MONDAY, 6.28
11 AM – 11:10 AM
introduction
ADRIANO PEDROSA, artistic director, MASP
JULIA BRYAN-WILSON, adjunct curator for modern and contemporary art, MASP

11:10 AM - 12:40 PM
NANCY GARÍN GUZMÁN
Anarchives and Archives as Counternarratives
Nancy Garín Guzmán intervention will be centered in works of artistic research and production She has been involved with over the past eight years, especially the experience around the Anarchivo Sida [Aids Anarchive], a project conducted along with Linda Valdés and Aimar Arriola—Equipo Re-—around the relation of art and movements fighting against HIV/AIDS in the Spanish State and Chile. She will also present two recent curatorial experiences: the exhibition of Archivxs LGTBIQ+ in the CAC of Quito (2019) and the exhibition Gent Positiva of the Centre LGTBI in Barcelona (2019). Such projects approach the notion of archive and are traversed by the idea of queer as both an answer and a overflowing of close-minded identity policies. This way, the notion of queer is understood as transversal to a broad spectrum of social struggles. These works give room to denied or erased narratives that connect affective and personal aspects to political ones.

C. ONDINE CHAVOYA
Axis Mundo Revisited 
This presentation revisits the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. that premiered in Los Angeles in 2017 and traveled to six additional cities in the United States through 2020. The exhibition focused on art and artists from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, presenting the first historical examination of artwork by queer Chicanx artists. Ondine Chavoya talk considers the impact that the exhibition has had on the queer and Latinx art histories while also mapping out areas of research and analysis that remain underdeveloped and merit further attention, recovery, and examination.

JEFFREY GIBSON
Power Full Because We Are Different
Jeffrey Gibson will discuss and share examples of their own artworks, and some of known and unknown Indigenous makers that reflect the innovation and transformation of foreign materials and aesthetics that have found their way into the material cultures of various Indigenous tribes throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. These materials and aesthetics shift from being colonial markers into new hybrid forms that embody specific cultural purposes and enable the survival of tribal traditions in the face of drastic and traumatic cultural shifts. For Gibson these circumstances mirror what has been articulated by the Manifesto Antropófago, published in 1928 by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade.

2PM - 4PM

NICÓLAS CUELLO
Sex and Delusion: Expressive Languages of Queer Negativity in the Post-Dictatorship Argentina
The return of democracy in Argentina represented the opportunity of building a political promise of reparation after the extreme marks of violence left by the last period of military dictatorship (1976-1983). As a project, this period known as democratic spring, although capable of distilling the multiple fantasies of justice and desires of freedom that got carried away, also saw itself being interrupted due to the public pressure towards a subjectivity created in the heat of anti-revolutionary social consensus, in addition to the conservative imaginary defending the familiar ecclesiastic tradition. Faced with this phenomenon, and from the darkened margins of the historic surfacing of the human rights movement led by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a new matrix of alternative political action came up, headed by the intersectional work of uneasy feminists, sexual dissidents, sex professionals, transhumance anarchists, and underground artists infuriated with the hypocrisy of the political power, manifestly distanced from the utopian projects of the traditional left.

CARLOS MOTTA
History’s Back Rooms
Through his art practice, Carlos Motta explores alternative narratives regarding marginalized communities in the context of social histories, focusing on politics of gender and sexuality. His work has developed along two clear lines: one that investigates political and social injustices in Latin America, emphasizing and criticizing democracy as a form of government from a queer and feminist perspective; and another one where he re-articulates historical narratives around sexuality and gender from Colonial times until the present in order to trace genealogies of discrimination. In this talk, the artist will present examples from his experiments in photography and performance, to installations based on documentary and archival research, until recent films and installation that deal with pre-Hispanic and colonial sexualities, deemed immoral and illegal by patriarchal institutions. 

MEL Y. CHEN
The Queer and the Viral
This talk will examine the sexual cultural politics of contagion, beginning with considerations of kinds of queerness that attach to viruses (such as COVID-19) or even pollutants, understood as harmful entities that are not primarily sexually transmitted. Chen will turn to historicize the forms of anti-Asian hate linked to COVID-19 in the US and other diasporic loci as a feature of the reproduction of race. The histories of racialized sexuality are deeply entangled with the politics of reproduction that surround pandemic alarm.

