Interview with Futuro Conjunto
Interview by Natalia Rocafuerte
How is your winter going, where are you located?
We’re living in two different parts of the country, actually—Charlie in the Rio Grande Valley, and Jonathan in Los Angeles. We’re both trying to make the best of our situations this winter, especially given how precarious things are right now. We’re grateful to have some work stability and the ability to create together.
How did you create this piece?
In the fictional world of Futuro Conjunto, “HEATDEATH” is performed by a band called Simonada, the members of which work day jobs at a brutal Sun Farm in a future Pharr, TX. So for this piece, we thought it’d be fun to create an in-universe lyric music video that tied into Simonada’s mythology and gave viewers a neo-psychedelic representation of RGV heat.
Early in the process, Charlie suggested a great creative constraint: use mostly low-fi, at-home techniques. So we traded a few ideas and eventually landed on food coloring, oil and water, handwritten lyrics, and static images that could be minimally manipulated. Once we got into editing, we started having fun with contrasts, saturations, exposures, and colors. We wanted the piece to grow progressively hotter and brighter, and the hard cuts—from searing whites and reds to dusty blacks and greys—allowed us to play with that a bit. The flashes create positive afterimages, little impressions that the eye carries across darker spaces after being exposed to bright lights.
What drives your experimental work?
We love finding connections between materials that feel disparate, working up new skills and techniques as we complete different projects, and collaborating with others and learning from their perspectives. We try to make “What if?” a refrain in our work across different spaces. There’s an ethical, political, and artistic strength in that kind of questioning. Asking “What if?” melts the world and its categories down, takes them from solids to liquids. It makes even the most dominant ideas pliable and highlights how the imagination and the physical world connect. “What if?” implies a future. There’s hope and responsibility in that.
Why is sci-fi part of your practice?
There’s a long tradition of what literary scholar Paula Moya calls “ethnospeculative fiction” in the U.S.—books, music, and audiovisual media by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, and other differently racialized and marginalized authors drawing from their histories, connections, communities, and personal experiences to imagine new worlds. Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle Monae, Cherríe Moraga, David Bowles, Beatrice Pita, Rosaura Sánchez, Sesshu Foster, Ted Chiang, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor—more experimentalists than we can name here. In their work, these writers are constantly challenging readers, viewers, and listeners to seek and embrace new ways of thinking and relating. In Futuro Conjunto, we wanted to follow their example, so we turned to some of the layered histories of the Rio Grande Valley, our home, to imagine post-national, “futurasquache,” and decidedly local possibilities through sound design, original music, video and animation, collaborative fiction, and web design. We wanted to build a future we could dance to.
How did conjunto frontera become an energy?
Conjunto music has been part of the cultural fabric of the South Texas borderlands for many generations. Since the days of Narciso Martinez and Lydia Mendoza, it's been an energy that's infused much of our region’s creative expression. There’s always more to discover and create. We’re excited to keep exploring this rich tradition and honoring its musicians in future work—and always asking, again, “What if?”
Jonathan and Charlie from Futuro Conjunto
Would you care to share your last dream?
Charlie: I found myself in a public place without my mask. Lately, this dream has supplanted my old stress dream of showing up for a final exam in a class I didn’t remember signing up for.
Jonathan: It’s hazy now, but there was a cat, a bus station, a case of dark chocolate, and a scroll full of pictograms. Funky.
Check out Futuro Conjunto latest video project Artifact Record 4X694 Heatdeath during our Experimental Shorts Broadcast hosted by Natalia Rocafuerte on December 4 2020 at 8PM Central Time. RSVP here!
Social/website: Instagram:@futuroconjunto www.futuroconjunto.com
