Dalida María Benfield - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Dr. Dalida María Benfield is an artist and scholar who theorizes decolonial media and aesthetics. She is the co-founder and Research and Program Director of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research. Her work addresses questions of decoloniality, technology, and feminisms as they intersect with contemporary artistic, cinematic, digital media, and pedagogical practices. Her work also includes arts-based research through film, video art, installations, and social practice, including an ongoing project of films, installations, and texts that engage the semiotic decolonization of the Panama Canal. As an organizer and curator, she co-constructs collective and alternative spaces for cultural production and commoning - "temporary autonomous zones" (Hakim Bey) - independent arts activist organizations and flexible, open digital platforms. She is the co-founder, with Annie Fukushima, Alanna Lockward, and others, of the independent research platform the Institute of (Im)Possible Subjects, which has engaged in exhibitions, symposia, and publications, focused on migration from a transnational decolonial feminist perspective, since 2013. This includes an international series of workshops, exhibitions, and publications, "Migratory Times," (2016-2018) which culminated with an exhibition and symposium, as the Biennial of the SALASAB, Bogotá, Colombia (2018) and continues at migratorytimes.net. She was a member of the Transnational Decolonial Institute and co-author of the Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto (2011), which received international attention and multiple republications. She was also the co-founder, with Christopher Bratton and others, of Video Machete, an intergenerational youth-focused media activist collective that worked across multiple platforms of media production, arts-based research, critical pedagogy, and community organizing in Chicago, Illinois, US, 1994-2007, with major funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute. Amongst other collective projects, she was also a founding member of the Escuela Popular Norteña, a popular education project co-founded by María C. Lugones and Geoff Bryce in 1990; the Latino Midwest Video Collective, co-founded with Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet; and the Women's International Information Project, co-founded with Salome Chasnoff. Her films and installations, and curated exhibitions and projects, often produced collectively, are exhibited internationally and discussed in multiple scholarly and popular texts.
After academic appointments at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University (2011-2015); and the Vermont College of Fine Arts (2012-2020), she co-founded the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR) with Christopher Bratton and Mary Ellen Strom. It is a trans-local, non-profit center that carries out transdisciplinary research projects, fellowships, residencies, workshops, and publications (2017-present). The work of CAD+SR's international community has resulted in numerous exhibitions, including the São Paulo Bienniale, Istanbul Bienniale; Lubumbashi Biennial; Venice Biennial; and Da'kart, and scholarly and popular articles, essays, and books.
Her Ph.D. is in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of California-Berkeley (2011); and her M.F.A. in Film and Video is from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1989). Benfield lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts, US, and Helsinki, Finland, with familial and affective ties to Chiriquí, Panamá and the global Latinx, Black, Asian and Indigenous diasporic communities of Abya Yala.
Supervisors: Trinh T. Minh-ha
less
Uploads
Papers by Dalida María Benfield
Routledge, Mar 8, 2022
There is an urgent need to build affectively rich virtual environments for creative collaboration... more There is an urgent need to build affectively rich virtual environments for creative collaboration between international and culturally diverse communities of researchers using arts-based methods. The COVID-19 pandemic shone a bright light on an already existing gap in platforms for individual artists, researchers, and global arts research communities wanting to exchange and build new knowledge toward social justice through effective virtual spaces beyond video conferencing. This chapter will reflect on one such experiment: an iterative, experimental virtual reality space for knowledge exchange and collaboration between global artists, designers, and transdisciplinary researchers of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR). The space was co-designed with M Eifler and Evelyn Eastmond (Microsoft), as well as a focus group of CAD+SR Research Fellows. In July 2020, the authors led this process of creating a remote-spatial collaboration space in Mozilla Hubs for the group’s virtual research residency. This chapter shares their reflections and frames the first-person responses of the collaborating artists and researchers who co-created and engaged the space. Collaborators produced multiple forms of virtual reality exhibitions and exchanges, and the space activated a significant sense of affective connection, despite considerable differences in technology literacy, hardware, and internet or cellular data access.
Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces ... more Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South." This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the rearrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a politics as intertwined. Even more importantly, it provided the possibility of practicing film and politics with an equally integral poetics. This poetics, furthermore, was a poetics imbued with a distinctive voice, one that was fearless and forthright. This is the opening scene for this dissertation: The opening of this book. My first acknowledgement, then, must go to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose scholarship and artwork remain enormously generative achievements, always producing further affirmations and criticalities. If this dissertation marks a return to this book, it is only because many people have made this time-space travel possible. The writing of a dissertation, as many have observed before me, is a collective project. First and foremost, the voices I would like to acknowledge belong to those of my dissertation committee. My dissertation chair, Trinh T. Minh-ha, is a mentor, teacher, and colleague who consistently opens pathways of passionate, transformative scholarship, for myself and many, many others. Minh-ha's friendship and hospitality, rigorous scholarship and poetics, breadth and depth of knowledge across the disciplines, and keen critique combined with kind generosity, have made this project possible. Her books and films form a constellation of visionary openings. Laura E. Pérez opened the initial door to the University of California-Berkeley and has kept opening doors ever since. Her work on spirituality and transformation come from rich insights drawn from life, of which she is never afraid. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has a voice that enables a wide and deep imaginary of liberation. His dislocating of modernity and unleashing of being also creates a condition that makes this work possible. Deniz Göktürk is a fearless and precise critic, the best of friends for a writer. Her engaged transnational scholarship is also a model for this work, as well as her humor, commitment to interdisciplinarity, and productive skepticism. My department at the University of California-Berkeley, the staff and faculty of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, are committed advocates for the assertion of other worlds of sense and new forms of rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship. In addition, the staff and faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women's Studies have been generous, providing me with another supportive location at which to think and work. Beyond these companions, there have been important conversations in seminars, working groups and conferences that have contributed to the production of this work. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the members of the Visuality and Alterity Working Group (2005-2008), including Lindsay Benedict, Laura Fantone, and Annie Fukushima, whose work established a set of terms that enriched the thinking done here. The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC-Berkeley provided a wonderful home for that group. I have listened, over the years, to other voices, which have been constantly in the background: Those of my family. I thus acknowledge the contribution of my children, Isadora and Joaquin Bratton-Benfield. Their voices provide the soundtrack of my life, and is, in fact, a sound that infuses it with sheer pleasure. My partner, Christopher Alan Bratton, is a trusted interlocutor and creative collaborator whose spirit infuses this project. My parents, Dalida Quijada Benfield and Marion W. Benfield, Jr. are loving and generous, and have been important examples for me of risk-taking and fearless living.
Comunicacion Y Sociedad, 2021
ARTMargins (2021) 10 (2): 93–104, MIT Press. , 2021
_rt Movement(s) is an arts research project intended as a text object that materially represents ... more _rt Movement(s) is an arts research project intended as a text object that materially represents the complex, relational articulation of art and history with particular emphases on the contingent relationships made by movements of different kinds: geographical migration of artists, displacement of art objects, performances, institutions/festivals, and theories/theorists. _rt Movement(s) challenges the linear developmental approach of normative art history, and its nationalist, racialized, and ethnocentric assumptions. Instead, the project argues through diverse sources, including texts, images, graphs and other visualizations for the essentially translocal and transhistorical character of works of art.
multiple publication venues, 2011
"Decolonial Aesthetics (I)", TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute, 22 May 2011; exp. as "Decolo... more "Decolonial Aesthetics (I)", TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute, 22 May 2011; exp. as "Decolonial Aesthetics (I). The Argument As Manifesto", IDEA 39, Cluj: IDEA, 2011, pp 89-97; repr. in BE.BOP 2012. Black Europe Body Politics, eds. Alanna Lockward and Walter Mignolo, Berlin: Kultursprünge im Ballhaus Naunynstraße, May 2012, pp 35-36; repr. Fuse Magazine, Toronto, 2013. Signed by Alanna Lockward, Rolando Vásquez, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Marina Gržinić, Michelle Eistrup, Tanja Ostojić, Dalída Maria Benfield, Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, Pedro Lasch, Walter MIgnolo. Access at https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
Arts Based Research in Communication and Media Studies. Special Issue, Comunicazioni Sociali. Eds. Nico Carpentier and Johanna Sumiala. , 2021
Conceived as a word/image essay, “Reasons to Kill a Poet” takes a critical look at how the term c... more Conceived as a word/image essay, “Reasons to Kill a Poet” takes a critical look at how the term creativity is being mobilized as a key concept of neoliberalism, functioning to repress forms of
oppositional creativity through structures of discursive, and embodied, policing and punishment. At the same time, counter-hegemonic creativity persists, and the essay foregrounds particular exemplary works by writers, including Chilean musician and poet Victor Jara, “Estadio Chile” (1973); US-based Black journalist, writer and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, “Teetering on the Brink: Between Life and Death” (1991); and Ugandan queer activist, researcher, and poet Stella Nyanzi, No Roses from My Mouth (2020). These writings are juxtaposed with visual images to create a third space between word and image, and elicit historical resonances on such questions as: how are their creativities conceived, posited and enacted as anti-neo-liberal formations? What threat does their work pose to the forms of authoritarian impunity that characterize the neo-liberal present? What is the relationship between social critique and arts research?
