Performances

CatoptROMANTICS

The CatoptROMANTICS invite 12 guests to gather around a table. As the 2boys.tv alter egos, Gigi L’Amour and Pipi Douleur, our hosts invoke the presence of “the other” to the table—an intimate encounter where we can collectively contemplate how we ended up together in this moment and question who might be missing or excluded from our gathering.

Biography

Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard are 2boys.tv, a transdisciplinary performance art duo from Montreal Canada.

2boys.tv: CatoptROMANTICS

Gift

Gift is a performance about presents. A cage sits in place of the head; origamis sit in place of birds. The offer of a gift replaces the notion of imprisonment. As we walk down the street handing out origamis, our heads become dwellings for these colorful birds. The action is complete when all, including myself, are released.

Biography

Alexandra Martins Costa is based in Brasilia and holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications with an emphasis on Dance and Visual Arts and a master’s degree in Gender and Feminism. She is part of the collective Tete a Teta. She has been editing video since 2010, performing since 2011, and clowning since 2016. She is currently part of the Fora da Casinha collective and the Rede de Palhaçaria Feminina (Female Clown Network).

Alexandra Martins Costa: Gift

Sound Memory III

The piece imagines sound as a particular language of vibrational conscience, generated by the body of performance artists who have been selected through an open call. A tissue of connective sound is created—a jam session capable of connecting us with memory and transporting us through time and space.

Biography

Alexia Miranda is a multidisciplinary artist from El Salvador whose work explores the limits of human relations. She works with vulnerable communities through art therapy as well as with college students. Her art has been exhibited in North, South, and Central America, as well as Europe. In 2019, she was invited to the 13° Biennial de La Habana "La construcción de lo posible" (The Construction of the Possible).

Alexia Miranda: Sound Memory III

OUFF

Late capitalism, youth culture, white privilege, oh my! OUFF is an onomatopoeia, the heaviest of sighs. A deconstruction of white privilege in all its ugly shades. The costume mutates and the décor expands to threaten us all. This is the non-white of whiteness, a rich-lady rosé, the sad sick beige of a dirty bandage, an angry, saggy fake-tan.

Biography

Alexis O’Hara has toured internationally with spoken-noise performances and sound installations that abet spontaneous musical collaboration between strangers. She has dropped four albums and enough helium balloons to get her dress caught in a chandelier. Alexis and her drag king alter ego, Guizo LaNuit, are pillars of the Montreal cabaret scene.

Alexis O’Hara: OUFF

Soft Light

The poem has images of light and shadows of human life and nature. Its theme is empathy among humans despite their differences. It evokes the intergenerational relations of the sane and not so much. An older woman dances, a singer, and a boy. We listen. A conversation between movements, the playing child, and sung words.

Biography

Anadel Lynton was born in the U.S. into a Quaker pacifist family. She grew up in times of war and segregation, yearning for change and expression, and immigrated to Mexico where she found like-minded souls. She is co-founder of the Ballet Independiente and the National Dance Research Center where she continues to work with Dancing in Community projects.

Anadel Lynton: Soft Light

MADE IN MEXICO

This is a tour through Mexico’s history from Astrid’s point of view: humorous, irreverent, but also well-documented. Carried by slaves, Astrid takes us from the ancient Mexico of Tenochtitlan to the present, doing justice to the memory of women forgotten by history, and using laughter as a powerful weapon of optimism.

Biography

Astrid Hadad is an actress, director, and singer who has developed her own style of cabaret, known as “Heavy Nopal.” She performs popular repertoires, adding texts and songs that she composes and performs, and using costumes she designs for visual effect (with as many as 13 costume changes in a single show). She has presented her performances across the globe.

Astrid Hadad: MADE IN MEXICO

Bendiciones

Bendiciones is a parody of digital blessings sent by loved ones across Latin America through WhatsApp. Transmitted daily over the course of the Encuentro week, the eight blessings intervene traditionally Catholic messaging with humor that invites a more radical politic, beckoning recipients to reflect on oppressive forces they want to confront and transform.

