Guillermo Gómez-Peña (and me)
Posted September 29, 2008 by bec_young in Events
This weekend, writer and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his troupe were in Detroit. I joined perhaps fifty other people for a fairly intimate interactive performance of Gómez-Peña's Mapa Corpo at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This is the the first time I've been to one of his performances, but I'm told that it's par for the course that the event was visual overwhelming and emotionally challenging. I was forewarned by one of the maintenance guys at the museum that the Mapa Corpo was a naked woman's body stuck with acupuncture needles with many, many tiny flags of the U.S. and Britain (and one or two of Israel), which the audience was invited to help pull out at the end. He wasn't too impressed, but most of the audience seemed entranced by the visual and mental connections. The performance also involved video, music, poetry, and other simulations, rituals, and installations on the subjects of identity, power, and immigration. The event had the feeling of a dangerous but necessary ritual that we all somehow survived, together. This fall, Gómez-Peña's troup will be in San Francisco, Albequerque, Toronto, Alaska, and Arizona. Check his website for more specific information.
On a totally different note, I've just returned from a voyage to Buenos Aires to seek information for a project that I hope to do next year about art collectives in Argentina. Especially considering I was only there for two weeks, I learned about an amazing amount of artistic, radical, and collective projects, and had the opportunity to meet with people from a few of those projects. I'll be writing about some of the projects that I learned about in the coming weeks. Here I am in the Museo Municipal de Arte Hispanoamericano before the guard yelled at someone else for taking pictures inside the museum.
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i, too, was at the performance; and i must say that i feel fortunate to have been introduced to his work in such a medium. i am going to run out and get the book ethno-techno which has been recommended to me. the visual, aural, visceral and intellectual stimulation was a delight, albeit an indictment of western (american, in particular)hegemony and growing concerns of economic unilateralism, censorship, neofascism, civil liberties and propagrandizement of the islamic culture, to name just a few. we need more works like this.
sachiko
Posted by: sachiko woods at September 29, 2008 6:11 PM