Diana Damian Martin, Supporting Editor of performingborders e-Journal #3 Entangled Practices: Embodying cross-border live art:
Entangled stories and practices are also encountered in Rodolfo Suárez and Giulia Palladini’s Backpack, a sharing and invitation to join this unfolding multi-modal text-action woven around the Fronteras project on migration and exile. Backpack is in itself a multi-vocal speculative form of travel and action where transit, exile, displacement become fabrics of grief and possibility. The invitation of a farewell letter you never got to write, or perhaps, one that never got sent, is resonant- and such letters and offerings are woven here in what McKrittik might call geographic stories at the borderlands. ‘Yes’, we read in Backpack, ‘migrating is jumping the walls of all frontiers separating us from some kind of fantasy life. It is crossing the desert and becoming a piece of night behind a bush.’ The text continues ‘when we arrive something in us will feel as if we had arrived there before.’. In transit, what is stable becomes blurred, what is fixed becomes fluid, and we shape-shift and body-morph and for a while, we time travel. I kept coming back to ‘incitement’ in my reading of Backpack. Inciting has an energy that travels with.
Picture by Rodolfo Suárez
Rodolfo R. Suárez Molnar, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana- México. I am currently coordinator, with Philippe Olé, of the ICORN-UAM project for the foundation of refuge houses for writers, artists and journalists at risk, and I am also the coordinator of the Project Fronteras. (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), dedicated to social intervention through artistic devices on issues related to migration and exile.
I studied a degree in Psychology and a Master and PhD in Philosophy of Science. Throughout my academic career, I have carried out various research projects on the theory of history, collective psychology and popular culture. However, for the last 15 years, I have dedicated a large part of my work to projects and activities focused on the use of academic and artistic tools and devices for social intervention in different topics (migration, exile, forced disappearance, gender-based violence) in diverse social contexts (Mexico City, Sarajevo, Tijuana, Gaza, or Santiago de Chile). Some examples of this are the Project Ciudades Inmateriales that I developed with Ángel Hernández, the Bitácora del encierro (a book co-directed with Philippe Olé in which 180 writers participated with texts about the measures generated by COVID-19), the Diploma in Forced Disappearance in Mexico and Latin America, or the Cátedra Pensamiento situado (Museo Reina Sofía/UAM).
I was also the editorial coordinator – with Philippe Olé and Rodrigo Fernández – of the Selected Works of Antonin Artaud in Spanish and, with Giulia Palladini, the curator of the art exhibition Rumbos de vida (Atri, Italy) and of this project: Backpack
Giulia Palladini is a writer, and curator currently based between Italy and Mexico, working in the field of performance and contemporary art both in academic and contemporary art contexts. Her work moves between different languages and fields of knowledge, striving for a situated and affective approach to both critical and creative practice. Her main interests are political imagination, the politics and erotics of artistic production, social reproduction, language and translation. She is an Alexander von Humboldt alumna, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London. She also taught in Germany, the Netherlands, Colombia and Spain, and presented her work in numerous art institutions in Europe and Latin America, such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museo Miguel Urrutia in Bogotà. Giulia collaborated as dramaturg and critical theorist with various international artists like Mapa Teatro, Forced Entertainment, Tara Irani. She led various research clusters fostering a dialogue between artistic practice and critical theory, such as Affective Archives (Italy 2011, Poland 2014), and Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience (UK/MX/Ecuador/Brazil 2021). In 2024, she curated the series Antidotes: encounters to think live arts in the political landscape (Centro de Cultura Digital, Ciudad de México) and Rumbos de vida (with Rodolfo Suárez Molnar, Atri, Italy,). She authored The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2017), numerous essays published in various languages, and co-edited Lexicon for an Affective Archive (Intellect, 2017, with Marco Pustianaz).