Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Strange Democracy
play video >
performance lecture: duration 68 mins; video documentation above – 69 mins
from the original Festival website:
a short spoken word performance
In his new performance, post-Mexican writer and performance artist Gómez-Peña deals with the end of the Bush era and articulates the formidable challenges facing Obama. He also denounces the anti-immigration hysteria and assaults the demonised construction of the US/Mexican border — a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minute Men, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalisation, and transnational identities.
Gomez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style, “a combination of performance-activism and theatricalisations of postcolonial theory.” In his eight books, as in his live performances, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what’s left for artists to do in a repressive global culture of censorship, paranoid nationalism and what he terms “the mainstream bizarre.” Gómez-Peña examines where this leaves the critical practice of artists who aim to make tactical, performative interventions into our notions of race, culture and sexuality.
Guillermo and fellow member of the legendary Pocha Nostra performance troupe Roberto Sifuentes will conduct a four-hour workshop on performance art with a focus on the human body as a site for creation, reinvention, memory and activism.
In permanent progress as of April, 2008 – The New Barbarians: a declaration of poetic disobedience from the New Border by Guillermo Gómez-Peña is in the documents section of this website.
a short spoken word performance
WATCH VIDEO (if we get his permission!)
from the original Festival website:
In his new performance, post-Mexican writer and performance artist Gómez-Peña deals with the end of the Bush era and articulates the formidable challenges facing Obama. He also denounces the anti-immigration hysteria and assaults the demonised construction of the US/Mexican border — a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minute Men, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalisation, and transnational identities.
Gomez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style, “a combination of performance-activism and theatricalisations of postcolonial theory.” In his eight books, as in his live performances, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what’s left for artists to do in a repressive global culture of censorship, paranoid nationalism and what he terms “the mainstream bizarre.” Gómez-Peña examines where this leaves the critical practice of artists who aim to make tactical, performative interventions into our notions of race, culture and sexuality.
Guillermo and fellow member of the legendary Pocha Nostra performance troupe Roberto Sifuentes will conduct a four-hour workshop on performance art with a focus on the human body as a site for creation, reinvention, memory and activism.