Free Third Thursday

Join us for a free evening at MOCA with galleries open late, live music by KXCI Community Radio, food by Herculean Chicken, and drinks by Brick Box Brewery! Don’t miss this lively time to gather with friends and family around art, music, and drinks; all ages are welcome!

This month, MOCA presents a special one-night screening of the film Archivo deshilachado (Unravelling Archive), by curator and historian Veronica Rossi in the East Galleries.

Inspired by the Archivo deshilachado (Unravelling Archive) film’s concept of the archive as a living site of metamorphosis, join us on the plaza for a physical media swap. Contribute your personal archive – books, records, CDs, DVDs, VHSs, artwork, and beyond – and swap with others. Share the transformative nature of communal cultural exchange with us this evening!

At 5pm, MOCA Members are invited to come early for a special Members cocktail reception, screening of Archivo deshilachado (Unravelling Archive), and conversation with the guest speaker, curator and historian Veronica Rossi.

 

About the film (New York, 14’50”, 2025)
Archivo deshilachado (Unravelling Archive) examines what archives preserve and, at the same time, what is lost, scattered, or deliberately erased. The film understands archives as unstable spaces, traversed by decisions, affections, and forms of control, where memory is constructed both by accumulation and by absence. Documentary materials intersect with personal stories and everyday gestures, shifting the idea of the archive as a repository toward a metabolic entity that overflows and transforms. Rossi’s film approaches the archive of Argentinean contemporary artist Claudia del Río to declassify it, to allow its fragments to reveal unexpected relationships. Archivo deshilachado proposes a form of fragmentary, layered biography and autobiography, where the preserving impulse also implies hiding, dividing, and letting grow. Rather than securing a legacy, the archive here is a place of metamorphosis.

 

About Veronica Rossi (Buenos Aires, 1973)
A historian and archivist, Veronica Rossi has organized literary and artistic collections and was a curator at MALBA, Buenos Aires. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Biography and Memoir at the Graduate Center (CUNY, New York), where she explores experimental forms of storytelling based on documentary materials. Archivo deshilachado is her first film essay.

 

About the Exhibitions
On view in the Great Hall is Tlazohuelmanaz (offering of love), a solo exhibition by artist Fernando Palma Rodríguez that features a series of newly commissioned robotic sculptures that interweave art, nature, and technology exploring shared issues like climate, water, and the care for Indigenous knowledge, which impact both the artist’s home and community in Milpa Alta, Mexico as well as communities in the Sonoran Desert. On view in the East Wing Galleries is Living With Injury, an exhibition centering the environmental justice movement led by Mexican American community members in their fight against defense industry pollution that caused widespread illness in the southside of Tucson in the 1980s. Featuring archival materials, and the work of local artists, journalists, researchers, and community members, the project reflects on the power of community organizing, disability justice, and collective healing in the face of environmental racism

Monthly Free Thursdays are presented in collaboration with KXCI Community Radio.