Bunker Talk - Roberto Sifuentes
From Michael Pinchbeck
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Presented by the Performance Research Group at Manchester Met University. This presentation will chronicle a history of Roberto Sifuentes' radical performances with La Pocha Nostra Performance group since the mid ‘90s, his radical performance pedagogy and recent collaborations with digital media artists including his most recent project #exsanguination.
Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance artist. His work fuses highly charged cultural issues with a wild pop culture aesthetic. From homeland security to extreme reality television – from video games to military training – from fetishism to evangelism – Sifuentes creates interactive performance installations where personas wind their way through psycho/sexual/political/ universes. The result is a cinematic style that uses satire, humor, and spectacle to peel away the viewer’s protective layers and reveal society’s desires, fears and obsessions.
Sifuentes’ recent projects include: #exsanguination, a collaboration with new media artist jonCates and Aram Han Sifuentes (present); “Reculmulations: Digital Avatars and Performance objects” A collaboration with digital artist Claudia Hart and composer Edmund Campion (Black and White Gallery NYC).
A founding member of La Pocha Nostra performance troupe (San Francisco), Sifuentes has collaborated and performed with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra throughout at over 800 venues throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. Projects with La Pocha Include: “Corpo Illicito” (2009-2011), “The New Barbarians Collection Fall ’07 X-teme Fashion show and Human Auction” (Arnolfini, 2007), “Divino Corpo” (NRLA, 2008) “The Mapa/Corpo Series: Interactive rituals for the new millennium” (2005-2009), The Mexterminator Project (1997-2001), BORDERscape 2000 (1998-99), The Temple of Confessions (an interactive performance/installation which opened at the Corcoran Gallery in October 1996), El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD, and The Dangerous Border Game. Sifuentes has co-authored two books: Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy (Routledge 2011), and Temple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (Powerhouse Books 1997). Sifuentes is a Collected Artist of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
From 2001-2006, Sifuentes was in residence at LaMaMa ETC in New York as Artistic Director of The Trinity College/La MaMa Performing Arts Program NYC. He was the 2008 Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Georgia. Sifuentes is currently a tenured full Professor of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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