Co-morbidities

Collaborative exhibition, Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University, 2019
In collaboration with Raul Ayala / Compania Canibali (Co.Ca)

Co-morbidities emerged as a collective response to the emotional, political, and institutional pressures faced by two artists in transit—Cesar Valdes and Raul Ayala—during their MFA studies in the U.S. Formed in 2019, their collaboration, named Compania Canibali (Co.Ca), created a shared space of artistic research rooted in dialogue, mutual support, and experimentation.

Borrowing the term “comorbidity” from medical discourse—where it describes the coexistence of multiple conditions within a single body—the project reclaims the word to explore layered emotional, material, and cultural conditions carried by migrant artists. Here, comorbidities are understood as poetic, conflicting, or even unclassifiable symptoms of adaptation, memory, and displacement.

The gallery installation served as both an archive and a symptomatology. Personal objects, gestures, conversations, and unfinished works from their studios converged into a critical body—a constellation of material emotional responses that resisted linear interpretation. Some elements refused explanation entirely, inviting viewers to experience the work somatically rather than intellectually.

The project questioned how we construct knowledge through artistic practice—especially as artists navigating institutional frameworks that often lack the capacity to hold emotional complexity, cultural specificity, or embodied knowledge. Through this process, Valdes and Ayala sought to transmute anxiety and stress into collective reflection, opening up a space where vulnerability becomes a site of knowledge production.