Rodrigo García Reading & Conversation
Channel: Aesthetics and Politics
Date: 11/12/2021

Rodrigo García reads from his new book A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Marquez and Mercedes Barcha. In conversation with Amanda Beech (Dean, School of Critical Studies), Martín Plot (Faculty, Aesthetics and Politics), Brian Evenson (Director and Faculty, MFA Creative Writing Program), Julia Saenz Lorduy (MFA, Creative Writing '22).

Rodrigo García is an award-winning writer, director, and cinematographer. Born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in Mexico City, he is the son of iconic novelist Gabriel García Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). His new memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, celebrates the formidable legacy of his parents. García has taught workshops in CalArts’ Film Directing program and helmed Albert Knobbs (2011), starring Glenn Close and Janet McTeer, who both earned Oscar nominations. Other films include Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, which received the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes, and Nine Lives (2005). The Los Angeles resident garnered an Emmy nomination for directing the pilot of HBO’s Big Love, and was the showrunner of In Treatment, also on HBO. Among his other directing credits are Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. García is also Vice President of the Board of Directors of Film Independent.

https://calarts.edu/about/news-and-events/events-calendar/event-details/rodrigo-garc237a-reading-and-conversation

In Conversation With:

Amanda Beech is an artist, writer, and Dean of the School of Critical Studies. Her work proposes a new realist politics of the artwork and its possibilities in the context of contingency and neo-rationalist conceptions of power. Solo shows include Covenant Transport, Move or Die, Baltic Museum, UK, 2016; All Obstructing Walls Have Been Broken Down, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, N Ireland, 2014; and Everything Has Led to this Moment, Xero, Kline, Coma, London, UK 2014. Her artist’s books include First Machine, Final Machine and Sanity Assassin (Urbanomic Press, 2015 and 2010). Beech regularly speaks at conferences, and her work can be accessed on YouTube broadcasts. These include Art and Reason: How Art Thinks Parts I and II, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and Baltic Museum; and her keynote for Generative Constraints, ‘Art Habit and Rule,’ Royal Holloway and Kingston University, UK.

Martín Plot (PhD, Alfred Schutz Memorial Award in Philosophy and Sociology, New School for Social Research) was a full-time faculty in the CalArts’ School of Critical Studies from 2003 to 2015. Since then, he has become a Research Fellow in Political Thought in the CalArts’ MA Aesthetics and Politics program. He works in the fields of political and social theory/philosophy, Latin American studies, cultural and political sociology, and American politics. He is the author of The Aesthetico-Political: The Question of Democracy in Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière (Bloomsbury Academic), Indivisible (Prometeo, 2011), La Carne de lo Social (2008), and El Kitsch Político (2003), and has published in academic journals including Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Social Imaginaries, Anacronismo e Irrupción, Temas y Debates, Continental Philosophy Review, Constellations, Theory and Event, International Journal of Communication.

Brian Evenson is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2015) and the critical book Ed Vs. Yummy Fur: Or What Happens When a Serial Comic Becomes a Graphic Novel (Uncivilized, 2014).  His collection Windeye (2012) and the novel Immobility (2012) were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the 2009 ALA-RUSA Award). His novel The Open Curtain (2004) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, David B., and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. 

Julia Sáenz Lorduy is a knitter, educator and writer from Bogotá, Colombia. She is currently in the second year of the MFA program in creative writing at CalArts. Her current work explores the intertextuality of crafts and practices of the self in the process of healing, creation, and transformation. She has worked with different textile protest movements in Colombia, learning from the stitching of individual and collective memories. Julia was selected by the organization Enseña por Colombia (Teach for Colombia) and worked in a public charter school in Bogotá during the two-year program. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, with a concentration in Math, from Columbia University in New York.