On March 3rd, I experienced a new way of communicating a story with a crowd through performance art.
Nonfiction Gallery in Savannah, GA is known for featuring out of the box art and aims to tell stories through their shows. Emilio Rojas' show was nothing short of out of the box and featured two readings from a book given to him as a child. Through the reading of this and his performance, Emilio was able to convey the feeling of being separated by two worlds and two life paths. Torn between the two, these dilemmas separate his body in two causing him to experience chaotic feelings.
"Mestizo is a word used during the Spanish Empire to refer derogatorily to people of mixed European and native ancestry. Later appropriated after the Mexican independence to consolidate a sense of national identity. The government depicted the country's history as mestizo-driven, a term that carried a sense of pride of our native origins. In the murals of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, mestizaje is the leitmotif: The past is portrayed as a clash of civilizations, and the present as an attempt at balance. This exploration of duality is full of contradictions, what Octavio Paz refers as The Labyrinth of Solitude, work that inspired this piece. A nation whose citizenship lives in a constant search for identity outside of themselves, an unbalanced polarity. Thinkers like José Vasconcelos, Samuel Ramos, and Octavio Paz have contributed, each to his own pace, with the ideological purpose of mestizaje at stake and the complexities of the Mexican psyche. The work attempts to investigate these paradoxes as the artist embodies his own mestizo blood, in a physical form."
This was a collaboration with Adulio Pitaksalok, and curated by Gabrielle Buffong.
Emilio's website can be viewed here: http://www.performancero.com
Nonfiction Gallery in Savannah, GA is known for featuring out of the box art and aims to tell stories through their shows. Emilio Rojas' show was nothing short of out of the box and featured two readings from a book given to him as a child. Through the reading of this and his performance, Emilio was able to convey the feeling of being separated by two worlds and two life paths. Torn between the two, these dilemmas separate his body in two causing him to experience chaotic feelings.
"Mestizo is a word used during the Spanish Empire to refer derogatorily to people of mixed European and native ancestry. Later appropriated after the Mexican independence to consolidate a sense of national identity. The government depicted the country's history as mestizo-driven, a term that carried a sense of pride of our native origins. In the murals of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, mestizaje is the leitmotif: The past is portrayed as a clash of civilizations, and the present as an attempt at balance. This exploration of duality is full of contradictions, what Octavio Paz refers as The Labyrinth of Solitude, work that inspired this piece. A nation whose citizenship lives in a constant search for identity outside of themselves, an unbalanced polarity. Thinkers like José Vasconcelos, Samuel Ramos, and Octavio Paz have contributed, each to his own pace, with the ideological purpose of mestizaje at stake and the complexities of the Mexican psyche. The work attempts to investigate these paradoxes as the artist embodies his own mestizo blood, in a physical form."
This was a collaboration with Adulio Pitaksalok, and curated by Gabrielle Buffong.
Emilio's website can be viewed here: http://www.performancero.com
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