6th Encuentro

Centro Cultural Recoleta

Buenos Aires, June 8-17, 2007

Since 2000, our Encuentros have been a meeting place for artists, scholars, students, and activists investigating the relation between performance and politics in the Americas. Gathering between 300 and 400 participants, each Encuentro is part academic conference, part performance festival, part workshop series, and wholly interdisciplinary: it is a concentrated space of experimentation, dialogue and collaboration, featuring lectures, performances, installations, roundtable discussions, exhibits, video screenings, work groups and hands-on performance workshops.

Our 2007 Encuentro in Buenos Aires focused on body politics: the politics of the body, political bodies, bodies politic, and the relations between them. We were particularly interested in the formations of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender articulated through body politics in different eras, geographies and imaginaries in the Americas. We examined the body as a site of negotiation, discipline, and a means of expression and meaning.

These issues are clustered under four large umbrella topics that served as points of departure for a range of performances, installations, exhibitions, roundtable discussions, workshops, lectures, and work groups:

1) Corpografías: bodies and the making of place
(how have the politics of the body been enlisted in the production of political bodies?),

2) Corpodinamias: bodies and movement(s)
(how does attention to the performing body help us understand political movements, the staging of power, the body politics of migration?),

3) Corpusterrorificus: bodies and terror
(how can we understand the production of terror and the ways in which it produces terrifying/terrified, fearful/fearless bodies?), and

4) Corpoéticas: poetics and politics
(what is the relation between aesthetic and ethical performance; what practices, theories, or models allow us to explore the politics and poetics of the body?). We invite a range of proposals, both individual and collective, that focus on issues that are contemporary and historical, local and translocal