Lectures & Presentations

As a capstone to an event series celebrating visual artist Gertrudis Rivalta’s show at the Thomas Nickles Gallery and her residency at the Hemispheric Institute, scholar Jacqueline Loss interviews Rivalta in a sprawling conversation about her life and work. They touch on topics such as: Rivalta’s family and childhood in Santa Clara; representations of Blackness in her work and in Cuban culture more broadly; her relationships and missed connections with other figures in the art world, such as Kevin Power, Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare, and Cindy Sherman; the historicist use of mass media in her art; her use of materials such as varnish and sequins; the relationship between “cure” and “curation”; and various series of Rivalta’s, such as her “little theater” (“teatrillo”) dioramas and her reimaginings of Walker Evans photographs. They also discuss works of hers such as “Quinceañera con Kremlin”; “Mulata Tropical”; and “Mami llévame pa San Lázaro”. In one particularly emotional moment, Rivalta describes the reaction to her exhibition “Fantasmas de azúcar” (“Phantoms of Sugar”) of a Holocaust survivor, who compared the Cuban sugar plantations shown in her work to concentration camps.

Opening address for the Hemispheric Institute's 9th Encuentro, held at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, sought to explorethe multiple valences of the term MANIFEST! How are performances mobilized andsyncretized in civic, community, and cultural contexts to create manifold formsof political expression? How do public, theatrical events produce ‘evidence’ that manifests ideas otherwise invisible, hidden, or unspeakable?

In this workshop and keynote address, celebrated in the context of in the context of the first Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2000, Boal talks about the history and coordinates of the Theater of the Oppressed.

Performance artist and playwright Dan Fishback works out some of his anxieties about queer history, gay representation, male protagonism, and the limits of the queer imagination in this vaguely academic (but not really) captial-T 'Talk,' theoretically leading toward some thoughts (and hopefully some revelations) about queer ennui, queer depression, and how the adult queer universe can strategize to prevent queer teenage suicide.

Institutional Welcome and Opening Remarks for the 2013 Encuentro, followed by the presentation of the Senior Fellows Awards to Vivian Martínez Tabares and Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (representatives: Miguel Rubio and Teresa Ralli).

In this introduction to the 30-years celebration of the first public CADA’s ‘acción,’ Diamela Eltit reads a text in which she highlights the political relevance of this collective in relationship with the Chilean dictatorship, and the hegemonic cultural domination against which CADA performed.

This is a video documentation of Regina José Galindo’s artist talk ‘Experiences,’ presented in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Galindo offered a retrospective of her performance art work, from 1999 to the present, speaking about pieces of art that she links with vital experiences: ‘I have experiences with life’s episodes.

Disorientalism (Katherine Behar & Marianne Kim), a collaboration between Asian-American artists Katherine Behar and Marianne Kim, studies the disorienting effects of technologized labor, junk culture, and consumerism.

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format;The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction; and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture.

Colectivo CARNAR is: Gonzalo León Rabanal, father and grandfather, who was initiated into performance art after the piece Mal decir la letra; Valeria León Ibáñez, daughter and granddaughter, whose BA is in Visual Arts; and Bernardo León Gómez (Gonzalo Rabanal), son and father, who has degrees in Audiovisual Communication and Art.

The Illuminator is an art collective that emerged from Occupy Wall Street in New York City. Armed with a powerful projector, it supports the 99% by beaming messages of solidarity and staging political interventions in NYC and beyond.

Inside the verbs, pronouns, articles of the world’s Aboriginal languages are the keys to the planet's long-term survival. Western languages hold that nature died at mankind’s eviction from a garden. Aboriginal languages refute this—to them, nature has a soul, the planet is a garden. Kill those languages and that vision—and the planet—would die.

Flagrantly fanciful and subversive, the protest ensemble Anonymous became widely popular among some Internet geeks, political activists, and academics along with many unmarked spectators. In this talk I examine its popular appeal through the vantage point of its art, artistry, and trickery.

Protest movements are sometimes the driving force in the transformation of societies. This project will examine how movements succeed in penetrating the fog generated by dominant political discourse, and how they sometimes wield sufficient power or leverage by disrupting institutionalized relationships

Analysis of indigenous social movements focuses on their public manifestations and manifestos, revealing an aspect of the world that advances certain agendas. Exploring the choreographies of these movements, I introduce a distinction between contentious politics and prefigurative politics, and examine their archives and repertoires of struggle.

