Starting with The Formaldehyde Trip in 2017, Naomi Rincón Gallardo has since produced two other critical fabulations that also deal with the struggles against land dispossession in Mexico in the contemporary moment. Whereas The Formaldehyde Trip fuses live performance with film to offer alternative ways in dealing with land and food Mixteco activist Bety Cariño's murder in 2010, the other two are scaled down productions created solely as films, Sangre pesada / Heavy Blood from 2018 and Resilencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience from 2019, both of which deal with extractivist practices and (possible) responses in different geographical locations in Mexico. This presentation thinks about these works as a trilogy and reads their respective use of an ancestral animal figure as guiding spirits (the axolotl, the hummingbird, and the opossum) and their d.i.y. queer punk aesthetic practice to position a Global South process of imagining otherwise imbued with queer futurity.
Dr. Laura G. Gutiérrez is Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she teaches on Latinx performance studies, visual culture studies, and popular culture. Her research interests include embodied practices and visual representations in Latinx and Mexican performance and visual art. She is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage. Currently Gutiérrez is completing two manuscripts, one on contemporary Latinx performance and visual arts that deals with queer modes of intimacy, and another on sexual and racial panics in Mexican culture via readings of films from the middle of the twentieth century.
