"Tierra": Artist Talk and Screening with Lukas Avendaño

ARTIST TALK AND SCREENING WITH LUKAS AVENDAÑO

Join us at the Library for Arts and Culture for a special evening with interdisciplinary artist and performer Lukas Avendaño. 

Presented in both English and Spanish, this artist talk will offer an intimate look into Avendaño’s creative process, the political and personal questions that shape her work, and the role of performance as a space for memory, resistance, and collective dialogue.

The evening will feature a conversation between Lukas Avendaño and respondent/moderator Maria Regina Firmino-Castillo, and screenings of two works that exemplify the breadth of Avendaño’s practice: Tierra (directed by Fana Adjani) an experimental film exploring ecofeminism, identity, and the defense of territory across Latin America, and Utopía de Mariposa (directed by Miguel J. Crespo), a documentary portrait tracing Avendaño’s artistic journey alongside her ongoing search for her brother Bruno, who disappeared in Mexico in 2018. Together, these works illuminate the ways Avendaño uses the body, performance, and film to confront violence, question power, and imagine other possible worlds.

PARTICIPANTS

Lukas Avendaño is a performer and dancer who uses anthropology as a lens to examine sexuality, gender, and ethnicity within performance. Her work — often described as disobedient, militant, and rooted in sexual dissidence and rural folklore — draws on what she calls an “archaeology of memory,” excavating personal and collective histories to expose structures of violence, exclusion, and power. Avendaño is a 2026 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee and her performances, ranging from participatory public actions to choreographed multimedia works, have been presented internationally, including at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam during the Holland Festival, Kampnagel in Hamburg, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her long-running performance project Buscando a Bruno confronts the crisis of forced disappearances in Mexico through an ongoing public search for her brother. Avendaño holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Universidad Veracruzana and has received numerous recognitions for her work, including support from Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

María Regina Firmino-Castillo, PhD, is a scholar and artist interested in ontologies and how they are corpo-realized by and through bodies in relation to each other and environments, especially in the contexts of genocidal coloniality and its contestations. Trained in cultural anthropology and transdisciplinary studies, she brings an anti-paradigmatic lens to performance and embodied practice. Her work prioritizes the theoretical insights of research and artistic collaborators, including Be’ena’Za’a (Zapotec) artist and anthropologist Lukas Avendaño, whose work and thought are at the core of Firmino-Castillo’s recently published works such as “Through the Obsidian Mirror: Onto-Corporeal Experimentations at Twilight,” a contribution to Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness, and “Tracing the Ouroboros’ Tail: Paradoxical Politics against Necropolitical Binaries in Lukas Avendaño and Muxx Project’s Theory and Practice.” Firmino-Castillo is also a faculty member in the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches and mentors students across the department’s BA, MFA, and PhD programs in dance, experimental choreography, and critical dance studies.

 

This event will be in Spanish, with simultaneous translation provided.