Dirección / Address / Endereço: Av. Revolución 1500, Col. Guadalupe Inn, Álvaro Obregón
Accesible para silla de ruedas / Wheelchair accessible / Acessível para cadeirantes

Dirección / Address / Endereço: Madrid 13, Col. Del Carmen, Coyoacán
Accesible para silla de ruedas / Wheelchair accessible / Acessível para cadeirantes

Dirección / Address / Endereço: Calle Motolinia 33, Centro Histórico, Cuauhtémoc
Planta baja accesible para silla de ruedas / Ground floor is wheelchair accessible / Piso térreo acessível para cadeirantes
Rampa de acceso; baños en planta baja accesibles pero no especializados para personas en sillas de ruedas / Entrance ramp; bathrooms accessible but not specialized for wheelchair users / Rampa de acesso, Sanitários do piso térreo acessíveis mais não especializados para cadeirantes

Animating the End of Prohibition: Artists Confronting the Challenges of Marihuana Regularization in Mexico

On February 22, 2019, the Supreme Court ruled the absolute prohibition of marihuana in Mexico unconstitutional. A bill permitting the regularization of cannabis is currently up for debate in Congress. While legislative changes are well underway, there are still a number of challenges in terms of cultural awareness, particularly the stigmatization facing both marihuana users and cultivators. Together with the Hemispheric Institute, a group of Mexican artists are developing a campaign that uses humor and art to change perceptions and stigmatizing attitudes. Cartoons and animations will be distributed in Mexico City and throughout the country with the help of publicity on public transportation and in the various State Secretariats.

We invite you to this forum in order to learn about the current status of this campaign, to exchange ideas on this important legislative initiative, and to reflect on the role of artists in this process.

Biographies

Jesusa Rodríguez (Mexico, 1955) is a scenic creator. From 1980 to 2018, she directed and performed in opera, theater, and political farces. Since December 2018, she has been a Senator in Mexico. Her greatest achievement was, and still is, to accumulate disgrace. She was awarded Best Actress at the Festival of the Americas in Montreal, 1989, and is a recipient of a 2000 Obie Award, with Liliana Felipe.

Julio Glockner is an anthropologist and graduate of the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. He is a researcher with the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and co-founder of the School of Social Anthropology. He has published his work on the cosmovision of Indigenous communities in Mexico in academic journals and edited volumes. He is author of Los volcanes sagrados. Mitos y rituales en el Popocatépetl y la Iztaccíhuatl (Sacred Volcanoes. Myths and Rituals in Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl); La realidad alterada: Drogas, enteógenos y cultura (Altered Reality: Drugs, Entheogens, and Culture); La mirada interior. Plantas sagradas del mundo amerindio (Inner Vision: Sacred Plants in the Amerindian World); and El paraíso barroco de Santa María Tonantzintla (The Baroque Paradise of Santa María Tonantzintla).

Zara Snapp holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Colorado, Denver. She is the co-founder of the RIA Institute and a consultant for the ReverdeSer Colectivo (Mexico). Snapp is the author of Diccionario de Drogas (Drug Dictionary), published in 2015 by Ediciones B. .

Jorge Hernández Tinajero is a political scientist and internationalist specializing in drug policy. Cannabis and poppy are among his interests and are the subject of his recent publications. He is a founding member of the Asociación Mexicana de Estudios de Cannabis (Mexican Association of Cannabis Studies) (AMEXA) and the Colectivo por una Política Integral hacia las Drogas A.C. (Alliance for a Comprehensive Drug Policy), where he served as President from 2009-2015. @elcalamar

Rafael Pineda (Monero Rapé) is a political cartoonist and animator from Veracruz. He holds a degree in Social Communication from UAM-X, and studied drawing at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. He is Director of El Chamuco magazine and host of Chamuco TV. Since 2007, he has published his work in Milenio Diario. Pineda is a member of Cartoonists for Peace and Cartónclub Latino, and was the recipient of the 2011 Gilberto Rincón Gallardo Award. He was a finalist of the Gabriel García Márquez Prize for his documentary animation Soy el número 16 (I’m number 16) and member of the winning project Buscadores in 2017. He received the National Journalism Award in 2016 and second place for the Walter Reuter Award for Chamuco TV in 2017. In that same year, he received an honorable mention for the 2017 National Journalism Prize for his collaborative work on Buscadores.

