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Hemispheric Performance and Digital Access

PI: Laura Levin

Hemispheric Encounters is a network of artists, activists, and scholars across Canada, the US, and Latin America studying “hemispheric performance” as a tool for social change. Our goal is to advance understandings of performance as a unique method for addressing humanitarian and ecological challenges shared by multiple communities in the western hemisphere–from the dramatic rise in nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment, to the migration north of Central American refugees, to the displacement of Indigenous groups by government actions and extractive industries. One of the network’s goals is to develop digital tools and methods for conducting community-engaged research-creation projects across different geographic contexts. In 2022-23, for our proposed “Hemispheric Performance and Digital Justice” project, we hope to work closely with several community groups in the US and Latin America to develop platforms for transnational collaboration and mobilization of artistic work – with the goal of creating digital structures that allow for building coalitional politics and shared resources. In the next four months we hope to hold two residencies (one in Toronto and one in Montreal) to start developing this digital justice project, with a focus on learning from our community partners what their needs for developing digital methodologies for research-creation and knowledge mobilization, as well as developing early models for these exchanges. Our first phase of our research is guided by the needs of our partners in Brazil (the Yara Costa & Itacoatiara-Mirim Community, an Indigenous community in the Amazonian peri-urban area of São Gabriel da Cachoeira/ Amazonas; onucleo & Aldeia Maraka’nã, members of the Maraka’nã Village Indigenous resistance movement in Rio; and members of Frente Calvacanti (Calvacanti Front), a collective of local Calvanti residents who came together in 2020 during the pandemic to combat the health and social impacts of Covid-19 through community actions. However, the reverberations of this work will extend out to other partners in other sites in the Americas and we will be joined in Montreal by artists from Chile, Mexico City, and the US that will help develop these digital methodologies.