Creative Conversations: Rodrigo Valenzuela with Macarena Gómez-Barris

Wednesday, October 7 | 6PM 

Artist Rodrigo Valenzuela constructs narratives, scenes, and stories which point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. Through his videos and photographic depictions of day laborers, desert ruins, and barricades, he weaves together histories of Latinx migration with personal autobiographical experiences to interrogate conditions of alienation and displacement. He writes, “My work serves as an expressive and intimate point of contact between the broader realms of subjectivity and political contingency.”

In her most recent publication, Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas, Macarena Gómez-Barris examines artists whose work challenges dominant ideology in relation to nation-state politics, settler-colonialism, and neoliberal capitalism. She proposes an examination of contemporary culture that “reach[es] beyond the crashing ebbs and flows of national elections and political defeat to instead perceive how art and social movements fundamentally remake the world.”

The guests will discuss their individual research-based practices, focusing on their shared interests in decolonial methodologies in art, activism, and politics, and the relationships between subjectivity, migration, and sociocultural politics of the Américas. They will speak about the ways in which artistic practice adds to and often shapes progressive discourse surrounding these issues at a time when nationalism and colonialist rhetoric are the foundation of disparate political platforms around the globe.

About the guests
Rodrigo Valenzuela was born in Santiago, Chile. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and is an assistant professor at University of California, Los Angeles School of Art and Architecture. Valenzuela studied art history and photography at University of Chile (2004), holds a BA in Philosophy at The Evergreen State College and an MFA at University of Washington (2012). Recent residencies include Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas), Lightwork (Syracuse), Kala Art Institute (CA) and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (NY). Recent solo exhibitions include Screen series at the New Museum, NY (2019), Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna, AU (2018), Work in Its Place, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene (2018); American-Type, Orange County Museum, 2018; and Labor Standards, Portland Art Museum, 2018. Rodrigo Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors, an Art Matters foundation grant, and an Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust, Seattle, WA.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar that focuses on cultural memory, authoritarianism, queer decolonial femme epistemes, and political violence. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives which theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas, published by University of California Press. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009). She is working on three new book projects, Latchkey, a work of fiction, and At the Sea’s Edge, a scholarly book, and Decolonial Ecologies that rewrites environmental history from the perspective of decolonial movements. Macarena is Director of the Global South Center and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.