Performative Screening of "The Formaldehyde Trip" at the New Museum

7:00 PM EDT

New Museum Theater
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
Ticketing and Event Details at the New Museum

Join artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo (b. 1979) for a performative screening of her film The Formaldehyde Trip (2017) in the New Museum Theater. A dynamic and experimental story-teller, Rincón Gallardo mixes live performance with video projections to expand upon her “mythical-critical Surrealist” narratives, using precolonial myths to find anti-colonial poetic weapons against injustices of the present. The accompanying exhibition, Screens Series: Naomi Rincón Gallardo, is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.

Made in honor of human rights activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño, The Formaldehyde Trip imagines the activist’s passage through the underworld after she was murdered in a paramilitary ambush in April 2010. Through music, dance, improvisation, digital animations, and excerpts of speeches by Cariño, the lively, eventful, and mesmerizing journey unfolds as a series of encounters with spirit animals, women warriors, witches, and Mesoamerican deities. The journey is narrated from the perspective of an axolotl preserved in formaldehyde, played sometimes by the artist herself. Almost extinct in its natural habitat, this species of aquatic salamander explains to us how Cariño’s murder is directly associated with the maintenance of colonial power structures.

Featuring an original soundtrack by composer Federico Schmucler set to Rincón Gallardo’s lyrics, the film comprises nine distinct musical numbers with interchanging parts in Spanish, English, and German. In this her live performance of The Formaldehyde Trip, Rincón Gallardo expands “Bety” Cariño’s feminist legacy and challenges hegemonic forms of social categorization and hierarchization, imagining a vibrant and surreal environment of pleasure and flourishing interdependence in the face of brutality and expropriation.

This event is co-presented by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and the New Museum.