On October 21, 2021, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra invited guests to Jane Addams Hull-House Museum for a fully immersive activation of the museum’s current exhibition Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive, Directed by Gómez-Peña, special guest performers DRAGONFLY (Robin LaVerne Wilson), Balitronica, Aranza Cortés, and others inhabited, haunted, and activated Jane Addams’s office, bedroom, the Hull-House courtyard, and other spaces in the historic home.
This was a new activation in Gómez-Peña’s decades-long effort to challenge anthropological and museum practices and generate temporary sites of radical democratic engagement. The day-long take-over featured interactive live imagery, lectures, poetry, tarot card readings, and calls for the audience to consider how museums of the future can cross borders between individuals and neighborhoods to serve the public good.
This video captures a day of activations by performers who encroached on museum respectability and challenged American democratic myths. Performers activated Jane Addams’ bedroom as a space of intimate queer desire, played with themes of death and regrowth during the Fall season, and engaged with the history of racialized mob violence during Jane Addams' lifetime. Gómez-Peña provided the soundtrack to the day-long take-over and, in this video, performs “The Casa Museo Jam”, a multilingual meditation and a call for ongoing interventions that break down borders of all kinds.
Featuring: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s La Pocha Nostra members: Balitronica, Emma Tramposch, Aranza Cortez’ Special Guest Performer: DRAGONFLY (Robin LaVerne Wilson); and Performance Assistants: Alé Campos, MahNu, Carrisa Lee Pinckney, Amaya, and Celeste. Video by Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman & Robert Salazar).
Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive (September 9, 2021—May 29, 2022) is an initiative of Toward Common Cause in partnership with Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (JAHHM) and Public Media Institute (PMI). To learn more about Gómez-Peña’s residency at JAHHM, reserve a visit to see the exhibition, or listen to Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files, an experimental radio broadcast visit the link below.
