Join us for an evening of readings with Demian DinéYazhi´ and Alán Peláez López.

This event is presented in collaboration with EFA Project Space, where Speculations on the Infrared, curated by Christopher Green, is on view.

Speculations on the Infrared explores tactics of speculative Indigenous futurism that foreground and redeploy the subsumed and repressive nature of the settler state’s relationship to colonized peoples as a potential tool of sovereignty. Considering infra- as "below," as in the spectrum below visible light, but also that which is "further on," the works in this exhibition speculate on the latent desires for Indigeneity and the subaltern Indigenous DNA of the settler national identity and mythos. Working from the premise that Indigeneity underpins the colonial nation state’s identity formation and its most base cultural desires, the work in Speculations on the Infrared suggests that there is a strategic decolonial position to be gained from that subaltern power.

Visit their current exhibition, Speculations on the Infrared, on view through March 6. Reservations can be made here.

Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulative, exploitative, and supremacist nature of hetero cis gender communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupies and refuses to rightfully give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.

Alán Peláez López is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México. Much of the artist’s work is invested in thinking with and through theories of fugitivity, language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020).