Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

I have deployed my research/creation around mestizo identity within the framework of artistic residences, in a sway between practice and theory. The encounter with the thought of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and the study of referential works created by choreographers in the region, marked the perspective of this search. This is the story of a path and its findings: new challenges and questions for creation.

Conversation between the editors of this edition, Gabriela Ponce and Marcela Correa, the general editor of post(s), Anamaría Garzón, and Genoveva Mora, director of El Apuntador. Link is a reflection on the themes discussed in this issue of the magazine. 

In this article, I revisit an archive of interviews to dance practitioners in Quito-Ecuador between 2013 and 2014. During the interviews, the dancers were asked to talk about their own artistic trajectories, and about ways in which they would name and categorize their own work. They were also asked to give a definition of contemporary dance in their own words. When this question came up, a good number of the interviewees were unsure and doubtful, filling the live interview with gaps and silences. Sometimes their definitions became puzzling, especially when prompted to give categorical definitions. Though initially it seemed like there was a difficulty on the side of the interviewees to account for their own practice, I have come to realize that the doubtfulness and gaps were actually functioning as symptoms. The slits in the narrations of the dancers came to account for the particular way in which the encounter between two histories has taken place: a concert dance history that circulates more or less globally and a local dance history. On the one hand, we have that this relationship is clearly asymmetric in terms of visibility, and on the other, that the assimilation of local practices to those Western canons seems to conceal different memory paths around their dance practices as well as other ways of talking about them.

This article questions the ways in which Ecuadorian dance, or our dance, is generally understood. It tackles the question avoiding the notion of a natio- nal identity. Thus, it builds upon alternative understandings of territory, cultural formations and filiations and it draws a moving landscape that refuses to be contained within pre-established borders. The aim is to apprehend the dances made in Ecuador as the product of the crossing of different historicities and bodies that, in their complex relationality, cannot be understood as either endemic or foreign. The particularity and the value of the dances produced in this part of the world can be found therefore on the specificity of these crossings. This articles seeks to understand dance creations through a study of their historical particularities, which sets them in relation to other dances, rather than trying to relate them to a (national) identity that would set them apart from that which is considered different.

To describe the activity of the artist, the notion of "creation" is often used. In the performing arts for instance, one will speak about  "stage creation"; and often this "creation" will be thought of as taking place "in front of the audience". But nothing ensures that it is really what happens. At least it is worth launching a double interrogation. On the one hand: to produce an art work, does the artist work with what did not exist before? On the other hand: does what occurs with the art work occur "in front" or "with" the audience?

Based on the case study of the play Esas asesinas asesinas, a free adaptation of the story by Roberto Bolaño, created by the Colectivo Mitómana performing arts in Quito in 2014, we wonder how, the objectual presences can become an axis of displacement in hierarchical relationships within the scene and with the public. We will analyze the importance of the place as a condition of the objectual appearance, we will insist on the need to establish a creative treatment marked by the delicacy and the recognition of the mutual affectation between the subject-actor and the object; and we will end by showing that in the displacement of the everyday to the sinister we can open the material world towards multiple possibilities of existence and interpretation.

This text explores the scenic dimension of a group based in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that works in sound improvisation in the expanded field. The experience is analyzed around the trajectory of its creator: Manuel Larrea, an experi- mental musician with a deep interest in the live scene. This essay presents the work of Manuel Larrea, but focuses on the project Culebra Cascabel, in order to challenge notions such as live dramaturgy, listening, community, repre- sentation, presentation, etc. This, because this group includes the body complexity involved in the act of creating sound improvisation, and also shows how various agencies can participate in the production of the scenic event.

In November 2017, I premiered the work-installation-documentary We searche in the silence of things at Casa Mitómana (Quito), as the closure of an artistic residency guided by Shaday Larios and Jomi Oligor, from the group Oligor y Microscopia. The work explores the poetics of objects found in Bahía de Caráquez after the catastrophic earthquake of April 16, 2016, in relation to the city's own, family and collective memory. With the remains of lost houses and stories of forced displacement due to the infeasibility of the old inhabited place, this piece faces how to build from what remains and what was, how to remember from the cracks, how matter and memory are transformed and resignify themselves. In the work, a habitable memory space is built and inhabited by family stories and reflections on vulnerability, memory, loss and resilience. It is an invitation to look at the moment in which everything is transformed.

Interview conducted by Gabriela Ponce to the members of Teatro Ojo. This group was formed in Mexico in 2002. Their work generates displacements of conventional theatrical forms and opens new ways to conceive the scene. In this interview, they analyze their work and talk about the concerns that surround their projects.

Digital activism and data analytics applied to the US Presidential elections of 2008, 2012 and 2016 helped consolidate “computational campaign management” as a strategic resource that implied a change of paradigm in our understanding of political communication during electoral campaigns. The use of the same tools and practices of political and electoral mobilization in the Spanish 2015 and 2016 elections proves that online campaigns are also becoming increasingly important in other less technologically developed democracies. The main changes brought about by the new paradigm are as follows. Firstly, the micro-segmentation and geo-localization of voters into very specific sectors that are then targeted messages tailored to their profiles. Secondly, the decisive role played by party supporters as intermediaries between parties and other voters, using their influence online. Moreover, the use of social media by political groups in order to generate an attractive discourse that will bypass those of otherwise hegemonic mass media. Among these significant transformations we can also identify technological forms of lobbying in small groups and primitive communities which somewhat mirror 19th century practices, while using 21st century technology.