July 17-23, 2016 
I am thrilled to be attending this year’s Encuentro in Santiago, Chile with CONSTELACIONES. We’ll be performing “Echoes: North… North” and I’ll also be co-facilitating the work group “Artist as Repertoire: Unceded Imaginaries” with Doris Difarnecio and Javier Serna.
More about Encuentro:
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the Universidad de Chile invite scholars, artists, and activists from all disciplines to formulate and present work around the theme of eX-céntrico: dissidence, sovereignties, performance, at our Xº (10th) Encuentro, to be held in Santiago, Chile from July 17-23, 2016.
The Xº Encuentro seeks to examine 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.
How do we manifest the artist’s repertoire, make visible artistic knowledges, skills and theory, describe the process and depth of art making and transmit these knowledges? We understand the repertoire to be both ephemeral and embodied cultural and social practices of transmission. We situate ourselves at the crossroads of hemispheric regimes as the queer, the troublesome, the heretics, passing through the confines of the normative to break down binary and unitary paradigms. Deeply affected by the processes of colonization, we are interested in what artistic knowledge transmission looks like within a decolonizing framework. Our focus is to sustain, proliferate, and transmit the artist’s repertoire through multiple explorations, divergences, and articulations.
