Playing With Fire: Incandescent Pedagogies and Critical Politics (Mexico City, 2016-22)

This conference focuses on the ways in which the protest- in particular young feminist and student protest in México City- can be visualized, translated, most of all read and theorized as crucially pedagogical and critically political. Much of what is expressed, drawn, painted during the protest (graffiti, murals, pintas) fades or vanishes below the surface. My aim is to stay with what vanishes and fades, with what is incommensurable or difficult to be narrated or placed together, and may be constitutive of a political discourse or a pedagogical intervention. I analyze the narrative mechanisms and conceptual trajectories -the verbal and performative explosions, the Molotov and the fire, graffiti and murals- these glancing, incandescent points of light, transformed into constellations of meaning, delivered by women and sexual dissidence in the public space in México City (2016-2022)