Welcome to the Temple of Confessions Blogspot!

This Blog is based on the Temple of Confessions performance piece by Guillermo Gomez Pena. Above are various Hispanic and Latino/a situations and stereotypes. I encourage you to be honest and state your opinions in order to complete a mini-social experiment of sorts. Your postings and comments would be greatly appreciated as I would like to see what other think of the topics and articles that I have found regarding these issues.

First, I would like to get the ball rolling with a little bio on Guillermo Gomez Pena and his history and ideals:

Guillermo Gomez Pena was born in Mexico City and moved to the United States in 1978 where he became an important performance artist, writer, activist and an educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art. His eight books include essays, experimental poetry and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish.



Most of his artistic and intellectual work concerns the interface between North and South (Mexico and the U.S.), border culture and the politics of the brown body. His original interdisciplinary arts projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and otherwise, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. and the various Latino cultures: the U.S.-Mexico border itself, immigration, cross-cultural and hybrid identities, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures, languages and races. His artwork and literature also explore the politics of language, the side effects of globalization, "extreme culture" and new technologies from a Latino perspective[1].

Gómez-Peña is regarded as a pioneer in US Latino and Latin American performance art. Some of his legendary performance art pieces include Border Brujo (1988-89), The Couple in the Cage (1992-93), The Cruci-fiction project (1994), The Temple of Confessions (1995-96), The Mexterminator Project (1997-99), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999-2002) and the Mapa/Corpo series (2004-2008) His performances often involve audience participation, elaborate costuming and environments, interactive technologies and other collaborators, including Roberto Sifuentes, James Luna, Violeta Luna, Coco Fusco[2], Michelle Ceballos, Maria Estrada, Emma Tramposch, Antonio Turok, and Demián Flores.



Through his unique organization, the San Francisco-based La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of citizen diplomacy and as a means to create transnational communities of rebel artists. La Pocha Nostra runs an extremely popular intensive performance workshop. Every year it takes place in a different country. This year (2009), there was a winter school in Tucson (January) and a summer school in Evora, Portugal (August). He is currently working with Canadian theorist Laura Levin in a book of “conversations across the border” (Seagull Press, 2009) and with Roberto Sifuentes in a book about their performance pedagogy (Routledge, 2010). Gomez-Peña is a special guest in the upcoming Havana Biennale (2009).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Gomez_Pena

His main and personal website, which is very interesting and informative, can be found here:

www.pochanostra.com/