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the award winning author of multiple books, among them: Theatre of Crisis (1991), Disappearing Acts (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), and Performance (2016). Her new book, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Taylor is director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics which she helped found in 1998. In 2017, Taylor was President of the Modern Language Association and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio (Moderator) is Associate Director, Arts & Media, at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In her role, she heads up the curation and production of Hemi’s large-scale, biannual Encuentros; curates HIDVL, a growing digital video library that archives and circulates the work of politically engaged artists; directs EMERGENYC, Hemi’s emerging artist program focused on art and activism; initiated and runs Hemi’s Artist Residencies for local NYC artists; and has co-created initiatives like the Helix Queer Performance Network, supporting queer artists of color and fostering intergenerational mentorship.

Andy Bichlbaum: Laughtivism with The Yes Men

In this workshop/master class, taught by Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonano, we will devise one or more comedic media actions in the service of an activist cause. In case any of the participants wish to carry out the devised action, Andy will provide every participant with a toolkit containing everything needed to do so, along with a complete list of every technique that will be needed.

Biography

Andy Bichlbaum (AKA Jacques Servin) began his current adulthood by inserting a swarm of kissing men to a shoot-'em-up video game just before it shipped to store shelves. Finding himself fired and momentarily famous, he opted to go into weird activism. Since then, as co-founder of the Yes Men (www.theyesmen.org), he's worked for entities such as Exxon, Dow, Monsanto, and the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as for the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Washington Post, all without their approval.

This workshop explores the newly released Tome authoring platform developed at the Hemispheric Institute, which serves as the basis for their award-winning digital publication imprint Hemi.Press. Tome is a multilingual, multimodal, publishing tool designed for making online books, journals, and collaborative courses. Attendees are required to bring a laptop with WiFi capabilities, a current internet browser, an intrepid spirit, and a collection of media and text materials to create an online project.

Biography

Lex Taylor is a web developer specializing in scholarly digital publications. Lex was a designer and consultant for the Scalar platform, and is the creator of Tome, a WordPress based publishing platform currently being used at NYU, Columbia, Harvard, and other institutions. Lex holds an MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

This 2.5 hour street theatre workshop addresses issues affecting you within your community, the nation, or across the globe.. Starting with a discussion of what makes a good piece of protest art and the evolution and philosophy behind some of Guerrilla Girls On Tour!’s famous posters and street theatre actions, participants will form small groups to work collaboratively on creating a short piece of street theatre. Works-in-progress are presented and the workshop ends with a planning session that walks participants through the process of how to stage their work. Turn Your Attitude to Action is for anyone with a passion for combining activism and art.

Biography

Donna Kaz is a performer, activist, author, and leading feminist voice on how to combine activism and art. For the past 20 years, she has been proving feminists are funny with Guerrilla Girls On Tour!. Her new eBook,PUSH/PUSHBACK 9 Steps to make a Difference with Activism and Art, is at ggontour.com. donnakaz.com @guerrillagsot @donnakaz

Description:

Performance and disability have been in close conversation since their concurrent emergence in the second half of the twentieth century. This working group focuses on the interfaces between performance and disability, Deafhood and performance, highlighting the artistic and aesthetic innovations being produced by these communities of practice. It invites artists, academics, theorists, and activists to explore, through haptic and kinaesthetic means, how these paradigms might productively inform each other, challenge performance studies, and be deployed as a part of an activist agenda. We take up the theme of this Encuentro, focusing on humour and noise, as well as the silences to turn the world inside out, and upside down.

Enabling Performance

• In what ways might critical perspectives on Deafhood, disability, disease, and health enhance current understandings of performance and performativity?
• How do Deaf/disabled bodies challenge conventions of representation in art and in everyday life?
• How might Deafhood/disability redefine the conditions of acting, seeing, hearing, communicating, and engaging in performance?
• What new perspectives can critical Deaf/disability research, including “crip theory,” and the concept of “Deaf gain” or Deafhood bring to discussions on the tensions between lived experience, the physical “realities” of the body, social constructions of Deafhood and disability, and systemic forms of discrimination?
• How are Deaf and disabled artists using performance and new media to advocate for social change?

