Performance documentation from Pocahontas Revised by Tesora Garcia. Courtesy the artist.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
In this participatory performance and engagement, artists Tesora Garcia and Zacarías González come together to build an evening that questions our physical and spiritual nourishment inside of extractive, colonial systems. How does the process of communing in physical space allow us to envision new systems through curiosity and empathy towards each other? How can we plant the seeds within ourselves to imagine differently? As artists who hold embodied and nuanced relationships to health and wellness through the experiences of transness and/or living with HIV, Garcia and Gonzáles will prompt us to examine our collective power and potential. Tesora Garcia will lead a ceremony utilizing various insects placed in jars from which we will absorb "energy food" for purposes of healing and self-transformation. After the performance ceremony concludes, we will share a communal food moment led by Zacarías González that reflects on food sovereignty and its denial to communities deemed as other. Together, the artists will provide a meditative and intentional space for collective healing and exploration.
This event is organized by Center for Performance Research and Blake Paskal, Programs Director of Visual AIDS, an organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV-positive artists, and preserving legacies during the ongoing AIDS epidemic.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tesora Garcia (she/her) is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator whose work investigates how structural violence patterns bodies, dreams, and belief systems. Drawing from migration politics, queer theory, and non-Western esoterica, her projects prototype alternative ways of sensing, belonging, and being.
Garcia has worked with lens-based media for more than a decade, spanning analog film, digital cinema, performance, and experimental video. Her recent projects, including Pocahontas Revised and Collagen Cult, have been exhibited nationally across the U.S. Her work often merges performance and moving image with ritual poetics, situating marginalized bodies as conduits of resilience and prophecy. As an HIV-positive Indigenous trans woman, Garcia approaches artmaking as a practice of survival and revelation.
She is currently Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Zacarías González is a transdisciplinary artist in NYC whose participatory practice uses food as a container for collective inquiry, collaborative authorship, and the building of networks of care. Working at the intersection of documentary, participatory art, and pedagogical resistance, González creates conditions for gathering and relationality that emerge through shared space, communal eating, and learning together. Through their ongoing project "Carry," González uses deployable mobile structures—kitchen carts and garden carts designed in collaboration for public space activation. These objects function as tools, sites of pedagogy, and performance, becoming part of the work itself rather than merely supporting it. By extending communal practice into public spaces, the work resists permanence while building resilient networks of care and imagination.
Their work focuses on long-term projects: 吃了吗 | Have you eaten? with migrant sex workers; "The Future of Food" with Creative Time; EARTH LIFE at the Institute for Public Architecture; and Auxilio Space, a community-based food center supporting queer, Black, trans, and Indigenous communities and individuals living with HIV/AIDS. Work has been supported by Creative Time, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, MoMA PS1, Pioneer Works, and Socrates Sculpture Park. They are a Visiting Lecturer at SVA and The New School.