Journal of Disruptive Media , 2017
This contribution documents the generative method we used to create a two-day public workshop on ... more This contribution documents the generative method we used to create a two-day public workshop on archiving digital memory, which occurred in April 2016 at the Counterplay Festival in Aarhus. Our group members, collectively known as the Futuremaking group created two distinct experiences. The “Help Desk of the Future” was created as a means of acting out how unhelpful many helpdesks actually are and to imagine how algorithms may be positioning our futures for us. The Museum of Random Memory functioned as a pop-up curatorial event where participants could offer up memories, experiences, and objects that they wished to “forget,” which was subsequently documented by the museum.
We asked each member of the Futuremaking group to share their experiences of the Help Desk and Museum, and posed the question “What is your recollection of our futuremaking?”
Access at https://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk/creating-future-memories/
Original Project Archive:
http://museumofrandommemory.com
http://futuremaking.space/workshop
"Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization: Introductory Notes." Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, Volume 3, Dossier 1: Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization. Guest Editor: Dalida María Benfield. , 2009
This is my introductory essay to the dossier, Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization, th... more This is my introductory essay to the dossier, Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization, that I guest edited for the Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise series published by the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, edited by Walter Mignolo, 2009. Access at https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-digital-1.
Moscow Art Magazine #96, 2016
Two of the world's most important resources for sustaining human life, water and information, are... more Two of the world's most important resources for sustaining human life, water and information, are in similar conditions of imposed scarcity, a result of neoliberal economic imperatives of privatization and efficiency. The metaphor of "global flows" of information is ubiquitous. But does information really flow freely, globally? Or is it dammed, enclosed, and rerouted in unequal flows to people? Like water?
Social Text/Periscope: The Decolonial Aesthesis Dossier, Ed. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, 2013
The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, creates a borderland of North and South. The nation of Panam... more The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, creates a borderland of North and South. The nation of Panamá was invented by it, a consequence of centuries of Spanish occupation and US imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The canal initiated a series of migrations and dislocations, including those of thousands of Afro-Caribbeans who came to Panamá to excavate and build. Its construction produced a public spectacle of empire —photography, cinema, journalistic accounts — punctuated by the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco that celebrated its completion. The US occupied the Canal Zone, a 553-square-mile strip of land including and on either side of the canal, from 1903 to 1979, and the School of the Americas was founded in 1946. Looking at this dense site of coloniality, the decolonial aesthetic project of this essay is to evoke and elaborate an ancestrality, a form of decolonial thought, the “lived philosophies and collective memories that constantly reconstruct historical, cultural, and spiritual ties and energies and rearticulate feelings of belonging within everyday life” (Walsh 2005, 14). In conversation with the work of the artist Enrique Castro Ríos, my own video art, and a tracing of the canal’s digital archive, I build from the canal’s waters, with its transparencies and opacities, towards a polysemic ancestrality.
Décolonialité et expérience esthétique: une approximation, 2012
In this collective essay, the authors map diverse poetic and political strategies for artistic in... more In this collective essay, the authors map diverse poetic and political strategies for artistic inquiry, arts based research, cultural production, and social interventions in relation to decolonial aesthetics.
Published online at civilsocietyproject.info, as a supplement to the CUE Art Foundation exhibition catalogue, "Michelle Dizon," curated by Mary Kelly, 2010. Access exhibition website at https://cueartfoundation.org/michelle-dizon. , 2010
The film, Handsworth Songs (1986), by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective tells us:... more The film, Handsworth Songs (1986), by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective tells us:
“…there are no stories in the riots…only the ghosts of other stories.”
I ask: How shall we tell of ourselves, us ghosts, ghosts of other stories? Ghosts with no stories to tell?
María Lugones writes:
“As Women of Color, we cannot stand on any ground that is not also a crossing” (2006, 98).
I ask: Is this crossing not also a crossing of dimensions, across time-spaces? How do we tell of these journeys?
Descriptions of spectral landscapes often sound like quaint travelogues.
I want to tell you how a real ghost lives.
Books by Dalida María Benfield
The early promise of computing has been fulfilled mostly in the interest of more powerful and pri... more The early promise of computing has been fulfilled mostly in the interest of more powerful and privileged groups. Thus our work, as critical researchers, artists, and activists, is to build alternatives together.
