Electra Garrigó Intro

Alejandro Meitin: Artistic Initiatives in Community Organizing, and their Metaphorical and Juridical-Social Dimension

Photo/foto: Julio Pantoja Artistic Initiatives in Community Organizing, and their Metaphorical and Juridical-Social Dimension This keynote explored transdisciplinary strategies of critical urbanism that integrate artistic modes of thought and action to create contexts of resistance and transform reality. Biography Alejandro Meitin is an artist, lawyer, environmental activist, and co-founder of the art collective Ala Plástica (1991), which is based in La Plata, Argentina. Since 1994 he has been a member of Arte Litoral, an independent network of artists, critics, curators, and scholars interested in new ways of thinking about contemporary artistic practice and critical theory. Meitin has been involved in…

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Ana Gita de Oliveira: Safeguarding Cultural Heritage

Photo/ Foto: Julio Pantoja Lecturer: Ana Gita de OliveiraModerator: Octávio Elísio (Presidente IEPHA/MG) Biography Ana Gita de Oliveira holds a doctorate in Anthropology from the Universidade de Brasília. Coordinator of Brazil's Programa Nacional do Patrimônio Imaterial (National Program for Intangible Cultural Heritage) of the Secretaria de Patrimônio, Museus e Artes Plásticas of the Brazilian Ministery of Culture, Ana specializes in research related to themes of intangible heritage, national borders, and indigenous etiology. Academic works include her dissertation O mundo transformado: Um estudo da Cultura de fronteira no Alto Rio Negro. In this keynote address, titled Safeguarding Cultural Heritage, delivered as…

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Andreas Huyssen: Natural Rights, Civil Rights and the Politics of Memory

Photo/Foto: Paula Kupfer Natural Rights, Civil Rights and the Politics of Memory 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. Biography Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is founding director of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003)…

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Antanas Mockus: Bogotá: A Case of Cultural Agency

Photo/ Foto: Julio Pantoja Lecturer: Antanas Mockus Biography 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. He proceeded to preside over Bogotá as mayor for two eventful terms, in which he sprung many surprising and often humorous initiatives upon the city's inhabitants. His initiatives tended to involve grand gestures, often including local artists or personal appearances by the mayor himself – taking a shower in a commercial about conserving water, or walking…

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Antonio Araújo (Teatro da Vertigem): Artist Lecture

Photo/Foto: Julio Pantoja Artist Lecture: Antonio Araújo 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. From the practice of the situationist-inspired dérive used as a device for field research, to improvisations, and urban games conducted in the open and in dialogue with architecture and layout of the neighborhood, the whole process was marked by experiences of urban intervention. Biography Antonio Araújo is Artistic Director of Teatro da Vertigem and Professor in the Department of Performing Arts of…

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Artist Round Table: Performance Artists

photo/foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Presenters: Gonzalo Rabanal, María José Contreras, Rocio Boliver, Xandra Ibarra Moderator: Lois Weaver Biographies 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. María José Contreras Lorenzini is a performance artist and the Director of Teatro de Patio. She teaches at the School of Theater at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her work…

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Artist Round Table: Visual Artists

photo/foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Presenters: Marianne Kim, Katherine Behar, Julio PantojaModerator: Lorie Novak Biographies 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. Through live performance, video, and photographic projects, Disorientalism explores how these forces mediate race, gender, and bodies. Julio Pantoja is a photo-documentarian, journalist, activist and educator/researcher at the National Universities of Tucumán and Rosario. He is the director of Agencia Infoto and of Argentina’s Documentary Photography Biennial. He has lectured at academic and cultural convenings in Europe and the Americas, and shown his…

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Artist Round Table: Urban Interventions

photo/foto: Laura Bluher Presenters: Grayson Earle, Helene Vosters, Hector Canonge, Eelonora Fabião Moderators: Shauna Janssen Biographies 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. This “spectacularization machine” draws people into a space where a new kind of conversation may take place. Helene Vosters and Kim McLeod, both artist-scholars,engage in their first creative collaboration. Their work addresses a number of questions including: How can performance alter our relationships with everyday space? How…

