benjamin charles lundberg/torres-sanchez

Lundberg/Torres-Sanchez
Performance. (2014)

Lundberg / Torres-Sanchez is a three-part re-imagining of Benjamin Lundberg’s political identity. The body of the artist transforms between and within each part, standing in opposition to culturally perceived paradoxes: American and Colombian; Latino and white; assimilated and displaced; orphaned and privileged.

Part I: Naturalization
Naturalization is a re-performance of Lundberg’s naturalization ceremony when, at the age of two, as a transnational adoptee from Colombia, he was first publicly documented as a United States Citizen. As viewers bear witness to this initiation they are, in turn, initiated as members of a congregation, incited to adopt and publicly proclaim their own identities at will. Naturalization draws from the artist’s personal archive of images, official text, and familial memories to create a site where the spiritual implications of citizenship are explored.

Part II: Colombioplasty
The artist presents himself as a patient prepared to undergo a Colombioplasty, and invites the attending public to illustrate with surgical pens how his body might be altered to make it more Colombian. Through the viewers’ participation, this section engages the assumptions, desires, and questions of the body politic at hand, provoking a force that is at once external to the artist and agent over his identity. Colombioplasty is an opportunity for those viewing the piece to reckon with their agency over their perceptions of other(ed) bodies.

Part III: Resurrection
Resurrection is a ritual created to commemorate what is dying and what is rising.

Performed as a triptych, the three parts become Lundberg / Torres-Sanchez, a piece that refigures the religious, governmental, personal and social rituals that use the artist’s body as a filter for communally defined expectations and vocabularies. Lundberg / Torres-Sanchez resists the use of binaries as an acceptable tool by which to understand identity by proposing a version of self that is volatile and cyclical.

Performance History:

Re Performed 25 September 2014
at the Psychic Readings Room at AS220
as part of a one month residency at the 115 Empire Street Complex
Archival photos by Eduardo Robles & Shey Rivera

Performed 24 June 2014
at the PHI Centre, Montreal
as part of the Hemispheric Institute’s 9th Encuentro
MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas
Archival photos by Julio Pantoja
Archival video & stills by Teddy Zegeye-Gebrehiwot & Jeca Rodríguez-Colón