The Hemispheric Institute’s 10th Encuentro, eX-céntrico: dissidence, sovereignties, performance, took place in Santiago, Chile from July 17–23, 2016. This digital catalog features video and photo documentation of the many performances, keynote lectures, street art actions, work groups, exhibitions, teach-ins, and roundtable discussions that animated the event.

The Xº Encuentro examined the eX-centric—that which stands apart, on the peripheries of power—as a site of identity, struggle, creativity, and political power. We understand the eX-centric as the dissident, that which stands apart, creating a space outside that makes possible other futures, subjectivities, and ways of doing and knowing. We seek to explore politics and aesthetics generated from without, from an outside that marks its distance and non-desire to be written in dominant codes, destabilizing common sense and disarranging the blueprints of the possible. We are drawn to the proactive and creative charge of these un-framings, to their capacity to generate sovereignties in bodies and territories that yield eX-centric subjects and collectivities—styles and poses, movements and nations, traversed by indigeneity, disability, queerness, blackness, as well as punk, trans, proletarian, and migrant sensibilities. These sovereignties resist and interpellate the centers of power with aesthetic ruptures, liberatory autonomies, and disobedient body politics. In this context, performance—performance art, theater, underground cultures, occupations of public space, digital corporealities, body art, drag, cabaret, the music that animates the nightlife of social movements—is a central tool both for the creation of new meaning and for the transmission of knowledge, memory, and identity.