Sign up to receive your Blessings here: http://bit.do/Bendiciones

Biography

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez is a New York City- and Providence-based artist and educator. His work focuses on the ways both performance and object can call out to temporary publics to transform individual witness into collective action. Lundberg Torres Sánchez is the founder and co-curator of the exhibition series Se Aculilló?.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez: Bendiciones

Empathy 5.1, Site-Specific Technoshamanic Ritual

This ritual is an offering, a gesture, banquet, caucus, a form of divine love, an autoallusive meditation, a cosmic choreography, a coral embrace, a way of gratitude, and a connection between what is above and below, inside and out. We become one and connect to the spaces that surround us.

Video provided by the artists.

Biography

Bioescénica is a transdisciplinary company based in Mexico City and Buenos Aires that develops and produces stage proposals combining art, science, and technology. Our hybrid, transdisciplinary work merges live, corporal, visual arts, and performing arts, using site-specific and/or interactive installations.

Bioscénica: Empathy 5.1, Site-Specific Technoshamanic Ritual

“Cara de Niño”

Through popular apps like Tinder and Grindr, young-looking men of my height will be invited to participate in a dance choreography to Jerry Rivera’s song “Cara de Niño” in public space.

Biography

Born in Callao, Peru, Bryan Rodriguez Cambana generates surreal narratives through the performative language of generational trauma, migration, blackness/indigeneity—all in relation to his body. Rodriguez is also the 2018-19 recipient of More Art’s Public Art Grant.

Bryan Rodriguez Cambana: “Cara de Niño”

Acknowledgement

The history and struggles of Afro-diasporic communities in Mexico have been ignored and erased from the country’s official history. This performance calls attention to the Mexican state’s ongoing refusal to recognize the status of Black communities, many of whom have lived in relative isolation along the Pacific coast of Oaxaca since their ancestors were taken from Africa as slaves in the 16th century.

Biography

Carlos Martiel (born 1989, Havana, Cuba) lives and works in New York and Havana. He graduated in 2009 from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. Between the years 2008-2010, he studied in the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, directed by artist Tania Bruguera. Martiel’s works have been included in the 14th Sharjah Biennial, UAE; 14th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador; 57th Venice Biennale, Italy; Casablanca Biennale, Morocco; Biennial La Otra, Colombia; Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom; Pontevedra Biennial, Spain; and the Havana Biennial, Cuba.

Carlos Martiel: Acknowledgement

La Prietty Guoman

Mexico has one of the highest rates of hate killings of the LGBT community. I wanted to create a singular voice that could speak for all of the voices that have been silenced. The “Prietty Guoman” is not just one body. She is many bodies: trans, indigenous, poor, sex worker, artist, and all those who stand on the outside—unseen, unheard.

Biography

César Enríquez is an actor, playwright, and director. He is currently an Art Playwright Exchange 2019 resident at the Lark Institute in New York. He was also lead actor of The Lion King musical under the direction of Julie Taymor in Mexico.

César Enríquez: La Prietty Guoman

Water for a Challenge, or Don’t you forget about me: A ritual of national liberation

Fire will be frozen as a symbolic ritual of world liberation. Several sculptures made of flavored ice in the shape of firearms are presented as part of a tasting. Once they have melted, tasters/spectators may drink the juice.

Biography

César Martínez is an “indisciplinary” Mexican artist whose artwork navigates different conceptual frameworks and technical supports—from dynamite to gelatin. His work has been exploded and eaten, morphing into symbolic nutrients and creative enzymes inside the bodies that have savored it. Martínez has presented his work in venues throughout the world.

César Martínez: Water for a Challenge, or Don’t you forget about me: A ritual of national liberation

The Fraternal Socialist Kiss

The Fraternal Socialist Kiss is a performative action that draws attention to the stereotypes associated with power, which are always present in the history of humankind and without the protagonism of women.

