Club Chufa
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"MTV is a model to writers all around the world. I cannot think of a writer that could work his material without cable TV..."
Fugo Medina[1]
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El Club Chufa (the most acceptable English translation would be "Scorn Club") is an artistic movement based in Mexico, mainly concerned with performing arts, experimental literature, social disobedience, visual arts, film and gonzo journalism. El Club Chufa uses diverse tactics to confuse, enrage and mock the audiences, the reader, and/or the critics. The group's firts aim was Literature, but it gradually expanded to the other arts. Their guidelines are written in various manifestos published in local newspapers and Internet webpages. El Club Chufa spreads through local propaganda, hoaxes, and through the creation of myths and urban legends.
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[edit] History
El Club Chufa was created in November, 1998 by Literature majors and writers Carlos Mal Pacheco, Fugo Medina, Luis Lope, Ray Rojas and Cecilia Catalán. The group started performing for the small circle of students and teachers of the School of Linguistics and Literature in the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico.
Carlos Mal Pacheco (born in 1980) took the idea for the name of the club from El libro de Buen Amor, a very influential Spanish Medieval text, in which the author, Juan Ruiz (The "Spanish Chaucer"), mentions an obscure word: chufa, referring to the character of his book:
"Non tengades que es libro neçio de devaneo,
nin creades que es chufa algo que en él leo".
"Do not think this as a book of foolish musings
nor do think that anything I read of it is scorn or mockery"
(Translation by Carlos Mal Pacheco).
In the words of Fugo Medina, El Club Chufa's birth is a little more mythical:
"It was in a Creative Writing Workshop during our third semester at the University. Luis Lope had an argument with professor Jesus Antonio Villa (deceased); the latter laughed and thus inspired quite unexplainably the Scorn Club into Luis Lope's brain. Villa was the creator of the movement and professor Volker Schüller Will(deceased) is the Official Sentinel of the Club, even when neither of them know about it.
"This happened the 27th of November, 1998... then, Luis Lope leaned toward us and said: why don't we create a Club? We shall call it Chufa...! And we all agreed on that."[2]
El Club Chufa's logo: a one-eyed cat
Pacheco, Medina and Catalán thought of the Club as a literary Avant-garde movement but after Pacheco's experience with various literary clubs and a theater company, the Club became comprehensive, involving in its plans all of the liberal arts and the new media arts and hybrids of all kinds.[3]
Carlos Mal Pacheco considers the Club as defined by:
"Narrative bureaucrats and tactic, cold poetry-plotters; our proposal to the world is nurtured by Islamic irrationality and Western Stupidity, along with Eastern absurd and African darkness... we are the World."[4]
[edit] The Club Chufa's Manifesto
Signed by Carlos Pacheco the 16th of December, 1998, the first manifesto shows the strong avant-garde tendencies of the early years of the group. The manifesto's name was "The theology of the involved" and was an exercise of experimantal literature. It started with the "conclussions" and then, the second paragraph was the "introduction" or "fintroduction", a wordplay with the opposites "intro" and "fin".
In this manfesto El Club Chufa is proposed as a literary movement, not a group, and it states a number of points of view towards arte and language, like "skepticism towards language" and the urge for "destroying regional, mexican literature" and an open call to plagiarizing other people's art and using lies to achieve the artist's goals.
The list "Estamentos a fijar en la realidad cultural contemporánea" is a good example of El Club Chufa's early postures:
Reality is oneiric.
Word are useless.
The Sun turns around the Earth.
The letter "a" will defeat letter "i" and will take its crown from it.
Dante Alighieri's portrait is fake. He had a mustache.
Viscerality is an epistemologic category.
Euphemism is the numen of spoken language.
Lorca painted Dalí's paintings.
Pizu-masti-lupi.
The Earth is obola.
Love is not pretty.
Dalí wrote Lorca's poems.
Canada doesn't exist.
Antonio Alatorre is omnipresent and omniflavored.
The Earth is pentagonal, with a side for each continent.
Carlos Fuentes is a collective creation of Mexican intellectuals.
An Orgonotic field rules us.
Reality is indeleble.
[edit] "TheClubChufaZine"
Since the very beginning of El Club Chufa Carlos Mal Pacheco and Fugo Medina started the project "TheClubChufaZine", originally a fanzine-format publication that tried to mock subversive fanzines in circulation. The result was a sporadic, low-budget magazine that served as a forum for El Club Chufa's aims. The fanzine had a run of four years, having released 5 issues, all of them designed by Carlos Mal and Fugo medina. The sixth "ChufaZine" is available online (in Spanish).
[edit] Events of El Club Chufa
El Club Chufa has engaged in several events that could be categorized as happenings: public speeches, acts of apparently sporadic strange behaviour and arbitrary interventions in the local media. These "happenings" have the peculiarity of being ephemeral, no written or visual record is kept of them. However, there are a few of other events that have been more notorious and have had impact over the regional art scene of northern Mexico.
[edit] Down with Ronald Reagan's Death!
In june, 2004, El Club Chufa learned of the death of American ex-president Ronald Reagan and performed a spontaneous protest against the death of the politician and against death itself. During the "protest", member of the rival group "Ateneo de los ciegos" attacked El Club Chufa with water balloons and signs with "anti-chufa"phrases on them. The whole act was stopped (peacefully) by municipal police.
[edit] Pira Pagana
Starting in November, 2004, in the celebrating the sixth annversary of the foundation of the Club, several members joined together in the outskirts of Hermosillo and lighted a hube bonfire in which they burned "precious material possessions", as commanded by Pacheco in a bulk e-mail to all members. The event was stopped by the police again. A Pira Pagana is celebrated every winter in Hermosillo.
[edit] Pendejo: Jackass Leve, El Club Chufa on film
During the Summer of 2004 the members of the Club filmed a series of stunts mocking those of the popular MTV's Jackass, but in a much lighter manner. The film was directed, acted and edited by El Club Chufa's members. The apparent aim of these video-recordings was to achieve a humorous simulacrum of what is popular in television, but the real goal was to record a DVD and show it to the public. This was done in July 2005 in the Casa de la Cultura de Sonora, an official cultural space in Hermosillo. The DVD was shown twice with enthusiastic reactions in the audience. Part of this 30 minutes movie is available online in YouTube.
There are plans for filming a sequel to Jackass Leve. Filming will tentatively begin in December 2006.[5]
[edit] El Club Chufa's Links (most of the contents are in Spanish)
- The first Manifesto of El Club Chufa
- El Club Chufa - Art the Manifesto for the year 2000
- Interview with El Club Chufa in El Club Chufa's Online Archive.
- "Chufa" Club Involved in Suicide Attempt
