Kirsten Leenaars

I will talk like you will talk like me / Yo hablaré como tú hablarás como yo –

is a collaborative work by poets Joel Craig, Luis Felipe Fabre and artist Kirsten Leenaars, performed on October 18th, 2014 in Chicago at Co-Prosperity and on February 6th, 2015, as part of the Lit & Luz Festival in Mexico City at del Museo de Chopo. This 2-part performance took shape through a dialogue between the poets Joel Craig, Luis Felipe Fabre, and artist Kirsten Leenaars about the violence in both cities and a shared history of police brutality. Questioning what it means to be a witness, or to be a media consumer of this violence. From the point of the view of the archive, forgetting is the ultimate transgression. According to philosopher Andreas Huyssen, we suffer from a hypertrophy of memory. Through social media we have amassed archives so thorough that real time is cannibalizing present time.  In an era when eyewitness testimonies, photos, and videos are tweeted seconds after a catastrophe, mainstream media’s power to bear witness now feels outdated and inherently passive. To just bear witness, consume feels utterly passive, yet we do it all the time. Hence the seed of this entire work is an attempt to solicit responses from the audience and taking on a point of view. I will talk like you will talk like me / Yo hablaré como tú hablarás como yo – Mexico City is a follow up on the performance that took place on October 18th, 2014 in Chicago. While addressing the same issues, the content differs from the first iteration.

 

Lit & Luz Festival is organized by MAKE Literary Productions featuring renowned authors and visual artists from Chicago and Mexico City in cultural exchange and conversation. Through readings, performances, visual art, and the 2014/2015 theme “Archive,” the participants exploredboth Chicago and Mexico City’s historical contexts; how we document our lives and our culture in a digital age; and translation between language and artistic mediums. Participants: Joel Craig, Luis Felipe Fabre, Kirsten Leenaars, Marvin Tate, Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Borzutzky, Don De Grazia, Fred Sasaki, Irvine Welsh, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Kathleen Rooney, Valerie Mejer, Álvaro Enrigue, Brenda Lozano, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Benjamín Anaya