Biography

Deborah Castillo is a Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist living in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Deborah Castillo: The Fraternal Socialist Kiss

Kill the President

Kill The President explores the intersection of dance and military training. Performed by a professional bodyguard and a dancer, this "pas de deux" combines improvisation with drills and maneuvers used by bodyguards during attempted political attacks and escapes.

Biography

DETEXT’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including: MoMA PS1; Museum of Arts and Design MAD in New York; MACBA in Barcelona; CA2M in Madrid; ARTIUM in Vitoria, Spain; and most recently, the Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains MUDAC in Lausanne, Switzerland.

DETEXT: Kill the President

Video installation of Do Not Feed the Fish in Brazil.

Do Not Feed the Fish

The video installation Do Not Feed the Fish reframes different urban spaces such as windows, doors, and fountains, turning them into an "aquarium" where strange fish perform their dances. It seeks to problematize the rhythm of our lives by disrupting our daily perception of time and space. Who is the captive one, after all?

Biography

Éden Peretta is a dance artist and professor in the graduate program in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil. He coordinates the Anticorpos collective, where he develops research at the intersection of dance, theater, and video art, creating performances and installations centered on the body.

Éden Peretta: Do Not Feed the Fish

Ver, verde, verdade. Swallowing History

The power of words, swallowing histories, pure anthropophagy. The artist invites people to pass by his store and nourish themselves with their own history. It is an invitation to recognize the collective memory within us all. We are many inside a single body.

Biography

Efe Godoy lives and works in Belo Horizonte. His artistic proposals move between design, music, and performance. In his work, we often see animals and plants in perfect symbiosis with human nature, as well as a strong connection to aspects of everyday life, such as memory and the passage of time.

Efe Godoy: Ver, verde, verdade. Swallowing History

One Melon…!! Your Melon…!!

One Melon…!! Your Mellon…!! came about after the renewal of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. This performance calls into question the endless construction of stereotypes, the broken and often falsified notion of authenticity, and the banality behind the image of tourism, which paints the Cuban archipelago as an incomparable tropical “paradise.”

Biography

Nelda Castillo founded El Ciervo Encantado in Havana in 1996 as a space of experimentation and exchange that fosters innovative connections between theater, visual arts, music, literature, dance, theoretical research, etc. Thanks to this interplay of knowledges, El Ciervo Encantado connects with different spaces of artistic and cultural production, escaping any attempt at categorization.

El Ciervo Encantado: One Melon…!! Your Melon…!!

SHITGOAL. Photo provided by the artist.

SHITGOAL

SHITGOAL: a play on the phrase “Shithole Countries," which U.S. President Donald Trump used to refer to African, Caribbean, and Central American countries, including Haiti and El Salvador. I incorporate a deflated soccer ball with an image of the U.S. flag, a toilet as a goalpost, artificial grass, and audio recordings.

Biography

Eliu Almonte (1970, San Francisco, Rep. Dominicana) lives and works in Málaga, Spain and San Diego, USA. He is an interdisciplinary artist and curator of the Festival Internacional de Performance Independence, the Encuentro Internacional Chocopop, and the “Acciones de Otoño.” He is also Founder of the Plataforma Dominicana de Performance (2011).

Eliu Almonte: SHITGOAL

I'm (not) afraid of so much reality

A queer militant dressed in white and blue (the colors of Nicaraguan nationalism) will release ants in front of the Nicaraguan Embassy in Mexico City. This second performance proposes a critical cochón/queer approach to understanding the kind of uprising and revolution being constructed in the process of liberation underway in contemporary Nicaraguan society.

Biography

Elyla Sinvergüenza (Fredman Barahona) is a performance artist and activist from Nicaragua. Their work often blends video performance, installations, photo performance, relational art, and workshops that explore crossings between theater, performance, and activism. Elyla uses drag as a weapon for political action aimed at social change and collective healing.

Elyla Sinvergüenza: I'm (not) afraid of so much reality

No One Likes Fat Girls

In Latin America, being fat is the cause of discrimination and violence, especially towards women. A few years ago, one Mexican governor spoke out about pregnant youth, saying, “No one likes fat girls.” His comments elicited outrage. This performance is a response.

