MOAD MDC Presents Mexican Theater Collective Teatro Ojo In Disorganizing Mimesis

Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (MOADMDC) will present Disorganizing Mimesis, a lecture-performance by members of the award-winning cutting-edge Mexican theater collective Teatro Ojo. In Disorganizing Mimesis, two of Teatro Ojo's founding members, Héctor Bourges and Patricio Villareal, give an immersive introduction to one of Mexico's most avant-garde theatrical companies, while taking their audience on an idiosyncratic and twisting tour of Mexican history itself. Disorganizing Mimesis will have one performance at the MDC Live Arts Lab on at 7:30 p.m., March 10.

The Mexico City-based group Teatro Ojo essays the possible dispositions and sequences of gestures, images, and machinations that sketch tensions within the texture of a "spectral contract" on which the figure of the Mexican nation-state is incessantly organized and disorganized-a contract plagued by "public secrets": what we all know and yet we cannot utter. Bourges states the following about Disorganizing Mimesis: "Five images of a radical theatricality: a flayed/flayer god; a talking cross that incites a silent indigenous uprising that lasted a hundred years; a skeleton of the last Aztec emperor made from the bones of birds, deer, dogs, and a woman's skull; the corpse of Emperor Montezuma talks to his people through a sinister act of ventriloquism; Subcomandante Marcos is unmasked by the Mexican government in1995... and he turns out to be the son of a furniture dealer."

Made up of Bourges, Karla Rodríguez, Villarreal, Laura Furlan, Gisela Cortés, and Emanuel Bourges, Teatro Ojo was founded in 2002 in Mexico City, where they still live and work. Their practice has shifted from conventionally theatrical territory to an expanded field that includes artworks, performances, and urban interventions that question memory, the city, violence, community, modernity, education, pre-language, and the post-human. Teatro Ojo's most important projects include the installation Xipe Tótec, Ponte en Mi Pellejo (Put Yourself in My Shoes), at the 2012 Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Fribourg, Switzerland; and Lo Que Viene (Forthcoming), a stage project at El Galeón Theater, INBA, Mexico City, also in 2012. In 2011, Teatro Ojo received the gold medal for best Theater Architecture and Performance Space in the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.

Disorganizing Mimesis is part of Living Together, an exciting cross-disciplinary series of programs that will galvanize Miami audiences with thoughtful and challenging performances and exhibitions that draw from art, music, theater, politics, and poetry. Spread across the city at a wide array of venues, the series features performances, exhibitions, film and video screenings, readings, talks, and workshops that will reflect the cultural, social, and political realities of how we live now. Living Together seeks to find new ways to think about civic space and citizenship, to instigate actions and conversations that may help us to reimagine our cities and our lives.

Living Together will take place at various sites across the greater Miami area through September 2018. It will include works by 17 of the most acclaimed national and International Artists, art collectives, musicians, and writers. Events in the series will be produced by MOAD in collaboration with a range of other Miami institutions, and most events will be free and open to the public. The curators of Living Together are Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator of MOAD, and Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator based in New York.

Disorganizing Mimesis is presented in collaboration with the Consulate General of Mexico and the Mexican Cultural Institute in Miami. Living Together is made possible by the generous support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council; the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council.

Please visit the MOAD website for updates and a full schedule of events: http://www.mdcmoad.org/.

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