Marcelaygina’s art practice is rooted in using denial as a strategy: to challenge the traditional female role to confront the academic concept of the artist. According to Georgina Arizpe and Marcela Quiroga one should not paint or use materials that involve manual labor; they refuse to see the studioas a place for thought and creative individuality. Therefore, in the style of certain art practices of the seventies in the United States, marcelaygina find that rebellion can be a possibility for discourse, self-proclaimed as a “collective”, they see it as creation’s only possible output. Thus, public space turns out to be where alterity is displayed and where the attack on the art trade is turned into a strategic axis or guide.At first, they were also known by many other names such as “The Bunnies”, “The Chantilly Girls,” “The Pathetic” or “Mecca of Lounge Co.”, all allowed them to build the mythical idea of two aggressive colleagues who appeared in group exhibitions, institutions, and international art fairs in order to mock any established social cliché.

It is no coincidence that the artists studied at Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo León, Monterrey, in the early nineties, a place that defied the idea of the workshop and classroom to move the students toward political confrontation in public spaces. For Marcela and Gina, it was time to use their bodies as representations of the social characters they were challenging. So they awarded themselves, in a desert landscape, diplomas and trophies for occupying such a prominent role as young ladies of society; they posed like sweet sixteeners in a photo study —following the vernacular critique put forward by the eighties kitsch style— facing a hog that symbolically bore the casual game of the middle class. They showed up as sexy bunnies, got drunk and ate wildly on their first appearance in a commercial gallery, while the public only had access to the image of the full breadth of their erotic butts. They also urinated in public at the Paris art fair, 1999, in front of the stand of a renowned political artist. Marcelaygina walked around Paris with ruffled panties, stressing the city’s modern distribution with the looks and remarks of the pas-sersby. They also had some fun; for these creative ladies it was all about smiling as they de-structured Monterrey’s female promise. All their strategies reaffirmed a mockery towards the “politically correct” construction of the northern woman, the symbol of a feisty girl in the most developed industrial city in northern Mexico.

The tour, the knowledge, and the intervention of public space moved the collective from performance into action. In 2001, marcelaygina shifted their attentions from their bodies to actions, where the rules of a conceptualized game were laid down following the rules of street smuggling, that which occurs naturally across borders: the illegal traffic of jewels, weapons, drugs, and miscellaneous items. One way to disrupt the idle foundational character of the “game” is to force each of its participants to play a destined role. The invitation to the IV International Performance Festival in Cali, Colombia, was the right move to manage a complex journey featuring a large number of toy guns, carried by the artists in their hand luggage, between the airports of Monterrey, Mexico-Houston, Texas-Panama City, Panama, and Cali, Colombia. Each customs officer, military intelligence specialist, and immigration officer played the role the artists predetermined for them: to pursue a traffic that was, in the end, allowed. In other words, a new, great laugh. Once in Cali, after having escaped the interrogatories of the corresponding agents, there was only one thing left to do: shooting. Publicly and theatrically, Gina and Marcela shot each other.

Trafficking is thus a viable action strategy, an exercise that allows the institutionalization of the street. It is not exactly about a critical stance on ethics and morality, nor a documentary, but about displacing the camouflage strategies that define an important part of the economic and social system toward what is established; in other words, to define the operating marginality in contemporary social structure. In 2006 the collective designed a vest with the pragmatic goal of having a container for jewelry traffic to help support a middle class family from Monterrey. The artists crossed the border from Laredo, Texas to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas carrying a cargo of “18 K” jewels. Thus, the border and its simulacrum abilities have spanned the last five years of work by the collective marcelaygina; during this period, a chained series of simulations (bins of pirate products, planted guns, prints, objects left behind by those crossing the border, and even shell casings) have allowed them to follow the traces of illegal traffic from the United States to Mexico City. Some of the products currently on display at Check Point / Punto de control go beyond the limits of what is allowed, of what is legal or illegal. Could we define those margins today?

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