Lamas 2026 Newsletter
The Final Two Days
The Latin American Media Arts Symposium is heading into its closing weekend. Here is everything happening on Friday, October 16 and Saturday, October 17, from counter-archives to a closing live performance.
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.
Join Us to Close the Symposium
Admission is free with registration, and every session welcomes artists, scholars, students, and community members. Reserve your seat for the closing days and help us wrap up LAMAS 2026 in collective listening, reflection, and celebration.
