La Pocha Nostra (Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Saul Garcia Lopez/La Saula, and Balitronica Gómez), San Francisco, CA is the featured PASEO 2019 Artist in Residence.

La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds. They are devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. For over 25 years, La Pocha Nostra has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generation as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create ephemeral communities of rebel artists.

La Pocha Nostra was in Taos for two weeks in September of 2019. In the first week they offered one of their legendary international performance summer school workshops in Taos, New Mexico. These workshops are considered to be La Pocha Nostra’s most important pedagogical and political adventures of the year. Taos County residents were invited to apply for this FREE workshop.

The residency ended with a two night performance piece during PASEO 2019.  The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities was the next step in their performance research to develop large-scale interactive performance/installations that functioned as “intelligent raves and art expos of Western apocalypse.” This “living museum” was site-specific and was realized from a pre-festival workshop featuring different groups of local and international performers. Original music, video projections, cinematic lighting, taxidermied animals and twisted ethnographic motifs helped enhance the high-tech “robo-baroque aesthetic.”

About the artists: La Pocha Nostra’s performance work mixes experimental aesthetics, activist politics, Spanglish humor and audience participation to create a "total experience" for both live and online audience member/reader/viewer. Continually developing multi-centric narratives and large-scale performance projects from a border perspective, La Pocha Nostra creates what critics have termed "Chicano cyber-punk performances," and "ethno-techno art." In the work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members and readers in the position of "foreigners" or "minorities."

La Pocha Nostra’s artwork has been presented at over a thousand venues across the US, Canada, Mexico, Spain, the UK, Germany, Haiti, Latvia, Belgium, Greece, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Russia, Australia, South Africa, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Argentina. La Pocha Nostra has participated in the following Biennales: Venice, Documenta, Havana, The Whitney Museum, Sydney, Liverpool, Thessaloniki and Mercosur, and they performed at the Venice Biennale Performance Art Week. The troupe’s photo-performances are now in the permanent collections of Daros Foundation (Zurich), Galeria Artificios (Gran Canaria), the MAM (Mexico City), and the Getty (Los Angeles), among other institutions.