Open letter to my ghosts, 2024
Performance lecture, chroma key, television, live broadcast, GIFs.
26’
Through an action that alludes to the media capacities of image dissemination, as employed in cinema, video games, and live news broadcasts through the use of CGI, I use humor as a tool to navigate trauma while making this performance lecture, in which I examine the impact that the September 11, 2001 attack on New York’s World Trade Center had on me, narrating how I experienced that moment in parallel with George W. Bush. I am interested in highlighting the power of images, who produces and distributes them, and how they operate in the interstice between shock and desire.
I draw from my personal history, the relationship I had with Mexican public television during my childhood, and how it was instrumentalized through its programming to soften the military operations the United States carried out in the Middle East after the attack on its territory. This is a performance lecture with which I explore, from a personal perspective, memories of my childhood to also revisit and develop the connections and similarities that exist between the September 11, 2001 attacks and the beginning of the war on drugs in Mexico in 2006. Both events share similar axes: the criminalization of racialized people in the Global South under the pretexts of terrorism and organized crime, using tools of shock and soft power to suspend individual rights.
The activation of the performance lecture took place as part of “Miércoles de SOMA” at the facilities of SOMA México. It was live-streamed on the institution’s YouTube page and can be viewed below.