Mixed Media The Taos Paseo Festival
IMMERSIVE, SUBVERSIVE, CONVERSIVE: THE TAOS PASEO FESTIVAL
Santa Fe may have the new media fest Currents, but Taos has the Paseo, which brings outdoor projection, performance art, interactive and immersive art installations, and more to the city’s high desert streets each fall.
This year’s Paseo festival, which takes place on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 13 and 14, brings local, national, and international artists together under the theme “Connections.”
Parisian artist Antonin Fourneau brings his Waterlight Graffiti project, an interactive wall of thousands of LEDs lit up when sprayed or brushed with water. Tag the wall to your heart’s content on this ephemeral installation, and watch your creations fade as the water evaporates and the lights go out.
Regional artists Britney A. King and Jennifer Nev-Diaz invite the public to participate in a playfully conceived immersive video environment in
El Agave. The artists explore the experience of women of color and the connection between culture and land, as well as to each other, in a setting meant to induce conversation and interaction.
The Paseo Project, which sponsors the event, hosts resident artists each year. The 2019 artists in residence — Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Saul Garcia Lopez/La Saula, and Balitronica Gómez of the transdisciplinary arts organization La Pocha Nostra — present The Enchilada Western (A Living Museum of Fetishized Identities), an interactive performance and art installation. The event was born from a pre-festival workshop composed of local and international performers, and includes music, video projection, and “taxidermied animals.” The project engages the audience in a high tech, rave-like atmosphere, and brings awareness about the ways people and nature have been exoticized by Western culture.
Other artists include Ryon Gesink of Oakland, California, who creates kinetic, mobile sculptures and whose work has been featured at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert; Caitlyn Au, a Taos-based artist whose project When Shouting Produces No Echo isa site-specific, interactive work that explores the theme of diaspora through video projection in a built environment; and Amber Vasquez and Taos Youth Ballet, whose dance performance explores the physical, spiritual, and emotional connections between people, and was choreographed with the boundaries of the Paseo festival in mind.
The festival takes place in the historic downtown district, starting at 7:30 p.m. (sunset) on both days and running to 11 p.m. There is no cost to attend. For more information, contact the Paseo Project at 575-613-0601 and visit paseoproject.org for a complete schedule of events and times.