Guillermo Gómez-Peña + La Pocha Nostra: The Body Cartographic
Co-curated with Kevin B. Chen. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. March 2016
Performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña premieres a new work at the San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery, presenting a series of five “spoken choreographies” that explore aging, memory, and belonging. The performance enlists close collaborators from his troupe La Pocha Nostra, including prima ballerina Michele Ceballos, who guides Gómez-Peña through ballet exercises, highlighting the tensions and possibilities of the body over time. Other choreographies weave together personal confessions about displacement, the loss of homeland in Mexico to organized crime, and the pressures of gentrification in San Francisco, creating an intimate reflection on identity, migration, and survival.
Gómez-Peña’s practice merges embodied poetry, performance activism, and postcolonial theory, challenging audiences to reconsider cultural, racial, and sexual norms through what he calls “imaginary activism.” Across ten books, digital works, videos, and photo-performances, he interrogates censorship, nationalism, and the boundaries of public discourse, crafting interventions that are as intellectually rigorous as they are viscerally compelling. In this latest work, literature, theory, pedagogy, and live performance coalesce, inviting audiences into a dynamic process that is simultaneously creation, reflection, and performance.
Commissioned in conjunction with the exhibition Bring it Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy through the Body, curated by SFAC Galleries Director Meg Shiffler and independent curator Kevin B. Chen, Gómez-Peña’s performance situates itself among the work of diverse Bay Area artists exploring the intersections of cultural identity and the human condition. His solo and collaborative performances have been presented internationally across North America, Europe, Latin America, Australia, and South Africa, bringing his distinctive voice to a global conversation on art, activism, and the body.