The essays in this volume serve as a contribution to that change, discussing issues such as Ubuntu's relational personhood, community-centered policy, algorithmic work, and deepfakes.
The book is edited by Dalida María Benfield, Bruno Moreschi, Gabriel Pereira, and Katherine Ye, with contributions from Katherine Ye, Sabelo Mhlambi, Dalida María Benfield, Rodrigo Ochigame, Rafael Grohmann, GAIA (Bruno Moreschi, Guilherme Falcão, & Bernardo Fontes), Amanda Chevtchouk Jurno, Giselle Beiguelman, Gabriel Pereira, Didiana Prata, Jennifer Lee, Taís Oliveira, Silvana Bahia, and Sylvain Souklaye. Access online at https://book.affecting-technologies.org/; purchase print copy at https://shop.centerartsdesign.org/product/atmi-printed-book.
Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now, 2011
Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces o... more Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside “Third World” struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the “Third World” and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the “Third World” and the present context of cinematic praxis of the “Global South.”
Tiempos Migratorios, 2020
Tiempos Migratorios [Migratory Times] is a catalogue of a co-curated exhibition for the Salasab B... more Tiempos Migratorios [Migratory Times] is a catalogue of a co-curated exhibition for the Salasab Biennial, 2017, Bogotá, Colombia. The project is the culmination of a two year traveling exhibition, art education, and social intervention series, Migratory Times, co-organized with Dr. Annie Fukushima, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), 2016-2018.
Tiempos Migratorios, 2020
La Bienal ASAB es una muestra expositiva que se realiza desde el año 2003 en el recinto de la Sal... more La Bienal ASAB es una muestra expositiva que se realiza desde el año
2003 en el recinto de la Sala de Exposiciones ASAB. Es un evento
artístico que se propone localizar y documentar los más recientes
debates del arte contemporáneo, su relación con los contextos
locales y sus repercusiones en las realidades globales.
Esta octava versión de la Bienal se realiza en conjunto con el Proyecto
Tiempos Migratorios, propuesto por el Instituto de sujetos
(Im)posibles, dirigido por Dalida María Benfield. Esta colaboración ha
sido posible por la complementariedad de los objetivos de la bienal
con los del mencionado proyecto. En este sentido, es evidente la
necesidad que tenemos hoy de comprender el contexto histórico y
el presente actual de los flujos múltiples de la cultura, los objetos
y las ideologías que atraviesan los países del Norte y del Sur global.
Así mismo, es importante indagar por las dimensiones de género,
raza, nacionalidad o clase que determinan las acciones políticas y
las formas de producción de subjetividad de los migrantes y/o desplazados.
También, la dimensión del cambio global del clima es una
presencia espectral que que se anuncia a través de “la natura” y
sus catástrofes. La des-naturalización que es necesaria para
entender la naturaleza es una de las metodologías paradójicas que
nos enfrentan.
Guest/Special Issue Editor by Dalida María Benfield
"World"-Making and "World"-Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color", 2020
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2020 A special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Stud... more Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2020
A special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Available at Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/42309
Routledge, Mar 8, 2022
There is an urgent need to build affectively rich virtual environments for creative collaboration... more There is an urgent need to build affectively rich virtual environments for creative collaboration between international and culturally diverse communities of researchers using arts-based methods. The COVID-19 pandemic shone a bright light on an already existing gap in platforms for individual artists, researchers, and global arts research communities wanting to exchange and build new knowledge toward social justice through effective virtual spaces beyond video conferencing. This chapter will reflect on one such experiment: an iterative, experimental virtual reality space for knowledge exchange and collaboration between global artists, designers, and transdisciplinary researchers of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR). The space was co-designed with M Eifler and Evelyn Eastmond (Microsoft), as well as a focus group of CAD+SR Research Fellows. In July 2020, the authors led this process of creating a remote-spatial collaboration space in Mozilla Hubs for the group’s virtual research residency. This chapter shares their reflections and frames the first-person responses of the collaborating artists and researchers who co-created and engaged the space. Collaborators produced multiple forms of virtual reality exhibitions and exchanges, and the space activated a significant sense of affective connection, despite considerable differences in technology literacy, hardware, and internet or cellular data access.
Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces ... more Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South." This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the rearrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a politics as intertwined. Even more importantly, it provided the possibility of practicing film and politics with an equally integral poetics. This poetics, furthermore, was a poetics imbued with a distinctive voice, one that was fearless and forthright. This is the opening scene for this dissertation: The opening of this book. My first acknowledgement, then, must go to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose scholarship and artwork remain enormously generative achievements, always producing further affirmations and criticalities. If this dissertation marks a return to this book, it is only because many people have made this time-space travel possible. The writing of a dissertation, as many have observed before me, is a collective project. First and foremost, the voices I would like to acknowledge belong to those of my dissertation committee. My dissertation chair, Trinh T. Minh-ha, is a mentor, teacher, and colleague who consistently opens pathways of passionate, transformative scholarship, for myself and many, many others. Minh-ha's friendship and hospitality, rigorous scholarship and poetics, breadth and depth of knowledge across the disciplines, and keen critique combined with kind generosity, have made this project possible. Her books and films form a constellation of visionary openings. Laura E. Pérez opened the initial door to the University of California-Berkeley and has kept opening doors ever since. Her work on spirituality and transformation come from rich insights drawn from life, of which she is never afraid. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has a voice that enables a wide and deep imaginary of liberation. His dislocating of modernity and unleashing of being also creates a condition that makes this work possible. Deniz Göktürk is a fearless and precise critic, the best of friends for a writer. Her engaged transnational scholarship is also a model for this work, as well as her humor, commitment to interdisciplinarity, and productive skepticism. My department at the University of California-Berkeley, the staff and faculty of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, are committed advocates for the assertion of other worlds of sense and new forms of rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship. In addition, the staff and faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women's Studies have been generous, providing me with another supportive location at which to think and work. Beyond these companions, there have been important conversations in seminars, working groups and conferences that have contributed to the production of this work. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the members of the Visuality and Alterity Working Group (2005-2008), including Lindsay Benedict, Laura Fantone, and Annie Fukushima, whose work established a set of terms that enriched the thinking done here. The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC-Berkeley provided a wonderful home for that group. I have listened, over the years, to other voices, which have been constantly in the background: Those of my family. I thus acknowledge the contribution of my children, Isadora and Joaquin Bratton-Benfield. Their voices provide the soundtrack of my life, and is, in fact, a sound that infuses it with sheer pleasure. My partner, Christopher Alan Bratton, is a trusted interlocutor and creative collaborator whose spirit infuses this project. My parents, Dalida Quijada Benfield and Marion W. Benfield, Jr. are loving and generous, and have been important examples for me of risk-taking and fearless living.
Comunicacion Y Sociedad, 2021
ARTMargins (2021) 10 (2): 93–104, MIT Press. , 2021
_rt Movement(s) is an arts research project intended as a text object that materially represents ... more _rt Movement(s) is an arts research project intended as a text object that materially represents the complex, relational articulation of art and history with particular emphases on the contingent relationships made by movements of different kinds: geographical migration of artists, displacement of art objects, performances, institutions/festivals, and theories/theorists. _rt Movement(s) challenges the linear developmental approach of normative art history, and its nationalist, racialized, and ethnocentric assumptions. Instead, the project argues through diverse sources, including texts, images, graphs and other visualizations for the essentially translocal and transhistorical character of works of art.
multiple publication venues, 2011
"Decolonial Aesthetics (I)", TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute, 22 May 2011; exp. as "Decolo... more "Decolonial Aesthetics (I)", TDI+Transnational Decolonial Institute, 22 May 2011; exp. as "Decolonial Aesthetics (I). The Argument As Manifesto", IDEA 39, Cluj: IDEA, 2011, pp 89-97; repr. in BE.BOP 2012. Black Europe Body Politics, eds. Alanna Lockward and Walter Mignolo, Berlin: Kultursprünge im Ballhaus Naunynstraße, May 2012, pp 35-36; repr. Fuse Magazine, Toronto, 2013. Signed by Alanna Lockward, Rolando Vásquez, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Marina Gržinić, Michelle Eistrup, Tanja Ostojić, Dalída Maria Benfield, Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, Pedro Lasch, Walter MIgnolo. Access at https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
Arts Based Research in Communication and Media Studies. Special Issue, Comunicazioni Sociali. Eds. Nico Carpentier and Johanna Sumiala. , 2021
Conceived as a word/image essay, “Reasons to Kill a Poet” takes a critical look at how the term c... more Conceived as a word/image essay, “Reasons to Kill a Poet” takes a critical look at how the term creativity is being mobilized as a key concept of neoliberalism, functioning to repress forms of
oppositional creativity through structures of discursive, and embodied, policing and punishment. At the same time, counter-hegemonic creativity persists, and the essay foregrounds particular exemplary works by writers, including Chilean musician and poet Victor Jara, “Estadio Chile” (1973); US-based Black journalist, writer and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, “Teetering on the Brink: Between Life and Death” (1991); and Ugandan queer activist, researcher, and poet Stella Nyanzi, No Roses from My Mouth (2020). These writings are juxtaposed with visual images to create a third space between word and image, and elicit historical resonances on such questions as: how are their creativities conceived, posited and enacted as anti-neo-liberal formations? What threat does their work pose to the forms of authoritarian impunity that characterize the neo-liberal present? What is the relationship between social critique and arts research?
