Awilda Rodriguez Lora
Livable Futures contributing artist and featured Artist in Residence with the Wexner Center for the Arts 2021-2023
Puerto Rico
Biography
Awilda Rodríguez Lora was born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, She challenges in her work the concepts of woman, sexuality, and self-determination. These concepts are explored through the use of movement, sound, and video as well as through literal instantiations of an “economy of living” that either potentiates or subtracts from her body’s “value” in the contemporary art market. In this way, her projects promote progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial legacies and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez Lora is currently a host at La Rosario in Santurce Puerto Rico where she is creating, researching, and producing her life project, La Mujer Maravilla, while developing new strategies for the sustainability of live arts in Puerto Rico
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
Community first and foremost. It is the spine for sustained living. One body, a individual, a single person or whichever way we are thought about imagining our future can now exist by itself. We can try and we’ve tried but imagine even your own body and ask yourself can the heart function just by itself? And how does the heart support the body?
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
At the moment I am reading Dawn from Octavia Butler, La Intimidad como espectaculo by Paula Sibilia and rereading Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown. I am listening to Black History Bootcamp Podcast by GirlTrek.
What practices are sustaining you?
Currently I am on a transformation of home living so my daily practice has been shifting and I am rethinking how the discipline of self love and joy can be part of my life as a free form. How does joy become a daily practice that sustains my spirit? I have since 2015 been dancing everyday in front of the camera and uploading 15 second to a minute videos on social media platforms; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr as a practice of accountability and of sharing the persistence and insistence of dancing as a right for life and expresion.