Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Structural Patterns

Reflections on Art, Technology and Society

“The Un-accounted Body in Performance” by Laura V. Sandez

without comments

Scholar and writer recently published an essay titled “The Un-accounted Body in Performance: Who is the Subject of the Rights of the Illegal Alien?” in the current publication of the academic journal LLJournal in which she discusses the art projects VOTEMOS.US and Design for the Alien Within.

Following brief abstracts of the two projets, Sandez opens the essay with the following paragraph:

Both Votemos.us and Design for the Alien Within imagine treating the illegal alien as if he/she matters; Votemos.us considers their political substance through hypothetical voting rights, and Design for the Alien Within considers their safety. It is not my intent to provide an in-depth analysis of either Votemus.us or Design for the Alien Within, but to trace the specific phenomenon of the unaccounted body as it is articulated in each project2. These artistic interventions, which have the unaccounted body as their subject/theme, present a space that has yet to reach their subject—whether as audience or as a catalyst for a better life making their situation better—and the hypothetical situations they evoke. Giving voting rights to undocumented people could not occur when their civic being has not yet been accounted for, and designing furniture for the hiding of bodies cannot be functional if people do not feel a real need to hide undocumented immigrants.

Read the entire essay on the current volume of the LLJournal, Vol5, No 2

Written by ricardo

March 4th, 2011 at 7:50 am