Berta Jottar

Lecture & Presentation

The lecture she is presenting at aluCine Festival is part of her series Los Rumbos de la Rumba, which focuses on rumba as a cartography of the Diaspora. Rumba is a transitory space, an international, transnational and post-national site in the making and unmaking of itself, in its performance. The geography of this site is the rumbos de la rumba, its different routes, directions, in one locale and another, simultaneously when rumba is performed and fragmented by its relationship to location; once rumba is within and outside the barrio, solar, hood, ethnic group, place of origin and beyond. Rumba is its migratory condition. This world map is a worldview that understands movement and sound as its epistemology. This site is the compilation of rumbas beyond place in the constant making and unmaking of place, nation and narration.

Exhibition at National Film Board, Médiathéque, Toronto, Canada, in the framework of aluCine Festival.

Berta is a video artist from Mexico City who lived and worked between Tijuana and San Diego for eight years. From 1988-1991, she was a member of Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo. Founding member of the art collective Las comadres and collaborator with the artist and activist from Tijuana. Moved to New York in the fall of 1994, Jottar is currently working on an experimental documentary about Afro-Cuban rhuma music in New York. She is finishing her Ph.D. in the Program of Performance Studies at TISCH School of Arts at New York University.