ARTISTS

Anúk Guerrero (Querétaro, México, 1990,) is currently living in Guadalajara, Jalisco. She understands her work as an active ritual, where the sacred body serves as a symbolic space. With an education in Visual Arts, which focussed on sculpture and performance art, for Anúk performance forms a vital medium of communication. She is using this medium to provoke, deconstruct and evolve herself continually. She hopes to be part of a new generation of performers who are mobilizing people and helping to speed up her country’s spiritual awakening. It’s her dream to see Mexico depolarize and for justice to re-equilibrate itself.
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Lukas Avendaño was born in Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, where their umbilical cord has been buried under an almond tree. They grew up in Oaxaca, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Chiapas, Guerrero, Tlaxcala, Querétaro, Puebla, Chihuahua, Baja California Norte and México DF, as well as in Cuba, Argentina, Colombia and the United States. Currently they live in Monterrey. Lukas’ education took place in the nucleus of a family of a dirty, hostile indigenous family. He also studied Anthropology. In terms of performance, Lukas prefers to ignore the existing classifications which are usually being used to describe this art genre. Lukas chose to engage in performance art simply because that’s what they like to do. Their utopian vision for Mexico would be to break the circle, not  to get vengance, but in order to achieve justice. To not be a person, but a butterfly.

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Violeta Luna (México DF, 1969), actress, performance artist and activist, grew up in Mexico City and currently is living inbetween Mexcio City and San Francisco, United States. With an education from the University Theatre Centre of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and La Casa del Teatro (Mexico City), she is looking to explore the relations between theatre, performance art and social commitment. Violeta uses her body as a realm to cross aesthetic and conceptual borders. In her work she tries to re-significate and re-construct her mexican/latina identity on a trans/human level, where the mirror distorts the big other (the United States), which she uses as part of the process of reflecting and contructing a new sense of being mexican. Her utopian dream for Mexico would be contributing to build a country where everyone has access to a good live, without exclusion, with justice, balance and harmony between ourselves and our mother earth.

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Gustavo Álvarez (1973) is originally from Mexico City, where he grew up and completed an education as a Social Anthropologist. He went on to live in the Northern part of the country for ten years and currently lives in Chihuahua. He describes his performance as creating a symbolic fetish, although he also really liked the description of his work by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who called him once a postmodern shaman. He believes in the revitalizing power of performance art and his intention is to share energies and create autonomous spaces with those, who are witnessing the performative action. His utopian vision for Mexico would be a place where all can live in dignity.

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Miguel Pérez Ramos aka Santo Miguelito (San Pedro Cholula, Puebla, 1986) holds a degree in Visual Arts from the University of the Americas in Puebla. His performance work is a constant self-portrait: he is what he is and becomes what the other, the spectator, wants to project on him. He engages in performance, because it frees him from all stigmata, because it allows him interact with a public without caring about what “they” say, and also because it creates a space, where he is ruling over his body and mind. His utopian dream for his beautiful, beloved Mexico would be that all governments who do not work to help their people will cease to exist.
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Petrona de la Cruz (Zinacatán, Chiapas, 1965), writer, poet and performance artist, is one of the founders of “Power of the Mayan Women” (FOMMA), a civil associacion in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. She lived in Zinacatán, Chiapas, until she was 19 year old. She currently lives in San Cristóbal de las Casas. In 1992, Petrona recieved the Chiapas Literature Prize “Rosario Castellanos” for her playwrite A Desperate Woman and her theatrical work in Chiapas. She studied acting and directing with Ralph Lee, Raul Quintanilla y Doris Difarnecio. With her work, she wants to transmit messages, education and stimulate protest. Her utopian visión for Mexico is the healing of the injustice that exists in this country.

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Sayak Valencia (Tijuana, 1980) holds a PhD in Philosofy and Critical Feminist Theory from Complutense University of Madrid. Poet, author and performative exhibitionist. As a performance artist, her works are based on taking the public space through her body as a place for reflection and interjection of the patterns of normality.

