Compania Canibali (Co.Ca) is a collective founded in 2019 by Cesar Valdes and Raul Ayala, two MFA alumni from Mason Gross School of Art and Design at Rutgers University, NJ. This initiative materialized as a need for expanding the framework of our studio practices. We decided to mobilize from our studios, based on the need to open the reflections produced during critique sessions. We wanted to build a shared space of artistic research to process some of the most prevalent concerns as bodies in transit confronted by the current political events.

We borrowed the concept comorbidity from the healthcare vocabulary that uses it to assess the risk taken by insurance companies and healthcare providers before accepting a new patient. Comorbidity is the presence of more than one anomaly in a single body. With the intensification of hate speech, we felt that our memories, practices, and personal archives were perceived as anomalies. We did recognize the symptoms of these anomalies as emotional responses not aligned exclusively with western thought. We created a space of reflection placed between the limits of assimilation and isolation through a series of "Comorbidities"