Encuentro

Every two years, the Hemispheric Institute hosts an Encuentro—part academic conference, part performance festival—in a different site in the Americas. Fostering experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, each Encuentro brings together approximately five hundred scholars, artists, activists and students to take part in a ten-day program of keynote lectures, work groups, performances, installations, roundtable discussions, visual arts exhibits, video screenings and hands-on performance workshops. As we explore the relationship between expressive culture and politics in the Americas, we build on the premise that the practices we study and participate in cannot be thought from any one place, no single vantage point or theory can account for them. Encuentro participants are encouraged to work across disciplines and share their work in English, Spanish or Portuguese. Past thematic topics of the Encuentros have been: “Performance and Politics in the Americas” (2000), “Memory, Atrocity, and Resistance” (2001), “Globalization, Migration and the Public Sphere” (2002), “Spectacles of Religiosities” (2003), “Performing 'Heritage': Contemporary Indigenous Performance and Community-Based Practices” (2005), and “Corpolíticas/Body Politics: Formations of Race, Class and Gender in the Americas” (2007). Our upcoming Encuentro (2009) will be on “Staging Citizenship: Performance and Politics of Cultural Rights” and will take place in Bogotá, Colombia.