Artist Emilio Rojas lecture/performance All Water has a perfect Memory, will touch on issues of indigenous sovereignty, migration, borders, trauma and decolonial aesthetics. This is the title of a recent piece responding to the disappearance of the Tulare Lake, commissioned by the Tachi Yokuts tribe in the San Joaquin Vallery in California. The title comes from a lecture Toni Morrison gave at the New York Public Library in 1986 where she stated: " ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was." Thinking through the body as a vessel, this lecture considers the water in our bodies as a medium of solidarity, remembrance, belonging and connection to each other and the natural world and to the broader geopolitical spheres that inform his performance and social practice.
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments.
His work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions such as The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Mass MoCA, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, SECCA, the Syracuse University Museum of Art, The Johnson Museum of Art, The Botin Foundation, and the 54th and 60th Venice Biennale.
From 2019-2022 Rojas was a Visiting Artist in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York. He has taught in the M.F.A. programs at Parsons the New School and the low-res M.F.A. programs at PNCA in Portland, Oregon, and University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. In the fall of 2022 he was the Teiger mentor at Cornell University in the School of Art, Architecture and Planning where he is currently teaching. His traveling survey exhibition Tracing A Wound Through My Body, accompanied with a bilingual catalogue, toured to four different locations culminating at the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina.
