Immersing Miami with Alexandra Vazquez

This talk involves a willful submerging into the performance ecologies of Miami, Florida.  The city, too often made mere fulcrum for many a geopolitical before and after, holds rich and established resources for creative practices. Far beyond a cultural wasteland or cold war terminus, Miami's artists have long made things from vast distances, inside precarious currents, outside of their families. “Immersing Miami” is and isn’t about the city; it is an exercise on how to write through the intimacies of the local and out towards parallel gatherings.  The talk specifically works with the 1998 “Speed Split” series by the Cuban born, Miami-based artist Consuelo Castañeda (b. 1958), as an opportunity to transpose an artist’s visual mode into a musical response to displacement and dispossession. Castañeda extends a call to listen on the insides of the alienating narratives that drown Miami and in doing so enables us to hear robust aesthetic histories everywhere else.