Interview with Teddy Cruz, conducted by Diana Taylor, during the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held in August of 2009 in Bogotá, Colombia under the title Staging Citizenship: Cultural Rights in the Americas. In this interview, Teddy Cruz talks about his take on how his particular performance-related work makes a political intervention in the public sphere. This interview complements his participation in a round table on Architecture, Geography, and Visuality, presented in this 10-day event, which brought together activism, scholarship, and art around the themes of legacies, memories, struggles, and frontiers of citizenship.

Biography

Teddy Cruz is an Associate Professor in Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California. He has been recognized for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, and for his work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city.