EVENT: “¡A Viva Voz!” presents “Filmformance and Hacktivism: New Directions in Latin@ Performance,” with performance artist Nao Bustamante and new media activist artist Ricardo Domínguez.
WHEN: 7-9 p.m., Thursday, April 12, 2012
WHERE: The Benson Latin American Collection (SRH 1.108)
BACKGROUND: The Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin celebrates its 10th annual salute to Latino culture, “¡A Viva Voz!,” with a pair of artists whose work draws upon new media and information technology to inform and provoke dialogue on Latino cultural and political issues.
Performance artist Nao Bustamante and new media activist artist Ricardo Domínguez will present their work at the Benson Latin American Collection in Sid Richardson Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
Bustamante’s work employs video installation, visual art, filmmaking and writing, but she is perhaps best known for her absorbing and sometimes outrageous performance art (such as faking her way onto “The Joan Rivers Show” as a “stunt exhibitionist” in 1992). Popularly known for her appearance in the Bravo Network television show “A Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” she has also exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Sundance Film Festival and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Domínguez is a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group that developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. His recent projects include the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S. border, and “Drones at Home,” an exhibition on drones, drone economies and art. Domínguez is an associate professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California-San Diego.
Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, associate director of the university’s Center for Mexican American Studies, will provide opening remarks, and a reception with light refreshments will follow the presentation.
“¡A Viva Voz!” was developed by former Benson director Ann Hartness to highlight the library’s broad Mexican American/U.S. Latino resources, engage the local community and celebrate U.S. Latino culture. Past events have featured a variety of speakers and performers, including Afro-Latin funk band Ocote Soul Sounds, renowned Chicana artist Carmen Lomas Garza, author David Rice, actor Luis Avalos and comic artists Los Bros Hernandez.
The Benson Latin American Collection, a unit of the University of Texas Libraries, is a specialized research library focusing on materials from and about Latin America, and on materials relating to Latinos in the United States. The library’s collections are composed of more than 1 million items including books, manuscripts, maps, photographs and art.
