GP: I really like the idea of creating a contemporary curiosity cabinet. It's a logical extension of both my performance/installation work (The Year of the White Bear, The Temple of Confessions, The Living Museum of Fetish-ized Identities, etc.) and your ongoing interest in border art.
KJ: What do you see in it?

GP: Carefully selected "borderabilia" and what I term "barrio conceptual art." We can have "high" velvet art, juxtaposed with deranged tourist art, rare transcultural comix, and pirate videos. I see pirate culture...

KJ:...and of course, a selection of artifacts from your personal performance archaeology, unique props and costumes from your performance biography.

GP: Sure, the idea is to create a robo-baroque environment with an encyclopedic scope, enveloped by a literary metafiction which is part social reality and part Chicano sci-fi.

KJ: Just like our sensibilities...

GP: ...and our times. The backdrop is the macabre theater of globalization gone wrong, or rather "the global(ized) border," and the overall aesthetic ought to be bien high-tech etnográfica, bien Discovery channel on acid, que no? I like the term "Ethno-techno" which was coined by this Spanish critic referring to my work.

KJ: I believe this project could effectively recontextualize, not just mimic or recreate, the wunderkammers, or "wonder chambers/cabinets" that were wildly popular in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We can achieve this by replacing the objects of naturalia and artificialia that they originally contained with our own, borderized versions...a contemporary version that resonates with your own writing and performance strategies, and addresses and challenges the politics of (re)presentation and display engaged in by museums.

GP: Let's find some Latin, faux Latin, or Spanglish names for artist-made artifacts that mimic border pop culture and juxtapose them with trans- or intercultural pop artifacts that are themselves defacto "involuntary conceptual art." Am I clear?

KJ: Involuntary conceptual art? I love it! One of the categories of objects on display in the original wunderkammers was artificialia, which typically consisted of man-made objects that the collector, or Liefhebber, found to be unusual or exotic. In our borderized version we could include "exotic artifacts from distant cultures"---we could redefine this category by limiting it to objects associated with hegemonic [a.k.a., Anglo] culture? The dominant culture would be made exotic through cultural inversion.

KJ: Involuntary conceptual art? I love it! One of the categories of objects on display in the original wunderkammers was artificialia, which typically consisted of man-made objects that the collector, or Liefhebber, found to be unusual or exotic. In our borderized version we could include "exotic artifacts from distant cultures"---we could redefine this category by limiting it to objects associated with hegemonic [a.k.a., Anglo] culture? The dominant culture would be made exotic through cultural inversion.

GP: Our modus operandi must be "reverse anthropology."

KJ: Explain...

GP: We need to "anthrolopologize" Anglo tribes and millennial subcultures by taxonomizing their artifacts and creating dioramas of say, a "suburban family" or "a republican yuppie" with a perverse orientalist secret collection...(pause) or a "redneck"...

KJ: A "redneck" diorama? Yes, the male figure(s) would have to have "mullet" hairdos, a bad sunburn or ó better yet ó a farmer's tan, and a wife-beater T-shirt. A very Anglo suburban family, with a trompe-l'oiel SUV parked in front of a "cookie-cutter" house in the suburbs would work. Presenting what is considered to be "the norm" in this context would be perfect for anthropologizing it, turning it into the "new Other."

GP: What about exhibiting "the collection of a fallen Silicon Valley tycoon," or the paraphernalia of a "Global Apocalypse hipster?" During the opening, we can actually exhibit a live "chic New York curator" with his/her personal photo album containing staged images of cultural transvestism?