Journal of Disruptive Media , 2017
This contribution documents the generative method we used to create a two-day public workshop on ... more This contribution documents the generative method we used to create a two-day public workshop on archiving digital memory, which occurred in April 2016 at the Counterplay Festival in Aarhus. Our group members, collectively known as the Futuremaking group created two distinct experiences. The “Help Desk of the Future” was created as a means of acting out how unhelpful many helpdesks actually are and to imagine how algorithms may be positioning our futures for us. The Museum of Random Memory functioned as a pop-up curatorial event where participants could offer up memories, experiences, and objects that they wished to “forget,” which was subsequently documented by the museum.
We asked each member of the Futuremaking group to share their experiences of the Help Desk and Museum, and posed the question “What is your recollection of our futuremaking?”
Access at https://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk/creating-future-memories/
Original Project Archive:
http://museumofrandommemory.com
http://futuremaking.space/workshop
"Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization: Introductory Notes." Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, Volume 3, Dossier 1: Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization. Guest Editor: Dalida María Benfield. , 2009
This is my introductory essay to the dossier, Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization, th... more This is my introductory essay to the dossier, Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonization, that I guest edited for the Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise series published by the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, edited by Walter Mignolo, 2009. Access at https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-digital-1.
Moscow Art Magazine #96, 2016
Two of the world's most important resources for sustaining human life, water and information, are... more Two of the world's most important resources for sustaining human life, water and information, are in similar conditions of imposed scarcity, a result of neoliberal economic imperatives of privatization and efficiency. The metaphor of "global flows" of information is ubiquitous. But does information really flow freely, globally? Or is it dammed, enclosed, and rerouted in unequal flows to people? Like water?
Social Text/Periscope: The Decolonial Aesthesis Dossier, Ed. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, 2013
The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, creates a borderland of North and South. The nation of Panam... more The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, creates a borderland of North and South. The nation of Panamá was invented by it, a consequence of centuries of Spanish occupation and US imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The canal initiated a series of migrations and dislocations, including those of thousands of Afro-Caribbeans who came to Panamá to excavate and build. Its construction produced a public spectacle of empire —photography, cinema, journalistic accounts — punctuated by the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco that celebrated its completion. The US occupied the Canal Zone, a 553-square-mile strip of land including and on either side of the canal, from 1903 to 1979, and the School of the Americas was founded in 1946. Looking at this dense site of coloniality, the decolonial aesthetic project of this essay is to evoke and elaborate an ancestrality, a form of decolonial thought, the “lived philosophies and collective memories that constantly reconstruct historical, cultural, and spiritual ties and energies and rearticulate feelings of belonging within everyday life” (Walsh 2005, 14). In conversation with the work of the artist Enrique Castro Ríos, my own video art, and a tracing of the canal’s digital archive, I build from the canal’s waters, with its transparencies and opacities, towards a polysemic ancestrality.
Décolonialité et expérience esthétique: une approximation, 2012
In this collective essay, the authors map diverse poetic and political strategies for artistic in... more In this collective essay, the authors map diverse poetic and political strategies for artistic inquiry, arts based research, cultural production, and social interventions in relation to decolonial aesthetics.
Published online at civilsocietyproject.info, as a supplement to the CUE Art Foundation exhibition catalogue, "Michelle Dizon," curated by Mary Kelly, 2010. Access exhibition website at https://cueartfoundation.org/michelle-dizon. , 2010
The film, Handsworth Songs (1986), by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective tells us:... more The film, Handsworth Songs (1986), by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective tells us:
“…there are no stories in the riots…only the ghosts of other stories.”
I ask: How shall we tell of ourselves, us ghosts, ghosts of other stories? Ghosts with no stories to tell?
María Lugones writes:
“As Women of Color, we cannot stand on any ground that is not also a crossing” (2006, 98).
I ask: Is this crossing not also a crossing of dimensions, across time-spaces? How do we tell of these journeys?
