Chaired by artist and researcher Onyeka Igwe, David Aruquipa Pérez and Grace Dillon will discuss oral history traditions and the roles of the archive and spacetimes in knowledge preservation and advocating for minorities. They will speak on their practices as authors, archivists and activists and expand on research on pre- and post-colonial queerness in Bolivia and beyond and placemaking for and recording of ethnic minorities in the Western and diasporic context. They will expand on strands of speculative fiction emerging from Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter, and touch on world endings both as possible futures and already past events and the importance of science fiction to Indigenous understandings of spacetime and the possibilities of imagining otherwise.
Tickets are pay what you can, all profits will be donated to Land In Our Names, a grassroots Black-led collective committed to reparations in Britain by connecting land and climate justice with racial justice.
Programmed by Ignota Books and Auto Italia in cooperation with NTS Radio. The programme has been made possible with the support of Goethe Institut London, Canada House and Art Fund.
David Aruquipa Pérez (b. 1971, Bolivia) is an artist, archivist and human rights activist living in La Paz, Bolivia. Pérez is the National Head of Cultural Management at the Cultural Foundation of the Central Bank of Bolivia. He is the author of La China Morena: Transvestite Historical Memory (2012), and co-authored Collective Memories: The History of the LGBT Movement in Bolivia, (2012). He has published several essays, including The aesthetic revolution of La Familia (Galán, 2016), and Trans and queers at the ‘First Planetary Summit on Decolonization and Depatriarchalization’, Bulletin of the French Institute for Andean Studies (2015).
Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe with family, friends, and relatives from Bay Mills Nation and Garden River Nation with Aunties and Uncles also from the Saulteaux Nation) is a Professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Department in the School of Gender, Race, and Nations and Affiliated Professor at English and Women, Gender, and Sexualities Departments at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. She is the Senior editor of the upcoming Routledge Handbook of (Alternative) Futurisms (forthcoming, 2021), and editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012) and Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (2003).
Onyeka Igwe (b. London, 1986) is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. Through her work, Igwe is animated by the question – how do we live together? – with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question. Igwe’s video works have been screened at ICA, London (2017); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); London Film Festival (2015 and 2020); Rotterdam International, Netherlands (2018, 2019 and 2020); and the Smithsonian African American film festival, USA (2018). Solo projects have been presented at Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2018), and Jerwood Arts, London (2019).