We and the caribou, dwarves of the giant corporate system that runs our life and devastation, are here to rise up. Columbus, who imports the New World Order, drums in the billionaire-superheroes who dominate our economy, which destroys the herds that roam the earth, and we all end up in the same boat, with no idea where we are going./p>

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics held its first Encuentro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2-15, 2000. Participants included artists, scholars, graduate students, and activists. This eclectic and culturally diverse group, from countries throughout the Americas, captured the spirit of Encuentros: to provide a forum that encourages an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between performance and politics from diverse cultural perspectives.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics held its first Encuentro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2-15, 2000. Participants included artists, scholars, graduate students, and activists. This eclectic and culturally diverse group, from countries throughout the Americas, captured the spirit of Encuentros.

Gonzalo Rabanal (Chile) studied Audio Visual Communication at the ARCOS Institute, where he began to develop a way of working that projects from individual to collective, opening up space for an expressive multiplicity. María José Contreras Lorenzini (Chile) is performer and Doctor of Body Language and Psychology.

Álvaro Villalobos (Colombia/México) holds a Master of Visual Arts from the Universidad Autónoma (México) and from the Facultad de Artes ASAB (Bogotá). Bel Borba (Brazil), known as “The People’s Picasso,” has spread his artwork throughout the 500-year-old urban landscape for thirty-five years.

Jacques Servin: New Frontiers in Humor and Revolution
Jade Percassi: Culture and Communication in the Struggle for a New Society
Juan Marco Vaggione: Sexuality and the Law in Argentina: Challenges and Steps Forward
Julieta Paredes: The Red of Wellbeing, Suma Qhamaña
Víctor Hugo Robles: Free Sex Education!

The recent capitalist development in Brazil generated an institutionalization of cultural production in the country. The research in the arts, which previously operated against the grain of dominant logics, now frequently becomes a conformist site of alternative inclusion in capital’s ideological order. Dissonant voices in this process, including the voices of some theater groups in the city of São Paulo, look for critical ways of confronting the general depoliticization and commodification imposed by the bare necessities of survival.

The unconscious repression of the knowing-body is the greatest violence of the colonial enterprise from a the micropolitical perspective. Such violence is at the marrow of the modern Western culture, which still structures us. Today, the toxic effects of this unconscious repression have reached their limit, generating the vast crisis in which we are immersed.

How did a feminist film scholar trained in post-structuralist theory end up running a software lab? In answering that question, this talk engages various histories in the  development of computational systems in order to argue that we need more humanities scholars to take seriously issues in the design and implementation of software systems.

The Poetics of Grief brings to light deeply discomforting issues and proposes to question citizens through diverse symbolic means. It refers to proposals that intervene in public space calling attention to the dangers of forgetting crucial past events; events which move us away from triumphalism and that insist, over and over again, on the need to continue processing the worst of the past.

Discussion of theatrical experiments performed in streets and public spaces of the São Paulo neighborhood of Bom Retiro during the creative process of Bom Retiro 958 metros, by Teatro da Vertigem.

Miguel Rubio's lecture explores how dramatic languages expand and invade public space, converging with citizen actions. To this end, he looks at several recent artistic proposals that act on and in public spaces - inserting themselves into social processes in the context of contemporary Peruvian society.

What options for political and economic justice do people have when the electoral process has been violated or corrupted, the media sequestered in the hands of power-brokers, and official institutions cannot adjudicate in a way that is seen as transparent and legitimate? "The Poltics of Passion" explains the resurgence and even centrality of the body in politics.

Video documentation of Leda Martin's keynote address, Performances of Spiral Time, presented as a part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York, United States under the title Spectacles of Religiosities.

Video documentation of the Religious Fervor and Popular Culture mini-seminar presented as a part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York City, United States under the title Spectacles of Religiosities. Moderated by Ulla Berg and Alyshia Gálvez.

Video documentation of the Manifestations of the Divine: The Body mini-seminar, presented as a part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York City, United States under the title Spectacles of Religiosities. Moderated by Gisela Cánepa Koch.

Video documentation of Jean Franco's keynote address, The Second Coming: Religion as Entertainment, presented as a part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York City, United States under the title Spectacles of Religiosities.