She conceives performance as a device to fuse multiple languages, for example, the languages of decolonialist philosophy, transfeminisms and sexual dissidence to create tools for thinking, resisting and transforming the discourse and the social scheme. Her utopian vision for Mexico would be for the country to achieve a depatriarchalization and decolonization, in a physical and on an economical level.

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Mónica Mayer (Mexico DF, 1954) studied Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts of the Autonomous University of Mexcio (UNAM) and received her Masters from Goddard College (USA) in Art Sociology, while she was also taking clases at the 2-year programme of the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, California. Since the 70ties she concluded long-term projects that were stirring up social processes y que involucran procesos sociales y and that were blurring the usual of performance art. Implicitly or explicitly, on its content or on its format, the work of Monica is feminist, because she considers feminism to be at the heart of the fight for democracy. At this stage, even though there have been some changes in the realm of gender issues in the last 40 years in Mexico, her wish is to see a decrease of violence against women, but also against men, who are her sons, friends or mates.

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Claudia Algara (Tecate, Baja California, 1975) grew up between Tecate and Tijuana, close to the US border. She currently lives in Tijuana and holds a PhD in Hispano-American Language and Literature from the Autonomous University of Baja California. Apart from this, she also studied different artistic disciplines, such as performance, music, video, installation and fine arts, as well as painting and sculpture. Since 2003, she is also a member of Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (New York University, USA).

In her audio-visual performance style she mixes different artistic genres. She considers performance art to be the perfect means to create art in which one of her main interests is to work with the body. On a personal level, Claudia continuously works on being a better person and citizen. Her utopian dream for Mexico would be to see more justice and a general development of the country.
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Jesusa Rodríguez (Mexico City, 1955) lived in Mexico City until she turned 55 years old. Since then she has been living in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. She studied Design at the San Carlos Academy and Theater at the University Theater Center of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City (in both cases she didn't finish the degrees). She considers the 5 years she worked with Julio Casillo her apprenticeship in theatre.

Jesusa sees her performances as an act of slinging pebbles into the eye of Goliath. Her motivation to create performance art is to support civil resistance and to fight state sanctioned terrorism. Her utopian vision for Mexico is to rescue the corn from the insatiable greed of Monsanto and to decolonize the minds of the Mexican people.

Since living in Mexico is a lottery at the moment, this performance is intended as a wake up call to encourage the inherent strength of a sleeping nation.

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Alejandra Rodríguez aka La Bala Damiana Cactaceae (La Paz, Baja California Sur, 1986) lives in Querétaro. Fat activist, butch and transfeminist. Politicized exhibitionist. The performance she embodies is a counter-offensive of an occupied body, a disobedient mouth, which chews on a wheat tortilla garnished with salsa macha. Fat women are on a mission to make the world tremble.

La Bala uses performance to learn about herself and she intends to visually fight back the dictatorships of mediatized beauty standards, to decolonize the body, to empower the flesh and anticipate in Riots not diets. She would like Mexico to find its memory, self-determination, civil disobedience and peace.

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Felipe Osornio Panini aka Lechedevirgen Trimegisto (Querétaro, 1991) holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the Autonomous University of Querétaro. His performances take their meaning from a postdisciplinary spiritualism that emerges from a combination of magical practice, body art and the politics of subversive identities, infused by queer theory, postpornography, postcolonialism, chaos, the human body devoid of its organs and the search for liminal experiences.

In Felipe's opinion, the root of Mexican art is witchcraft. He understands art as an equivalent to magic and he uses it in a ritualistic way. In this context, performance art transforms him into a medium or a channel. For him, performance art is a true creative act, an extraordinary act that has the power to transform its surroundings. His utopian dream for Mexico would be a radical transformation and a healing process, which would change the cannibalistic violence that is devouring the insides of a poetic country, and for Mexico to recover its authentic and archetypical roots.