Events
Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience
To celebrate the publication of the new HemiPress book Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience, the Hemispheric Institute invites you to a special event that will include a panel discussion with the artist, editors, and contributors to the volume, and the performance Theoretical Fetishes by the artist. Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience, edited by Irina Troconis and Alejandro Castro, brings together six critical texts on the work of Venezuelan performance artist Deborah Castillo that reflect on both the performance of power and the power of performance as an act of radical disobedience. The panel discussion will feature Irina Troconis, Alejandro Castro, Rebeca Pineda Burgos, and Diana Taylor, and Marcial Godoy-Anativia as moderator.
Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience
This edited volume compiles for the first time six critical perspectives on the work of Venezuelan performance artist Deborah Castillo. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cultural studies, political theory, and performance theory, the contributors explore the different forms of radical disobedience that materialize as Castillo engages with questions of power, authority, the body, and the State, against the background of Venezuela’s current crisis and the failures of the Bolivarian Revolution. Taken as a whole, this volume not only illuminates the different operations at play in the work of one of Venezuela’s most prominent performance artists, but it also gives insight into the dynamics of political authority as it emerges amidst a global scenario dominated by populisms, polarization, and new forms of social oppression and subjugation.
Theoretical Fetiches 2019 (Performance)
In this performance, the artist addresses the subtle ways in which the control over bodies—individual and collective—is exerted through the mobilization of discourse and the fetishization of certain types of knowledge. Through a sensual engagement with a collection of books that critically approach the topic of performance—an engagement that includes turning and licking the pages and underlining with her tongue every word and every sentence—Castillo underscore the power embedded in orality, and the possibilities of resistance that open up when we consider that which manages to linger and survive beyond the duration of the moment.
About HemiPress
HemiPress is the Hemispheric Institute’s digital publication imprint, created to house and centralize our diverse publication initiatives. Using a variety of customized open-source digital humanities platforms, HemiPress includes the Gesture short works series—which includes the Duke U.P./HemiPress co-publications––stand-alone essays, and the Institute’s peer-reviewed journal emisférica, alongside interviews, Cuadernos, ArtWorks, Course Dossiers, and other online teaching resources. It also provides state-of-the-art multilingual publication capacities as well as immersive formats for capturing the “live” of performance and connecting communities of readers across the Americas.