La Nostalgia

The LAB
2948 16th Street @ Capp Street
San Francisco, California

La Nostalgia Re-mix
(Best hits and outtakes for an imaginary bar)
by Guillermo Gomez-Pena and James Luna

Performance: Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 8PM
$10-20 sliding scale admission at the door

"Since the early 90's, Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Native American conceptual artist James Luna have worked in an ongoing project titled The Shame-man meets El Mexican't, in which they challenge stereotypes, assumptions, and lazy thinking about race and culture with a strong dose of melancholic humor and sharp-edged conceptualism.

Last in the series is La Nostalgia, a new collaboration that promises to build on both artists' provocative legacies of performance and installation art. The project researches the cultural, symbolic, and iconographic dimensions of nostalgia both in the Native American "reservation" and the Chicano "barrio," through a series of live performances, writings, photo-shoots and videos.

Gomez-Pena and Luna's current collaboration, La Nostalgia, deals with varying notions of nostalgia and how the term can be used as a mechanism of cultural defense, as a stylistic device, and also as a way of revising the artist's careers in a series of re-enactments. The project was launched last year in San Francisco with two performances. First, the artists staged their own ritual deaths inside coffins and then they engaged in a poetic dialogue at the Headlands Center for the Arts, while Luna cooked an Indian stew and Gomez-Pena played roulette."

[photo from Lab press release.]