctuations of global capital.