The Haunting of the In Between Space: Tracing Future Memories

Co-facilitated by: Ximena Ayon, William Camargo, Amanda Cortes, Michael de Anda Muñiz, and Silvia Gonzalez

*This workshop is intended to center POC artists and POC social movements. It will focus primarily on Chicanx history.

“El pueblo que pierde su memoria pierde su destino”
“A people that loses its memory forfeits its destiny”
-Mexican Proverb

What haunts Xicanx work? In this workshop participants will learn about Chicanx artists and the Chicano movement. How have Chicanxs used art in social movement work? What is the role of art in cultural preservation and historical reclamation? What memories are urgent to preserve? How do Xicanx use art to critique displacement and create new spaces of belonging? What role do mitos play in preserving and creating new stories to tell? What stories will haunt our future generations? What is the destiny we are building for our future ancestors?

During this workshop, participants will have a series of prompts to select from that include a listening station, collaging, zine making, redactive poetry/writing, and will be encouraged to share resulting works in progress with one another.

About the facilitators:

Amanda Cortés is a cultural worker and a public servant. She was born in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood and raised in La Villita; her experience growing up in a Mexican, working-class neighborhood shaped her commitment to racial justice, equity, and human rights. She is a certified mediator and a member of the Chicago ACT Collective and the 96 Acres Project Steering Committee all of which create social change through collective art and culture making. She is inspired by her fellow Chicagoans’ resilience and determination to create spaces for marginalized people of color and the working class to thrive in.

Michael De Anda Muñiz is a Chicano educator/researcher who is currently a doctoral candidate in sociology at UIC. His work focuses on Latin@s, art, oppressive structures, and resistance.

William Camargo is a Chicano photographer and performance artist that focuses on issues of immigration, biculturalism and the use of raquachismo as a form of resistance.

Born in the beautiful region of central México, Ximena Mora is an artist, educator, and aspiring cultural historian. After living on the San Diego Tijuana border for 14 years she attended Beloit College in Wisconsin where she developed an interest in the intersection of visual culture, identity, and advocacy. Her most recent work includes an examination of the narrative and liminal space surrounding diversity and displacement in academic communities. She is currently working on a large accession for the National Museum of Mexican Art.

Silvia Gonzalez is an Artist and Educator living in Chicago creating zines and curating workshops to address structures of power, imagination, play, confinement, and freedom. Collaborative justice based projects include work with local art groups such as the Chicago ACT (Artist Creating Transformation) collective and the 96 Acres Project, led by the Artist Maria Gaspar. Silvia Gonzalez has experience organizing educational workshops that centralize creative work with intergenerational participants interested in critically disrupting current power imbalances. As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses visual and performance work to make connections between justice work, education, histories of trauma, healing processes, Xicanidad, the Nepantla state, and the potentiality within the radical imaginary. She is the organizer of an artist group called POCAS, People of Color Artist Space and connects artists of color from across Chicago to resources and each other.

Presented in conjuction with the exhibition At The Borderlands: Mitos | Memory // new work by Silvia Gonzalez and Amy Reidel

ACRE’s space is ADA Accessible. Please contact Kate Bowen (exhibitions (at) acreresidency.org) if you require additional accessiblity information.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: ACRE, Amanda Cortes, Chicago, Lower West Side, Michael de Anda Muñiz, Silvia Gonzalez, The Haunting of the In Between Space Tracing Future Memories, William Camargo, Ximena Ayon