Bodies of Occupation: Conversation with Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza

This conversation with artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza will cover her project “Speculations” (on how to enter and exit a forest) (2018), the spectral presence of colonial occupations, and their resonance with present-day political situations

Stills from the videos Speculations (2018), courtesy of the artist

Participants

Zuzanna Dziuban is a 2019-2024 Senior Postdoc on the ERC Consolidator project “Globalized Memorial Museums: Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals” at the Austrian Academy of Science. She received her PhD in cultural studies in 2009 at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz and research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies, the University of Amsterdam, with a position founded by the DAAD/Marie-Curie cofound program P.R.I.M.E (2015-2017) and a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam, and Freie University of Berlin, iC-ACCESS /HERA “Uses of the Past” Project (2017-2019). Zuzanna has been a Fritz-Thyssen Stiftung fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin and House of the Wannsee Conference (2012), Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Fellow at the University of Konstanz and Humboldt University of Berlin (2012-2014), Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem (2013), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2014-2015), and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg, University of Konstanz (2016-2017).

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza was born in Quito, Ecuador, and works and lives in Paris. She works with different languages and medias (installations, video, photography, actions). Her practice has been constantly motivated by interrogations related to her own displacements and relocations, between her country of origin and the one in which she is established. This situation has driven her to explore, in a wide spectrum, notions such as territories, migrations, frontiers, memory and history, visibility and invisibility (her website).