Biography

Erika Bülle Hernández (Mexico City) holds a PhD in Arts and Design from the UNAM. She has been working in the field of performance for 30 years.

Erika Bülle Hernández: No One Likes Fat Girls

Fabiano Kueva: THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT: Dispossession. Collections. Repatriation. The Geopolitical Life of Objects and Documents

The Alexander von Humboldt Archive is an artistic research project that intervenes in institutional settings (museums, archives, libraries, and universities) to challenge scientific-intellectual authority, patrimonial-artistic authenticity, and geo-biopolitical legitimacy—products of XVII century scientific expeditions. THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT is a dialogue on the relations between word - body - space - ritual, which generates a critical space and a common language.

Presentation: Fabiano Kueva, Ana Rodríguez, Miruna Achim, Malena Bedoya, César Martínez

*Space is limited to 30 people. Please RSVP: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Biography

Fabiano Kueva is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited in museums, public spaces, and community settings. He has participated in the Havana Biennial (Cuba, 2009), the Montevideo Biennial (Uruguay, 2014), and Venice Biennal (Italy, 2015), and was recipient of the Prince Claus Fund Grant 2010. Kueva lives and works in Ecuador.

Fabiano Kueva: THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT: Dispossession. Collections. Repatriation. The Geopolitical Life of Objects and Documents

THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT: Travelers, Narratives, and Senses. America as Form and Source

The Alexander von Humboldt Archive is an artistic research project that intervenes in institutional settings (museums, archives, libraries, and universities) to challenge scientific-intellectual authority, patrimonial-artistic authenticity, and geo-biopolitical legitimacy—products of XVII century scientific expeditions. THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT is a dialogue on the relations between word - body - space - ritual, which generates a critical space and a common language.

Presentation: Fabiano Kueva, Luis Gerardo Morales, Ana Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Cecilia Delgado Masse, Adriana Salazar, Néstor Quiñonez

*Space is limited to 30 people. Please RSVP: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Biography

Fabiano Kueva is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited in museums, public spaces, and community settings. He has participated in the Havana Biennial (Cuba, 2009), the Montevideo Biennial (Uruguay, 2014), and Venice Biennal (Italy, 2015), and was recipient of the Prince Claus Fund Grant 2010. Kueva lives and works in Ecuador.

Fabiano Kueva: THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT: Travelers, Narratives, and Senses. America as Form and Source

What Does My Body Tell You?

Dressed in a monkey suit, the artist walks in silence. Headphones hidden beneath the suit are connected to MP3 speakers located on the body. Using these headphones, pedestrians can listen to random, informally recorded memories associated with the part of the body where the sound device has been placed.

Biography

Geovanni Lima da Silva is an artist and performer. He holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas and a BA in Visual Arts from the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo. He is a member of the research group Diálogos entre Sociologia e Arte – DISSOA (Dialogues Between Sociology and Art - DISSOA), and is currently researching the body (fat, Black, LGBT) as a political interface.

Geovanni Lima da Silva: What Does My Body Tell You?

Un-global Diaspora

We will walk barefoot along a cartography of the globe, marking traces of blood on the routes carried out by migrants seeking refuge around the world. A group of health professionals will extract our blood using blood donation equipment.

Biography

GRUPO D3 CHOK3 (Yeshua David Hinojosa Romero, Omar Matadamas, Esperanza Balderas, Mayumi, Alec, and Orgy PUNK) emerged in Mexico during the #yosoy132 Movement. The group creates and implements artistic techniques as tools for nonviolent political action against governments that practice discrimination and are opposed to sexual and gender diversity. They have presented their performances in festivals in Amsterdam, Canada, Germany, and Thailand.

GRUPO D3 CHOK3: Un-global Diaspora

Mapping Silence, Liberating Public Space. Photo provided by the artists.

