Intercambio/Exchange is a collaborative partnership between Bread & Salt Gallery and Arista 1701, a contemporary art space located in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. Aiming to produce a dialogue between San Diego and Mexicali, the galleries will trade spaces and offer an exchange of cultural resources and artistic projects. Beginning in September 2026, the year-long program will feature four exhibitions curated by Arista 1701 at Bread & Salt, presented in Not an Exit Gallery and the courtyard wall. In turn, Bread & Salt will organize four exhibitions at Arista 1701, using a billboard on the exterior of the building and a passageway within the art space. This bi-national creative exchange aims to establish a long-term bilateral relationship between both galleries and the artists, offering a space for artistic exchange and community feedback at Bread & Salt and Arista 1701.
Intercambio/Exchange es una colaboración entre Bread & Salt Gallery, en San Diego, California, y Arista 1701, un espacio de arte contemporáneo ubicado en Mexicali, Baja California, México. Con el objetivo de generar un diálogo entre las regiones de San Diego y Mexicali, las galerías intercambiarán espacios y compartirán recursos culturales y proyectos artísticos. Este programa, de un año de duración y con inicio en septiembre de 2026, incluirá cuatro exposiciones curadas por Arista 1701 en Bread & Salt, las cuales se presentarán en la Not an Exit Gallery y en el muro del patio. Por su parte, Bread & Salt organizará cuatro exposiciones en Arista 1701, utilizando un panel publicitario en el exterior del edificio y un pasillo dentro del espacio artístico. Este intercambio creativo binacional busca establecer una relación bilateral a largo plazo entre ambas galerías y los artistas, ofreciendo un espacio para el intercambio artístico y la retroalimentación comunitaria en Bread & Salt y Arista 1701.
ON VIEW AT ARISTA 1701
El Poder Del Ser: Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá
Film Dispatch
El Poder Del Ser by the group Film Dispatch is the inaugural installation by Bread & Salt Gallery at Arista 1701, as part of the project Intercambio/Exchange, a year-long collaborative partnership between Bread & Salt Gallery and Arista 1701. Installed on the exterior billboard, El Poder Del Ser is always visible outside Arista 1701 day and night.
A road that runs through the body as much as the land, El Poder del Ser: Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá is a visual and sonic project about the migrant condition. Belonging fully to neither the country left behind nor the one arrived in, told through La Rumorosa, the mountain highway connecting Tijuana and Mexicali, the road becomes both literal route and spiritual threshold. Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá–“neither from here, nor from there”–names the emotional condition at the center of the project: the in-between state of someone who has crossed a border and left a piece of themselves on both sides. The story is about connection beyond geography: values, memory, tradition, and inherited ways of being that travel with a person even when the land they came from does not. La Rumorosa becomes the central symbol: its winding road, sudden weather, danger, beauty, and history of accidents and disappearances turn the highway into a passage between worlds, a physical road that mirrors a migrant’s spiritual and emotional road.
Film Dispatch is an independent collective of filmmakers, producers, photographers, and creatives. Born between San Diego, Tijuana, and Mexico City, the Film Dispatch was created in an effort to platform underrepresented voices in the film industry. Film Dispatch was a Bread & Salt IMPACT Artist in Residence in 2026, using the residency to carve a space for engagement with emerging independent filmmakers and creatives in the community
ON VIEW AT BREAD & SALT
Lost and Found
Héctor Bázaca
Lost and Found, by Mexicali artist Héctor Bázaca, is the inaugural exhibition of Intercambio/Exchange, a year-long collaborative partnership between Bread & Salt Gallery and Arista 1701.
Based on Bázaca’s exploration of site-specific, anonymous scribbles and texts found in downtown Mexicali near the U.S.–Mexico border, the artist uses drawing as a strategy for aesthetic preservation through documentation and graphite reproduction. Approaching these markings from what he describes as an “archaeological-speculative perspective,” Bázaca connects his encounters with these markings to the discovery of the Lascaux Cave, a network of caves in southern France covered in prehistoric artworks. According to a popular account, the caves were found in 1940 by a dog named Robot, who followed a rabbit into an opening in the ground. The installation includes photographs of sites explored in downtown Mexicali; drawings that reproduce phrases and markings found on the area’s walls; and a sculpture based on one of Bázaca’s routes, as recorded by Google Maps. An image of Robot also appears as a narrative element, drawing a speculative connection between the chance discovery of one of the most significant sites in prehistoric art and the anonymous texts observed in Mexicali which go unnoticed by those who inhabit these spaces daily. Through his multidisciplinary installation, Bázaca resists passive acceptance of his surroundings, driven by the desire to become more conscious of the spaces we move through.