Bookings
Please indicate ideal dates and event budget in your inquiry.
POETRY READINGS:
Alan has performed multimedia poetry at universities, museums, and stages across the U.S. and abroad including Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Museum of Latin American Art, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Universität Duisburg-Essen and elsewhere. Alan’s poetry centers on themes of undocumented im/migration, mourning as a framework of anti-colonial struggle, trans* resistance in Mexico and the United States, and Indigenous speculative futures.
Their poetry readings range between 20 to 40 minutes and they are accompanied by community dialogues.
ARTIST TALKS
Art as Civil Disobedience: Artists are often taken-for-granted contributors to social movements. In this artist talk, Alan Pelaez Lopez will share their experience as a young undocumented, Black queer organizer in the migrant justice movement. They’ll talk about the ethics of storytelling, why stories matter, and the dangers that exist when allies become surrogate storytellers for communities they are not a part of. This talk features Pelaez Lopez’s artistic contributions to various social movements while highlighting five currently and formerly undocumented Black migrant artists.
N[EG]ATION: In Feb 2023, the doors to Alan Pelaez Lopez’s solo exhibition “N[EG]ATION” (pronounced Nation Negation) opened at Harvard University. This artist talk addresses Alan’s solo show, especially the interactive graveyard installation inviting Latin American and Latinx attendees to imagine a future outside nation-states. In the installation, the artist provided 100 cotton flags for attendees to take and write an anxiety, political commitment, and/or statement they wanted to offer that addressed the end of nations and a universal latinidad. In this talk, Alan addresses the radical potential of anti-patriotic futures by sharing the flags produced by Latin American and Latinx gallery attendees.
DIALOGUES
Latinidad is Cancelled: In this hybrid keynote and conversation, Alan Pelaez Lopez talks about their social practice project, Latinidad is Cancelled (2018). Though often misquoted on social media, Latinidad is Cancelled is an artistic approach developed by Alan to image futures where all people of Latin America and its diasporas are no longer forced into a single-dimensional narrative. Alan’s use of Latinidad is Cancelled stems from the 2015 practices of Black Twitter where Black Twitter users across international borders began to cancel frameworks, companies, art, and other Twitter accounts that were inherently detrimental to Black futures. “Cancel culture” for Black social media users has its roots in protecting digital spaces from the everyday encounters of anti-Black violence experienced in in-person spaces. “Cancelling” has since been co-opted by non-Black new media users who are often the perpetrators of the anti-Black violence that “cancelling” by Black social media users tried to combat. This talk explores nuanced criticism spearheaded by Black cultural workers in Latin America and the Caribbean and Black Latinx cultural workers in the United States.
ACADEMIC TALKS
Trans*Migrant Life & Futures Otherwise traces how undocumented transgender migrants resist and survive violence by leaning on their imagination. In the United States, undocumented trans migrants alongside refugees and political exilees must prove that their home countries are not safe for them and ask the United States for safety. However, the U.S. has failed to protect trans*, non-binary, and gender-expansive citizens. This talk addresses dreaming and worldmaking as radical and dangerous acts that trans* migrants take on in their day-to-day lives. Rooted in Black, Indigenous, and trans theory, “Trans*Migrant Life & Futures Otherwise,” centers on tactile resistance methodologies that refuse traditional trans* and migrant spectacles of violence often produced in academia.
Illegalized Non-Performances reads contemporary memoirs, poetry collections, and asylum declarations authored by illegalized and formerly undocumented Black migrants to understand how the notion of the “U.S. liberal democracy” forces Black migrants into non-consensual performance contracts. When they fail to meet these performance contracts, migrants are produced as bad migrants, criminal migrants, and unproductive migrants. This academic talk explores illegalized non-performance using and developing frameworks in Global African Diaspora Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Please write for inquiries about specialized keynotes.