This weekend marks the 15th anniversary of the premiere of Some Kindly Monster, the most ambitious project I’ve ever headed commissioned by the most important art event I’ve ever been a part of — inSite05. inSite05: Art Practices in the Public Domain was the fifth incarnation of a bi-national, biannual art event between the U.S. and Mexico which used the San Diego-Tijuana region as the site for research, artist residencies, and public art interventions that resulted from the exchanges between artists and local communities.
Some Kindly Monster was a natural progression of the work I was doing in grad school that integrated car culture, hip hop DJs, and the conceit of the Santo Ninyo prayer gatherings among Filipino Catholics as a way for collaborators across generations, race/ethnicity, and class to engage each other. With an old school Boriqua biker and an Asian import car crew on board, the project was born. The result was a self-fulfilling prophecy — a strangely modified bread delivery truck-cum-mobile DJ station/ice cream truck that was far from beautiful, yet endearing in its own unwieldy way.
In rides throughout San Diego County and Tijuana, blasting DJ mixes inspired by and created for ‘El Monstruo,’ a driver and i would encounter passersby and engage with them, giving away CD copies of the music we were playing. At events, the collaborating DJs would spin, transforming the Monster into a site of communion, manifesting a utopian moment for as long as the music played. I don’t know if the inSite folks understood my intentions. Because the U.S.-Mexico border is always framed as a site of perpetual crisis, the art intelligentsia didn’t know what to make of my piece. But it was those moments when people came together to dance that made the Monster — the conflicts, the self-doubt, the friendships, the growth — matter.
Poster promoting the project and its appearances in San Diego and Tijuana in 2005.
Some Kindly Monster passing through National City, California.