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Augusto Boal and the Theater of the Oppressed

Augusto Boal is an innovative and influential Brazilian theatrical director, writer, pedagogue and politician. He is considered to be on of the most important creators of political theater since Brecht. Boal is the author of Theater of the Oppressed, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, Rainbow of Desire, Legislative Theater, among others. He was a Member of Parliament for Rio de Janeiro from 1993-1996. Boal is the founder of Theater of the Oppressed, a political theatrical form originally used in radical popular education movements, growing up alongside Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Theater of the Oppressed is a system of…

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Carlos Monsiváis: Performance as religion, religion as performance

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. Carlos Monsiváis is a prominent essayist, satirist, and novelist living in Mexico City. Mr. Monsiváis has contributed to Mexican journals such as, Excelsior, Siempre, and Nexos and he currently writes for La Jornada as well as El Financiero. He is the author of more than a dozen books in Spanish, both fiction and nonfiction, including Amor Perdido,…

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Claudia Briones: What, Where and When to Manifest: Contentious Politics and Prefigurative Politics

photo/foto: Dexter Miranda What, Where and When to Manifest: Contentious Politics and Prefigurative Politics 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. Biography Claudia Briones received her PhD in Anthropology from UT Austin. She is a Full Professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, and a Researcher at the National Council on Scientific and Technical Research at…

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Conference on the publication of RUPTURA journal (1982)

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. The inclusion of this interview generated a heated polemic because this artist was rejected by the liberal/leftist political milieu in which CADA participated. The interview was considered a wrong move. CADA members Raúl Zurita and Diamela Eltit defend and explain CADA's decision to publish the interview.In part 2, they discuss the homage that the journal decided to…

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Dan Fishback: Prostalgia

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. Along the way, he discusses Lady Gaga, prostalgia (pro-active nostalgia), David Halperin's How to Be Gay, and Fishback's own book-in-progress, Thirtynothing, based on his solo performance of the same name. Thirtynothing explores the legacy of gay artists who…

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Diamela Eltit 30 Years of CADA's 'NO+' (2009)

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. CADA’s ‘acciones de arte’ functioned as an archive and artwork simultaneously. Their members wanted to make a strategic material from the excerpt; in this sense, their methodology is based on a fragmented reality, and heterogeneity. The well-known intervention ‘NO +’ was the opening to a rebel narrative, and also opened a space for the word from the…

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Diamela Eltit: Folds in the Body

Photo/ Foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Folds in the Body: The Symptoms of Power Read this keynote in e-misférica 4.2 Abstract 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. Biography Diamela Eltit is a distinguished Chilean performance artist, novelist and cultural critic. Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other awards and appointments, Eltit was a member of the acclaimed Colectivo de Acciones de Arte…

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Diana Taylor: The Politics of Passion

Photo/Foto: Julio Pantoja The Politics of Passion 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. As political parties fail to represent their constituencies, people are re-learning to represent themselves. Biography Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama…

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Encuentro 2013 Institutional Welcome, Opening Remarks, and Senior Fellows Awards

Vivian Martínez Tabares is a critic, theatre researcher, editor and Professor. She holds an undergraduate degree in Theatre and a doctorate in Art Sciences at the Instituto Superior de Arte. Editor of the journal Conjunto and director at the Casa de las Américas and Mayo Teatral. Her most recent book is Escena y tensión social. Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru) is a collective formed in 1971, who travel paths sustained by theatrical performance research conducted from the perspective of a group culture with diverse roots both traditional and contemporary. Their works have resulted in unique processes going far beyond the material…

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Frances Fox Piven: How Movements Matter

photo/foto: Laura Bluher How Movements Matter 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 Biography Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She writes about social movements, and her books include Regulating the Poor (1972), Poor People’s Movements (1977), Why Americans Don’t Vote (1988) and Challenging Authority (2006).

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Gabriella Coleman: The Art, Artistry, and Trickery of Anonymous

photo/foto: Laura Bluher The Art, Artistry, and Trickery of Anonymous 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. Biography Gabriella Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. She researches, writes, and teaches on digital activism and computer hackers.