Deafhood and Performing Disability

• In an era of chronic illness and ageing populations where the acronym TAB (Temporarily Able-Bodied) is replacing the term able-bodied (see Davis 2002: 36), what is the legacy of the term disability and how might performance help situate that legacy?
• What is the relationship between Deaf and disabled performance practices?
• How might performance and performance studies energize and animate tired debates, such as the impairment and disability divide?
• How could performance – as a mode of inquiry – be used to represent pain and convey extremely embodied experiences of disability?
• What are the aesthetic contributions of Deaf and disabled artists to performance studies?
• What are the ways in which Deafhood and disability connect with and diverge from oft-used paradigms in performance studies such as gender, sex, queer, ethnicity, and post-colonialism?

References:

Davis, Lennard (2002) Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, New York: NYU Press.

Format and Structure:

The working group accepts papers, performances, experimental work, videos, etc. Session presentations and discussions will be in the form of a dialogue rather than standard conference format. The final session of the group will be a think-tank practice where participants will collaboratively:

1. discuss the issues that have emerged out of previous sessions,
2. bullet point the current interface of performance and Deaf and disability arts, and think of ways to diversify this interface,
3. reflect on the gathering of the work group itself, the practical issues involved, and contemplate on alternative conference formats.

Languages spoken/understood by conveners:

French, English, Spanish, Quebec Sign Language/ Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ). *Participants can propose communications in LSM (Lengua de Señas Mexicana), ASL (American Sign Language) or IS (International Signs), as long as they contact the conveners to take the needed step to secure translation.

Conveners:

Véro Leduc is an artist, engaged scholar, and a professor in Communication Studies at the University of Quebec, Montreal. Leduc is the first Deaf university professor in Quebec. She teaches in cultural action program, which trains professionals to design cultural actions and promotes the democratization of culture and cultural democracy. Her projects and practices are anchored in research-creation as well as critical, feminist, queer, intersectional, “crip,” and Deaf perspectives. Her current research focuses on Deaf and disability arts practices in Canada, Deaf music, and cultural accessibility. Véro is a member of numerous research teams including Ageing + Communication + Technologies, Testimonial Cultures, Groupe de Recherche Sur la Médiation Culturelle, Participatory Media Cluster, and Critical Disability Studies Working Group.

Laurence Parent is a Montreal-based disability activist, researcher, and artist. She is passionate about disability activism, disability history, and issues pertaining to mobility. She co-founded Quebec Accessible and has been active in various disability organizations over the past decade. A Ph.D. candidate in Humanities at Concordia University, Laurence holds an MA in Critical Disability Studies from York University and a BA in Political Science from the University of Quebec in Montreal. Parent’s doctoral research examines the politics of wheeling (moving using a wheelchair) in the city of Montréal. Her academic writing, video, and photographic work has been featured in conferences and exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and the UK.  In 2016, she was selected by the Canadian Disability Studies Association (CDSA-ACEI) as the recipient of the 2016 Francophone Tanis Doe Award for Canadian Disability Study and Culture.

Kim Sawchuk is a feminist theorist, writer, and activist living and working in Montréal. Her work engages with the politics of embodiment, explores issues of mobility justice, and the uses of experimental methodologies for social change. A Professor in Communication Studies, Sawchuk is the co-founder of Studio XX, a Montréal feminist digital media studio and the Critical Disability Studies Working Group. She directs ACT- Ageing + Communication + Technologies: Experiencing a Digital World in Later Life, and co-directs the Participatory Media Cluster at the Milieux Institute for Art Technology and Culture at Concordia University, Montreal.

