A few months ago my awesome
Aunt B, the reigning
Pop Culture Queen, suggested that AM and I present
Are You My Other? at the
2011 National Popular Culture Conference in San Antonio Texas. We loved the idea, but weren't sure if we should submit to the
Internet Culture section or the
Latin Americans & Latinos: Identity Issues & Cultural Stereotypes section. So we posed the question on Facebook, asking for feedback. The communal concensus was the
Latin Americans & Latinos section.
With this in mind, we embarked upon or first collaborative writing endeavor and created the following statement:
Negotiating Latina Identity through Performance Art on the Web
with Maya Escobar and Andria Morales
Challenging mainstream and academic representations of Latina identity, performance artists Maya Escobar and Andria Morales publicly negate, deconstruct, and reconstruct their individual histories, identities, and conceptions of self. In their current project Are You My Other? a self-portrait dialog exchange blog, Escobar and Morales draw from popular culture, Latino/a cultural iconography, and their lived experiences to create and virtually perform conflicting representations of Latina selves. From devoted homemaker to hockey player, reggaetonera to construction worker, conceptual artist to human corn on the cob, the artists model the multiplicity of identity.
Due to their shared physical similarities, followers of their online exchange often mistake Escobar and Morales for one another. The merging of their identities is further perpetuated through their activities on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By locating these performances within the space of the web, where they are free from restrictions of time and place, the artists are able to concurrently enact multiple personas while simultaneously forming a unified (Latina) hybrid self.
And... (drum roll please)... we were accepted!
But in order to get there we need to collectively raise $1,500. So we created the Taking it to Texas Campaign. In exchange for donations we are offering all sorts of
Are You My Other? goodies in exchange for donations, including postcards, patches, t-shirts, and our personal favorite: we will photoshop you into any image your heart desires!
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