Descriptions of spectral landscapes often sound like quaint travelogues.
I want to tell you how a real ghost lives.
The early promise of computing has been fulfilled mostly in the interest of more powerful and pri... more The early promise of computing has been fulfilled mostly in the interest of more powerful and privileged groups. Thus our work, as critical researchers, artists, and activists, is to build alternatives together.
The essays in this volume serve as a contribution to that change, discussing issues such as Ubuntu's relational personhood, community-centered policy, algorithmic work, and deepfakes.
The book is edited by Dalida María Benfield, Bruno Moreschi, Gabriel Pereira, and Katherine Ye, with contributions from Katherine Ye, Sabelo Mhlambi, Dalida María Benfield, Rodrigo Ochigame, Rafael Grohmann, GAIA (Bruno Moreschi, Guilherme Falcão, & Bernardo Fontes), Amanda Chevtchouk Jurno, Giselle Beiguelman, Gabriel Pereira, Didiana Prata, Jennifer Lee, Taís Oliveira, Silvana Bahia, and Sylvain Souklaye. Access online at https://book.affecting-technologies.org/; purchase print copy at https://shop.centerartsdesign.org/product/atmi-printed-book.
Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now, 2011
Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces o... more Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside “Third World” struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the “Third World” and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the “Third World” and the present context of cinematic praxis of the “Global South.”
Tiempos Migratorios, 2020
Tiempos Migratorios [Migratory Times] is a catalogue of a co-curated exhibition for the Salasab B... more Tiempos Migratorios [Migratory Times] is a catalogue of a co-curated exhibition for the Salasab Biennial, 2017, Bogotá, Colombia. The project is the culmination of a two year traveling exhibition, art education, and social intervention series, Migratory Times, co-organized with Dr. Annie Fukushima, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Latipa (née Michelle Dizon), 2016-2018.
Tiempos Migratorios, 2020
La Bienal ASAB es una muestra expositiva que se realiza desde el año 2003 en el recinto de la Sal... more La Bienal ASAB es una muestra expositiva que se realiza desde el año
2003 en el recinto de la Sala de Exposiciones ASAB. Es un evento
artístico que se propone localizar y documentar los más recientes
debates del arte contemporáneo, su relación con los contextos
locales y sus repercusiones en las realidades globales.
Esta octava versión de la Bienal se realiza en conjunto con el Proyecto
Tiempos Migratorios, propuesto por el Instituto de sujetos
(Im)posibles, dirigido por Dalida María Benfield. Esta colaboración ha
sido posible por la complementariedad de los objetivos de la bienal
con los del mencionado proyecto. En este sentido, es evidente la
necesidad que tenemos hoy de comprender el contexto histórico y
el presente actual de los flujos múltiples de la cultura, los objetos
y las ideologías que atraviesan los países del Norte y del Sur global.
Así mismo, es importante indagar por las dimensiones de género,
raza, nacionalidad o clase que determinan las acciones políticas y
las formas de producción de subjetividad de los migrantes y/o desplazados.
También, la dimensión del cambio global del clima es una
presencia espectral que que se anuncia a través de “la natura” y
sus catástrofes. La des-naturalización que es necesaria para
entender la naturaleza es una de las metodologías paradójicas que
nos enfrentan.
"World"-Making and "World"-Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color", 2020
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2020 A special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Stud... more Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2020
A special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Available at Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/42309
Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, Volume 3, Dossier 1, 2009
Guest edited dossier for the Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise series, published by the Center for ... more Guest edited dossier for the Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise series, published by the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Ed. Walter Mignolo, 2009. Access at https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-digital-3.
Mapping Latina/o Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader , 2012
Historically, and across the spectrum of our differences, one of the most important self-identifi... more Historically, and across the spectrum of our differences, one of the most important self-identifications of Latina/o independent media makers has been our oppositional stance to mainstream media representations. For most Latina/o media artists, the possibility represented by independent media production has been that of counteracting what we perceive as the dominant discourses propagated by mainstream media. We have privileged the communicative, transformative possibilities of media over its profit making. Building on this potential, while als ocontending with the growth of the economic sphere of (US) Latina/o popular culture, this essay articulates a platform for Latina/o media independent media praxis as a media of mestizaje - of both plurality and political/historical specificity. The development of this praxis would facilitate the formation of an intentional community of Latina/o producers without sacrificing our complexity, while also building on our diverse cultural and political strengths as artists and activists. The essay sketches out the context in which we might begin the building of this form of Latina/o independent media community.
