GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! a performance lecture by artist and visiting scholar in performance studies Emilio Rojas
The Department of Performance Studies is delighted to welcome Emilio Rojas, a Visiting Assistant Arts Professor in the department for this semester, for a performance lecture.
Reconfiguring a racist and xenophobic slur as a critical point of departure, this performance lecture mobilizes language itself as material—treating the slur not as an object to be neutralized, but as a site through which to examine the persistence of coloniality and violence in the present. The work situates the artist’s practice within intersecting discourses of decolonization, de-linking, migration, border regimes, archives, queerness, and the contamination of public space. It approaches performance as both method and epistemology: a way of knowing through embodied action.
Rather than attempting to correct or rewrite history, the lecture proposes a reorientation toward it. Drawing on non-linear temporality, it engages the past as something that lingers, repeats, and inhabits the body. In this framework, performance operates in the space between archive and repertoire, monument and ruin, visibility and erasure. The body becomes a living document—one that carries traces of displacement, racialization, and survival while also staging refusal and re-signification. The lecture examines how monuments, botanical histories, and national borders function as performative structures that naturalize colonial power. By foregrounding contamination, migration, and queer relationality, the work unsettles notions of purity, origin, and fixity. It asks us: How are we complicit in the past we have inherited? How are we accomplices of the history of what we consume in the present? How do we respond to our present moment of crisis?
Content warning
This performance contains sensitive language and nudity.
BIO:
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with the body in performance, incorporating video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. 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. In addition to his artistic practice, he is a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator working with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. He holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.
His work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals across the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Colombia, and Australia. His work has been shown at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Park Avenue Armory in New York; Ex Teresa Arte Actual and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City; the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; the Surrey Art Gallery; the DePaul Art Museum; MASS MoCA; the North Carolina Museum of Art ; the Botín Foundation; and the 54th Venice Biennale, among others.
Rojas has taught performance and interdisciplinary practice at Cornell University, Bard College, the University of Illinois Chicago, Parsons School of Art and Design, Hamilton College, Bennington College, PNCA, and the University of the Arts MFA in Dance.