This is a project long overdue. I bought this domain in 2016, when I was teaching graduate art in California, with the desire of establishing an active writing practice that would take criticism and reviews as a point of departure and move into more experimental formats as time passed. Time passed, and I changed cities a few times before I could stop for long enough to decide that I wanted to start this project by observing the dynamics of Mexico City, where I live. I came here in 2019 with no fixed expectations, although I was interested in participating in the ever-growing artistic scene while producing editorial and curatorial work internationally. But the pandemic, as well as an unintended consequence of it—a business—prevented me from having the space and time to do what I am finally presenting here. A copy is a copy is a copy is a contribution I offer to an ecosystem that has a conspicuous need for insightful debate.

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What’s in a name?

acopyisacopyisacopy obviously comes from Gertrude Stein’s poem, Sacred Emily. Never was the rose so red, as they say, than when Stein cast it into her writings. The intensity captured in that repetition conveys part of the spirit of the writing that interests me, but also of my thinking process. The name also obviously comes from Palahniuk’s declaration, “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy,”  which incarnates the schizophrenic experience of living in late capitalism, where digital prosthetics often prevent us from moving away from the same constellations of images and ideas. In our everyday lives, where everything is a reboot or a refried version of something else and everything has been said and done already, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

As an artist and curator, I have a compulsion for lookalikes. It is simultaneously a way of building understanding and a form of skepticism, perhaps even terrible criticism. acopyisacopyisacopy is a device to conjure that criticism and dig deeper. It comes from the desire to not settle with first impressions, of deciding that sometimes the copy is not only that—a mere copy—but something that finds virtue through insistence, dwelling, and repetition. This is just as true for my writing as it is for the works and exhibitions I review and the ideas I entertain, study, or rehearse.

This space is meant to present some of the writing I publish—particularly reviews, interviews, conversation pieces, and similar formats—but also some of the writing that I don’t send for publication, for many reasons. There are writings that will be done in more experimental, or perhaps whimsical formats and tend not to fulfill the expectations of magazine or journal editors, so they will happily live here for anyone to enjoy, engage with, or contradict.

Some of these writings will be in English and some in Spanish (they will be in both as much as I can), because these are the languages I often write and publish in, but also because I want to offer my ideas (and the art I engage with) to as many people as I can. I sincerely hope you enjoy, and if you ever have questions, want to engage in conversation, or want to put any of these materials elsewhere, kindly write me at davidayala [at] gmail [dot] com

Thank you.

—David Ayala-Alfonso.

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Except for the content published elsewhere or attributed to a different author (cases in which other licensing rules may apply), all of the texts, images, videos, sounds and other resources of this website are licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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