ON COLLABORATION Felicia Rice

DOC/UNDOC is the sequel to CODEX ESPANGLIENSIS, which I published in 1998. The CODEX was a collaboration between Guillermo Gómez-Peña, writer/activist, Enrique Chagoya, artist/printmaker, and myself, bookmaker/printer. Nine years later, while discussing who would be the visual artist for DOC/UNDOC with our collaborator Gustavo Vazquez, Guillermo turned to me and asked, “Do you draw?”

At three, I ran to my mother because my big sister had made me cry, and my mother said, “Draw it, draw what happened.” When your mother is a children’s art teacher, and she sees art as the way to process any and all experience, you draw, and you write, and there’s resistance when you don’t. So I responded, “Yes, I draw,” even though I had rarely incorporated my drawings into my bookwork. Guillermo said, “You draw,” in the imperative. It was imperative that I did.

Collaboration is an active acknowledgement of the other, a call and response. What results from the mix has unique merit. In this seven-year collaboration I experienced a profound metamorphosis. I slowly emerged from behind my elegant typography and careful craft, explored and privileged my markmaking, and pulled it into my prints. As we added collaborators to the group—Jennifer González, art historian/critic and Zachary Watkins, sound artist—over dinners, in meetings, and through correspondence, another element developed: the aluminum traveling case for apprentice shamans. Only five hearts and minds could have conceived of this invitation to a self-reflective and transformative experience.

Open the case, open your mind
Explore freely, touch everything
Empty the silk bags, empty your heart
Choose an object, find a poetic way of using it
Reimagine yourself, tell a new story
then,
Collaborate with four other artists, embrace difference