G O D C L U B

This past Sunday, a few of us attended Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “Mapa Corpo: Interactive Rituals for the New Millenium” at the DIA. The performance was a collaboration between Gomez-Pena and a few other performance based artists, one of which being Violeta Luna. Taking place in the DIA’s Rivera Court, Colonial and Neo-Colonial representations of ethnic and gendered Others were displayed on four screens while three stages displayed the physical performances of Gomez-Pena and his collaborators. The three stages were dedicated to demanding the consumption of imagery based on fetishized, ethnic Others while at the same time flipping these images onto their heads by making the audience witness the ways in which western colonialism—specifically U.S. cultural/political/physical-geographical imperialism constructs notions of the Other. At the same time, these performances based themselves on the ways that gender and sexuality (sexuality in the sexualized-bodies/owning one’s own sexual autonomy sense--not homo/hetero expected trash here; something more theoretical, structural) are intertwined within both the construction of the Other and the lived experiences these constructions create.