Performed by  micha cárdenas, Ching-In Chen, Bridget Feerick, Shawna Elizabeth,  Jennifer Morales,  Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi, Shelly Schauer, Trenton Francis Schoonover, William Skaleski, Ali Sperling.  Photos by Wes Tank.

More about this performance here: http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/03/14/building-local-autonomy-networks/

More about this performance: http://transreal.org/2013/02/27/local-autonomy-networks-los-angeles-with-gstaender-justice-la/

E-Lit Under the Stars Micha Cárdenas from Mark Marino on Vimeo.

Take the trigger warning seriously folks, it’s a serious game.

A SURVIVOR IS #REBORN is a meditation on violence and transformative justice, a transgender incest survivor’s response to the new Tomb Raider. Take the trigger warning seriously, but try it out if you can and let me know what you think! and pass it on!

Click here to play: A SURVIVOR IS #REBORN

Tons of gooey thanks to porpentine for the huge inspiration and technical advice.

Thank you to merritt kopas, anna anthropy, a.j. liszkiewicz and samantha gorman for inspiration, and to J for telling me about Porpentine’s Ke$ha game!

On top of the performances with Mangos with Chili that I just posted about and I’m working on daily, I’m also doing some other very exciting things in April. Check out these great talks and exhibitions if you’re in LA, Amsterdam, Toronto or Hamburg/Luneberg!

April 19, Los Angeles
Congress on Research in Dance
April 19 – July 21, Amsterdam
Transcreen: Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, art exhibition “Lost & Found Transgender Image Making”
April 26, Lüneburg, Germany
Post Media Lab: Don’t Forget the Archives! Symposium

Post-Media Lab | »Don´t Forget the Archive!« | Lüneburg, 25th-26th/27th April 2013
»Don´t forget: the archive!«
: Collecting Non-Archives for the Post-Media Condition (I)
// Concept Note
The possibilities as well as the challenges to engage in this constructions and projection of memory and accessible ressources for shared reference have dramatically increased with networked media, but also been shaken sometimes traumatized by the demanding model of the archive. It might be said: the post-media condition is not only characterized by a breakdown (at least: major reconfiguration) of mass media, but also of other media institutional setups like ‘the archive’. At the same time the Net (and all its grey and dark parts) may seem like the ultimate archive, one that at the same time doesn´t adhere to any of the rules of what an archivalist would or could accept. Not to mention all media devices and systems beyond the internet, creating archivable material of different sorts, as we speak. Given the overabundance of archiving possibilities of the present, some would hold that ‘the archive’ is confronted these days with ‘problems’ of volatility, real-time mediations or fictionalization.

We are therefore collecting and assembling acteurs and projects trying to re-imagine what the function formerly performed by ‘archives’ is, was and what enlivened patterns it can take in the future present. Everything between deliberate non-archivable practices to the never achievable reconstruction of the ‘cultural archive’ is of interest.

//

Also, don’t forget Mangos with Chili!

April 20-21, Toronto
Mangos with Chili 

http://www.makeshiftmag.com/

Make/shift magazine creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art. Made by an editorial collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives, make/shift embraces the multiple and shifting identities of feminist communities. We know there’s exciting work being done in various spaces and forms by people seriously and playfully resisting and creating alternatives to systematic oppression. Make/shift exists to represent, participate in, critique, provoke, and inspire more of that good work.

I am beside myself with excitement about these events and so honored to be performing with Mangos with Chili again! I hope you can make it!

http://engenderingresistance.noblogs.org/

Featuring performances by:

Micha Cárdenas
Juba Kalamka
Natro
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins
Manish Vaidya
Ms. Cherry Galette

200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1

Mangos With Chili
Sunday, April 21, and Monday April 22, 2013, Toronto, ON

Mangos With Chili the floating cabaret of two spirit, trans and queer people of color bliss, dreams, sweat, sweets & nightmares

Come to a breathtaking evening of healing and transformative performance by and for two spirit, trans and queer people of color!

After six years, Mangos With Chili returns to Toronto, for two nights of performance, presenting amazing work in theater, performance art, dance, hip hop, burlesque, and spoken word. Don’t miss this life changing night of healing, transformation, testimony, and booty.

**2 Nights, 2 Performances, 2 different locations**

$20-$10 dollars, sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds (WE REALLY MEAN IT!!!)

Sunday, April 21 – 8PM – The Tranzac Club 292 Brunswick Avenue (19+, accessible, open bar, and the fabulous Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Birthday!)