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George Lewis: Living with Creative Machines

GEORGE E. LEWIS Living With Creative MachinesRead this keynote in e-misférica 4.2 Abstract The computer is now an irreversible part of how improvisation has become a site for interdisciplinary exploration, exchanges of personal and cultural narratives, and the blurring of boundaries between art forms. For George Lewis, living, working, and performing with creative machines of his own design is closely intertwined with the study of how improvisation produces knowledge and meaning. Part memoir, part history and criticism, the talk intersects with critical histories of new media and American experimentalism, as well as ethnographic and historical work on improvisation. Biography George E.…

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Gustavo Buntinx: Sarita Colonia

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. Gustavo Buntix is an art historian, critic and independent curator, and director of the Cultural Center of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Peru). A graduate of Harvard University, where he studied Literature and History, he completed postgraduate studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He has been…

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In the Streets: Contemporary Social Movements in the Americas Round Table

Photo/Foto: Lorie Novak Jacques Servin: New Frontiers in Humor and RevolutionJade Percassi: Culture and Communication in the Struggle for a New SocietyJuan Marco Vaggione: Sexuality and the Law in Argentina: Challenges and Steps ForwardJulieta Paredes: The Red of Wellbeing, Suma Qhamaña Víctor Hugo Robles: Free Sex Education! Moderator: Nick Mirzoeff Biographies Jacques Servin (Andy Bichlbaum, US) is a co-founder of the Yes Men, a group that has accomplished numerous high-profile media interventions serving to highlight environmental, economic and social injustices and the systemic problems that lead to them. He teaches at NYU and at the Hemispheric Institute he heads the…

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Jean Franco: The Second Coming-Religion as Entertainment

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. Everywhere secularism is in retreat. Not only are fundamentalists on the rise but also many competing brands of spirituality are now widely disseminated through media, film, best selling fiction and television. While most orthodox religions have always used ritual and performance, telecommunications and televisual effects are transforming religion into religiosity. "The return of religion"…

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Jesús Martín Barbero: Arts of Memory and Regimes of Visibility

Photo/Foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Arts of Memory and Regimes of Visibility 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. The journey of memory, however, defatalizes the past, recuperating its incompleteness (Walter Benjamin). The past is shaped not only by events but also by tensions that destabilize the present…

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Leda Martins: Performances of Spiral Time

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. Africa prints her marks, traces and styles on the American territories, inscribing herself on the palimpsests that, by means of countless processes of cognition, assertion and metamorphosis, both conceptual and formal, transcreate and perform her presence and heritage. The arts and cultural creations colored by the African knowledge ostensibly reveal the ingenious and arduous means of survival…

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Maris Bustamante's Lecture/Performance

Starting with a semiotic performative that states ‘this is not a performance,’ this lecture/performance is another turn of the screw of RenéMagritte’s ‘this is not a pipe’ and Fernando Muñoz’ ‘this is not a cow.’ The relationship between performance and art tradition intertwines witha constant interpellation of the audience, blurring the boundaries between art and life. In the Q&A, Maris Bustamante renders her understanding of what non-objective arts are, and how gender roles can perform in art. A juicy conversation about her trajectory includes insights about gender and sexuality, feminist art, maternity, and her work with Polvo de gallina negra…

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Mary Louise Pratt: Language Ecology, Language Politics-Towards a Geolinguistic Imagination

Photo/Foto: Paula Kupfer Language Ecology, Language Politics: Towards a Geolinguistic Imagination 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. It will ask what the idea of rights can and cannot do in this context and consider what an ecological approach to language might involve. Biography Mary Louis Pratt is…

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Mary Schmidt Campbell: The Role of the Arts in a Time of Crisis

Lecturer: Mary Schmidt Campbell Biography 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. Dr. Campbell began her career in New York as the executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, widely regarded as the principal center for the study of African and African-American Art. Dean Campbell, who authored several catalogues on African-American artists, and frequently curated major…

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Megaron Txucarramãe: The Indigenous Question in Brazil

