Latin@merica: Embedding Bodies and Localities offers the possibility of rethinking how traditional place-based affiliations and notions of cultural identity end up reproduced, reaffirmed, or even transformed in the digital realm. The exhibition aims to highlight how technology has had an impact in the construction of Latin American identity and its networked localities. New forms of negotiation between the local and the global, between the virtual and the real are constantly being elaborated by the presented works, leading to new ways of understanding what it means to be Latinx and/or Latin American in a contemporary digital field.
Alexandra Gelis, Ana Maria Millán, Santiago Tavera and Laura Acosta interrogate some of the keyplace-based concerns of Latinx identity through their on-and offline cultural practice. Using new media technologies, these artists express alternative viewpoints about the places they represent allowing people to make important connections to their physical and offline locations. This tactical interplay between virtual and real space to construct new formulations of territorial identity and new cartographies of urban/rural space, give voice to oppositional discussions through new media technologies, alternative modes of expression and dissemination.
The artists in Latin@merica engage in re-appropriations and re-imaginings of globalizing technologies, providing space for the expression of resistance discourses and towards the recuperation of cultural memory.
Curated by Claudia Arana at Sur Gallery and Co-presented with Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.
