20 STORIES OF CIRCOSTRADA - CELEBRATING THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NETWORK: Mapping Mexico

CEDACIRC only joined the network in 2022, but I’ve been following Circostrada for a long time. I trained as a circus artist at Académie Fratellini in Paris, and even as students we would use the mapping on the Circostrada website for research and to see where there were festivals and residency spaces. I’m sure that back then we didn’t explore it as much as we could, but Circostrada has stuck in my mind ever since. After working in France and touring the world as an artist, I eventually returned to Mexico to set up an organisation dedicated to promote circus arts from Mexico and Latin America. In early 2020, Circostrada approached me for some information about what was going on in Mexico as they were planning a visit to the country as part of their programme of research trips. I suggested that Festival Periplo in Guadalajara would be the perfect event to centre it around. Then of course the pandemic came and the trip moved online. The idea was to turn it into a collection of videos, podcasts and publications that would be published on the Circostrada website over a five-day period — but to do that we had to create the content itself, and map what was actually happening in the country. For the Mexican community I think this mapping was a very important process. We collected the names of something like 400 different organisations doing circus, then selected 30 or so from Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City, and we built a beautiful database of what’s going on in Mexico. Even for me, I met a lot of groups and individuals I didn’t know. It made me rediscover my own country. We produced a few videos, one in Guadalajara, one in Monterrey, and one in Mexico City to try and present a panorama of circus in Mexico. We also wanted to capture the sounds of Mexico, so we made some podcasts to express the colourfulness of Mexico and its cultural traditions. We were documenting our communities and at the same time weaving them together into a network. After the online trip, I realised that we needed to build on these networks and make them stronger. We began a programme called ‘Hablemos de circo’ to promote dialogue and reflection in the sector. At our first meeting, we were 8 people, then we were 10, then quickly we had meetings of 80 or 100. It was still the pandemic and nobody could leave their home, but they had a lot of things to say. I also started a new project to build a wider community in Latin America – Cartografía de circo — in collaboration with Leandro Mendoza from Ciclicus in Spain. After doing the mapping of Mexico with Circostrada, I realised that of course we needed to have an online map for the whole of Latin America. In Mexico, everyone wants to go and tour in Europe, but it’s very expensive to do that. So the idea has been to encourage a distribution network in Latin America. If we can tour more in our own region, travelling by land, then we can create a different kind of mobility and exchange between artists in Latin America, before building bridges with Europe. After running the project for a year, we also added Spain and Portugal to the mapping, making Cartografía de circo the only resource uniting Iberoamerica. Now, it lists almost 200 projects. Circostrada’s research trip to Mexico was an inspiration for all of this. My intention in being part of the network now is to give visibility to these new projects and to all the people who are working in circus, in Mexico and throughout Latin America.