Through the Speaker Series, CCS Bard brings distinguished artists, scholars, and curators to campus to present on their work. Speaker Series talks are held within Classroom 102 at CCS Bard unless otherwise noted. All talks are free and open to the public.
This talk will reflect on the Museo Travesti [Transvestite Museum] in Lima, Peru, founded by the late philosopher, drag queen and queer activist Giuseppe Campuzano (GiuCamp) in 2003. This museum was an attempt at a queer counter-reading and promiscuos intersectional thinking of history, one that collected objects, images, texts and documents, press clippings, and appropriated artworks in order to propose experimental displays and publications that would fracture the heterosexual gaze and dominant narratives. Between performance and historical research, Campuzano proposed a critical reviewing of history from the strategic perspective of a fictional figure she called the ‘androgynous indigenous / mixed-race transvestite.’ López will share ideas related to his collaboration with Campuzano, her museological performative experiments, and her queer strategies of archiving, curating and historicizing.
Miguel A. López (b.1983) is a Peruvian writer, researcher, and co-director and chief curator of TEOR/éTica, a center for exhibitions, research, and publications on Central American and Caribbean contemporary art in San José, Costa Rica. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and transformations in the understanding of and engagement with Latin American politics, and feminist re-articulations of art and culture in recent decades. His texts have been published in journals such as Afterall, Artforum, E-flux Journal, ramona, Art in America, Art Journal, and Manifesta Journal, among others. He has curated Cecilia Vicuña, a retrospective exhibition at Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2019; Social Energies/Vital Forces. Natalia Iguiñiz: Art, Activism, Feminism (1994-2018) at the ICPNA, Lima, 2018; Teresa Burga: Structures of Air (with Agustín Pérez Rubio) at MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2015; and the God is queer section for the 31st São Paulo Biennial, 2014, among others. He has recently published the books Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia (Dissident Fictions in the Land of Misogyny, Pesopluma, 2019); and The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War(together with Ruth Estévez and Agustín Diez Fischer, REDCAT and JRP-Ringier, 2017). He was the editor of Giuseppe Campuzano. Saturday Night Thriller y otros escritos, 1998-2013, a collection of writings by drag queen Giuseppe Campuzano published by Estruendomudo in 2013.