Today we’d like to introduce you to Francisco Eme.
Francisco, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started playing guitar at the age of 7. I joined a band and started writing music at the age of 14. I was playing in bars and parties even before I was old enough to be there. Those were fun times. As a musician, that was one of the periods in which I connected the most with people. After a while I realized that although I love performing live, I really enjoy composing and producing music in the studio. When I was 24 years old I started collaborating with a lot of dance and theatre organizations in Mexico, making music and sound design for their works, going on tours and playing in festivals. My music changed, I started to feel more and more attracted to new genres, experimental, electroacoustic and noise music. I also started feeling more interested in sound art and electronic art. I began showing my works in galleries and museums in Mexico and my music was being played in other parts of the world as well.
The first time I came to San Diego was in 2013, I was Invited to show one of my sound installations at Cecut in Tijuana by curator Luis Ramaggio and of course, I had to cross to San Diego and get a glimpse of the transnational life. I fell in love with the region. I was also producing an album with Monica Camacho, a singer/songwriter from San Diego, who later became my wife. I moved permanently to San Diego in 2014. Since then, I started showing my artwork in galleries, participating in group shows, collaborating with artists and organizations. One of the first places I visited was The Front Arte Cultura, art gallery in San Ysidro. I started collaborating with the south San Diego non profit Casa Familiar, producing some videos for them, working on their website and some arts and culture activities. I curated my first exhibition at The Front in 2016. As an artist I had my first solo exhibition in the USA at San Diego Art Institute in 2018.
I can say that I am working in parallel in two careers, one as a curator and cultural promoter and the other as an artist. As a curator, I have been working at The Front Arte Cultura for the last three years and officially became the Gallery Director in 2019. I have curated there, many exhibitions, concerts and projects relevant to the binational – transnational life of this region that now I call home. As an artist I have developed a body of work that goes from sound to multimedia installations. I have released three music albums in the past 5 years with different projects and collaborators. Coming up very soon, I will be releasing an album called “The Invention of Us – Treatise on Violence” which is going to be an album that was supposed to be premiered as an opera-like performance, but canceled because of the pandemic.
Has it been a smooth road?
Definitely starting from scratch in another country has been the biggest challenge. When I moved to San Diego I knew almost nobody and making all these connections takes time and trust and a lot from you as a human, but it’s beautiful too.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
As an artist, I have been focused on making sound installations and multimedia works. Somehow I have been expanding my techniques and the media I use, including video, photography, field recordings, even sculpture, to mention a few. In my art I like to talk about our culture and our society, Things that affect me in one way or another, spiritually, emotionally, economically. It could be violence, it could be language, it could be politics. For me, art is like having a conversation: You make a piece about something and sometimes you are placing more questions than statements, sometimes people have to respond to the piece to activate it, they have to think about it by themselves so they can come to their own conclusions. Most of the times there´s no conclusions at all, because these themes and subjects are complex. Our society is complex, and there´s different dynamics happening in different parts of the word, and they are constantly flowing. I like to talk about them just as if we were having a conversation, but I use sounds, electronics, screens, projections, cables, to speak, instead of my voice. My music is similar, although I usually get more personal and emotional when making music. I can talk about love in a song or in a electroacoustic composition. Music is more essential to me, it comes more from the gut than from the intellect. I write songs too, with lyrics, that´s how I started and I still love it very much. Writing lyrics with music is a beautiful art and very dear to my heart. I like to make music in my studio using old instruments and objects that are not necessarily musical. I like to use sounds from movies and videos to make music. I also like to think about the meaning of the sounds and not only the sonic qualities, I like symbols. For example think about the sound of somebody cutting wood with a machete, visualize it: it symbolizes our essential relationship with nature, it means destruction but also construction, it means fire, food. Then put that image and that symbol in the middle of a slow music composition and it becomes even more poetic.
Working at The Front Arte & Cultura has been very exciting. The Font has been active for 13 years now, thanks to the vision and hard work of a lot of people. Casa Familiar, the non-profit I work for, and runs the gallery, is an organization that knows how important arts are for the community. As a director and curator, working at The Front Arte Cultura is amazing. We are in the middle of the binational arts scene, that is very exciting, we have contact with amazing artists with such a strong voice from both countries, and we get to work with them. One of the goals since I started at The Front, was to connect young audiences and engage them with art, although they ended up engaging us instead. The connection is there, we both are working, either making a street art exhibition (which is coming up), hosting a workshop or having a house concert, we are working, but there’s still more way to go, there’s still more bridges to build. We are proud to stay local and really work with our community, without losing sight of the rest of the world and collaborating with international artists as well. We support our artists and try to give them a safe space to work, experiment and grow as artists.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Art exists everywhere, the best place to make art is where you are right now. It could be in a lonely mountain, it could be in a cosmopolitan city. San Ysidro is an amazing place for a gallery working with the binational community. Of course you have to understand that we are one with Tijuana, Ensenada and other border communities. The Front is one of the few art spaces in south San Diego and the only one in San Ysidro, but art exists anyway. As long as there are humans there will be art. As an artist I like working here too. Coming from Mexico City is quite a change, but I needed it. I enjoy the lifestyle and the complexities, the flow of people, the crash of cultures.
Contact Info:
- Address: 147 W San Ysidro Blvd
- Website: thefront.casafamiliar.org – franciscoeme.com
- Phone: 6199626757
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
Francisco’s portrait by Braulio Lam. The Front’s photos by Francisco Eme
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