Mapping Silence, Liberating Public Space

The metro car, platform, and tunnel are spaces overrun by violence, perpetrated by those who believe depth/distance gives them a license to attack and harass women. It is more urgent than ever to listen to all of our testimonies. We propose hearing as a performative act, capable of showing us that depth is can be found at ground level.


Biography

Hebzoariba Hernández Gómez, based in Mexico, researches memory, political life, and social contexts in the performing arts, and is involved in cultural initiatives focused on gender.

Hebzoariba Hernández: Mapping Silence, Liberating Public Space

TALIXMXN

Encuentro participants are invited to create their own TALIXMXN - an energetic archive of Encuentro performances. Receiving small cotton bags and instructions at registration, they are then invited to approach participating Encuentro artists throughout the week to collect, assemble and activate their TALIXMXN bags with materials infused with the energy, intention, agency and will of the archive.

Biographies

Jess Dobkin is a Toronto-based artist, curator, community activist, and teacher. She creates and produces intimate solo theatre performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures.

Laura Levin is a settler artist-scholar and Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance Studies at York University. Laura’s current research focuses on performance and political culture; site-specific and urban intervention; and performance and digital media. She is a Co-Investigator for the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas.

Jess Dobkin & Laura Levin: TALIXMXN

Performative Inversion of Injury, Decolonial Manifesto from the South

This performance focuses on chains of signification regarding what it means to be a woman, a migrant, and a bitch. It renders visible the marginal spaces to which I belong from the territories that I inhabit.

Biography

Julied Zapata Arias is a Chilean artist-activist, based in Mexico, who views “art” as a way of resisting and re-existing in “reality.” She has participated in community art initiatives in Peru, Guatemala, Spain, Chile, and Mexico. She is part of the artist collective Ajo Confita’o and is currently enrolled in the Masters program in Performing Arts at the Universidad Veracruzana.

Julied Zapata Arias: Performative Inversion of Injury, Decolonial Manifesto from the South

7 Moments of Becoming

the fragile, the frozen, the fossilized
feel them
in your eyes

become us
rare specimens,
radiating alchemistic
shards
_

hielo, piedra, vidrio
llénate—la
oquedad
del ojo

internalice, adentrar
alguito precioso
con la promesa alquímica
de trozos

Biography

Kristin Reger (Chicago, 1984) is a visual and performance artist with a background in fashion theory. She completed the educational program at SOMA in Mexico City and holds a MFA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Kristin lives and works in Mexico City.

Kristin Reger: 7 Moments of Becoming

COINTELSHOW: A PATRIOT ACT

Join Special Agent Christian White on a cheerfully creepy tour of the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The federal documents are heavily censored in the name of the Freedom of Information Act. But when Chris takes you beneath the redaction marks, into the haunted underworld that lies beneath, things go horribly, fabulously wrong.

Biography

L.M. Bogad is an author, performer, and professor at UC Davis. His publications include: Tactical Performance; Electoral Guerrilla Theatre (Routledge) and COINTELSHOW (PM Press). His performances include: ECONOMUSIC, ORWELL’S WAR, POSSIBLE PASTS: SANTIAGO 9/11, HAYMARKET, EXIT 11, and A FAIR FIGHT.

L.M. Bogad: COINTELSHOW: A PATRIOT ACT

Posnacional 2: Glosolalia Remix

A remix of performance, spoken word, electronica, video art, and performance installations. Gomez-Peña, Saul García-Lòpez (aka La Saula), and Balitrónica will present fragments from binational collaborative projects with artists and poets on both sides of the border. The playlist will include music from DJ Ricardiaco, Nayla Altamirano, Julia Antivilo, Erika Bulle, Felipe Lechedevirgen Trimegisto, Rojo Córdoba, and Logan Phillips, among other special guests.

Biography

La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations, and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. La Pocha Nostra has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender, and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy, and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists. Please write to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for a full CV.

