Emilio Rojas performances

The Emilio Rojas drawing

The multidisciplinary artist will present “A Vague and Undetermined Place (a Gloria) (2019)” noon-1 p.m. Wednesday and “A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father (2015–ongoing)” 4-5 p.m. Friday in Skillman Library

These performances will be held in conjunction with the activation of Jason De León’s work Hostile Terrain and are part of the larger survey, Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body, on view at the Grossman Gallery, Williams Visual Arts Building, through Saturday.

Rojas works primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver.

“As a queer Latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and an anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.”