Participants:

Description:

In a globalized present marked by forced displacements, governments—in alliance and complicity with transnational corporations—have devised and implemented different authoritarian, carcerial, racist and hetero-patriarchal policies, not only to curb migratory processes, but also to profit from them. Neoliberal states have recycled old laws and created new ones to harden and militarize the borders, while generating quick capital through the production of security, militaristic, and criminalizing paradigms that extend regimes of deportation, imprisonment, persecution, as well as the physical, legal, and humanitarian impediment to free movement. This working group aims to generate a space for activists, and/or researchers, and/or artists working with issues related to migration, forced displacement, incarceration and deportation, to share their activism and political practices. By sharing our research, local and transnational organizing practices, and analogous and digital art, this work group seeks to establish dialogues and generate tools, materials, and networks that will allow us to build a coordinated force of liberation, to devise ways of dignifying migrant transit, to develop new forms of integration and political hospitality, and to build respect for the inalienable rights of displaced and refugee people. We are especially interested in generating articulations between sanctuary practices, defense committees, immigrant rights organizations, activist research, popular education, and performance in public spaces.

Format and Structure:

• Days 1-2: Presentations, planning, discussion—each participant or collective will have 15 minutes.
• Day 3-4: Visits to organizations (Other Dreamers in Action)
• Day 5: Closure / conclusion and development of a roadmap for future collaborations and across-border joint actions. Production of a document, text or video about the work done over the five days for dissemination / publication.

Languages spoken/understood by conveners:

English, Spanish, Portuguese.

Conveners:

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is a Professor with the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. Her book, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Duke UP 2016), received the 2017 John Hope Franklin Book prize & NACCS Book Award for the Best Book in American and Chicanx Studies, respectively. Her first book, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Duke 2003), analyzes the discursive complicity between Central American and Mexican revolutionary movements and economic development discourse. Her next monograph, NAFTA, Narcos, and Migration: How Free Trade Brought Us the Drug Economy and Its Refugees, investigates multiple connections between free trade, migration, and the drug trade that have flourished in the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Accord in 1994. She is also Chairwoman of Coalición Mexicana, a New York City immigrant rights organization and a volunteer and expert witness with immigration aid agencies internationally.

Pablo Domínguez Galbraith is a Ph.D Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Princeton University. He is currently working on his dissertation Migrating Violence, Migrating Justice: Politics and Aesthetics of Central American Migration in the 21st Century, which situates the historical process of displacement, expulsion and transit of Central American migrants along the corridor towards the USA in the neoliberal age after NAFTA, and traces the emergence of transnational networks of migrant care, forms of resistance and struggles for human rights and human dignity. His research focuses on migration, forensic aesthetics and politics, transitional and transnational justice, non-fiction and documentary cultural production as well as with critical studies of surveillance, sovereignty, citizenship, kinopolitics, and contemporary forms of violence. He is also a founding collaborator of the Ecologies of Migrant Care initiative.

César Barros A. is an educator and activist. He works with the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, where he is part of the Popular Education program. He has focused his activism on researching the relations between the criminalization of immigration and big capital. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures and Director of the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz. His current research focuses on the political economy of images, a theory that creates a dialogue between Political Economy, Performance and Visual Studies in order to see the different exchanges, repetitions, erasures and frame-workings by which an image, and the event to which it is articulated, acquire their social efficacy and position in a system of visibility. He has published articles on Latin American literature, film, visual arts and aesthetic theory. His most recent work has been published in Vazantes, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, la Fuga Revista de Cine, Artishock  and Potlatch. He is the author of the book Escenas y obscenas del consumo (Cuarto Propio, 2013).

Ángeles Donoso Macaya is an immigrant educator, researcher and organizer from Santiago, Chile, based in New York City. Since 2017, she is a member of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City. She participates in the weekly Pro Se Immigration Clinic, collaborates in the NSC accompaniment program and does organizing work. In July 2018, she co-organized the #WhatWouldYouPack action at 26 Federal Plaza. Ángeles is also Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY and teaches a decolonial history of Latin American photography at The CUNY Graduate Center. Her research and teaching interests include Latin/x American photography theory and history, counter-archival production, human rights activism, and documentary film. Her book Documentary Matter(s): Photography and Resistance in Chile under the Military Dictatorship is forthcoming with University Florida Press (Fall 2019). Her research has been published in the journals Vazantes, American Quarterly, Aisthesis, Chasqui, Revista Hispánica Moderna, La Fuga Revista de Cine and in several collective edited volumes. She is a contributor of ATLAS Imaginarios Visuales and member of the FONDART reviewers commision in the area of Photography (the FONDART is the major annual grant given by the Chilean National Council for the Arts and Culture).

