In this performative lecture Rebecca Schneider and Emilio Rojas discuss their ongoing exploration of decolonial listening, site and non-site in land art, and the question of “reenactment” when “the body” or flesh is also “the earth”. Rojas will perform moments from his performance Tezcatl- Smoking Mirror and/or Obsidian Meditations.
Rebecca Schneider, Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, teaches performance studies, decolonial methods in media and live arts, and theories of intermedia. Engaging with Black Feminist Thought and cognates in Indigenous and postcolonial studies, she is the author of "This Shoal Which is Not One: Island Studies, Performance Studies, and Africans Who Fly" (2020) and the award-winning essay "That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in Times of Hand Up" in Theatre Journal.
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.