Sara Garzón Guest Speaker

 Sara Garzón specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art, specifically focusing on issues that consist of decoloniality, temporality, and ingenious ecocriticism. Alan Poma is a sound artist who has worked on site-specific projects, and Kiyo Gutiérrez is a Mexican performance artist and Historian whose work explores issues affecting society. 

One of Poma's musical works, Dancing Across Stars, is a video depicting how the Incas, Aztecs, and Maya were able to gain astronomical knowledge from the stars to predict natural phenomena without having all of the fancy technology of telescopes and other scientific equipment. 

Gutiérrez work Afloat had the aim to show the notion of adaptability in terms of climate change, which is still a problem that we are facing today. The work was performed in an area in the Pacific Ocean where there is a lot of plastic floating around. After she cleaned the beach, she made a sort of costume using the plastic she had collected and used that for her performance. 

Garzón's argument is basically that the world is changing, and how we can adapt to those changes. The point of the project Worldmaking Practices: A Take on the Future is to show artists different interpretations on what the future could look like depending on how they see it. The point of Poma's work is to show that old astronomers were capable of predicting this future, while Gutiérrez's work seems to show the future heading into a more waste-filled planet. 

I believe that the future is nearly unpredictable. We can see where the changes are going, but anything can potentially happen. Just one natural disaster or one man-made disaster could cause drastic changes. Despite that, we can still make an attempt to form a brighter future for both ourselves and future generations to come.