In Garcia, M. & Valdivia, A. N., 2012, Mapping Latina/o Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Valdivia, A. N. & Garcia, M. (eds.). New York: Peter Lang Publishing, (Intersections in Communications and Culture).
The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, Eds. Cheris Kramerae and Dale Spender. New York: Routledge. , 2001
Encyclopedia definition of Video (now quaintly outdated, but nonetheless an interesting artifact ... more Encyclopedia definition of Video (now quaintly outdated, but nonetheless an interesting artifact of feminist video, globally...).
Kramarae, C., & Spender, D. (2000). Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women's Issues and Knowledge (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203800942
Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons, 2011
Affecting Technologies, Machining Intelligences, 2021
In the current moment, there are many urgencies that frame my understanding of the state of both ... more In the current moment, there are many urgencies that frame my understanding of the state of both teaching and technics, and my approach, then, to imagining and mobilizing them. These include a recognition of the existing and emerging forms of social inequalities in which both education and technologies are situated. Most importantly, these are legacies of colonialism and the activities of the modern capitalist world-system, on local and global scales, but as we also know, we are living in a renewed moment of nationalist fascisms, undergirding discourses of difference and rationalizing a myriad of forms of inequality and worse, mass incarceration and genocide. We can understand these conditions as long historical shadows, molecular social and economic movements, and under- and over-currents of power that flow through money, governments, and transnational capital both above and below the horizon of visibility and the governable. And creating friction across these different scales, macro and molecular, of transnational capitalism, nationalisms, racisms, sexisms, queerphobia, and heteronormativity, are education and technology. It has been a continuous thread, that education and technology are levers for people to move from underdevelopment to development. Yet, both education and technology create spaces that galvanize impassioned imaginaries and desires for knowledge equality and epistemic diversity. How do we move forward with a renewed commitment, in these times, to a passionate occupation of these spaces for past and future liberation of knowledges and human potential, beyond homo-economicus, and the overrepresentation of “Man” as Sylvia Wynter writes (Wynter, 2000)?
Estéticas Decoloniales, 2011
This is my artist's statement in the Estéticas Decoloniales exhibition catalogue, curated and edi... more This is my artist's statement in the Estéticas Decoloniales exhibition catalogue, curated and edited by Walter Mignolo and Pedro Pablo Gomez Moreno, 2011. Access at https://issuu.com/paulusgo/docs/est_ticasdecoloniales_gm/70.
Estéticas y opción decolonial , 2013
This book chapter (pp 90 - 99) engages the multiple valences of the Panama Canal in relation to m... more This book chapter (pp 90 - 99) engages the multiple valences of the Panama Canal in relation to modernity/decoloniality, and cinematic and technological histories and discourses. This is the second book to emerge from the Estéticas Decoloniales exhibition and symposia in 2011, curated by Walter Mignolo and Pedro Pablo Gomez Moreno.
Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Eds. xtine burrough and Judy Walgren , 2022
There is an urgent need to build affectively rich virtual environments for creative collaboration... more There is an urgent need to build affectively rich virtual environments for creative collaboration between international and culturally diverse communities of researchers using arts-based methods. The COVID-19 pandemic shone a bright light on an already existing gap in platforms for individual artists, researchers, and global arts research communities wanting to exchange and build new knowledge toward social justice through effective virtual spaces beyond video conferencing. This chapter will reflect on one such experiment: an iterative, experimental virtual reality space for knowledge exchange and collaboration between global artists, designers, and transdisciplinary researchers of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR). The space was co-designed with M Eifler and Evelyn Eastmond (Microsoft), as well as a focus group of CAD+SR Research Fellows. In July 2020, the authors led this process of creating a remote-spatial collaboration space in Mozilla Hubs for the group’s virtual research residency. This chapter shares their reflections and frames the first-person responses of the collaborating artists and researchers who co-created and engaged the space. Collaborators produced multiple forms of virtual reality exhibitions and exchanges, and the space activated a significant sense of affective connection, despite considerable differences in technology literacy, hardware, and internet or cellular data access.
Urgent Pedagogies Issue #5: Pluriversality, 2023
With Isabelle Massu and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Dalida María Benfield engages in a roundtable... more With Isabelle Massu and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Dalida María Benfield engages in a roundtable, ”Inside/Outside/Across/Between: Crossing Thresholds, Academically and Otherwise,” regarding the perils of the practices of liberatory pedagogies in two art academies in Europe. The feminist and decolonial research, artistic practices, and pedagogies of each collide with patriarchy and entrenched colonialities.