Participants:

Description:

As one of the G20 nations, Mexico City is the perfect venue to bring together a hemispheric group to think through how the goals of decolonization and decoloniality can shape our work as artists, activists, and academics in the post-neoliberal world. This group will make field visits both to pay respect to indigenous and black sites of resistance and to learn about the Mexico City metropolitan area, with 21 million people, average age 27, 56% access to the Internet, and 60% informal housing threatened by biosphere crisis. This is the ground for present-day decolonization. The workshop will work towards creating a collaborative, free, downloadable decolonized “curriculum” in the sense of Paulo Freire’s “practices of freedom.” How can decolonizing remain grounded, continue to make territorial acknowledgements, advocate for restitution and reparations, and create new perception under these ever-changing conditions?

Format and Structure:

In the workshop, all participants will share ideas and work from their own region and particular interests. The goal is to begin the work of collaboration by coming to understand each other’s situations, and to form community. While people of all experiences are welcome, this is not conceived as an “introduction to decolonizing” workshop but as a place for people working through the  many challenges of the present to learn by sharing and through mutual support. The workshop intends to bring together practitioners, academics, and activists to share skills, knowledges and possibilities.

Languages spoken/understood by conveners:

Spanish/French/English (we welcome speakers of other languages)

Conveners:

Alicia Grullón: a 2018-2019 Hemi Artist in Residence, directs her interdisciplinary practice towards critiques of the politics of presence, arguing for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. She is co-organizer and co-author of the People’s Cultural Plan, a coalition of artists, cultural workers, and activists responding to New York City’s first ever cultural plan in 2017. Her work has been shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, BRIC Arts, Spring/Break Art Show, and Performa 11, among others. Grullón is also a contributing author to Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?, ed. Nicola Mann and Charlotte Bonham-Carter (Palgrave Macmillan, London). Recent activities include the Shandaken Project inaugural artist residency on Governors Island and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Alum program at 80 White Street. Grullón is an adjunct professor at School of Visual Arts (SVA) and City University of New York (CUNY).

Nitasha Dhillion is a writer, artist, educator, and organizer. As member of MTL Collective, Dhillion co-founded Decolonize This Place (DTP), an action-oriented movement centering around Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, dismantling patriarchy, global wage workers, and de-gentrification. Since 2016, DTP has organized an Indigenous Peoples Day/Anti-Columbus Day tour of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City involving over 1,000 participants. Demands have included for removal of the statue of Theodore Roosevelt and the creation of a Decolonization Commission which is rooted in the process of reparations and repatriation. Dhillion has organized similar events with DTP at the Brooklyn Museum specifically around decolonization in response to the hiring of Kristen Windmuller-Luna, as consulting curator for African art, criticizing this hiring decision as proof of the disconnect between the museum and its surrounding community. In December 2018, DTP organized an action at the Whitney Museum to protest Board vice-chairman Warren Kanders' ownership of Safariland, the manufacturer of tear gas used against  members of the 2018 migrant caravan along the US-Mexico border, Ferguson, Palestine and Standing Rock. This was followed in January 2019 by a public town hall on the issue calling for Kanders' resignation from the Whitney Board. Dhillion's writings have been published in October, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Hyperallergic, Dissent Magazine, Creative Time Reports, and Brooklyn Rail, among others. She is a contributing author with Paula Chakravartty to The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Laboredited by Andrew Ross from Oregon Books. Dhillion has lectured at major universities in the United States and abroad including at Brown University, Magnum Foundation, SUNY Stony Brook, University of Chicago, SUNY Purchase, University of Colorado, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Visual Arts. Most recently, Dhillion presented for the 3rd Rencontres of the Franz Fanon Foundation on "Visual Art and Decolonial Aesthetics in the Spirit of Bandung" at Rugters University Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. Dhillion will be defending her Dissertation, "Institutional Liberation and Decolonial Practices in Contemporary Art and Media," Spring 2019 at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she is also an adjunct in the Department of Media Study.

Participants: