Description:

In this talk, De Ferrari explores the conceptualization of the accident as a creative force. She analyzes recent installations by Puerto Rican artist duo Allora & Calzadilla that juxtapose the aftermath of Hurricane Maria with a Surrealist view of chance. By combining game theory, avant-garde theory, and postcolonial studies, she reflects on the complicities between art making and contingency, and on what such art says about being human under duress.

Guillermina De Ferrari is Halls-Bascom Professor of Spanish and Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (2007), Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba (2014), and Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today (2015). She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to 20th- and 21st-Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms (2022).

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.