Emilio Rojas:

Hands to Hold

& Text by Pamela Sneed

Hands to Hold is centered around 2 durational performances devised by Emilio Rojas. For a 6.5-hour performance, the artist drank 1.5 gallons of sap from a 250-year-old sugar maple in the Hudson Valley.

About

Video

Hands to Hold

By Pamela Sneed

Biographies

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, he engages in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space.
Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. In 2020, she was the Commencement Speaker for the low-res MFA program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has been faculty in the program teaching Human Rights and Writing Art for the past 5 years. Sneed also teaches new genres in Columbia University’s School of the Arts.