Monday, April 22 – 8PM – The Palmerston Library 560 Palmerston Ave (All ages welcome, childcare available, accessible)

We acknowledge that this event takes place on stolen, unceded and occupied Mississauga of New Credit/ Three Fires Conspiracy Indigenous land and acknowledge that settlers benefit from occupying Indigneous land.

We will have ASL translation, details in next couple days!

Featuring performance by:
Micha Cardenas
Juba Kalamka
Natro
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins
Manish Vaidya
Ms. Cherry Galette

Access info about venues:
In order that beloved community members and performers living with chemical injury can attend, please come fragrance free. Good information about how to do this is here:

http://www.brownstargirl.org/1/post/2012/03/fragrance-free-femme-of-colour-realness-draft-15.html.

Leaving off cologne, perfume and essential oils for the evening is a great place to start.

ASL is still being finalized, but we have the intention of providing ASL at both shows

About Mangos With Chili

Mangos With Chili is a nationally touring, Bay Area based arts incubator committed to showcasing high quality performance of life saving importance by queer and trans artists of color to audiences in the Bay Area and beyond. Our goal is to produce multi-genre performances reflecting the lives and stories of two spirit, queer and trans people of color (TSQTPOC) and speaking out in resistance to the daily struggles around silence, isolation, homophobia and violence that TSQTPOC face. Mangos With Chili’s multi-genre productions present work in the disciplines of dance, theater, vaudeville, hip-hop, circus arts, music, spoken word and film.

More than a performance incubator, we are also a ritual space for two spirit, queer and trans communities of color to come together in love, conversation and transformation. Our goal is to present high quality performance art by TSQTPOC, but so much of our work is also about creating healing and transformative space through performances that are gathering places for community.

Mangos With Chili was founded in 2006 by Cherry Galette and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, two trailblazing artists with significant performance experience and honors to their names. Mangos With Chili began as an annual touring cabaret of queer and trans people of color performance artists, with the goal of creating a cultural institution that would build the careers and visibility of TSQTPOC artists. Since inception, Mangos With Chili has developed the work of over 125 queer artists of color, produced four national tours and created an annual season of Bay Area programming consisting of 3-4 productions that run for several consecutive nights for Bay Area audiences. In 2013 we remain North America’s only traveling TSQTPOC cabaret, and have a strong legacy of work on which we continue to build.

Mangos With Chili has featured at world class theaters, underground performance spaces, universities such as Brown, Oberlin, Swathmore, Amherst, Smith, Reed, American University, Georgetown, Berkeley, Mt. Holyoke, Humboldt State University, UT Austin, and many, many more. We have received positive media coverage from the SF Bay Guardian, the SF Chronicle, The SF Appeal, Bitch, Feminist Review, Hip Mama, Aorta, and Make/Shift magazines, and weeklies and alternative press across North America.

Quotes
Press:
“Mangos with Chili is a grassroots miracle.”- Bitch magazine.

Audience:
“My favorite thing about it is that it never feels cliché. There are so many queer narratives that I’ve seen 800 times in mainstream media, and Mangos never feels like it has anything to do with that.”

“When I go to a Mangos show, all parts of myself are held, and that’s a rare state for us as queer people of color. There’s so many parts of myself that I think I close off every day depending on what space I’m in, but when I go to a Mangos show I have this opportunity to be fully held.”

“To see my people, it’s like, ‘Oh, here you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. Why didn’t you tell me sooner I could just come here and see you? Good to see everyone!’ It was a relief.”

“Church.”

I’m so so happy that I just got my author copy of Troubling the Line in the mail! I’m so honored to be in this big, gorgeous book, which TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson describe as the first anthology of its kind. My section includes pieces from Becoming Transreal and the Transborder Immigrant Tool series, as well as a statement on poetics that I wrote just for this book. I can’t wait to read this! I’m going to start right away. And I am so honored to be in a book alongside Fabian Romero, Kit Yan and Eileen Myles! Get your copy here.

Collective Sun: Spirit House, from Hemispheric Institute GSI Convergence 2012, Durham, NC

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics Graduate Student Initiative (Hemi GSI)
Convergence 2013: Experimental Collectivities: Performance Nights | October 11th-13th, 2013
Los Angeles, CA

Call for Performances

Deadline Friday, April 12th 2013

How can we imagine collectivity in the present moment, after new media, when connection is often mediated down to 140 characters, coalitions are negotiated through Facebook and embodied occupations of the streets have reinvigorated people around the world? The Convergence 2013 Curatorial Committee, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas and Dino Dinco, invite artists to propose performances within the theme and practice of “Experimental Collectivities.” We are particularly interested in exploring methods that will collectively produce and critique systems of knowledge/power.

