Cog•nate Collective / 32 Cans (San Diego/Tijuana)

32 Cans (ongoing) by artists Cog•nate Collective

A central component of Cog•nate Collective’s production interrogates the way cultural objects mediate relationships to place and to others, and, how such objects could be mobilized to reconstitute these relationships: to reflect upon the ways we establish and express forms of political solidarity that (can) link communities across borders (both physical and symbolic). This has led them to develop systems of exchange that also strive to bridge the aesthetic and material concerns of their practice: leveraging forms of cultural capital/symbolic surplus associated with “Art,” to generate an economic/material benefit for communities contending with the fallout of border enforcement and anti-immigrant legislation. 

One such work, 32 Cans (ongoing) plays with Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can imagery to generate donations migrant shelters along the U.S./Mexico border. 

The artists begin the project by visiting a supermarket along the U.S.-side of border, and photographing canned food items frequently used by migrant shelters in the Mexican-side of the border—which house and feed migrants who have been deported from the U.S. as well as those seeking to enter the U.S. in search of asylum. 

A series of 15 prints of each canned item is then printed and exhibited in a gallery setting, where each print is sold for the price of the can in the store—e.g. a photograph of a Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup can that sells for $1.29 in the store, is sold for $1.29 in the gallery.