Translating research-sharing into ritual, Mireya Lucio performs a non-authoritative lecture as a process of de-colonizing herself. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, but educated and residing in the United States, Mireya weaves a personal revisionist history of a nation as she excavates the facts surrounding the U.S. occupation of the island. Using embodied research–historical timelines, folklore, archival footage, political speeches, popular culture, political commentary, childhood memories, and speculation–the performance undertakes an exorcism of the cultural politics inflicted on the Puerto Rican people. The mapping of this plurality of sources sets the stage on which to decompress the self through a playful maneuver between closeness and distance, the inherent and the extrinsic.
Presented at the LACE Project Room as part of Kelman Duran's Open Air Prisons Exhibition
(October 26, 2016)
Documentation: Sean Grattan