Tanda: The Semiotics of Belonging: A Study of Belonging in the Chicago Urban Landscape Through Visibilizing Markers of Displacement and Environmental Racism | Carlos Flores

Zoom Link: bit.ly/3ESVPjF

Through Tanda, I hope to collaboratively further a shared exploration of signs/signifiers that engender belonging and non-belonging in our everyday environments. Through decoding the markers of ‘sacrifice zones’, to studying the effects of a gentrifying South West side, to showcasing how Chicago artists are resisting silent and extractive capitalist complexes, I hope to explore as a group how the performance of objects/people/places create space for some and displaces others.

Carlos Flores is an artist, radical community arts organizer, culture worker, and flower farmer based in Archer Heights, Chicago. He received his BFA from UIC in 2016 and has since received recognition and awards including 3Arts, United States Artists, The Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Past exhibitions include the Hyde Park Art Center, Heaven Gallery, Mana Contemporary, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. His work is informed by his experiences as a queer Latine immigrant on the Southwest Side of Chicago and brings viewers face to face with issues of environmental racism, displacement, gender, and race.

Tanda is back with a new group of generous knowledge carriers ready to talk through the assembled afterlife, water’s relationship to the body, urban semiotics, auto-constructed pathways in the global south, and post-colonial story telling!

Josué Esaú will co-facilitate this Spring ’23 season. Josué participated in the Spring ’22 season with the topic: Mesofuturism: Reclaiming Historical Identity through Archiving and Critical Fabulation.

This season was pre-filled with applicants from the fall open call pool. We are grateful for the interest and word of mouth support that has grown this program to have enough applicants for two seasons.

Sessions are virtual, free, and open to the public. Closed captioning available. Recordings of Tandas are not posted online.

Tanda is a cohort program that aids individuals with their research and practice through self-directed and collective learning. It is a program providing time and space to gather, share, think and exchange conversations, resources, and knowledge on participants’ chosen topics and practices.

Co-Facilitator
Josué Esaú channels Mesoamerican cosmology, culture, and ritual to anchor reconnection with ancestry, land, and energy. Following the tradition of Afro- and Indigenous Futurisms, Esaú ventures the energetic middle spaces, spiritual-temporal portals and sites of future knowledge through the coined framework of Meso-Futurism. Aware of problematic pseudo-histories and distrust in science-fiction relationship to western ideas of progress and settler colonial time, Esaú creates garments, ritual devices, and collaborative performance as a mode of accountability, play, and care work to offer bridges to Maya space-time. He proposes ancient, plural ways to mark and enjoy time and space, entwining ourselves with the inherent rhythms of the earth, the cosmos and our co-inhabitants.

Tanda Spring 2023
Dates: Mondays, 03/27 – 05/01
Times: 6:30-8:30pm CT / 7:30-9:30 ET
Zoom Link: bit.ly/3ESVPjF

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Tags: Carlos Flores, Chicago, Chuquimarca, Josué Esaú, Tanda, The Semiotics of Belonging: A Study of Belonging in the Chicago Urban Landscape Through Visibilizing Markers of Displacement and Environmental Racism