Publications

Text of the Month: Gómez-Peña's "How to Survive the Apocalypse"

Glosolalia (Forthcoming Mantarraya Ediciones/La Pocha Nostra, Mexico City, March 2020) This multi-lingual, experimental publication includes the work of 15 performance artists and poets who have collaborated in Gómez-Peña's "Posnacional" projects since 2013.

Gómez-Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008 - 2019) This forthcoming anthology includes a selection of Gómez-Peña and LPN's favorite texts from the past decade and a few re-written classics (Routledge, September 2020)

La Pocha Nostra: A handbook for the rebel artist in a post-democratic society The new installment of LPN's infamous pedagogical performance exercises since "Rebel Artists". (Co-Authored with Saula Garcia-López, Forthcoming Routledge, Early 2021)

Award-winning Exhibition Catalog from Gómez-Peña's 2017/2018 Retrospective at Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City) including photographs, essays, manifestos, interviews and archival materials.

Out of print. Only 10 copies left in the artist's collection. Please contact ballitron[@]gmail.com for inquires.

“Gomez-Peña's work is among the most powerful examples of intercultural performance.” -Richard Shechner, American Theatre Magazine

Gómez-Peña and book artist Felicia Rice create a multi-media, border-crossing hybrid: the book as performance art.

Doc/Undoc presents a multi-media, multi-disciplinary collaboration in book form, documenting a unique and wildly ambitious adventure into the experimental realms of modern book arts. Included are a lush, photographic recreation of the installation, a reproduction of the codex, an essay by art historian Jennifer A. González who situates the project in the context of bookmaking, performance art, and cabinets of curiosities. The book is packaged with a USB drive containing the installation version's original sound art by Zachary James Watkins and video art by Gustavo Vazquez.

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Exhibition Publication in Spanish from Gómez-Peña's first major retrospective at CAAM, Canary Islands, Spain 2012. Including photographs, essays, manifestos, interviews and archival materials.

Available online.

“He's one of the handful of great performance artists in America today.”

-Peter Sellars

For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Gabriela Salgado, Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Brito Jinorio, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating conversations spanning 15 years and revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.

This book is Gómez-Peña's favorite book. Please also refer to the "Conversations" section of Essential Works for live performance versions.

“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.” - VillageVoice Literary Supplement

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In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’.

Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity.

Exercises for Rebel Artists is the best-selling and most popular book on contemporary performance pedagogy published by Routledge.

Expect in early 2021 a brand new pedagogical Anthology for the "post-democratic" era!

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"One of the most active and creative Chicano writer-performers, explores the techno-Chicano/border aesthetic and searches for a new dialogue between Latin Americans who left their homelands following the American dream and those who stayed behind."

The book begins in Spanish, journeys into Spanglish, Gringoñol, English and Robo-Esperanto. This publication, is in a sense, a literary melting-pot where a new language is being forged. The reader can start anywhere and read them [the parts] in any order. Borders, after all, are there for us to go across.

In the Trump/Obrador Era there is currently a very intense debate at the publishing house to reprint this in paperback - let's hope they do it!

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"Antropologia Inversa De Un Performancero Postmexicano" First Spanish-language anthology of Gómez-Peña's favorite texts. Selected by Mexico's top performance theorist, Joséfina Alcazar and translated into Spanish by the artist. There are currently 30 first-edition collector copies remaining.

"Guillermo Gómez-Peña created a spatial and temporal utopia, demonstrating why he is one of our most important living artists." -Philip Stanier, Live Culture at Tate Modern

“...a peacemaker in the world's culture clash." -Vanity Fair

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Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style of performance-activism; his theatricalizations of postcolonial theory. In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what's left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of what he calls 'the mainstream bizarre'.