La Pocha Nostra: Posnacional 2: Glosolalia Remix

The Wretched

Four female spies alive during the French Revolution discover that they are absent from the Declaration of Man and Citizen. Plunged into misery, they scream, cry, sing, and dance in order to find a hopeful path forward. Themes such as equality, fraternity, and liberty are questioned and scrutinized.

Biography

Las Reinas Chulas S.A. de C.V. is a Mexican cabaret company formed in 1998 by Marisol Gasé, Cecilia Sotres, Ana Francis Mor, and Nora Huerta. Their shows draw on satire, farse, and music, using humor to advance social critiques. Since 2005, they have led the Teatro Bar El Vicio, a space dedicated to the dissemination art and culture as agents of social transformation.

Las Reinas Chulas S.A. de C.V.: The Wretched

Mexico Exhumed

Using humor as a tool for political critique, this performance digs up some of the most absurd, extravagant, cruel, and outrageous moments of the country that invented the "Chupacabras" and express kidnappings. A one-way ticket to the most surreal country in the world, where dystopia mixes with reality.

Biography

Felipe Osornio, known as Lechedevirgen Trimegisto (Qro., Mexico, 1991), is a visual and performance artist whose multidimensional artworks focus on sexual dissidence, violence, illness, and death. He takes his artistic name from alchemy and compares art to magic due to its transformative properties.

Lechedevirgen: Mexico Exhumed

Subtle Strangeness

This performative ritual takes place in a fountain-reflecting pool outside of the MUAC in the Centro Cultural Universitario. In an emotional encounter of affective remembering, the artist will use her voice and skin around water to move closer to the people around her.

Biography

Lia Garcia (La Novia Sirena) was born in Mexico City, where she currently lives. She is a feminist apprentice, pedagogue, and performance artist. Her artistic projects have focused on weaving affective bridges between her own trans* experience and Mexico’s social context. She has performed by occupying public space in multiple routes and wanderings.

Lia Garcia: Subtle Strangeness

Where is Bruno?

This piece addresses the possibilities of “appearing” that artistic practice offers in the desolate social and political landscape, connecting artistic practices and political strategies that denounce and make visible: disappeared bodies, forced disappearance? How can we represent those who are invisible?

Biographies

Lukas Avendaño has presented his work in the 2018 RUTAS International Multi-Arts Festival, Toronto, Canadá; University of California, CA, USA; and Brave Festival, Wroclaw, Polonia, among others.

Edgar Cartas Orozco works as a concert musician and trumpetist. He is Director of the Sandunga del Istmo de Tehuantepec Philharmonic, based in Oaxaca.

Lukas Avendaño & Edgar Cartas Orozco: Where is Bruno?

Gift Boxes

Gift Boxesis a political cabaret where an elegant madame receives gifts from the most important presidents around the world. She opens and comments on each gift box, using satire, irony, critique, and humor. Through cabaret, she satirizes the political positions of each president. The gifts serve as a metaphor to demystify them.

Biography

Maria Eugenia Chellet is a multidisciplinary visual artist. In her videos, performances, etc., she draws on female archetypes, prototypes, and stereotypes. Her work examines the medium of self portraiture and images in popular culture and mass media.

Maria Eugenia Chellet: Gift Boxes

Mov. Auction

Led by an auctioneer, this piece creates the fiction of an auction house where seven pieces are on offer. A radical relationship is established in terms of cost and payment, where notions of price and value collapse. Here, value persists far beyond the initial transaction.

Biography

Founded in 2016 in Mexico City, ME RiNDO PRODUCCIONES is a collective of artists who explore forms of dance or kinetic and visual experiences that emerge from our own lived experiences. They seek to create pieces that can have a strong impact on audiences, old and new.

Director and Choreographer: Ana Patricia Farfán/ Assistant Director: Mariana Navarro/ Script and Dramaturgy: Ana P. Farfán, Mariana Navarro & Arturo González Villaseñor/ Scenic Creator: Andrea Zolá, Rita María, Gabriela Saldaña, Gerson Martínez & David Oropeza/ Live Sound Intervention: Omar Soriano/ Production Assistant: Vanessa Sánchez Delgadillo/

ME RiNDO PRODUCCIONES: Mov. Auction

Trigger

Trigger is a project aimed at transforming an object of violence into a pedagogical tool and reimagining a gunshot as method of construction. The body is the structure of the weapon; as an object of knowledge, it holds the same possibility as a book.

