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Cooperativa Crater Invertido
Founded in Mexico City, Mexico, in 2011.

Self-management, self-education, and self-publication (Autogestión, auto-educación, auto-publicación) are the main programs that give meaning to the artists’ Cooperativa Crater Invertido, which was founded as a “cooperativa” (a legally constituted cooperative enterprise) in a warehouse in “Colonia Obrera” (Workers Neighborhood) in Mexico City in 2011. According to their members, the emergence of this collective should be understood as a response to the limitations they perceive in the institutional channels that are responsible for the education, production, distribution, and reception of contemporary art and culture. Most of the members of Cooperativa Crater Invertido are artists, but the group’s flexible structure allows for the participation of other collectives and individuals on a temporary or permanent basis. The collective describes itself as “a space to gather and work together, a space to share means and ways. A place for dialogue—we are an inverted volcano. We are lava and magma, energy to cluster all kinds of matter.”
The group’s main concern is the disintegration of Mexico’s social fabric and the ways in which the country’s private and public cultural institutions use their resources to restrict artistic freedom. Cooperativa Crater Invertido is highly critical of individualism in the arts and they seek to find other ways to “make, think, and discuss art.” Since its inception, the collective has organized multiple activities, including panel discussions, exhibitions, book and magazine launches, concerts, workshops, assembly meetings, and other events. From these various platforms they seek to realize their aim to “socialize thought” in a very concrete way. Cooperativa Crater Invertido has stated that they were inspired, in part, by the Mexican artists’ collectives known as Los Grupos Generation of the 1960s and ’70s, who were successful in making an impact on the social context. Given this history, Cooperativa Crater Invertido rejects the more recent generation of artists’ collectives in Mexico, which seem to be driven by the very “self-promotion” that they critique. Cooperativa Crater Invertido attempts instead to transform the role of the artist as a catalyst for social and politically determined relations. Self-managed artist cooperatives and initiatives such as Cooperativa Crater Invertido demand models of comprehension and valorization that are radically different from the ones commonly used to give meaning to a work of art. They require an understanding of cultural context, not simply an understanding of historical meaning determined exclusively by aesthetic form. Their work also challenges and points to the limits of the anthropological shift that was introduced in the arts in the 1960s, a model that is insufficient for explaining the motivations that inform their work. Cooperativa Crater Invertido is thus also a welcome initiative in another way: It destabilizes the epistemological forces that determine how we define art and brings us new approaches and views.