“In everything he does, he remains an indomitably playful phrasemaker; a fertile rethinker of cultural contradictions, clichés, and conundrums; and an inspiring recruiter for a playground army of cultural pluralists.” -The Village Voice

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The book is a collaboration between Gómez-Peña, Chicano master visual artist Enrique Chagoya and book artist Felicia Rice. Originally created as a limited-edition of 50 this project was inspired by the pre-Hispanic codices that escaped immolation during colonial invasions, the artists' book opens out in accordion folds expanding to a length of over 21 feet. Rice has created a series of beautiful and jarring montages in which the mixture of languages, slang, poetry, and prose of Gómez-Peña's performance texts are woven through and around Chagoya's collages filled with pre-Hispanic drawings, colonial-era representations of New World natives, and comic book superheroes. Irreverent to the last, Gómez-Peña and Chagoya employ iconic figures and persistent stereotypes to overturn the fantasies of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and historical amnesia that cloud international relations. Rice's masterful typographic compositions orchestrate the text's many voices and views, offering a history of the Americas which must be read forward and backward, in fragments and in recurring episodes―in short, as history itself tends to unfold.

This paperback Codex was inspired by an original artist book with the same title printed on amate paper for collectors. The original Codex is held in private collections including The Getty and MACBA.

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This classic anthology of Gómez-Peña's performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this provocateur. It spans the decade, from 1990-2000, and explores the wild performance adventures of the original Pocha Nostra Troupe. This is one of Gómez-Peña's favorite books.

“Gómez-Peña is a linguist...As he shifts from one character, one accent, one language to another, I re-experience the vertigo of the border.” -Cindi Carr, The Village Voice

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This rare, award-winning art book documents the seminal performance art installation piece Temple of Confessions which appeared in museums across the country including the Corcoran Gallery.

Temple of Confessions features artists Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes and their collaborators acting in such personae as Tex-Mex shamans, holy gang members and pregnant nuns. Within an environment of humorous and provocative objects that serve “to open a Pandora box and let loose the colonial demons,” visitors are invited to confess their secret desires either by kneeling and recording into a microphone, writing a postcard, or calling a phone number.

The confessions are often emotional and reveal racism, tenderness, solidarity, or sexuality as visitors react to the Latino “other.” This is art as serious social exploration and should prove a challenging addition to public, academic, or special collections. The book documents the exhibit in text and photographs, along with a selection of visitors’ confessions and essays by commentators. It comes with a CD containing confessions, performance art, and commentary in the NAFTA languages.

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Interdisciplinary artist and writer Gómez-Peña collaborates with Chicano visual artist Enrique Chagoya in the multilingual, performative "Latino cyberpunk" exploration of post-colonialism in the internet age.

"Gómez-Peña celebrates hybridity, borderless frontiers, interdisciplinary art forms, linguistic amalgams, cultural collisions--virtually everything that partakes of "betweenness," especially the image of the Chicano cyborg, half human-half machine. So it shouldn't surprise that the author's books confound definition, fusing performance theory with performance diaries, conversations, essays, scripts, commentaries for NPR, travelogues, anecdotes and photographs of ‘living dioramas.”-Publishers Weekly

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The New World Border is a carnivalesque inversion of ethnic and geo-political ideology, a disorienting free-fall into the space between cultures and a head-on collision with the real and imagined borders that separate North and South.

Hero of a thousand syncretic faces—intercultural interpreter, reverse anthropologist, experimental linguist and political artist of the first order—Guillermo Gómez-Peña has won international acclaim for his efforts to create a hybrid culture and to articulate a borderless ethos. This book received the American Book award in 1996.

“Extremely articulate, Gómez-Peña rivets attention through deliberate gesture and a commanding, versatile voice...his role reversing strategy allows the non-bilingual audience/reader to experience first hand the outsider's perspective.” -Victoria Martin, Artweek

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This book, Gómez-Peña's first English-language publication, is considered his best known and most widely used in Academia. It covers his "border art" period from 1978-1993.

“At the heart of the performative is an activation of consciousness, triggered by multicultural puns and transcultural associations. Mexican by birth, Mexican-American by choice, this linguistic trickster does not appear to be insecure about who he is, but he knows many who are trapped in stereotypes and in the dangerous dynamics of disempowerment that characterize the lives of the underclasses in American society.”  -Carol Becker

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There are 12 limited edition book art pieces by Gómez-Peña held in private collections. Contact La Pocha Nostra directly to inquire about these rare publications.