Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is an interdisciplinary artist and a cultural historian.
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda will reflect on more than two decades of living between Vancouver and Guadalajara, and on working with artists, scholars and students in the Critical Media Art Studio at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology to examine the ideas and experiences that shaped the video Diasporic Worldings, currently showing on the Urban Screen.
Gabriela is an interdisciplinary artist and a cultural historian. Her work explores the female body as a site and an archive of cultural, gendered and techno-scientific expressions through academic publications and multimedia installations. She leads the critical media art studio at the School of Interactive Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University, where she is an Associate Professor.
Diasporic Worldings is an experimental video that explores the experiences of people in the diaspora as they form and imagine relationships with land, place, territories and ecosystems. It uses the term “diasporic” as an adjective to describe those who belong to a diaspora due to either forced or voluntary migration, and “worlding” as a creative process where “worlds” develop through ongoing engagement and interconnections with humans and more-than-humans.
Inspired by Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s distinction between archipelagic thinking as fragmentary and intuitive, and continental thinking as all-encompassing and systematic, and Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s use of frottage drawing as a mnemonic technique to recover an embodied connection to place, the video features actions performed on camera and images involving different approaches to map-making.
It will be on view on the Urban Screen until February 19.