Join Francisco Guevara for three-part workshop for conversations with a reading list crafted and led by the artist and curator around the impact and ethics of artist residencies. The workshop is aimed at emerging artists, artists-in-residence, those considering residencies, or managers of residencies  

Inspired by the 2024 AGO x RBC Artist-in-Residence theme of movement, the workshop will start by questioning ideas about creating spaces, then shift the focus away from the usual central areas to explore the often-overlooked edges. It will end by discussing ways to bring about change. The workshop will take a critical look at how visual culture and art practices are connected to mobility, especially in today’s age of tourism and globalization. Participants will also discuss how art influences power dynamics in spaces, rethinking “cultural exchanges” and considering ethical practices in art. 

Suggested reading list materials will be emailed to registrants in advance of the session. 

Reading list:
Session 1: Placing our Fantasies 
- Caroline Dean: The Trouble with (the term) Art  
- Rumya Sree Putcha: After Eat, Pray, Love: Tourism, Orientalism, and Cartographies of Salvation  
- Chloe Chard: Grand and Ghostly Tours: The Topography of Memory 

Session 2: De-Centering the Margins  
- Ramon Grosfoguel: The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century  
- Francisco Guevara: Performing the Fantasy of Mobility While Enacting the Violence of Immobility  
- Kirsten Buick: Race as Object Lessons 

Session 3: How do we move from here? 
- Nicholas Mirzoeff: To See in the Dark: The Nakba and the Landswept Way of Seeing  
- Amelia Jones: Who Is an Artist? Identity, Individualism, and the Neoliberalism of the Art Complex
- Audre Lorde: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
  
Francisco Guevara, Co-Director of Arquetopia Foundation, is a Mexican visual artist, independent scholar and curator specializing in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of transcultural artistic projects and the analysis of performativity in contemporary art practices. His experience spans more than 20 years of designing, curating, and managing art projects through visual arts education and historiography of art, facilitating Development, sustainability and social transformation. As a visual artist, Guevara investigates the historical construction of the differentiation process and its relationship with the performativity of identity, including gender, class, and race. His upcoming exhibition “Omens of Empire” exhibition presents a series of questions about violence, encapsulated in the vibrant colors of cochineal and indigo, the iridescent beauty of feathers, and the incomparable gleam of silver and precious gems. Each piece interweaves imperial history with the contemporary experience of the viewer, prompting us to question the role of forgetfulness in the production of modern dominant knowledge.