VITOR GRUNVALD
Art and Sex-Gender Crusade: Notes on What Art Does in Times of Repression
A lot has been said on how authoritarian regimes destroy art by repressing and regulating artistic expression from a logic that is, at the same time, broadly social and particularly institutional. In this conference, Grunvald proposed himself to think about what art does in/for regimes of authoritarian bias in the regulation of art-related practices, focusing on the contemporary Brazilian context and on art forms dealing with gender and sexuality issues (or that are mobilized around such topics in public discussions). Through some recent cases, the aim is to argue that there is an entanglement of social, digital, marketing, legal, and moral instruments that compete in the artistic scope towards the creation of moral panic serving the purposes of what some of us have been considering a sex-gender (or anti-gender) crusade.

---

TUESDAY, 6.29
11:10 AM - 12:40 PM

LUIZA FERREIRA LIMA 
In Between Outlines, Calls, and Paths: Trans Writings Reconfiguring the Visible
Over the past decades, a lot of controversy around the relationship between trans subjectivity and representation has flooded the fields of art, media, academy, and politics. Above all, the dispute regarding the sufficiency, the promises, and the threats of seeing people dissident from cisnormativity in spaces of exhibition and prestige have gained centrality. Going beyond the achievement or not of such visibility, beyond their advancement or insufficiency, trans writers invite to think: how is the visible designed, and through which models of authorship? How telling histories about oneself might be a refusal of knowledge, expectations and desires, insist in other terms for the discussion around gendered forms of existing and inhabiting bodies in the world? This is a presentation around expressive artistic-politic forms, seeking to reimagine potential realities and framings that might give them sense through the excavation of silenced histories.

OLIVIA K. YOUNG
Blackness and Breath in the Digital Video My Dreams, My Work Must Wait Till After Hell (2011) by the duo Girl 
In this presentation, K. Young will perform a close reading of the digital video My Dreams, My Work Must Wait Till After Hell (2011), by the duo Girl (Simone Leigh and Chitra Ganesh). By foregrounding the analytical term distortion, she reveals the complicated ways this art object materially undoes the relationship between the visual realm and the sonic by way of the breath; and by doing so, reveals and subverts important non-visual tactics of racial objectification. As a whole, the project seeks to enliven alternative paradigms for the careful analysis of black contemporary art, and to activate a keyword otherwise forgotten. Frequently misread, critics tend to overdetermine the visual codes of this digital video, missing tender expressions of sensory relationality and, as I argue, other central objectives of the work. 

GRUPO MEXA, LUIZA BRUNA
I Am Not a Character – The Collective Journal of an Artist
MEXA acts mainly through personal accounts. Although it is approached as a group in its presentations, individual histories are the ones creating the narratives of the works. For this reason, even if it looks for a collective voice, it is inevitable to go through inner disputes, dissent, and different positions. However, when presenting oneself in the name of others, how is it possible to separate the biography of the group from the autobiographies of those who compose it? How can individual longings be staged taking into consideration the shared standards? Here, Luiza Bruna will speak for MEXA. Luiza, other than being a performer, was the first transexual employee of MASP, hired as an audience guide. She now comes back to the institution as an artist. From the personal history of Luiza, MEXA discusses its own trajectory as a collective formed on the streets by people in vulnerable situations, and how it started to occupy institutional spaces little by little, discussing the distance and the proximity between the street and the museum, life and art, politics and aesthetics.

2PM - 4PM

E. PATRICK JOHNSON
Camp Revival: Race, Gender, and Performance in the Black Church
This presentation engages a discussion of black spirituality vis-à-vis the black church and riffs on church revivals so common among southern black evangelicals, while also engaging a discussion of “camp” performance beyond a genealogy of white queerness. Ultimately, the presentation suggests camp as always already embedded in the “sissification” of the black church, which facilitates the transgression of hegemonic and prescribed gender and sexual identity in a place where such expression is taboo and, at least on the surface, policed.

VIRGINIA DE MEDEIROS
Another Way of Saying ‘I’
Religion seeks to spiritualize the sexual drive, thus giving a sense to sex, while the desire does not respond to any cultural purpose outside of its own satisfaction. There lays an insoluble tension, and the chosen ones experience this inner conflict: the drives of desire and the constant attention towards inscribing sex in the field of sense. Law and religion neutralize identitarian possibilities, establish protocols for normatives of conduct—the matter of sexuality is merely the background of religious issues. Which subjectivity is implied in religious manifestations that articulate and support the social bonds we inhabit? This presentation leans on the film Sergio e Simone (2007-2014), contrasting two identities of the same person: the transvestite Simone, who worships her Orishas in a public fountain in Salvador; and Sergio, the evangelist preacher she becomes after going through a near-death experience. The character becomes the territory of dispute among two religious systems fighting for faith in Bahia.
 
