13 - The Transmedia, Post-Medium, Postnational, and Nomadic Projects of Pilar Acevedo, Rocío Cerón, and Mónica Nepote

Summary

Pilar Acevedo (born in Mexico and raised near Chicago, 1954) is the author of short stories and poems which often act as companion pieces to her artwork. Rocío Cerón (Mexico City, 1972) and Mónica Nepote (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1970) explore audiovisual and embodied forms of expression alongside their written poetry. While their backgrounds and relative emphasis on the visual or textual may differ, these women, like others in the volume, are increasingly embracing similar practices. Their work, which is yet to be the subject of sustained critical attention, is united by what Cerón and Nepote, as members of the Motín Poeta poetry collective (2000–10), once termed a “contaminating” ethos. In other words, their work challenges rigid divisions between media as a strategy for creative renewal. The creative dialogue and crossings between media reflect a broader questioning of borders and boundaries. In the works studied here, Cerón's Imperio (Empire) project, the “Hechos diversos” (“Sensationalist News”) section of Nepote's eponymous poetry collection, and Acevedo's assemblage Outcry (2009) and accompanying poem “Morí” (I Died), the crossing and blurring of media borders is used to interrogate the category of the nation as the primary basis for forging allegiances. As the (co-)creators of transmedia and post-medium projects which adopt an outlook based on non-nation-based forms of identification, their work represents a new moment in a Latin American cultural production.

Acevedo, Cerón, and Nepote build on earlier traditions of experimental poetry discussed by Debra Castillo in this volume and by Eduardo Ledesma who describes how such works questioned what the “literary means, what constitutes ‘poetry’ and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated” (Radical Poetry 2). Their work is also a progression following on from that produced by a generation of writers, identified by Emilse B. Hidalgo, who were born after 1960, who came to the fore in the 1990s. Their texts mix “the local with the foreign, the national with the transnational, the popular with high culture, and the traditional with the contemporary and the postmodern” (Hidalgo 109). They are further characterized by “a shift in media – from literature to visual art” as authors increasingly referenced visual culture in their work (Hidalgo 107). Acevedo, Cerón, and Nepote take the next step. They go beyond referencing other media to producing transmedia and post-medium projects.