Lamas2026
LATIN AMERICAN
MEDIA ARTS
SYMPOSIUM
2ND EDITION
The Latin American Media Arts Symposium (LAMAS) is a four-day gathering of artists, curators, filmmakers, scholars, and cultural workers dedicated to exploring the past, present, and future of Latin American and Latinx media arts in Canada. Presented by Southern Currents Film & Video Collective, LAMAS will take place in Toronto from October 14–17, 2026.
As Southern Currents celebrates over 25 years of supporting Latin American media arts, this symposium creates a space for critical reflection on the contributions of Latin American artists to Canada's cultural landscape while examining emerging artistic practices, challenges, and opportunities for the future.
SCHEDULE
Wednesday
October 14
Fertility Stories
Facilitated by Karleen Pendleton Jiménez
In this presentation and workshop, writer and filmmaker Karleen Pendleton Jiménez introduces their artistic practice and shares their personal and creative journey exploring fertility, queer family-making, reproductive desire, migration, identity, and cultural memory. Grounded in lived experience, Karleen's work examines the possibilities and challenges of creating families while navigating financial, legal, medical, cultural, and familial systems.
Thursday
October 15
Care-based, Inclusive Practices within Latinx Diasporic Communities
Cristal Buemi, Natalia Ruiz Cuartas, and Viviana Santibañez · Moderated by Paola Gomez
Human rights lawyer, community organizer, and MUSE Arts co-founder Paola Gomez moderates a conversation grounded in community-engaged arts, education, advocacy, and collective mobilization. Representing anivides collective, Cristal will reflect on the systemic barriers faced by BIPOC and youth artists, advocating for intersectional, community-based practices that prioritize equity, experimentation, and intergenerational sustainability. Natalia will draw from her experience in working with migrant communities, feminist movements, and broader struggles for equity, dignity, and justice. Viviana will speak about her advocacy for marginalized communities, particularly refugees, newcomers, and 2SLGBTQ+ Hispanic people living with HIV. Together, the panellists will consider community leadership as a relational practice rooted in listening, reciprocity, accountability, and care.
Trajectories of Latin-American Art in Canada
Francisco-Fernando Granados, Hugo Bernilla, and Jorge Lozano · Moderated by Luísa Cruz
Over the past decade, Sur Gallery has emerged as an important space for supporting, presenting, and advancing the work of Latin American artists in Canada through exhibitions, public programs, and sustained cultural dialogues. Moderated by Luísa Cruz, this panel brings together Francisco-Fernando Granados, Hugo Bernilla, and Jorge Lozano to reflect on their relationships with the gallery and the ways it has supported their artistic development at different stages of their careers. The panellists will also situate their individual trajectories within the evolving landscape of Latin American art in Canada, considering the role of galleries such as Sur in strengthening artistic networks, challenging the historical underrepresentation of Latin American perspectives within Canadian institutions, and contributing to a more complex and expansive understanding of Canadian art history.
Friday
October 16
Creating New Archives of Resistance
Claudia Bernal, Michelle Peraza, and Soledad Fátima Muñoz · Moderated by Nuria Carton de Grammont
Through cross-disciplinary and research-informed perspectives, Nuria Carton de Grammont, PhD, moderates a conversation on the creation of counter-archives that assert cultural and political presence and confront historical erasure. The panel considers how artistic practices can sustain intergenerational memory, foster healing, and facilitate the collective circulation of knowledge. Drawing from her diasporic experience, Claudia Bernal approaches the body as a living archive shaped by territory, displacement, and memory. Michelle Peraza's research- and material-based practice engages her Cuban and Costa Rican heritage through questions of postcolonial identity, transculturation, and resilience. Soledad Fátima Muñoz addresses the enduring legacy of Chile's civic-military dictatorship, mobilizing textile and sound-based practices to carry memory and open spaces for justice, visibility, and truth. Together, their practices reimagine the archive as a living and relational process of remembrance, resistance, and cultural continuity.
Entre niebla y cicatrices, resistir / Between Fog and Scars, Resist
Claudia Bernal
This excerpt from the installation Entre niebla y cicatrices, resistir explores the geographical and emotional dimensions of the body as territory, approaching embodiment as both lived experience and a form of poetic resistance. Drawing on her diasporic experience, the artist mobilizes the body as a site of inquiry through practices of walking, listening, touching, and seeing, addressing displacement and the ongoing need to inhabit and reconnect with land and memory physically, emotionally, and politically. Through video, sound, installation, and performance, the work examines how embodied experience can resist extractive and colonial logics. The artist invites audiences into a layered, sensory dialogue with the landscapes of Sumapaz, Rabanal, and Sutatausa in Colombia, alongside those of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean and Tadoussac in Québec.
Saturday
October 17
Echoes of Memory: Counter-Narratives in Digital Media Arts
Laura Acosta, Lucia Rojas, and Santiago Tavera · Moderated by Victoria Carrasco
Moderated by Victoria Carrasco, this conversation brings together artists working across performance, installation, immersive environments, and computationally generated imagery and sound to consider how contemporary media technologies can resist, negotiate, and unsettle dominant structures of power, identity, and visibility. Their practices engage with the ethical and political implications of emerging technological systems, questioning how algorithms, data structures, and computational aesthetics mediate cultural hybridity, representation, agency, and authorship. Grounded in lived experience and decolonial perspectives, the conversation approaches contemporary media technologies as both a critical tool and a contested terrain in which bodies can be reimagined, archives destabilized, and cultural memory reconfigured.
The Listening Body
Lucía Rojas and dssPow
Brown Dolly is a free-improvisation experimental music duo whose performance emerges in real time through the relationship between Lucía Rojas and dssPow, their accumulated materials, the space, and the audience. Working across sound, samples, field recordings, voice, moving image, photography, and text, they create unexpected connections among seemingly disparate elements. Although their practice is based primarily in Canada, extended periods of research and creation in Colombia have generated experimental films, sound works, and an evolving shared archive that continues to reappear and transform through performance. The duo also contributes to Tejer trayectorias: memoria viva de los bailes cantados de Tambora en la Depresión Momposina, an interdisciplinary research project led by ethnomusicologist María José Salgado from the Universidad El Bosque in Colombia, that encompasses fieldwork, archives, recording, and documentary practice. Informed by this bicultural terrain, the duo will wrap up LAMAS 2026 with a live improvised performance combining sound, samples, voice, and moving image.
About Southern Currents
Founded in 1995, Southern Currents is a Toronto-based non-profit media arts organization committed to amplifying the voices and creative practices of Latinx and diasporic artists.
As the presenter of the aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival, we create spaces where artistic expression becomes cultural resistance and community building. As the first arts organization in Canada to focus on Latin film and media arts, we've built an enduring network of artists, curators, and institutions.
Our ethos values process over product, collaboration over hierarchy, and cultural specificity over assimilation. We seek to promote inclusion, innovation, and experimentation by presenting important works by established and emerging Latin artists. We encourage critical discussion and understanding of the diversity of Latin film and media arts culture in Canada and around the world.
Together, Arana and Southern Currents are aligned in cultivating platforms that reflect the evolving concerns and imaginaries of Latinx and diasporic creators while advancing cultural equity in Canada.
