Encuentro 2009: Staging Citizenship
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the National University of Colombia invite artists, performers, academics and activists to propose performances, papers, performance-based scholarship, videos, installations, visual art exhibits, activist projects, hacktivist or virtual actions, work group projects and other forms that bring together performance and politics in the Americas, and participate in our upcoming
7th
Encuentro
Staging Citizenship:
Cultural Rights in the Americas
at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá
August 21-30, 2009
Our 7th Encuentro invites interested participants to investigate "cultural rights" and their complex relationship to citizenship in both historical and contemporary contexts. We understand cultural rights as a juridical figure, a technology of power and an articulation that brings together multiple political demands, social subjects and modalities of citizenship. They allow us to explore the relationship between performance and politics through diverse expressive forms, analytic categories, disciplines, traditions and movements. Cultural rights necessarily invoke the State, made visible by the same citizens and institutions that it produces, and also highlight the instrumentalization of ritual, identity, protest and art. They also invite us to examine the right to identity and interculturality; the use and promotion of native languages, languages of choice and their hybrids; artistic training and access to its expressions; and the recognition, transmission and transformation of collective memory, among others. Cultural rights also bring attention to the enormous distance between juridical discourse and everyday experience and between written theory and embodied practice, and extol us to examine these tensions, antagonisms and social inequalities and the performative practice mobilized by artists, social actors and states to intervene them.
These themes will be organized under three umbrella topics that will serve as the point of departure of a great variety of performances, installations, exhibits, roundtables, workshops, keynotes and work groups.
The Memories of Politics and the Legacies of Citizenship
Reflecting on the history and the memory of over two centuries of "independence" in the Americas and its colonial legacy, we ask: Can the rights to memory and to history as cultural demands ever be separate from the exercise of political rights? What is the shape of the struggles over the definition, transmission and control of the past in the public sphere? In what ways do hegemonic mechanisms and institutions highlight, disseminate and legitimize particular narratives and practices, while devaluing, restricting or erasing others?
The Struggles Over Citizenship
The "normalization" of cultural practices in accordance with ideological interests presumes that culture can exist in homogenous and static forms. In such contexts, citizenship is defined in the degree to which subjects are able to obtain "equaility in difference," recognition or identity-based "empowerment." What strategies have individuals, groups and communities deployed to make themselves visible as citizens or, to the contrary, to make themselves invisible as a form of cultural resistance? How may these discursive and performative processes categorized and understood? How do practices repeated upon bodies turn these very bodies into territories of contestation and risk?
Multiculturalism, Interculturality and Migration
Since the 1980's, many countries in the Americas have constitutionally recognized multiculturality, ethnic diversity and differential forms of citizenship while others, like the United States, have moved in the opposite direction. During this same period, diverse forms of violence, forced displacement and migration have intensified both within and across national boundaries. How do these phenomena alter and refine notions of citizenship and belonging? What cultural transformations do they bring with them? How can intercultural dialogue be framed in light of struggles for social justice? What debates emerge about place and territory, about the right to land as a cultural right?
The application deadline was February 23, 2009.