The 2nd Hemi GSI Convergence will be an exploratory space of lateral collaboration and alternative pedagogy among scholars, artists and activists from throughout the Americas. Convergence 2013 will be jointly hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC) on October 11–13, 2013. Hemi GSI will also plan an optional pre-Convergence hosted by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla and Tijuana on October 10th, 2013.

The performance nights at Convergence 2013 will take place on and off campus, in collaboration with local art galleries and can include performances in public space. The exact venues are still being determined.

Possible themes to be adressed include:

Visualizing Cultural Circuits

Tangible and Corporeal Imperialisms

Querying Queerness

Mediatized Cultures and Virtual Communities

Decolonial Feminism

Tourism, Reception and the Ethics of Visiting

Indigeneity, Memory and Praxis

Ecocriticism and the Non-human

Rethinking Textuality

Queer Technologies

Trans/realities

Artists in the Southern California and Northern Baja California regions are encouraged to apply, as the possibility of travel funds is limited.

To apply, please:

1) email a copy of your CV and short bio (200 words) with the Subject: Proposal for Hemi GSI Performance Nights

2) Email a paragraph describing your proposed performance (250-500 words).

3) Describe your technical needs such as projectors, sound, amount of space, lighting, network access, etc.

4) All materials should go to: hemigsi@gmail.com

*Please look for a Call for General Convergence Participation soon*

Local Autonomy Networks :: Los Angeles with Gender Justice LA

March 8, 2013

USC School of Cinematic Arts Gallery, SCA 120
6:30-9:30pm

6:30-8:30pm Workshop using Theater of the Oppressed
8:30-9pm Opening reception
9-9:30pm Performance

Exhibition hours
Sat-sun 3/9-3/10, 12-4pm
Mon-Thurs, 3/11-3/14, 11am-7pm

“The colonial world is a compartmentalized world… The colonized world is divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations… In capitalist societies, education… those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of agents of law and order.”

“The [government] agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.”

- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

On March 8, 2013, Local Autonomy Networks, a project started by Micha Cárdenas, will be joining with Gender Justice LA’s Theater of the Oppressed Group to host a workshop and performance about the militarization of college campuses and community-based responses to violence. Starting with the question, “Does this look like safety to you?”, the two-hour workshop will respond to the recent policy at the University of Southern California to set up mini borders, complete with metal expanding fences and computer-aided checkpoints, at all of the school’s entrances at night. These checkpoints, reminiscent of both the US/Mexico border and the Israel/Palestine border, reinforce a militarized mindset that contradicts USC’s image of integration with the surrounding community. ID checks such as these only serve to make transgender people and undocumented people unsafe, effectively excluding them from the community. Join us for a two-hour workshop that will culminate in a performance just outside one of the checkpoints where we will use Theater of the Oppressed to embody what safety looks like to our community of genderqueer and transgender people of color and allies.

More about Local Autonomy Networks / Autonets:

Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is an artivist project focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The networks are both online and offline, including handmade wearable electronic fashion and face to face agreements between people. The networks are being established through a series of workshops, performances, presentations and discussions at art, activist and academic venues in the Americas and Europe. The project was started by Micha Cárdenas but is rapidly expanding into an ecology of networks involving many artists, hackers and activists.Autonets includes a line of mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The Autonets garments, when activated, will alert everyone in range of the the local mesh network who is wearing another autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s direction and distance.

These technologies are being developed through workshops and collective design processes, inspired by existing networks of horizontal knowledge production in queer, transgender, survivors of gender violence and diasporic communities. We are currently in collaboration with groups wanting to use Autonets to reduce violence against genderqueer and trans people of color in LA, prevent disappearances in Bogotá, Colombia, help provide safety for sex workers in Toronto and facilitate queer youth of color to avoid violence in Detroit. Autonets is fashion hacking for social reorganization, recoding the meaning of fashion symbols such as hoodies that have associations ranging from Trayvon Martin to the Black Bloc, or femme fashion elements like dresses and bracelets, into symbols of connectivity and autonomy.

http://autonets.org

More about GJLA:

Gender Justice LA is building a strong grassroots multi-racial coalition of transgender people and allies to advocate for our rights, win concrete improvements in our lives, and challenge oppression.

Are you ready to help us transform Los Angeles?

http://www.gjla.org/