Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómadas

Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet

Medium: Performance, Sensorial Experience, Video, and Website (2011-Present)
Issues: Decolonial Aesthetics and Irregular Population Movements

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Project Links

Description

Nomad Dreams /Sueños Nómadas is an experimental interactive documentary, game, social performance, and website interrogating the colonial mechanisms of the virtual and the physical results of irregular population movements taking place at the fixed iron wall constructed across the US-Mexico border. Exploring aiesthesis decolonially, the project proposes an intermedia approach where the viewer/spectator and its sensorial experience become an important axis in the construction of the narrative deployed on the video screen, the computer interface, the game, the social interaction, and the website navigation.

Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómadas is inspired by the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, Edouard Glissant, the astronomical and geometrical foundations of the Mayas, and the cinematic practices of the Argentinean media collective Tercer Cine where viewers are constantly asked to discuss the issues presented on the screen. As the social performance takes places, the participants must readjust the sensorial, especially the tactile, the sense indicating the way in which we place ourselves within the inhabited space that is already marked by coloniality. Decolonial aesthetics function as corporal strategies, directed toward the sensorial mechanisms where interpretation, knowledge, stereotypes, and memories framed by coloniality of knowledge and of being have accumulated and now must be questioned. Decolonial aesthetics invites the spectator to unlearn what he/she learned, to reposition the constructions of the self and to unveil the imperial mechanisms of knowledge and allow social and personal agency, as well as the construction of non-western subjectivities.

Coloniality shapes the life of the migrants and therefore decolonial aesthetics allows Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómadas to encompass a variable geometry such as the Maya to decenter from chronological history, linearity and closed circular structures, opening the project to a multidirectional imaginary closer to experience of the Latinos immigrants who have become powerful agents of decolonial transformation. Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómadas interrelates the life of an undocumented Latinx immigrant, the experience of transplanted people, and its impact in a transnational city such as Los Angeles, as well as in the territory left behind.

Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómadas focuses on the different stages of irregular population movement and in the new spatial logic that is specific to the Information Age where cities and urban centers face a transformation highlighted by an increasing migration from rural areas and other countries. The project is divided in seven acts: The Dream, Crossing, Connecting, Reversion, Detour, Deportation and Passing. Rather than creating a dark space for viewing, the project simulates an enclosed territory whose entrance denotes the many mechanisms taking place at a geopolitical border.

Prior Showings:
2018 Tiempos Migratorios/Impossible Subjects, curated by Dalida Maria Benfield and Pedro Pablo Gomez, VIII Bienal ASAB, The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects and Art Department, Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Bogota, Colombia.

2012 Nomad Dreams and Selected Videos, interactive media, documentary and socially engaged public art installation and performance, curated by Arlan Londoño and Gabriel Roldo, DysTorpia Media Project, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York, USA.

2011 Decolonial Aesthetics, exhibition and workshop organized by Walter Mignolo, Nasher Museum and Jameson Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA.

2011 Nomad Dreams, interactive media, documentary and socially engaged public art installation and performance, City of Merida Festival, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.

Bio

Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, Fulbright scholar, and community activist born in Havana, Cuba. Ph.D. Duke University. MFA, University of Iowa. Co-Executive Director of  Howard University Gallery of Art.

Author of Aestesis Decolonial Transmoderna Latinx_MX, FONCA- Instituto Kanankil (2019); editor of the anthology Andar Erotico Decolonial (2015), Ediciones del Signo, Buenos Aires, Argentina. His writings have appeared in Latino Book Review Magazine, 2022; Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2, UCLA, Los Angeles, California; Sisters in the Life: A History of African American Lesbian Media-Making, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina; Bienal de La Habana Para leer, Universitat De Valencia, Spain; Public No. 41, Toronto, Canada.

Ferrera-Balanquet artworks, installations, videos, and performances have been exhibited at Haceres Decoloniales, Galeria ASAB, Bogota, Colombia; BE.BOP 2013 Black Europe Body Politics, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, Germany; DysTorpia Media Project, Queens Art Museum, New York; Cuba: La Isla Posible, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Spain; MIX New York, Film Anthology, Nueva York, USA.

Executive curator of Arte Nuevo InteractivA (2001-2014), Ferrera-Balanquet has organized numerous art, video and new media exhibitions. Among them are Africana Hemispheric Performance, Actions, Socially Public Participations, Rituals, and Ceremonies, Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Iowa City, Iowa, USA; Indigeneity | Decoloniality | @rt, Jameson Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

In addition to a Fulbright Fellowship, Ferrera-Balanquet has been awarded grants from Critical Minded, FONCA, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Prince Claus Foundation, US/Mexico Cultural Fund, ANAT Australia, NEA, and The Lyn Blumenthal Video Foundation.