Club Chufa: Wikis

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<blockquote>"MTV is a model to writers all around the world. I cannot think of a writer that could work his material without cable TV..."
 
Fugo Medina[1484]</blockquote>.

Oh Rey!, art-object by Club Chufa's member "Harry"

Club Chufa (the most acceptable English translation would be "Scorn Club") is an artistic movement based in Mexico, mainly concerned with performing arts, experimental literature, social disobedience, visual arts, film and gonzo journalism. El Club Chufa uses diverse tactics to confuse, enrage and mock the audiences, the reader, and/or the critics. The group's firts aim was Literature, but it gradually expanded to the other arts. Their guidelines are written in various manifestos published in local newspapers and Internet webpages. El Club Chufa spreads through local propaganda, internet rumours and the creation of myths and urban legends.

History

El Club Chufa was created in November, 1998 by Literature majors and writers Carlos Mal Pacheco, Fugo Medina, Luis Lope, Ray Rojas and Cecilia Catalán. The group started performing for the small circle of students and teachers of the School of Linguistics and Literature in the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico.

Carlos Mal Pacheco (born in 1980) took the idea for the name of the club from El libro de Buen Amor, a very influential Spanish Medieval text, in which the author, Juan Ruiz (The "Spanish Chaucer"), mentions an obscure word: chufa, refering to the character of his book:

<blockquote>"Non tengades que es libro neçio de devaneo, 
nin creades que es chufa algo que en él leo". 
 
"Do not think this is a book of foolish musings 
nor think that anything I read of it is scorn or mockery" 
(Translation by Carlos Mal Pacheco).
</blockquote>

In the words of Fugo Medina, El Club Chufa's birth is a little more mythical:

<blockquote>"It was in a Creative Writing Workshop during our third semester at the University. Luis Lope had an argument with professor Jesus Antonio Villa (deceased); the latter laughed and thus inspired quite unexplainably the Scorn Club into Luis Lope's brain. Villa was the creator of the movement and professor Volker Schüller Will(deceased) is the Official Sentinel of the Club, even when neither of them know about it.
"This happened the 27th of November, 1998... then, Luis Lope leaned toward us and said: why don't we create a Club? We shall call it Chufa...! And we all agreed on that."[1485]</blockquote>
Pacheco, Medina and Catalán thought of the Club as a literary Avant-garde movement but after Pacheco's experience with various literary clubs and a theater company, the Club became comprehensive, involving in its plans all of the liberal arts and the new media arts and hybrids of all nature.[1486]

Carlos Mal Pacheco considers the Club can be defined as a group of:

<blockquote>"Narrative bureaucrats and tactic, cold poetry-plotters; our proposal to the world is nurtured by Islamic irrationality and Western Stupidity, along with Eastern absurd and African darkness... we are the World."[1487]</blockquote>

"TheClubChufaZine"

Since the very beginning of El Club Chufa Carlos Mal Pacheco and Fugo Medina started the project "TheClubChufaZine", originally a fanzine-format publication that tried to mock subversive fanzines in circulation. The result was a sporadic, low-budget magazine that served as a forum for El Club Chufa's aims. The fanzine had a run of four years, having released 5 issues, all of them designed by the Club's leader, Carlos Mal.