Latino Artists Cross Sci-Fi Borders in New Riverside Exhibition

It can be a little jarring to see a vehicle parked in the middle of a museum showroom, in this case UC Riverside’s Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, the flagship of UCR’s ARTSblock.

But there it is: a metallic green-and-white mean machine that looks like it was spawned from some unholy alliance of the ''Alien'' and ''Fast and Furious'' movie franchises.

"It doesn't look like a conventional pickup truck. It looks more like an abstract sculpture. It's all fragmented," explains Mexican-born artist Ruben Ortiz-Torres.

The vehicle -- dubbed "alien space toy" -- is actually a lowrider Nissan pickup that mimics the kind of patrol vehicle you might see kicking up dust along the U.S.-Mexico border, or tearing up and down craters of the moon.

"The bed of the truck, it rises and it spins," explains Ortiz-Torres. "Also the doors expand and then they spin, too. The hood of the truck also expands, goes up."

The body is cut up into sections and tricked out with lowrider hydraulics. When activated it can break apart like a giant Transformer toy, each section spinning madly as if it could get airborne any second.

“The front of the trunk also separates from the back of the truck and runs independently," says Ortiz-Torres, kind of like a rolling space capsule disengaging from its mothership.

Its menacing but playful exploits can be watched in an experimental sci-fi film Ortiz-Torres created to accompany the installation.

The "alien" vehicle is painted in the distinctive colors of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But just what kind of "aliens" is the driverless vehicle meant to apprehend?

"When I look at this thing, it looks a little bit like a space rover to me. This robot that would be this alien device that crosses across borders," says Ortiz-Torres.

“Obviously, I was not the first person that started playing with this double idea of 'alien.' It's in popular culture, it appears at movies,” he says. “We customized this thing in San Ysidro, which is right next to the border, so we were looking at border patrols all the time."

His creation, done in collaboration with famed Southern California lowrider designer and customizer Salvador Munoz, is emblematic of the kind of mind-bending works brought together in "Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas."

It’s a sprawling new exhibition at the Culver Center and its companion space, the California Museum of Photography.

Mundos Alternos is part of the Getty Foundation’s ongoing Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA series spotlighting Latin American and Latino art “in dialogue” with Southern California at more than 70 cultural institutions across the region.

Mundos Alternos pulls together over 30 visual artists from the United States, Portugal, Brazil and across the Spanish-speaking world to take on immigration, colonialism, trade and other cross-border issues through the lens of science fiction.

Some, like Mexican artist Tania Candiani, borrow old technologies to imagine utopian or dystopian futures.

The electronic sheets of metallic buzzes, chirps and crackles surging from the speakers of her "Engraving Sound" installation sound a bit like the echolocation signals of a bat colony layered over some faraway intergalactic ham radio operator who is stuck between frequencies.

But the futuristic sonic blizzard is actually coming from old-school technology: engraved copper plates wired to an analog synthesizer and played through long, curved rows of speakers.

“Speakers that are wraparound almost like bat ears,“ says curator Tyler Stallings.

“And there's a stylus like a record player. It's reading the engravings and then there’s the synthesizer where you can manipulate the sound and make your own (sound) information,” Stallings explains.

“She is interested taking antique technologies and translating it into a new language,” Stallings adds.

A new language only understood across the border of a place where earthlings have yet to venture, perhaps?

Another installation imagines what might happen if unauthorized border crossings from Mexico to the U.S. plummeted. Not because of improved economies or stepped-up security -- but because migrant workers could instead remotely control robot versions of themselves on the U.S side from digital sweatshops in their own hometowns.

It’s the premise of Mexican director Alex Rivera's acclaimed 2008 film "Sleep Dealer," which gets a special section of its own in the Mundos Alternos exhibit. UC Riverside ARTSblock will host a free screening of Sleep Dealer on Sept. 29.

“It deals with ideas of labor, immigration and memory, because there’s another character that sells her memories to people in order to make money for herself,” says Stallings.

"Sleep Dealer" offers a pretty bleak view of U.S. immigration policies and where they may be headed. But most of the works in Mundos Alternos express a reach-for-the-stars kind of optimism.

A Zapatista Spaceship, 'Where Many Worlds Can Fit'

In a secluded sub-gallery just off the museum’s main floor, visitors enter a colorful wood-paneled corridor made from pieces of a shipping container and adorned with folk art paintings from Southern Mexico.

It gives way to an inner sanctum, where a corn-husk-shaped wooden rocket ship the size of an old station wagon is suspended from the ceiling. A couple of handmade black-masked Zapatista rebel dolls are at the controls.

“And then on the interior of the spaceship you see a tree of life, crop fields, so it’s the idea of taking the homeland with you,” says Stallings. “Then you see other comforts of home with a basketball court, you see a school.”

The spaceship was constructed by L.A.-based Portuguese artist Rigo 23, in collaboration with artists affiliated with Southern Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

The Zapatistas formed as a paramilitary group. It now operates as an autonomous self-governing collective focused on advancing the cause and political clout of indigenous people across Mexico. But Rigo 23 says the group’s militant rhetoric has always been leavened with a sense of the cosmic.

“One of the first meetings they ever had, they called it the 'Intergalactic Meeting.' So they invited people from all over Mexico, all over Latin America, all over Earth, the Milky Way and beyond,” says the artist.

After multiple visits to Chiapas state, Rigo 23 eventually won an invitation to pitch the Zapatistas a "far-out" idea to help spread its message here on Earth, and perhaps beyond.

“And we were received by a group of Maya peasant organizers with their faces covered and I said, 'You know, eventually you'll probably get invited to attend a meeting in another galaxy,'” he recalls. Then he popped the question: “So how will you get there?”

"And then I could see their eyes started smiling (behind their black ski masks)," he laughs.

"If you're interested I will offer my services to build such a ship."

And so began a months-long collaboration with Zapatista painters, weavers and carpenters on what became known as the Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program.

"And it's fueled by Zapatista imagination and Maya capacity to endure," says Rigo 23.

"And when you're so curious and so welcoming that you have invited beings from another galaxy, I mean, imagine that from the people whose leader is saying, ‘Let's make us great again let's build a wall on our borders,' " he says.

“These people, who are seen as being so isolated in the mountains growing corn and coffee, their world view wants to embrace the cosmos!”

There’s a motto that’s lit the path of the Zapatista movement for years. And in a sense it’s now become the guiding principle of the Mundos Alternos exhibit: "We want a world where many worlds can fit."

“Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas” is on view at UC Riverside’s Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts in downtown Riverside. It will be there through early February.