TAVIA NYONG’O
We Don’t Need Another Hero: The Counter-Evidence of the Body Print
David Hammons’ body prints (1968-1979) trace a line of artistic flight that served as a collaborative response to a decade-long inflection point in “the long emancipation” (Rinaldo Walcott) of black peoples in the diaspora. These prints accumulate layers of rage, despair, and strangulated hope, indexing a register of black affect that is driven to explosively act and then, suddenly, strategically disappear. As the body prints accumulate, an artistic oeuvre took shape that the artist eventually responded to with a self-canceling gesture we can associate both with fugitivity, per Fred Moten, and with the myth-making powers of the trickster, per Ralph Ellison. Drawing on Kellie Jones’s suggestion that we understand Hammons and the wider circle of black arts in L.A. as seeking a counter-narrative to their times, this talk will explore the possibility of considering the body print as counter-evidence.

ÉRICA SARMET
Wild Patience Brought Us Here: The Lesbian Body as a Dispositif for Excavating and Inventing Memory
Enter into contact with history is a meeting of bodies. Despite its gaps and demolitions, queer memory penetrates the cracks of time and reaches us through art. In this movement, it becomes a feeling of belonging that connects diverse experiences through a common way of life. This is how movies and works by lesbian artists integrate our personal and collective “archives of feelings” (Cvetkovich, 2003); more than teaching a history we were never told, they allow us to feel it. Nowadays, the existence of LGBTTQIA+ archives in the Global North facilitates for artists to access such records, but what can be done faced with the absence or scarcity of these spaces? Sarment proposes a discussion on memory, body, and sensation based on the works of filmmakers and visual artists like Barbara Hammer and Cheryl Dunye, in addition to the experience of archive images in her most recent film, Uma paciência selvagem me trouxe até aqui (2021).

 

C. ONDINE CHAVOYA
Professor of art history and Latinx studies at the Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on contemporary art. His curatorial projects have addressed issues of collaboration, experimentation, social justice, and archival practices in contemporary art, including the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (with David Evans Frantz). He is a co-editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019). Chavoya served as the International Consulting Curator to the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) in Peru from 2018-2020.
 
CARLOS MOTTA
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department. Carlos Motta’s work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017), and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; New Museum, New York;  MoMA/PS1, New York; and Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia. Motta participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; 32nd São Paulo Bienal; Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art; X Gwangju Biennale; and X Lyon Biennale. In 2020, Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms, the artist’s first twenty-year career monograph was published by SKIRA.
 
E. PATRICK JOHNSON
Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg university professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American studies, performance studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays.
 
ÉRICA SARMET
Director, screenwriter, and researcher of cinema and audiovisual. PhD candidate in Audiovisual Media and Processes from ECA-USP, she holds a master degree in Communication and graduated in Cultural Studies and Media from UFF. Director and screenwriter of the short films Latifúndio (2017) and Uma paciência selvagem me trouxe até aqui (2021), she is also the author of the thesis Sin porno no hay posporno: Corpo, excesso e ambivalência na América Latina (2015), and coauthor of the books Feminino e plural: mulheres no cinema brasileiro (2017, shortlisted for the Jabuti Prize) and Explosão feminista, by Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda (2018, Prêmio Cesgranrio Literature Award in the Essay category). 
 
JEFFREY GIBSON
An interdisciplinary artist based in Hudson, New York. His artworks make reference to various aesthetic and material histories rooted in Indigenous cultures of the Americas, and in modern and contemporary subcultures. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New Museum, the Blanton Museum, the Wellin Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum. He is a citizen of The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is half Cherokee. Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and is a Visiting Artist at Bard College.
 
MEXA
MEXA was created in 2015 after some violence episodes in a few shelters for homeless people in the center of São Paulo. The group is composed of people in vulnerability, living on the streets, and members of the LGBTTQIA+ community. The collective has participated in events like 14th VERBO at Galeria Vermelho (2018); 11th Bienal Sesc de Dança, in Campinas, as well as the exhibitions Somos Muit+s, at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and Começo de século, at Galeria Jaqueline Martins (2019); in addition to performing in the 6th Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo (MIT-SP) and taking part of the collective exhibition Histories of dance at MASP (2020). They are also resident artists at Casa do Povo since 2016. In 2019, they were awarded the Denilto Gomes Dance Award in the category perspectives other black and gender aesthetics. Luiza Bruna do N. Souza is a performer and writer who performs with MEXA since its foundation, in addition to having worked at MASP.
 
