“Forcing people to migrate, giving them no choice but to migrate, is a way to eliminate them from the nation. And it is also a way to literally kill them to render them invisible. But migrating is nothing like that. It’s all about becoming. It brought with it many years of loss and mourning, but also special power and lots of joy. Because helplessly, I’m an optimist and as long as I’m alive, I have powers to imagine and to create.”
-Beatriz Cortez
In this episode Beatriz Cortez discusses, among other things:
– The Definition of Nomad
– Identity as being reimagined
– Nomadism and Western humanism
– Conversations among Deleuze, Guattari, Clastres, and Foucalt and Central American thinkers
– The excitement around postcolonial studies
– Artistic creation and Brown artists’ powers
– Migrating as a process of becoming
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As Part of Paroxysm of Sublime, in partnership with France Los Angeles Exchange (FLAX)
Artist Talk, Beatriz Cortez: A Dialogue of Nomads
A Conversation between Brown Border-Crossers and Dead French Philosophers
Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) has lived in the United States since 1989. She received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts in 2015, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State University in 1999. Cortez’s work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures.
Find out more on the event page.
