Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra Chicago Residency Kick-off and premiere of The San Francisco Living Archives of La Pocha Nostra
Join Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra core troupe members for the virtual Chicago premiere of The San Francisco Living Archives of La Pocha Nostra. Always inciting participation, La Pocha Nostra will present a performative introduction by core members Paloma Martinez-Cruz and Saula Garcia Lopez who will also create a collective poetic action after the film to help kick off the Chicago residency. Prepare to jam with La Pocha Nostra’s pulses and prompts!
The San Francisco Living Archives of La Pocha Nostra is a video anthology, created over multiple decades, works at the intersections of performance art, experimental video and “artivism.”. Watch raw performance documentation filmed at iconic Bay Area artist-run spaces including the LAB, Galeria de la Raza and SOMArts alongside street-style interventions and candid interviews with perplexed tourists. The Anthology results in a conceptual autonomous zone for the poetics of the virtual body in times of pandemic.
The anthology was created in 2020 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of international performance collective La Pocha Nostra. Founded in 1993 in Los Angeles, La Pocha Nostra is Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s ultimate and most long-standing project. La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization and 501-c3 non-profit that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations, gender complexities and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. For 25+ years, LPN has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists.
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance. Presented on the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by twenty-nine visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981. Find additional information about the artists and exhibitions at TowardCommonCause.org.
