TBA:16 LECTURE

Histories for the Future

by Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta will speak about his recent videos, installations, sculptural works, and the upcoming symposium Nefandus: Colonial Sexual Alterity and Histories for the Future, which he is co-convening with historian Pablo Bedoya at the Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) in Miami. These projects investigate pre-conquest and colonial sexualities, a topic that has traditionally held a marginal place on contemporary artistic, academic, political, and cultural agendas. Motta’s practice suggest that the dissemination of knowledge about sexuality and gender in the colonial period may prove important to understand the conditions of sexual and gender politics in the present. Can the the production of sex/gender orders tell us something about the historical evolution of certain subjects’ alterity? What can peripheral sexualities tell us about the hegemonic order? Where the boundary should be drawn between peripheral/abject/subordinate sexualities and sexualities at the center? What means are available to us for approaching that past? What other methods, theories, languages might be useful to us in approaching colonial studies and as a means for understanding our current problems? Motta will discuss his research and artistic methodology, which include strategies of documentary practice, fiction and parafiction.