Miguel A. López

This talk will reflect on diverse practices that create a dialogue between history, memory, and feminist politics in Latin America. Within this context, López will share ideas related to the Museo Travesti del Perú [Transvestite Museum of Peru] in Lima, founded by the late Peruvian philosopher, drag queen and queer activist Giuseppe Campuzano in 2003. The museum, halfway between performance and historical research, proposed a critical reviewing of history from the strategic perspective of a fictional figure Campuzano called the 'androgynous indigenous/mixed-race transvestite'. There, transgender, transvestite, transsexual, intersexual and androgynous figures were posited as the central actors and main political subjects for any construction of a history. In relation to this, López then will speak about TEOR/éTica, a non-profit visual art organization founded in 1999 by artist and curator Virginia Pérez-Ratton. Its mission is to contribute to the research and diffusion of contemporary art practices in Central America and the Caribbean in dialogue with global realities. Their recent curatorial projects of Central American artists who use diverse strategies of self-fashioning and image-making to explore the political representation of gender. The affinities that emerge in their works underscore the fact that art is an important place in which to reclaim the right to self-determination of our names, lives, and bodies.

Miguel A. López (b.1983) is a Peruvian writer, researcher, and co-director and chief curator of TEOR/éTica, a center for exhibitions, research, and publications on Central American and Caribbean contemporary art in San José, Costa Rica. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and transformations in the understanding of and engagement with Latin American politics and feminist re-articulations of art and culture in recent decades.

His texts have been published in journals such as Afterall, Artforum, E-flux Journal, ramona, Art in America, Art Journal, and Manifesta Journal, among others. He has curated Cecilia Vicuña. Seehearing the Enlightened Failure at Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2019; Social Energies/Vital Forces. Natalia Iguiñiz: Art, Activism, Feminism (1994-2018) at the ICPNA, Lima, 2018; Balance and Collapse: Patricia Belli, Works 1986-2016 in TEOR/éTica, San José, and Fundación Ortiz Gurdian, Managua, 2016-2017; Teresa Burga: Structures of Air (with Agustín Pérez Rubio) at MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2015; and the God is queer section for the 31st São Paulo Biennial, 2014, among others. He has recently published the books Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia (Dissident Fictions in the Land of Misogyny; Pesopluma, 2019); and The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War (together with Ruth Estévez and Agustín Diez Fischer, REDCAT and JRP-Ringier, 2017). He is a co-founder of Bisagra, an independent space active in Lima since 2014. In 2016 he was awarded the Independent Vision Curatorial Award, given every two years by Independent Curator International.