A Poetics of the Collective: Latin American Performance and its Constellative Dramaturgies

This presentation will engage theories of technopolitics and technopoetics to analyze how recent Latin American networked protests and performance art deploy crucial modalities of collective action that are deeply attuned to the region’s geopolitical exigencies and cultural legacies of embodied politics. Focusing on Tania Bruguera’s 2015 social media performance #InstaCitizen, we will explore how low-tech experiments by Latin American creators and activists might be productive as we grapple with the challenges prompted by digital mediation, surveillance, and disembodied sociality.

Marcela A. Fuentes is a scholar artist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on symbolic, embodied, and time based modes of communication and intervention in street protests, social media activism, and participatory art from the mid 1990s to the present. She examines the role of expressive performance in shaping emerging modalities of aesthetic expression, civic engagement, and transnational mobilization, with particular attention to trans feminist struggles. As a practitioner, Fuentes explores aesthetics as a form of knowledge production and dissemination. Working through genres such as lecture performance and autoethnography, her solo pieces illuminate the situated textures of complex social issues, opening space for layered narratives and experiences. Her most recent book, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (University of Michigan Press, 2019), was published in Spanish as Activismos tecnopolíticos. Constelaciones de performance (Eterna Cadencia, 2020). Her scholarship has appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, e misférica, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Conjunto, and in edited volumes on transnational and activist performance. Fuentes has received national and international fellowships and grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Grant. Her artistic and scholarly work has been presented across Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and the United States. From 2016 to 2018, she was a member of the Argentine feminist collective Ni Una Menos. She has also served as an External Consultant for the Buenos Aires Performance Biennial and as a Council Member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.