Rachel Price will present from her new book The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868-1968 (released this November 30!). She will share with us long-buried, little-known histories that connect backwards from 1970s Brazilian “process/poetry”—including the baking and eating of a 6-foot loaf of bread—to 1950s and 1960s Brazilian concrete poetry, Cuban modernism, and to histories of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world. Artists and poets featured will include Haroldo de Campos, neoconcrete artists and theorists Lygia Clark (the subject of a recent MoMA  retrospective) and Ferreira Gullar (author of a “theory of the non-object,” forgotten nineteenth-century inventions such as the “glossograph,” and Kongo visual script called “anaforuana”.

Before teaching at Princeton, Javier Guerrero was President of the Venezuelan Cinemateca Nacional, where he curated more than 25 International Film Series and Festivals. He has written a book on the Venezuelan filmmaker Mauricio Walerstein as well as a novel, Balnearios de Etiopia (2010). At the MAAS building he will draw on his book  El cuerpo bajo sospecha: Exhibicionismo y cultura visual en América Latina (The Body Under Suspicion: Exhibitionism and Visual Culture in Latin America), focusing on the artists Mario Bellatin and Armando Reverón’s relationship to their and others’ bodies.

Christoper Fraga will talk about some of his research in Mexico and show some clips from the Spanish-language dubbed version of the Simpsons and then to speak about some of the history and circumstances surrounding the dubbing of the show in Mexico City, and some of the bizarre choices that the translators were forced to make.

Afterwards we will share wine and snacks and some of our favorite latin music tracks.