For the last two years, San Diego–based architect Teddy Cruz and Mexico City–based artist Pedro Reyes have together been deliberating on, among a host of other interconnected matters, the relation between design strategy and social transformation in the age of globalization. Notably appearing in conversation in the pages of the November 2007 issue of Modern Painters, where they consider and actively invoke the power of nonrepresentational diagrammatic reasoning, Cruz and Reyes come together again, under the initiative of SFAI's Exhibitions and Public Programs, to repurpose their "micropolicies" for transfiguring the socio-urban topography as resolution procedures—in particular, for the variously imbricated, ground-level conflicts obtaining in postinvasion Iraq.
Working neither from within nor from outside "the system" (the latter being to them every bit as bourgeois as the former is to the self-styled subversive), Cruz and Reyes seek to engage the hands-on problematic of a war-torn or otherwise-blighted urban landscape in what they refer to, after Herbert Marcuse, as "the mouth of the cobra"—that is, to engage it with critical proximity rather than distance. For instance, in no way endorsing the prevailing just-war doctrines promulgated by certain members of the US and EU intelligentsia, Cruz and Reyes nevertheless embrace the unsought but de facto opportunities for understanding conflict, mediation, and facilitation that have been brought about by the situation in Iraq. As with their collaborative ruminations on the alternative design trajectories made available in and by the Tijuana–San Diego border area (conventionally taken, from the planning and architectural perspective, as a promiscuous sprawling muddle), their ref lections on how the war in Iraq was actually played out ("bottom up"), as opposed to how it was originally planned ("top down"), discover in the wake of calamity a palpable object lesson: conflict, and the dire wreckage of conflict, are, by their very nature, a base of operations for imaginative intervention and social and geopolitical negotiation—the kind of intervention and negotiation Cruz and Reyes have both explored and instantiated through their projects at SFAI.
Working neither from within nor from outside "the system" (the latter being to them every bit as bourgeois as the former is to the self-styled subversive), Cruz and Reyes seek to engage the hands-on problematic of a war-torn or otherwise-blighted urban landscape in what they refer to, after Herbert Marcuse, as "the mouth of the cobra"—that is, to engage it with critical proximity rather than distance. For instance, in no way endorsing the prevailing just-war doctrines promulgated by certain members of the US and EU intelligentsia, Cruz and Reyes nevertheless embrace the unsought but de facto opportunities for understanding conflict, mediation, and facilitation that have been brought about by the situation in Iraq. As with their collaborative ruminations on the alternative design trajectories made available in and by the Tijuana–San Diego border area (conventionally taken, from the planning and architectural perspective, as a promiscuous sprawling muddle), their ref lections on how the war in Iraq was actually played out ("bottom up"), as opposed to how it was originally planned ("top down"), discover in the wake of calamity a palpable object lesson: conflict, and the dire wreckage of conflict, are, by their very nature, a base of operations for imaginative intervention and social and geopolitical negotiation—the kind of intervention and negotiation Cruz and Reyes have both explored and instantiated through their projects at SFAI.
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