Double Disappearance: A Symposium About
the Undocumented Memorial of 9/11
Saturday, March 2, 2019
11am to 3pm
[Image Description: A photo of the September 11 memorial treated in yellow and purple colors with stacked text in purple and white reading “Double Disappearance:” and below it white text reading “A Symposium About the Undocumented Memorial of 9/11.” The text is placed in the upper-middle and middle sections of the image.]
Organized by curator Andrea Valencia Aranda, this symposium reflected on the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the National September 11 Memorial. Double Disappearance: A Symposium About the Undocumented Memorial of 9/11 brought together scholars and artists including Andrea Bowers, Alexandra Délano, Juan Mianuel Esquivel, Camilo Godoy, Pablo Helguera, Benjamin Nienass, and Harriet Senie to open a new dialogue about the politics of memorialization of September 11. It framed 9/11 as a landmark event in the construction of negative narratives on immigration and the consequences of a double disappearance: one from the everyday social life and a second from the official narrative of history.
Participant Bios
Andrea Bowers lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Bowers received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Over the last twenty-three years, she has built an international reputation for her drawings, videos, and installations, which deal with social issues ranging from women's and workers’ rights to climate change and immigration. Her work has been widely exhibited in venues such as the Hammer Museum, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Bronx Museum, New York; The High Line, New York; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Documenta 14, Kassel; Triennale di Milano, Milan; and Albertina, Vienna, among many others.
Alexandra Delano is an Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies, and the current holder of the Eugene M. Lang Professorship for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring in The New School. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on diaspora policies, the transnational relationships between states and migrants, immigrant integration, and the politics of memory concerning undocumented migration. She is a Faculty Fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a member of The New School's Sanctuary Working Group.
Camilo Godoy is an artist whose practice is concerned with the construction of political meanings and histories. His work engages with conceptual, photographic, and choreographic strategies to negotiate questions that confront the politics of citizenship, imperialism, and sexuality. Godoy’s work analyzes and challenges past and present historical moments to imagine different subversive ways of being. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia and is based in New York, United States. His work has been presented in public spaces and venues such as Instituto Cervantes, New York; Danspace Project, New York; Mousonturm, Frankfurt; and CUE Art Foundation, New York.
Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist whose work often draws improbable relationships between human histories, biographies, anecdotes, and historical events, always bringing them all together in a cohesive whole and making all serve as a reflection on our current relationship with art as a society. Helguera often focuses on history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, and anthropology in formats such as lectures, museum displays, performance, and written fiction. He has exhibited widely internationally and is author of several books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), a primer for social practice, What in the World, and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World, a book on the sociology of contemporary art.
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a multidisciplinary artist born in El Salvador who moved to the New York City area in the 1980s as part of the Salvadoran civil war diaspora. Maravilla currently lives in Richmond, VA where he is a Tenure-Track Professor at VCU. Maravilla has performed and presented his work extensively in venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo Del Barrio, Performa 11 and 13, Central America Biennial X (Costa Rica), XI Nicaragua Biennial, Exit Art, Sean Kelly Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, Caribbean Museum (Colombia), and MARTE Museum (El Salvador).
Movimiento Cosecha is a nonviolent movement fighting for permanent protection, dignity, and respect for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The name, "harvest" in Spanish, honors the long tradition of farmworker organizing and the present-day pain of the thousands of undocumented workers whose labor continues to feed the country. Cosecha believes in using non-cooperation to leverage the power of immigrant labor and consumption and force a meaningful shift in public opinion. Cosecha doesn't rely on traditional tactics, their campaigns are multifaceted but all focus on building the power of the immigrant community and activating the public to their support strategy and cause.
Benjamin Nienass is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His research focuses on debates about “collective memory” in political theory and the role of memory in questions about political membership. He also examines political challenges from migrants who introduce traumatic biographies into public acts of commemoration in Europe, the United States, and Mexico. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Collège d'études Mondiale in Paris, a faculty member at California State University San Marcos, and a Fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester. He received his PhD from the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Harriet Senie’s areas of research are public art, memorials, memory, material culture, the American landscape tradition, and contemporary pilgrimage practice. She is a Professor of Art History and Director of the MA Program in Art History and Art Museum Studies Program at the City College of New York. In 2008, she co-founded Public Art Dialogue, an only-peer review publication devoted to public art. In 2017, she joined the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, a group that advises Mayor de Blasio on issues relating to public art and historic monuments and markers.
Curator Bio
Andrea Valencia is an art historian and independent curator from Mexico City. She is a Fellow in the MA Curatorial Practice Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She worked as Assistant Curator at The National Museum of Art, Mexico City; as Liaison Manager for International Projects in the Office of International Affairs of The National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico; and she was Coordinator of the Pavilion of Mexico in the 57th Venice Art Biennale. In 2017, she co-founded the curatorial collective Se habla español. During the summer of 2018, she was a Curatorial Resident at Witte de With Contemporary Art Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Organizational Bios
The Master of Arts Degree in Curatorial Practice is a two-year program that focuses on professional training, with a thorough grounding in the relevant study of history, research, and theory, and with an emphasis on hands-on work with leading experts in the field, along with continuous opportunities for professional networking with curators, museum directors, and other professionals from around the world. Our foremost goal is to provide practical experience and intellectual depth in order to place graduates of the program in curatorial jobs. The program takes full advantage of the vast number of arts institutions and professionals on the doorstep of the school in Chelsea and throughout New York City, which provides countless occasions for study, mentoring, and professional development. Go to macp.sva.edu to find out more.
The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, both, the cultural branch of the Consulate General of Mexico in New York and an American non-profit organization, is committed to generating awareness of the richness, dynamism, and cultural diversity of Mexico as a plural and creative nation. It supports and develops programs that foster a better understanding of our country through the promotion of its arts and culture. The Institute aims to generate interest among the diverse communities in the Tri-State area by presenting Mexico’s most relevant artistic expressions ranging from the Pre-Columbian period to contemporary art.