DEAD LETTERZ / INVISIBLE INK: AKADEMIX
This study examines Chicano artist, Harry Gamboa, Jr.’s, most recent work over the last decade.
It specifically focuses on this work’s function as a decolonial Chicana/o artistic praxis and cultural production that combines live performance, visual art, radical pedagogy, a critique of neocapitalist urban space, ritual/ceremony, storytelling, psychotherapy, Indigenous American aesthetics and forms, and digital media.
In this study, I demonstrate how Gamboa uses the performance “scenario” within the context of digital media production to open/create the psychic space for a decolonial, healing, and transformative process, that arises from an oscillating manipulation of ephemeral (“repertoire”) and non-ephemeral (“archive”) elements. I argue that this oscillation is a densely layered decolonial application of Indigenous meaning-making methods that serves to propel participants along a transformative trajectory of self-construction and narrativity.
I therefore convey this process not only through the content of the study—which employs an Indigenous Chicana/o, North American, and Latin American theoretical discourse—but through its form as well, by oscillating a personal narrative/analysis of my experience working with Gamboa with a contextualizing endnotes discussion.
LINK:
EXILE IN CHICANOVILLE
[PDF; 2.5 mb]
[Note: Online readers are advised to use the "bookmarks" function in their PDF readers to navigate between endnotes and references.]
This review examines Phantom Sightings through a focus on the exhibition’s highly academic curatorial framework.
The critique explores issues of internal colonization/institutionalization in the current, overly eager ontological leap into the “post-” by many Chicana/o (and “post-” Chicana/o) artists and academics. In juxtaposition to the overly theorized, decontextualizing digital photography work of Ken Gonzales-Day, the work of Phantom Sightings artists like Sandra de la Loza and Arturo Ernesto Romo is highlighted in order to demonstrate the potential for paradigm-shifting power reconfigurations through decolonial, transformational artistic praxes.
Through the transformational application of what Chicana theorist Emma
Pérez terms a “decolonial imaginary,” these works by de la Loza and Romo contextualize and explore Chicana/o experience within the historical framework of ongoing imperialism, and demonstrate how the contextualizing, transformative, experiential process that defines the most effective Chicana/o art and cultural production arises from an indigenous-based, dialogical meaning-making relationship between archive and ephemeral.
In contradiction to such practices, some of the failures of Phantom Sightings demonstrate how the current form of internal colonization functions through a decontextualizing academic and curatorial erasure that substitutes for transformation with an interpolated, decontextualized representation of transformation, often rendering not only the work, but the artist as well, a kind of decoy disconnected from the paradigm-shifting power of the transformational.
LINKS:
Latinart.com: DECIPHERING THE DECOY [ENGLISH]
Latinart.com: DESCIFRANDO EL SEÑUELO [ESPAÑOL]
PDF: DECIPHERING THE DECOY [105k]