Author Description

For the last 15 years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gomez-Pena has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from around the world. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists and fellow artists-such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britto Jinorio, Silvana Straw and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer among others-explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gomez-Pena has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world. Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation. Laura Levin is an Associate Professor of Theatre at York University, Toronto. She is Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Theatre Review and Editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (2011). --Book Jacket.