Black Mirror: Decolonizing Land Art, a Workshop with Emilio Rojas

Taking Robert Smithson’s Double Nonsite, California and Nevada as a starting point, the workshop will look at the history of obsidian in Smithson’s practice, and will lead participants in a series of exercises to embody the symbolism of this rock in its pre-Hispanic context. We will discuss the history of Land Art as well as ideas and contemporary critiques around indigeneity, colonialism, landscape, and the environment. The program will begin with a conversation around Smithson’s work, exploring the failing of contemporary art to acknowledge extraction, indigenous sovereignty, and respect to the land.  The multidisciplinary artist Emilio Rojas will lead us in exploring movement, improvisation, and scores as a way to imagine and enflesh new, generative relationships with the land, inside and outside of the museum. No previous performance experience needed. 

Open to the Syracuse University and ESF communities.  Generous support for this project provided by Art Bridges.  

About Emilio Rojas 

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge. 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. 

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. He is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University in the School of Art, Architecture and Planning. His traveling survey exhibition Tracing A Wound Through My Body, accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, is currently exhibited in its third iteration at the Usdan Gallery at Bennington College in Vermont. It will also travel to SECCA, North Carolina, and Artspace, New Heaven. 

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