De-colonial Actions

As part of our Study Room Ambassador scheme LADA is delighted to be hosting a presentation and discussion with the artists Christine Brault, Isil Sol Vil & Marina Barsy Janer.

These three international performance artists from diverse backgrounds will share their personal views on (post)modern colonialism through the documented presentation of one of their works followed by an open discussion.

The actions presented as an entry point for discussion will be the following: 

·   Quebec – Querétaro: Acá como allá, todas somos hijas del maíz (Quebec – Queretaro: from here to there, we are all corn daughters) by Christine Brault

·   Llast Colonial (Colonial Burden) by Isil Sol Vil

·   (De) Colonial Reconquista by Marina Barsy Janer

“Decoloniality understands the colonial to be not only part of our past but engrained in our modern psyches, bodies, interrelations, and lands.” – Marina Barsy Janer

Bios

Christine Brault lives and works in Montreal, Canada. As an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, relating to a variety of contexts, she creates performative actions and site-specific interventions with a poetic, engaged and feminist angle using an anthropological vision. Her recent actions mostly relate to the feminicide problematic in the Americas, from North to South. Granted from the Canada Arts Council, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, and Engrenage Noir, her work has brought her to participate in various international performance festivals and artist residencies in many countries of the Americas, in China and in Europe.

Isil Sol Vil born in 1982 in the city of Igualada (Catalonia), with no sense of belonging there or anywhere, encounters performance art, this being his most complete form of expression. He is also creator and designer of conceptual spaces. His work is characterised by being critical, of protest and claim; manifesting the desire and spirit to change these outdated systems and with the eagerness to open minds and mentalities. He also uses the crudeness, the inner self –this little being that we hide and keep in the darkness of our bodies. He is co-founder of the artistic group Insurgents Arts, performer in the groups Performantiks and Corpologia, artistic director of the international festival of performance EMPREMTA, and co-founder of the cultural spaceMATERIC.org. He has participated in various encounters and international performance festivals and performed in theaters, cultural centers, galleries, and art spaces in Spain, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

Marina Barsy Janer is a Puerto Rican performance researcher, curator, and artist. She explores the body as uncanny and fragmented, social container, bridge and vehicle, sensuous and grotesque. Under the scope of ways of decolonising the body-geographies (de-linking from internal colonialism) she engages in forms of ‘aesthetic activism’ exploring relationality, the systematic and the intrinsic fear, legal implications of the body, modes of resistance and belonging, patriarchy's roles and their masquerades. She curated MIND THE GAP: performative-symposium (2013; Puerto Rico-U.K.) and has presented her work in Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Greece, Spain, Chile and the United Kingdom in museums, universities, cultural centres, theatres, performance festivals and in the flux of the urban streets.

Study Room Ambassadors

Following a public call for proposals, ten artists and researchers who represent a wide range of research interests have been invited to become Study Room Ambassadors, hosting Study Room visitors and receiving space, time and other support for independent research in the Study Room in return.