Photo/ Foto: Julio Pantoja Lecturer: Megaron TxucarramãePresenters: Aílton Krenak & Prof. Terence Turner Biographies 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. Working at Funai, he acted in Contact Fronts of the Ikpeng and Panará People. In 1984 he took part in the setting of the land boundaries of the Native Land Kapôt - Jarina and, in 1992/1993, of the Native Land M_kragnotire. He was a FUNAI supervisor of the Parque Indígena do Xingu (Xingu Indians Park) from 1984 to 1994…

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Miguel Rubio (Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani): Artist Lecture

Photo/Foto: Julio Pantoja Artist Lecture: Miguel Rubio We will discuss the issue of how dramatic languages expand and invade public space, converging with citizen actions. A look at several recent artistic proposals that act on public spaces, inserting themselves into social processes in the context of contemporary Peruvian society. Biography Miguel Rubio is a director, theater researcher, and founding member of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. His most recent directions include: Con-cierto Olvido (2010); El último ensayo (2008); Sin Título-técnica mixta (2004); Hecho en Perú-Vitrinas para un Museo de la Memoria (2001). He is also author of Raíces y semillas: Maestros y…

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Miguel Rubio & Teresa Ralli: Keynote Address (2000)

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. Their work has been among the most important in Latin America's so called "New Popular Theater," with a strong commitment to grass-roots community issues, mobilization, and advocacy. Yuyachkani won Peru's National Human Rights Award…

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Mini-Seminar: Manifestations of the Divine-The Body

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. Joseph Roach is the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University. Roach has chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. His books and…

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Mini-Seminar: Religious Fervor and Popular Culture

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. Silvia Spitta, is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College. Her field of interest ranges from contemporary and colonial Latina/o American writers, theories of transculturation, and narratives of mestizaje or miscegenation. Author of Between Two Waters: Literary Transculturation in Latin America, Spitta is currently working on a book…

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Nelly Richard: Feminism's Right to Be an Other to Itself

Photo/foto: Julio Pantoja Feminism's Right to Be an Other to Itself 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. Feminism's new critical and cultural orientations allow us to conjugate the politics and poetics of the self by mixing different registers, crossing civic militancy with intellectual-theoretical interventions and university activism with aesthetic passions, without fear of gender problematics that speak multiple…

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Opening Address for the 9th Encuentro Montreal 2014

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, orunspeakable? What new manifestations, manifestos, festivals, and manifs emergevia our changing visions of political spaces, intellectual arenas, and theeveryday street? The 2014 Encuentro invited artists, activists, and scholars toengage with and investigate the aesthetic, social, and choreographic techniquesthat transform political ideas into collective images, through actions,embodied utterances,…

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Opening remarks for the 1st Hemispheric Institute Encuentro

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. This is a video documentation of the opening remarks by Zeca Ligiéro, Diana Taylor, Luis Peirano, and Javier Serna, who introduce the general theme of the first Encuentro, ‘Performance and Politics in the Americas,’ as well as…

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Performance Art Roundtable

Photo/Foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Presenters: Gonzalo Rabanal, María José Contreras, Nao Bustamante, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Moderator: Antonio Prieto Stambaugh Biographies 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. In 1989 he received a grant from the ANDES Foundation and in 2010 another from the Ford Foundation. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Visual Art at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile. María José Contreras Lorenzini (Chile) is performer and Doctor of Body Language and…

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Performance Artist Roundtable

Photo/foto: Julio Pantoja 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. Wilson Díaz presented a retrospective of his visual arts work, which reveals recent Colombian struggles with violence and drug trafficking. His images related to natural coca leaves contrast with cocaine, its derivative chemical drug that engenders violence. Rocío Boliver performed an act of ventriloquism to make an artist statement, and to share…

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Peter Schumann: Anti-Tar Sands Manifesto

photo/foto: Laura Bluher Anti-Tar Sands Manifesto 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. Biography The Bread & Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 on New York City’s Lower East Side by Silesian-born sculptor and choreographer, Peter Schumann. Their shows address social, political and environmental issues or simply…

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Regina Galindo's 'Experiences' at the Hemispheric Institute

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. I don’t know if these are sad or not. They are simply experiences, and these have shaped me. They have been the fountain of my wisdom, the fountain of what I can speak, of that I know.’ Galindo presents her body as a site of conflict and violence;…

