Work Groups

Photo/Foto: Fran Pollitt
Work groups emerged as our alternative to traditional academic panels, providing a critical space for extended research collaboration and other modes of interdisciplinary exploration of shared areas of inquiry. Work groups may involve scholars, artists, and activists. Some groups may address interests specific to one of these constituencies; others explore dialogue and collaboration across them. Limited to no more than 20 participants, work groups meet several times during the Encuentro. The format is tailored to the specific aims of each group, and may include sharing essays, producing collective work, creating performance, or some combination of these. Please see specific group descriptions for information about each group.
This work group explores collective practices, spaces and movements that surface as alternatives to the modern paradigm and the neoliberal project in particular.
Activism Beyond Citizenship and the State
What limitations do institutional spaces (such as the museum) pose for performance artists and curators of performance?
Curating Performance: Re/activation Strategies
Focusing on embodiment in virtual and actual spaces, we will explore such issues as embodiment and affect, memory, biopolitics, medicine, technologies of reproduction, globalization, migration, activism and resistance.
Embodiment: Offline and Online
As utopian and dystopian sites, festivals represent powerful instruments that affirm and strengthen identities while producing new social realities. On the one hand, they are adaptive, reiterative, performative, and temporally integrated systems, and on the other, they are separated from everyday life.
Festive Performances: Staging Identity, Politics and Utopia in the Americas
This work group will analyze and discuss creative processes in which gender relations are the major theme.
Gender Expressions and the Empowerment of the Bodies in Art and in Sexual Politics
This group will investigate the historiographic challenges of writing about performance in relation to circuits of exchange, colonial legacies, and capitalist extraction.
Performance and Geographies of Knowledge Production
Scholars from fields as diverse as literature, sociology, geography, theater, architecture, and urban studies have long been captivated by the relationship between the lived and the imagined city.
Performance of the City and Its Double
This work group aims to (1) advance discussion on the concept of performance as episteme and (2) to create a space for artistic experimentation as a method of theoretical research.
Performance Practice as Research
Actor training permeates creative processes in the theatre, irrespective of artistic genre. However, if we look at it through broader lenses, the idea of training can be enhanced significantly.
Performance Training: The Production of Relational Dynamics
For this work group, we invite participants to examine alternative work models that view young people as critical agents that reflect on their own practices.
Performance, Action, and Youth Theater
In 2011, we have seen the reemergence of the “people” as a political actor, from Mexico’s Peace Caravan to student activism in Europe and above all the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Politics in and as Visual Culture
The current Working Group is continuing the work carried out with the Permanent Seminar on Sexualities, Visual Culture and Performativity, done with the University Program of Gender Studies of UNAM since 2005.
Sexualities, Visual Culture, and Performativity
Sonic urbanity: resonant landscapes and silences. Urban vocalities: voices perform in the city.
Sonic Urbanites and Urban Vocalities
In this workgroup, we will engage in discussions concerning the performance and representation of violence.
The Gun as Performance
This working group invites scholars, artists, and activists to explore ways in which theatre and performance intersect with hegemonic, residual, and emergent economies both in the theater and in urban settings.
Trans/Actions: Theatre and Performance As Sites of Economic Coexistence
This work group’s goals are: to develop, reflect on, analyze, design, and share individual and collective artistic works as strategies within the framework of the visual arts.
Visual Arts Clinic: Art/ Direct Action
Our proposition assumes that the continent is, in itself, performative, that is, it knows well the identifying features of this artistic language even before it was systematized by practice as well as its studies (i.e. Performance Studies).