Luminous Intensity: Growing Up with Fire and Dancing in the Springs Performance by Emilio Rojas

This performative tour of Félix Candela’s Concrete Shells: An Engineered Architecture for México and Chicago considers what it meant to grow up surrounded by Candela’s architecture as a child and adolescent in Mexico City. In collaboration with his mother, Emilio Rojas goes back three generations to remember specific personal and political events that took place in Candela’s Concrete Shells including baptisms, weddings, daily rituals, the 1968 Olympics, student protests and falling in love. The performance questions the relationship between memory and architecture, the ways not only our bodies but our biographies become intrinsically connected to the structures we inhabit and the affective nature of the poetics of space. The event is free and open to all.

Emilio Rojas was born in Mexico City, (ca.1985) he is a multidisciplinary artist, working primarily in performance, using, film, video, photography,installation, public interventions and sculpture. His works have been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. He has attended numerous residencies including the Banff Centre, Elsewhere Museum, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Botin Foundation, Hammock Residency, and Pirate Camp: Stateless Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Besides his artistic practice, Emilio is also a yoga teacher, translator, community activist and anti- oppression facilitator with Migrant and Queer Youth. His work is represented by Jose de la Fuente in Santander, Spain. Rojas has a MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, and a BFA from Emily Carr University, in Film Video and Integrated Media.