Apr 9th 2016

Gallery 400 is pleased to present Please Don’t Bury Me Alive!, a performative lecture by Josh Rios and Anthony Romero. The first performer reenacts Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque artist talk, initially delivered to graduate students at the University of Utah in 1970. Smithson’s ruminations about art, architecture, and Mexico are paired with historical photographs of San Diego’s Chicano Park. The discord and resonance between the two mirror the fractured associations between modernity and coloniality. The second performer enacts an abridged and rewritten version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In an attempt to complicate the social implications of waiting, the re-written play is set in an unnamed detention center along the US-Mexico border. Throughout the monologue the main character contemplates the nature of confinement, the imminence of torture, and the effects of delay on the racialized subject.

Anthony Romero and Josh Rios are educators, artists, and cultural critics. Their performances, 2 and 3 dimensional works, curatorial projects, installations, writings, and screenings deal with the key experiences of being US citizens of Mexican origin. Broadly speaking, their practice centers on contemporary Chicana/o aesthetics and elided histories, and the larger themes of US-Mexico relations.

This event, part of the Latino Art Now conference, is free and open to the public.

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