Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen by artist, scholar, and educator Javier Cardona Otero is a public performative pedagogy and art installation. Situated as an autoethnographic performance where the biographical, historical and ideological are localized in and on and around an opaque body, Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen, with its multimodal actions, dismembers and re-members, disorganizes and reorganizes, dislocates and locates social practices and discourses.
Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen is a 60-minute-long (without Q&A) translingual performance art piece crafted by Javier Cardona Otero in 2018. The geography of this performance art piece is circumscribed around and on a long wooden desk/table in which the performer’s body-self becomes a receptacle of and for emerging narratives. Thus, as a sociocultural artifact and responsive tool, this (human) body becomes a unified place and space to, as a decolonial and antiracist tactic, reunite diverse people to disrupt capitalist imaginaries of Black and Caribbean Otherness as commodities for marketable consumption. A Q&A will follow the performance.
This critical taxonomy to be experienced demystifies imaginaries and creates new myths about a Black and queer body that, while being monitored and studied by its spect-actors, it observes and studies as well. Since an enlightened taxonomy has been a Eurocentric enactment through which notions of race, gender, class and even education have been constructed, this embodied pedagogy for the present and future intersects various languages to (co)operate with its audience to problematize learned habits of classifying, hierarchizing, standardizing, categorizing and naming minoritized subjects and their practices.
Javier Cardona Otero is an interdisciplinary artist, critical educator and facilitator of arts experiences as education. His artistic and pedagogical scholarship, presented throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States, seeks to investigate sociocultural capitals, particularly concerning matters of identity politics, race, gender, class and the environment. As a teaching-artist specialist in using the arts as an aesthetic form and a dialogical medium, Javier inquires on art-making as research and an embodied pedagogy to rehearse. Javier is a Curriculum and Instruction PhD candidate in the Arts Education Program at Indiana University’s School of Education, Bloomington.
This event is free and open to the public. In-Kind space sponsorship provided by TDAI. Hosted by the Abolitionist Epistemologies working group and the Humanities Institute.
