Eventos
Colonial Archives, Erotics, and Latin/x American Performance
Thursday, September 21, 2023 | 6PM EST
This symposium on “Colonial Archives, Erotics, and Latin/x American Performance” brings together three artists—Carlos Motta, Yelaine Rodríguez, and Emilio Rojas—whose work has imaginatively engaged their own partly eroticized, partly obscured bodies to read new meaning into colonial devotions, records, narratives, and artifacts. These artists use queer performance art and erotic embodiment to critique colonizing representations and the breath radical potential into archived pasts and collected objects. Each will present work related explicitly to the erotics of colonial archives, leading to a roundtable conversation moderated by Josefina Saldaña Portillo and Zeb Tortorici on the intersections of colonial archives, sexuality, performance art, and decolonial praxis in the present. The event will be followed by a reception.
Bios
Carlos Motta
Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through acts of self-representation. As a historian of untold narratives, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.Motta’s work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Stigmata, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) (2023); Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, USA (2022); Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). In 2024, he will have a mid-career survey exhibition at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).
Yelaine Rodriguez
Yelaine Rodriguez (b.1990) is an AfroDominicanYork artistic scholar, educator, independent curator, cultural organizer, and writer who merges her creative language and academic research within her practice. As a visual artist, Rodriguez conceptualizes wearable art, sculptures, and site-specific installations drawing connections between her research on Black cultures in the Caribbean and the United States. She received her BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design | The New School (2013) and her MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Museum Studies from New York University (2021). She is currently an Adjunct Instructor at The New School and NYU. Rodriguez's curatorial projects include Radical Elegance at Longwood Art Gallery At Hostos (2021), Afro Syncretic at NYU (2019-2020), Resistance, Roots, & Truth at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (2018), and (under)REPRESENT(ed) at Parsons School of Design | The New School (2017). From (2015 - to 2018), Rodriguez founded La Lucha: Dominican Republic and Haiti, One Island, an art collective exploring Dominican-Haitian relations through exhibitions, artist panels, and interactive conferences. She has exhibited in various venues internationally, such as ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio's (NY) first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, UNTITLED Art Fair, Photoville, Mexic-Arte Museum, American Museum of Natural History, and Wave Hill in the United States, El Centro Cultural de España and Centro León Biennial XXVII in the Dominican Republic, SurGallery & Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Canada, Wereldmuseum in The Netherlands, and La Escocesa in Barcelona, Spain. Rodriguez's works feature in CNN, Artsy, EnFoco, Hyperallergic, Vogue, Aperture, and Elle Magazine. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews and academic journals like Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture.
Emilio Rojas
Emilio Rojas (b. 1985, Mexico City) is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.
20 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10011
Organized with the Center for the Study for Gender and Sexuality, The Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and The Latinx Project at New York University