Cooperativa Cráter Invertido: A Binding Latency

Sol Henaro situates Cooperativa Cráter Invertido in the context of both current social movements and historical collective practices in Mexico City. Contemporary art is often produced collaboratively, but collaboration is not always overtly present in the work and is rarely sustained over time. Yet for some, such collective processes are indispensable, for they bear the possibility of myriad contagions – a commoning of desires and affinities that may not be entirely clear in the beginning even if the drives are very tangible. Collective exercises, such as those carried out by Cooperativa Cráter Invertido (Inverted Crater Cooperative, CCI), are often filled with tensions and doubts about how best to administer energy, responsibility and visibility. Historically there are recurrent, unresolved questions: how to care for and reactivate affective relations; how to resist exhaustion and cope with changes in members’ interests; how to regulate egotistical excesses; how to negotiate between singular and collective voices while at the same time preventing singular positions from becoming diluted within the group or, on the contrary, becoming inextricable from it. Such is the paradox of collaboration: to be one with the group while remaining one within the group.