Lourdes Portillo and her film Señorita Extraviada to appear at SITAC XV ARTS CONFERENCE: "El fin/The End," at Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, March 17-19
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GIF courtesy of Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo A.C.
Lourdes will participate in a panel discussion, Friday, March 18th, 3:30pm - 5:30pm, Central Standard Time, 15:30-17:30 Mexico City, CST, (2:30 - 4:30 PST):
“Alarma!
Various parts of Mexico are trapped in a cycle of terrible violence, with horrific femicides, powerful criminal organizations and impunity for the vast majority of those responsible for increasing atrocities. Although the contexts are different, other Latin American countries have gone through similar periods, from Central American civil wars to drug violence (and social conflicts) in countries such as Peru and Colombia. Of course, not all violence is as spectacular and is exercised in different ways. What are the strategies that image artists have used to represent this? What are the ethical challenges and how can we confront them?”
PANELISTS INCLUDE:
Lourdes Portillo
Trevor Paglen
Kate Crawford
José Falconi
Irving Domínguez, moderator
SEE EVENT IN ENGLISH HERE
TRANSMISIÓN DEL EVENTO EN VIVO EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ
FREE TICKETS TO IN-PERSON EVENT HERE
In conjunction, Lourdes’ film Señorita Extraviada (Spanish version) is screening online March 10-15 in SITAC’s free Film Series, Program 4 “Out of three shots fired, only one was a kill shot," INFO HERE
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
“Death has always been at the core of both photography and film. Any number of theoreticians have reflected on the connections between these two media and death. “All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality,” wrote Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, “they are agents of Death.” “Cinema,” the film archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai writes, “is the art of destroying moving images.” What is clear is that the boundaries separating these media from others like them (Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok—which have only existed for a few years) are increasingly blurry, if not irrelevant, and that these new forums where today billions consume images are both like and unlike photography and film. Social media tools are used for countless ends, including those of criminal organizations, who broadcast their threats, taunts, and murders. Rather than hide the identity of the perpetrators of their crimes, these media provide a forum for perpetrators to advertise their wrongdoings. Meanwhile, activist citizens use these same technologies to document and denounce police brutality and abuse—brutality often directed at the imagemakers themselves. Digital manipulation further undermines the evidentiary and indexical status of documentary images, and fake (or highly partisan) news weakens journalism’s (and photojournalism’s) claims to the real. Digital platforms facilitate the widespread piracy (and détournement) of images. The Covid-19 quarantine may have been the one more step toward absolute digital domination, reducing our engagement with reality and society to a series of digital screens.
Meanwhile, photographers and filmmakers continue to make work that foregrounds the emulsion, the artifacts of hand-processing, the flicker of the projector, and other qualities unique to the media in which they work. Filmmakers project images that hover at the threshold of the moving image and the still. On the US-Mexico border, photographers subvert humanist photography and its assumptions. In many Latin American countries and places in Mexico like Veracruz, Ciudad Juarez, and Mexico City, the pervasive climate of fear produced by escalating violence, femicides, organized crime and corrupted law enforcement forces media artists to rethink the strategies to represent and condemn the terrifying context in which they work.
This edition of SITAC, the fifteenth, marks the twentieth anniversary of the symposium, and will bring together an international and multigenerational group to discuss these issues: theoreticians, art historians, filmmakers, philosophers, artists, and others from Mexico, elsewhere in the Americas, and beyond. Experimental media artists Ximena Cuevas, Craig Baldwin, and Steve Fagin will dialogue with the collective Los Ingrávidos. The photo historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau will perform a moving exorcism of documentary’s ghosts. Lorena Gómez Mostajo and Lourdes Portillo will present their projects from the U.S.-Mexico border, while Rubén Ochoa will explain his anti-monumental Snapchat activism in the heart of Los Angeles’ Central American diaspora. The event will be preceded by a film series and the publication of a reader, an anthology of reprinted essays, articles, extracts, and manifestos aimed at introducing a non-specialist public to the fundamental concerns and questions motivating this SITAC.”
Participants
Image courtesy of Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo A.C.