Video documentation of Gustavo Buntinx's keynote address, Sarita Colonia: De icono religioso a héroe cultural, presented as part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York City, United States under the title Spectacles of Religiosities. Introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Video documentation of Carlos Monsiváis' keynote address presented as a part of the 4th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, celebrated in July of 2003 in New York City, United States under the title Spectacles of Religiosities.Introduction by Lourdes Arizpe.

Antana Mockus is a Colombian mathematician, philosopher and politician, Mockus left his post as rector of Colombian National University in Bogotá in 1993, and later that year ran a successful campaign for mayor in the city.

In this keynote address, titled Safeguarding Cultural Heritage, delivered as a part of the Hemispheric Institute's 5th Encuentro (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2005), Gita discusses Brazil's current political and cultural climate related to the identification, inventory, documentation and registry of intangible cultural heritage.

Scholar, author and former New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Ms. Campbell is Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. As head of this pre-eminent art school, Dean Campbell oversees all phases of its ten professional training programs, as well as its two scholarly programs.

Megaron Txucarramãe is one of the most important native leaders in Brazil, with outstanding performance on behalf of his people, M_kragnotire, and of other Brazilian native people.

“The dreams of reason produce monsters”—two centuries later, Goya’s foresight affirms the nightmares of contemporary reason. In a context characterized by the unequal distribution of wealth and, especially, of risk, the politics of fear make themselves felt on the bodies of citizens.

This intervention intends to approach, somewhat arbitrarily, the effects of the body (of certain bodies) in the political arena and in aesthetic spaces. It also posits the body as a symptom and an effect, examining the trail of power it leaves in its wake.

In 1982, CADA published the journal RUPTURA, printing 200 copies. This video footage shows a discussion around the journal in a meeting of artists.In part 1, the discussion centers on the inclusion in the journal of an interview with visual artist Ernesto Muñoz.

Peru's most important theater collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani has been working since 1971 at the forefront of theatrical experimentation, political performance, and collective creation. "Yuyachkani" is a Quechua word that means "I am thinking, I am remembering"; under this name, the theater group has devoted itself to the collective exploration of embodied social memory, particularly in relation to questions of ethnicity, violence, and memory in Peru.

This roundtable offered an opportunity for discussion with - and between - selected performance artists who presented work at this Encuentro. These artists reflected upon their own process and production, and commented on the relationship of their work to the larger themes of the Encuentro.

Human rights and memory discourses must be robustly linked with each other to add a necessary dimension of futurity to memory and of history to human rights politics. Drawing on the early modern notion of natural rights, this paper asks to what extent ‘rights of nature’ need to be considered to nurture the sustainability of human rights as social rights.

What will the world look like linguistically a hundred years from now? The use and distribution of languages across the planet is changing so quickly that even experts cannot answer this question. This lecture will discuss some of the processes of change that are under way, including language death, language migration, and the formation of lingua francas and interlanguages.

Over the last two decades, a compulsion to archive has seized a large part of the globalized territory of art, from academic research to art exhibitions based on archives, provoking harsh disputes among collections over acquisitions. Among the privileged objects of analysis are the artistic proposals developed in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s, when politics became enmeshed in poetics. What has caused this desire for the archive to emerge in the present context? What are the politics of desire driving these initiatives and their modes of presentation?

Without relinquishing the sociopolitical force of its struggles against gender discrimination, feminist theory today also defines itself as cultural critique. This allows feminism's emancipatory potential to encompass imaginary and symbolic configurations of subjective economies that exceed those categories of "identity" and "difference" preconfigured by the sociology of gender.

This keynote explored transdisciplinary strategies of critical urbanism that integrate artistic modes of thought and action to create contexts of resistance and transform reality.

This keynote offered a reading of the iconography of Guamán Poma de Ayala (17th century) and Melchor María Mercado (19th century) as exponents of a theorization of Andean reality in colonial and republican times, focusing on their use of images. These images constitute a hidden text that reveals aspects not directly addressed in their writings. Building on these reflections, the speaker will argue the need to consider non-alphabetic forms of Andean discourse as a path toward understanding colonial and postcolonial experience in the Andes.

The fundamental issue still pending in Colombia—unresolved in theory, as in action—is the very special relationship between politics and violence in the fabric of its memories and history. It is the density of violence that unfolds throughout the history of what Paul Ricoeur calls the structures of the terrible, those "forces" of instinct and exploitation inscribed in politics from its foundation.

A discussion that addressed the theme of citizenship from the standpoint of anarcho-feminism, framing citizenship as an ancient, efficient, subversive, and ludic construction.