^{_{The Extractive Zone: Cecilia Vicuña’s Social Ecologies a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series Lecture by Macarena Gómez-Barris}} 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

6:00-8:00 pm

Macarena Gómez-Barris, Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute.

Extending arguments in her recently published book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Gómez-Barris considers performative engagement with oceanic space, its social ecologies, and its occupation by transnational mega-extractive industries. During a time of new authoritarianisms in the Américas, she shows how extractive capitalism reorganizes the Pacific Ocean into a normative geography, where questions of stewardship and governance become epiphenomenal to the primary condition of resource accumulation. How does New York-based and mestiza artist Cecilia Vicuña’s sense the sea? How does she address the complexities of Indigeneity in the Global South? And, how might we think about Vicuña’s sea choreographies and similar radical artistic work as forms of embodiment that dissipate human, inhuman, and (after) nature divides?

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and Director of the Global South Center. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism, especially upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of the forthcoming Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Américas (UC Press, 2018) and Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009). She is co-author with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor with Diana Taylor of Duke University Press series Dissident Acts. Macarena was a Fulbright fellow at Sociology and Gender Department in FLACSO Ecuador, Quito (2014-2015).

*This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible.*

Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics.

image: Cecilia Vicuña from Kon Kon (2012) 

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El Indulto: Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Peru

Friday February 2, 2018
6:00-8:00 pm

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor Conference Room
New York, NY 10003

This event will take place in Spanish with translation.
Photo by: Lucho La Torre

Participants:
Karen Bernedo Morales (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru)
Leticia Robles-Moreno (Muhlenberg College)
Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa (Lafayette College)
Moderator: Claudia Salazar Jiménez (NYU)

 The recent exoneration of former dictator Alberto Fujimori has transported many Peruvians back to the nineties. Today more than ever, it has become clear that the democratic transition of the early 2000’s was little more than a reconfiguration of authoritarian political forces. The image of Peru as “a country without memory” has reemerged in the public sphere while, at the same time, a series of massive responses from Peruvian civil society has demonstrated the strength of trans-generational resistance to this imperative. This event will examine the present through the “eyes of the archive” in order to connect ideas around affect, theatricality, and performance. Panelists will address the mechanisms of cooptation deployed by Fujimorist forces as well as the acts of resistance and remembrance that are disrupting this attempt to erase and repeat history.

Karen Bernedo Morales holds a masters degree in Visual Anthropology and a degree from the Gender Studies department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She’s an independent curator and a professor at the Universidad Científica del Sur specializing in performing arts. She has created documentaries and exhibitions around the themes of art and memory within the internal armed conflict in Peru. Karen is a founding member of theMuseo Itinerante Arte por la Memoriacollective, which has received the National Art and Human Rights Award from the Príncipe Claus Foundation.  

Leticia Robles-Moreno holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University. Her research focuses on knowledge and bodily practices in Latin America and in the way they reconfigure political and transnational communities. She is currently studying the role of collective creation within theatre groups in the current Latin-American socio-political context. She analyzes the expansive networks of art and performance collectives as survival tactics and in the recovery of cultural memory within the fight for gender equality as well as sexual reproductive rights. Leticia is a professor at Muhlenberg College.

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa holds a Ph.D in Literature from Columbia University. Her research specializes in contemporary Latin-American Culture, with a focus on the Andes region. She’s currently writing about the cultural and social implications of the eighties underground scene in Peru. Her interests include visual culture, literature, non-fiction film, and urban and interdisciplinary studies.

Claudia Salazar Jiménez is a Peruvian academic and writer. Her first novel “La Sangre de la Aurora”, written from a female perspective on the internal armed conflict in Peru, obtained the Las Américas de Narrativa award. Her research projects and publications connect personal narrations with memory politics. She’s currently a professor at NYU and Brooklyn College.

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Dancing While Black: This Body Knows Freedom Story Circles on Organizing toward Vision in an Age of Resistance

Thursday, November 9, 2017
6:00-9:00 pm

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor Conference Room
New York, NY 10003

Led by Wendi O’Neal and Paloma McGregor

With Invited Guests Ebony Noelle Golden, Kendra Ross, Maria Bauman, Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, and Ishmael Houston-Jones.

What does it take to activate and maintain vision, particularly in moments where there is much to organize against? In this evening of storytelling, we will hear from a group of visionary dance artists about what they are working toward, and share stories of our own. This event marks the kickoff of Dancing While Black’s fifth anniversary season. Story Circles is a democratic process of storytelling created by John O’Neal of the Free Southern Theater, the predecessor of Dancing While Black’s New Orleans partner, Junebug Productions.

Wendi Moore-O'Neal is a cultural worker, facilitator, and educator who was born and raised in New Orleans. She’s worked in local, regional and national justice organizations over the last 26 years; but her heart’s work is rooted at home, especially the kind of organizing that happens around kitchen tables and during porch-time. Wendi uses freedom songs and story circles to share what she knows about Black resistance movement culture and history.

Paloma McGregor is a New York-based, Caribbean-born choreographer whose work focuses on centering Black voices through collaborative, process-based art-making and organizing. She has worked with grandparents, children, environmental educators, academics and other artists to create a wide range of work, including a dance through a makeshift fishnet on a Brooklyn rooftop, a structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River and a devised multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at UC Berkeley. Paloma does this work as Co-Founder and Director of Angela's Pulse, which creates and produces collaborative performance work dedicated to building community and illuminating bold new stories.

Damcing While Black is an artist-led initiative that supports the diverse work of Black dance artists by cultivating platforms for process, performance, dialogue and documentation. We bring the voices of Black dance artists from the periphery to the center, providing opportunities to self-determine the languages and lenses that define their work.

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"The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist" by Marcus Rediker | Book Launch 

Thursday, November 16, 2017
6:00-8:00 pm

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor Conference Room
New York, NY 10003

The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man—a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labor, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.

Please join us as we celebrate the launch of this publication with a presentation by author Marcus Rediker. Reception to follow.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. His books have won numerous awards and been translated into fifteen languages. They include The Many-Headed Hydra (2000; with Peter Linebaugh), Villains of All Nations (2004), The Slave Ship (2007), and The Amistad Rebellion (2012).  His most recent book is The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Beacon Press, 2017). He is also the producer of the prize-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels, about the popular memory of the 1839 Amistad rebellion in contemporary Sierra Leone. He is currently working as guest curator in the JMW Turner gallery at Tate Britain.

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