Biography

Miguel Braceli, a Venezuelan artist and architect, has developed his practice in many fields, including landart, performance, and relational art. He has presented his work in institutional spaces and art biennials throughout Latin America and Europe. He currently resides in the United States and is a Fulbright fellow and graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Arts.

Miguel Braceli: Trigger

Pushit!!

Can resistance be choreographed? pushit!!, a site-responsive performance by NIC Kay, is a meditation on emotional labor and the impossibility of the stage as a place of freedom for the Black performer. This work is part of a larger set of exercises in getting-well-soon.

Biography

NIC Kay is a post-disciplinary artist who makes performance, installation, and publications.They are deeply invested in the act and process of moving, the change of place, the production of space, position, and the clarity gained from perspective shifts.

NIC Kay: Pushit!!

In Times of War, ENJOY!

They want to strip us of our freedoms, rob us of our vitality, take away our achievements, and tame our desires to live and enjoy. The resistance is real, and we are putting our bodies on the line. We are the granddaughters of the witches they could not burn. WE WILL ENJOY AND WE WILL FIGHT!

Biography

Roberta Nascimento is a Brazilian artist-activist, performer, vegan, yoga practitioner, feminist, Gemini, and feline admirer. She holds a BA in Performing Arts. Nascimento draws upone performance, installation, and video in her work, and researches space-time expansion and the use of psychophysical exhaustion as a tool to combat anguish.

Roberta Nascimento: In Times of War, ENJOY!

Under (De)construction: A low-tech immersive (un)reality home building and decorating game

An absurdist, task-based meditation on the connections between neo/colonial aspirations and their geopolitical costs, this piece foregrounds the reproductive labor of play. Participants will be invited to build and play house with Socorro and Bloody Mess and to deconstruct—physically and otherwise—the house by turning it inside-out.

Biography

Socorro and Bloody Mess have big plans: In keeping with the neo/colonial and expansionist tropes associated with their white bodies, they come to assemble their aspirational model home. But, as they build, they struggle with the heteronormative pull of house/home-making’s ideological organization of space and a deep-seated anarchic impulse. Socorro and Bloody Mess met in Mexico in 2015 while sporting their everyday personas, Denise Rogers Valenzuela and Helene Vosters. They share interests in found objects, menstrual paraphernalia, and playful performance. They have also shared a home.

Socorro! Bloody Mess!: Under (De)construction: A low-tech immersive (un)reality home building and decorating game

Noise and Interior Coloniality

This intervention is a combination of concert, performance, and conference. It engages noise as a basis for epistemic disobedience, as a way of creating knowledge from saturation, and as a “chaosmosis” of contingent and contradictory ideas informed by violence, destruction, resentment, and anger.

Biography

Susan Campos Fonseca is a Costa Rican musicologist and composer who specializes in the philosophy of technology, as well as cultural and decolonial feminist approaches to electronic art and sound creation. She is signed to the NY music label Irreverence Group Music and is a professor at the School of Musical Arts at the Universidad de Costa Rica. Campos Fonseca is also coordinator of the Archivo Histórico Musical (Historical Archive of Music) and researcher with the Instituto de Investigaciones en Artes (Institute for Arts Research).

Susan Campos Fonseca: Noise and Interior Coloniality

Faith in the Body, or the Body in Faith?

The Afro-diasporic body organizes everyday practices of visibility, affirming values, beliefs, aesthetics, and ancestral knowledge. It gives expression to notions of diversity, respect, memory, and the urban-ancestral Black body. When you watch, do you see what you do not see?

