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While in residence at Sector 2337 (April-June 2015), Josh Rios and Anthony Romero created a two-part project titled Please Don’t Bury Me Alive! Part One, a performance using gestures and strategies associated with pedagogy and dramaturgy, constituted an effort to Other Modernism. Robert Smithson’s lecture Hotel Palenque, for example, was re-performed in reference to San Diego’s Chicano Park; while Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot was both set in the future and placed in an unnamed detention center, presumably along the US-Mexico border. Part Two, a project space installation, featured variously arranged artifacts from the performance along side other works dealing with Chicano centered imagery and histories. In addition, a suite of drawings by Chicano sci-fi writer Ernest Hogan was on display—a collection of works that represents a fragment culled from a vast archive of sketchbooks, notes, and drafts, which Rios and Romero are working to curate for an exhibition in the Summer of 2016.
Please Don’t Bury Me Alive! has been subsequently performed at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York City and at the University of Illinois Chicago's Gallery 400 for Latino Art Now.
Video and photographic documentation of Part One:
Photographic documentation of Part Two:
The objects used in the installation and performance were reconfigured for a group exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery curated by Dani Bauer. Documentation below.
