POSTPONED--- Workshop with Paloma Ayala

Guided by the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, self-described as “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist”(1), visual artist Paloma Ayala in collaboration with musician Luna León, reframes Anzaldúa’s poetry in a format that invites to sing along, read together, listen and participate. This ‘queerified’, ‘mexified’ version of Anzaldúa´s texts, recognizes the importance of re-living her voice. It acknowledges her presence in the contemporary problematics of the Mexican/US border, seen from the perspective of Mexican women, feminists, whose roots and family still live in those spaces.

Karaoke Readings is part of a larger artistic project that explores ways to narrate the space of the delta of the Río Bravo/Río Grande, the Mexican/US border river, and to develop a relationship in solidary with rurality, water, bodies, and biota from the perspective of a Mexican mujer de frontera. In her project, Paloma questions: How could Anzaldúa´s, and other poetic, female, and cultural agencies lead to create platforms of knowledge creation in favor of the ecologies of the river delta? How could a practice of decolonization of the dominating narrative of violence of the border, create new accesses to the Río Bravo/Río Grande river, both physically and in the collective or personal imaginaries?
hosted by District Berlin at the Salon der Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, Blücherplatz 1, 10961 Berlin