The Formaldehyde Trip by Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Under the title Fantastic Wednesday the PhD in Practice Program opens its doors to the Academy, friends, and other interested people. One of the candidates shares their work with a larger audience and receives feedback through friendly conversation over drinks and nibbles.
About the Project
The Formaldehyde Trip (2017) is a speculative fiction comprising a cycle of songs and videos dedicated to murdered Mixtec activist Bety Cariño. By deploying Mesoamerican cosmologies and decolonial feminist perspectives, crafty and ornate props and stages, echoes from Mexican B-side Sci-Fi films from the 60s and 70s, sounds and voices from the past lurking into the future, and lyrics addressing women’s struggles against the dispossession of their lands, bodies and cultures, The Formaldehyde Trip imagines Bety Cariño’s journey to the underworld, where she finds women warriors, witches and widows, both-sexed deities and animals preparing her re-birth party.
About the Artist
Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a visual artist based in Mexico City, currently living and working between Mexico City, Vienna and Berlin. Her work addresses initiatives related to the creation of counter-worlds in neo-colonial settings. Through masquerade lenses she crafts fabulations populated with utopian projects, fantasies and crises of beliefs. Rincón Gallardo integrates her interests in music, humor, theater games, D.Y.I. aesthetics, decolonial feminisms, queer of color critique and radical education into her work.