Caminografias, 2010. Multiple performance-films, 18:29 min.
In Caminografías, a series of performance-films realized in Venice, Chicago, Mexico City, Berlin, and New York, among numerous other cities, Rojas roams each metropolis using a now-vintage, bodily-sized map. Splaying his arms out to the full extent of map corners, the cartography “guides” and obscures his vision as he walks. These pilgrimages to significant historic landmarks last until Rojas reaches a particular tourist landmark or possibly faces physical precarity, such as another person, a canal, or street crossing. In his reliance on peripheral vision, Rojas accumulates various rifts within presumed linear time, rendering tempi non-codified and unfamiliar.
Nationalism & Sports; the only way to love, 2010. Six-channel performance-film, 10:00 min.
Donning large Canadian flags and slathering their faces in red face paint in the multi-channel video installation, Nationalism & Sports; the only way to love, Rojas and his ex-husband Patrick Blazer walk across Vancouver from opposite ends of the city during the day of the national hockey final in the 2010 Olympic Games. Conceptualized within a series of performances and events staged by Rojas’s collective White Pillows at VIVO New Media Arts Center, the performance critiqued the neo-colonial strategies of the Olympics, such as settling stadiums upon Indigenous lands, disrupting wildlife migration patterns with dense traffic, and reifying heteronormative cis-male white patriarchy in the streets. Gut-wrenching screams of joy, war-like and intense, erupt from Rojas and Blazer, inciting further screams, guffaws, and “Canadian spirit” from onlookers. The variety of encounters across the monitors slip between normative hetero-masculine codes of conduct and homoerotic gestures, which Rojas and Blazer’s final encounter on the street exacerbates. When they finally meet, their increasingly intense bodily interactions draw more onlookers who cheer—until Rojas and Blazer begin making out. Rojas and Blazer’s display of desire conflates the space-times of linear hetero-masculine cheering and asynchronous queer longing that drags underneath the surfaces of the same encounters as the “only way to love.”
Colon, 2009. Performance-film, 15:33 min.
In Colon (2009), Rojas is bent over and naked, kneeling on velvet with his back and rear fully exposed. From this position, he inserts and removes 521 corks from his rectum, spelling the word “colonization” which later becomes “colonized.” On either side of his prostrate body, photographic reflectors serve as screens for projected footage from a 2004 protest pulling down the statue of Christopher Columbus in Caracas’s Plaza in Venezuela and other footage from Rojas’ colonoscopy. The acts of insertion and removal of corks reference the number of years since Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas on October 12, 1492 and a material native to the Spanish Peninsula, ultimately recalling a lineage of Spanish colonialism, and quite literally “take a shit” on the modernist project. The actions also recall homoerotic desire, an orientation that was denigrated in what Rojas identifies as his first encounter with homophobia when a friend’s father told his son to “put a cork up your butt,” if he were to sleep in the same bed with Rojas. in the conflation of historical and contemporary traumas, Rojas connects their lineages of power.
El Salto, 2011. Six performances-videos, c. 2:00 min each.
El Salto (2011) features multiple performance films in which Rojas surreptitiously trespasses through the 54th Venice Biennale Universes in Universe. Originally invited to exhibit in the first Stateless Pavilion, colloquially known as the “Pirate Camp,” Rojas not only staged works within the national pavilions in which he was not asked to perform, but also refused to enter the elite global art exhibition via the dedicated entryways. These acts configured personal protests against national borders and neoliberal exclusion that the Giardini and Arsenale spaces inevitably espouse, despite their “diverse” global exhibition logic and presumed accessibility. Instead, as the multiple, looped two-minute performance-films reveal, Rojas’s alternative means of entry into the Giardini defy patterns of neo-colonial and neoliberal time.
El Mestizo, 2010. Performance-film, 3:54 min.
In a seemingly simple gesture for an undergraduate critique at Emily Carr University, Emilio Rojas draws a central line down his scalp with a comb, splitting one side from the other. Eventually, he unceremoniously shaves off half of his head, followed by half of his body hair. Rojas recalls that he performed the five-minute performance El Mestizo (2010) impulsively, but continued to live with its aftermath throughout a four-month semester. He embodied what the colonial gaze expects of the Mestizo, or a person of mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent, receiving looks of wonder and scorn in Vancouver.
Meta + Pherein, 2011–12. Performance-film, 1:33 min.
Rojas conceived of the performance-film Meta+pherein (2010–2011) on Granville Island, a touristic peninsula in Vancouver, by centering his body in a marginalized industrial space. Carving a bodily-shaped hole within pallets, or wooden shipping platforms—what Rojas recognizes as migrating material laborers within capitalism—the artist asked a friend who worked as a pallet carrier to thread his body through the central hole. The uncanny performance-film features Rojas encased within the pallets, unseen by tourists sitting nearby, yet present through the gaps in the slats. He waits, meditating with yogi intention through uncomfortable corporeal duration unknown to others, but nevertheless performing alongside the material and human laborers who continue to work.
El Grito, 2010. Performance-film, 32:15 min.
In El Grito, a performance-film on split screen, Rojas stands staring at the camera on one screen, and on the other footage of Mexican President Felipe Calderón issues a “cry for independence” during the celebration of the bicentennial of Mexico’s sovereignty. Calderón’s shout mimics the 1810 Grito de Dolores [cry of Dolores] of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, which precipitated the Mexican revolt against three-hundred-years of Spanish colonial rule. Each time Calderón ceremoniously shouts “¡Viva!”— followed by the name of a revered Mexican citizen—Rojas follows with a full-bodied, non-verbal scream. Rojas’ lamenting shriek cuts the air as an absurd parody of its nationalistic twin until his voice gives way to a whisper. The juxtaposition of the temporal repetition in Calderón’s call and Rojas’s cry reveals the inherent violence of continued subservience to the nation-state.
About the survey:
The survey tracing a wound through my body stretches across Lafayette College campus, inviting viewers to see the main exhibition in The Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Gallery of the Williams Visual Arts Building (243 North Third Street), and additional works staged in the locations of Williams Center for the Arts (317 Hamilton Street) Farinon College Center, the gardeHouse, and Skillman Library, and 248 North 3rd Street, and now online through the Lino Kino para-site. The exhibition is accompanied by free public programming and a digital bilingual exhibition catalog featuring new poetry by Rojas and Pamela Sneed, an interview with Ernesto Pujol, and essays by Valeria Luiselli, Ethan Madarieta, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Rebecca Schneider, and Mechtild Widrich with Andrei Pop. For more information about the catalog and programming, see the Lafayette College Art Galleries website.
Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body is guest curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and supported by Michiko Okaya, Director Emerita of the Lafayette College Art Galleries, Rico Reyes, Director of the Lafayette College Art Galleries, and Néstor Armando Gil Carmona/ Taller Workshop, Professor of Art, Lafayette College. The exhibition is generously supported by the Lafayette College Collection & Galleries, the departments of Art, and Film & Media Studies, the Offices of Intercultural Development and Student Involvement, Skillman Library and Special Collections & College Archives, and the Maggin Creative and Performing Arts (CaPA) Scholars Program. Public programming partners include: the Sigal Museum and Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society, Skillman Library and Special Collections & College Archives, the departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, and Anthropology, the Office of Intercultural Development, the Maggin Creative and Performing Arts (CaPA) Scholars Program, Lino Kino, and Famous Tattoo Works, Easton, Pa.