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Rossana Reguillo: Condensations and Displacements

Photo/ Foto: Julio Pantoja Condensations and Displacements: The Politics of Fear on Contemporary Bodies Read this keynote in e-misférica 4.2 Abstract “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. Rooted in the socioanthropology of affect, this lecture examines the centrality of fear/terror/panic and the affect they produce (hatred, rage, sorrow, hope), in/between/on the social body. More than an inventory of traits and attributes of a threatening contemporaneity,…

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Round Table: Affective Tactics

photo/foto: Laura Bluher Presenters: Jonathan Sterne and Brian MassumiModerator: Marcial Godoy-Anativia Biographies 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. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader. | sterneworks.org Brian Massumi is a social theorist, writer and philosopher who teaches in the Communication Sciences Department at the Université de Montréal. He is widely known for his English-language translations of French philosophy and is…

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Sérgio de Carvalho: Group Theater in São Paulo and the Commodification of Culture

Photo/Foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Group Theater in São Paulo and the Commodification of Culture 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. Biography Sérgio de Carvalho is playwright and director of…

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Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Sociology of the Image. A View from Andean History

Photo/Foto: Frances Pollitt Sociology of the Image. A View from Andean History 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. Biography Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui…

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Suely Rolnik: Archive Mania

Photo/Foto: Paula Kupfer Archive Mania 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? Biography Suely Rolnik has degrees in…

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Suely Rolnik: The Return of the Knowing Body

Photo/Foto: Fran Pollitt The Return of the Knowing Body 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. To create the conditions for a return of the knowing-body —free from the effects of its traumas—becomes, thus, an unavoidable task in the resistance to the actual state of things. It’s not a matter of futurology:…

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Tara McPherson: Feminist in a Software Lab

Photo/Foto: Alexandre Nunis Feminist in a Software Lab 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. Biography Tara McPherson teaches courses in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She authored the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003). Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence,…

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Tomson Highway: The Place of the Indigenous Voice in the 21st Century

photo/foto: Hemispheric Institute Staff The Place of the Indigenous Voice in the 21st Century 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. Biography Tomson Highway is a writer from northern Manitoba, producing works in Cree, French, and English. Plays include "The Rez Sisters," "Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing," and "Rose"; he is the author…

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Urban Interventions Round Table

Photo/Foto: Julio Pantoja Presenters: Álvaro Villalobos, Bel Borba, Diana Collazos, Nadia Granados, Tania AliceModerator: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Biographies Álvaro Villalobos (Colombia/México) holds a Master of Visual Arts from the Universidad Autónoma (México) and from the Facultad de Artes ASAB (Bogotá). His work engages social and political problems through performances, videos, installations and photography. He is currently a professor at UNAM and UAEMéx in Mexico. Bel Borba (Brazil), known as “The People’s Picasso,” has spread his artwork throughout the 500-year-old urban landscape for thirty-five years. In 2012, he participated in the New York City’s Crossing the Line Festival, sponsored by the French…

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Víctor Vich: The Poetics of Grief: Memories that Occupy the City

Photo/Foto: Fran Pollitt The Poetics of Grief: Memories that Occupy the City 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. In this conference, I will analyze three public interventions, performed in contemporary Peru, that reopened discussions concerning political violence. Biography Víctor Vich holds a doctorate…

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Welcoming to the First Hemi Encuentro in Brazil by Marcos Terena

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. This is a video documentation of the welcoming by Marcos Terena, member of the Terena indigenous people, who discusses the political implications in the theorization and practice of ‘indigenous performance’ and intercultural encounters. He remembers the invasions…

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Ximena Castilla: Anarcho-Feminist Citizenship

Photo/Foto: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Anarcho-Feminist Citizenship A discussion that addressed the theme of citizenship from the standpoint of anarcho-feminism, framing citizenship as an ancient, efficient, subversive, and ludic construction. Biography Ximena Castilla is a criminal lawyer from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. She is a defender of women's rights and dedicates herself to human rights cases, especially those dealing with sexual and reproductive rights.

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