LUIZA FERREIRA LIMA
Holder of a master’s degree from the Social Anthropology post-grad program at USP, where they are currently a PhD candidate with the research Trânsitos em texto: uma análise comparada de biografias e autobiografias de pessoas trans no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos [Transits in Text: a compared analysis of biographies and autobiographies of trans people in Brazil and the US], under the coordination of Professor Silvana Nascimento, PhD, and funded by FAPESP. She is a member of the Coletivo de Estudos (In)Disciplinares do Corpo e do Território (COCCIX/NAU) and the Núcleo de Estudos dos Marcadores Sociais da Diferença (NUMAS), both at USP. 

MEL Y. CHEN
Associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at University of California, Berkeley. Following on Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke, 2012), they are completing a second book titled Chemical Intimacies, on intoxication’s involvement in archival histories of the interanimation of time, race, and disability. Besides publishing widely in journals, Chen coedits a Duke book series entitled Anima, enjoys teaching to the odd note, and is part of a small and sustaining queer/trans of color arts collective in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
NANCY GARÍN GUZMÁN
Independent journalist, art researcher, and curator working in projects related with critical thinking, new pedagogies, archives, memory, and decolonialism. She was part of the artist groups Etcétera and La Internacional Errorista, as well as the research group Península: Procesos coloniales y prácticas artísticas y curatoriales. She participates in the research and production platforms Equipo Re-, with which she has been developing the project Anarchivo Sida (anarchivosida.org) since 2013, and Espectros de lo Urbano (puntorojo.org), an initiative that approaches the urban as part of the colonial machinery and the predatory capitalist processes.
 
NICOLAS CUELLO
Professor and graduated in Art History from Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he also obtained a master’s degree in Art Aesthetics and Theory. Currently works as a PhD candidate scholar of the CONICET and as a professor in the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. He is an assistant member of the Program for Feminist and Sex-Gender Political Memories of Cedinci/Unsam. His research is focused around the intersection of artistic practices, sexual policies, critical representations of emotions, and alternative prints since the post-dictatorship period until now. He is the author of the book Ninguna Línea Recta. Contraculturas punk y políticas sexuales en Argentina (1984-2007) (Tren en Movimiento, Alcohol & Fotocopias, 2019).
 
OLIVIA K. YOUNG
An interdisciplinary scholar of African diaspora studies whose interests are contemporary art, visual culture, black cultural history, disability studies, queer theory, black feminisms, and performance studies. In the fall, they will join the Department of Art History and the Center of African and African American Studies (CAAAS) at Rice University as an Assistant Professor of African Diasporic Art. They are a graduate of the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
 
TAVIA NYONG’O
Chair and professor of theater and performance studies, professor of American studies, and professor of African-American studies at Yale University. Nyong’o’s first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) won the Errol Hill award for the best book in black theater and performance studies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018) won the Barnard Hewitt award for best book in theater and performance studies. He is currently embarking on a study of critical negativity in black thought in the twenty-first century. In 2019, he curated Dark as the Door to a Dream at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as part of the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie. 
 
VIRGINIA DE MEDEIROS
Virginia de Medeiros adapts documentary images for subjective and conceptual purposes, allowing for a revision of ways to read and represent reality and alterity. Her works have been presented at the exhibitions Liebe und Ethnologie at HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany; Feminist Histories and Histories of Sexuality at MASP; Jogja Biennale XIV, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The artist participated of the 31st and 27th editions of the São Paulo Bienal. In 2015, she was awarded the PIPA Prize from popular vote and the jury; and won the 5th edition of the Prêmio Marcantonio Vilaça CNI / Sesi / Senai. She was also a commissioned artist of the 11th Berlin Biennale in 2020.

VITOR GRUNVALD
Vitor Grunvald is a bixa from the North of Brazil, professor of the Anthropology Department of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and a free body of the artivism collective Revolta da Lâmpada. Co-coordinates the Visual Anthropology Center (UFRGS) and the Group of Acknowledgment of Artistic/Audiovisual Universes (UFRJ/UFRGS), in addition to integrating the Center of Citizenship Anthropology (NACi-UFRGS) and several other research groups of Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Also graduated in cinema from the Academia Internacional de Cinema. Vitor is a photographer and filmmaker whose academic and artistic works pivots on gender, sexuality, art, image, performance, cinema, and documentary strategies.