Performative Screenings by Naomi Rincón Gallardo

08.12.2017 - 15.12.2017

Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory, Wien / Österreich

8.12.2017, 7 p.m.

Ocotepec Odyssey (2014)

(performative screening)

Ocotepec Odyssey is a trans-disciplinary research project about radical social experiences challenging the belief in progress in Mexico in the 1960s and 70s. It takes its name from a small town in Morelos, whose indigenous communitarian features inspired Austrian philosopher and maverick Catholic priest Ivan Illich. Illich later founded a center called CIDOC in Cuernavaca: a gathering point for radical intellectuals from around the world, whose practitioners questioned the axioms of modern thinking with alternatives related to liberation theology....

Ocotepec Odyssey is a trip that goes from popular feminist pedagogical experiences to experimental, hallucinogenic group therapy and psychoanalysis in monasteries. In this non-linear narrative, stories around Illich and CIDOC are fictionalized; a galactic queer axolotl warns us about the counterproductive effects of modernity, and a transgender priest reads a mass and lulls to sleep their fetus-monks.



15.12.2017, 7 p.m.

The Formaldehyde Trip (2017)

(performative screening)

The Formaldehyde Trip is a speculative fiction comprising a cycle of songs and videos dedicated to murdered Mixtec activist Bety Cariño. By deploying Mesoamerican cosmologies and decolonial feminist perspectives, crafty and ornate props and stages, echoes from Mexican B-side Sci-Fi films from the 60s and 70s, sounds and voices from the past lurking into the future, and lyrics addressing women’s struggles against the dispossession of their lands, bodies and cultures, The Formaldehyde Trip imagines Bety Cariño’s journey to the underworld, where she finds women warriors, witches and widows, both-sexed deities and animals preparing her re-birth party.

An axolotl in formaldehyde plays a hybrid role between a story-teller, a ghostly artificially isolated native informant and a savage educated guide who agitates fact, fiction and friction.

[Quelle: Einladung]