Vol. 5 (2019): post(s) 5
Akademos

Taking up "Instructions for Becoming"

Rebecca Schneider
Brown University
Bio

Published 2019-12-05

Keywords

  • performance,
  • decolonial,
  • bodies,
  • animated/inanimated,
  • memory

How to Cite

Schneider, R. (2019). Taking up "Instructions for Becoming". Post(s), 5(1). https://doi.org/10.18272/post(s).v5i1.1591

Abstract

This essay engages a 2019 photo-performance series by Emilio Rojas titled Instructions for Becoming. Rojas"™s series performs an homage to artist Laura Aguilart and, thinking about homage, the essay considers gesture as well as call and response as performance techniques by which bodies and artworks jump body to body, limb to limb. By way of Rojas"™s work Heridas Abiertas (A Gloria), the essay then moves to discuss the performance-photographic work Fringe,  by Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore that can be read beside the Rojas/Aguilar amalgam. Belmore"™s appearance in the chapter ushers in work that  gestures to ancestral worlds, in her case indigenous, in order to body forth alternatives to the myopic forward march of capital-colonial registers of time. This is followed by a reading of Roberto Rossellini"™s Journey to Italy, read contrapuntally with Belmore, Aguilar, and Rojas. Rossellini"™s film, like Rojas"™s, Aguilar"™s, and Belmore"™s photo-performances, explore the jump of gesture between or among animate and inanimate materials, and human and nonhuman materials, such as stone statuary and human flesh or, with Rojas, tree limb and human limb. The effort, throughout, is to engage a practice of decolonial performance criticism.

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