Conversations Across Borders

For the past fifteen years, the performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been holding an ongoing series of conversations with cultural figures from both North and South America. His partners in dialogue include theorists, curators, activists and fellow artists, among them Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Their talks range across the ground between art and theory.

Conversations Across Borders gathers the most challenging and engaging of these exchanges and shows how much they have added to major debates in the international art world. The tone is bold and often humorous, and the topics are ones that matter to working artists: border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism and globalization gone wrong.

The book treats dialogue as a performative act and as a radical space in which to start, and push against, the limits of critical culture. Taken together, the texts propose a distinct set of critical practices, energized by the endangered art of conversation.