Biography

Tatiana Damasceno is a Brazilian choreographer, interpreter, and researcher. She holds a PhD in Performing Arts and is Professor of Dance at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where she coordinates the BA program. Damasceno also coordinates the research group on dance and Afro-Brazilian culture in the Department of Arts of the Body at UFRJ.

Tatiana Damasceno: Faith in the Body, or the Body in Faith?

(In)terfertilization: Of Word and Flesh

(In)terfertilization is a durational public performance that explores themes of need and self-actualization, transference of ideas and exchange, and growth. We will construct a series of hearts made of blood and soil, plant new seed/lives, follow their public growth, and allow their hearts to evolve into paradigm-defiant beings. #thedomystics

Biography

The Do-Mystics is a feminist collective created by Monique Blom and Arantxa Araujo, based in NYC, Mexico, and Canada. Their work incorporates the use of new media, performance, and socially engaged art. The collective explores themes through ritual processes of identity, gender, immigration, and domesticity.

The DoMystics: (In)terfertilization: Of Word and Flesh

Border Blaster

Border Blaster is an interactive game that harnesses collaboration and play to break through barriers - within ourselves, and between our communities. Projected outside, it invites people to spend time together and build connections, while blasting through walls.

Video provided by the artists.

Biography

The Illuminator is an art-activist collective comprised of visual artists, educators, filmmakers, and technologists living and working in New York City.The collective has staged hundreds of projection-interventions in public spaces, transforming the street from a space of passive consumption and transit into a site of engagement, conflict, and dialogue. @the.illuminator

The Illuminator: Border Blaster

Sinuosity

Sinuosity activates Indigenous rhythms of urban sound through a collaborative durational art-action and media installation. Braided fluorescent tape extends two bodies as a playful act of kinship, a connection to ancestral memory, and a protest to ongoing resource extraction in their territories and beyond.

Biography

Tsēmā Igharas and Jeneen Frei Njootli are award-winning Northern Indigenous interdisciplinary artists who create work to connect materials and bodies to the land. They are both members of the ReMatriate Collective. Friendship and collaboration has lead them to their joint performance, Sinuosity.

Tsēmā Igharas & Jeneen Frei Injootli: Sinuosity

Noises

Noises is a performance based on the use of interfaces and sound recordings, allowing for acoustic modifications in real time. In searching for tonality and corporeal sonority as a perceptual territory, Noises challenges listening as a way of embodying sound. It plays with the borders between what is seen and heard as a counterpoint to discursive registers.

Biography

Victoria Polti is a musician, performer, and anthropologist. She works on musical composition and teaches and researches music, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the body and sound. She is part of the Equipo de Antropología del cuerpo (Anthropology of the Body Working Group) the Red Latinoamericana de Antropología de y desde los cuerpos (Latin American Network of Anthropology of and from the Body), and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).

Victoria Polti: Noises

REQUIEM #3: Body Graves

Body Graves is a poetic action intent on rescuing memory and reclaiming the humanity of those buried in mass graves in Mexico. Starting from an inclusive, creative, and public space, it questions and reveals the impunity of an institutional machine devised to impede the right to access truth, justice, and mourning.

Credits:
Concept and Performance: Violeta Luna
Texts: Roberto Varea
Music: David Molina

Biography

Violeta Luna’s work explores the relationship between theater, performance art, and community engagement. Luna uses her body as a territory to question and comment on social and political phenomena. Luna holds a degree in Acting from the Centro Universitario de Teatro, UNAM. Luna performs and teaches extensively throughout the world.

Violeta Luna: REQUIEM #3: Body Graves

Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk

Nude Laughing

In an endurance-based performance of laughing while nude, Ibarra drags a nylon skin cocoon filled with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements." She engages the vexed entanglements that racialized subjects have with whiteness and white womanhood, and she embodies the skein of race, negotiating the joys and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood.

Biography

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the US/Mexico border who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom. Ibarra uses performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy. She has been awarded the Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, ReGen Fund, the Franklin Furnace Award, and the Queer Art Prize Award.

Xandra Ibarra: Nude Laughing