Memes are the smallest ideological - viral - unit. They are created, intervened, distributed, viralized, rethought and diluted. Their materiality lies in the act of spontaneous generation and its consequent filtration through the light veil of the internet. What stories are told from these spaces? which voices are valid? who do these qualities of uncontrolled expansion attend to in the www? and what is their place within the socio-political context we inhabit? Although, historically, art has had the capacity to reflect its environments for reflection, criticism, contemplation, and adaptation, what does it mean to simplify and limit a series of practices validated and revalidated by exhibition spaces in order to talk about possible worlds? And what are the implications of eradicating formats, materials, and discourses from contemporary creation by generating a panorama of the possible "new" ways of inhabiting the world?

This online exhibition brings together a series of current socio-political positions that confront the prevailing conditions we inhabit and which, without a doubt, must change. The specific implications of memes as political entities lie in a detachment from authorship by appealing to dispersed collective logics such as dynamic archiving, post-digital thinking and community tactics that seek to resist censorship and the growing eradication of memories from the collective imagination.

From the beginning of the massification of the Internet in the mid-1990s, virtual space and the way it is inhabited began to be seen as a territory without borders where interactions could take place in multiple forms and power apparently expanded, generating an illusion of democracy and decentralization. Thus, a collective imaginary has been raised where it seems that what happens inside the screen is not real or does not have repercussions in the material world. We built the utopia of the Internet, conceiving it as an isolated environment, when, in reality, it has been overflowing off the screen for years into the political, economic and social realms, affecting our lifestyles and ways of acting.

By 1990, Joseph Nye coined the term soft power, putting it before the idea of hard power, which alluded to that exercise of power by a political actor who employs tactics of military force or monetary coercion. Soft power, Nye said, is that strategy that seeks to co-opt and attract the attention of other political actors through cultural and ideological means to influence their actions and decision making. Hard power uses material objects (tanks, police force) to try to force an outcome. While soft power is more programmatic and is largely exercised through psychological operations (psy-ops), and the export of ideologies and cultural values, often through media such as newspapers/magazines, film, television, museums, and cultural space programming, and more recently, the consumption of content on the Internet.

This exercise seeks to bring together an active ecology of meme creators to open a dialogue/debate in the face of current conditions and resist the soft power that cultural spaces exert on the narratives that surround us.

Unidad de Conciencias Colectivas Terrestres en colaboración con Memeteca Nacional, Policia de Turing, Mexico Is Cheap, La Mirada Transgresora y Trips Sinsemilla.

Off Site Project, 28 de febrero - 31 de marzo 2021.

Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, México. PRÓXIMAMENTE.