30,000 Shots: Gestures from the 1976 Argentinian Dictatorship

When my father emigrated from Argentina he left a country that ‘disappeared’ 30,000 of its citizens during a brutal military dictatorship. This performance and accompanying exhibition explore the inherited memories, gestures and mythologies of this period from the perspective of his Australian daughter.

Presenting the new performance work, ‘30,000 Shots’, the artist will pose 30,000 times for a camera over eight hours, replicating a complicated image of police brutality. The accompanying exhibition includes photographic and video works created while in residence in Mexico, exploring site as one of the ways that memories can be transferred and also reworked.

The collection highlights the work of intergenerational memory. Drawing on family testimony, cultural references and the media images that the second-generation inherits, it reflects on the experience of inheritance as both an artist working within a lineage of work, and a daughter, living within a border-anxious state.

Alexandra Tálamo is a performance artist living on the unceded lands of the Eora Nation in Sydney, Australia. Her work draws on a choreographic framework to explore autobiographic research, personal mythology and postmemory. Within which, she pays close attention to the slippery, in-between and undocumented ways in which we might understand notions of belonging and relation.

She is a current PhD Candidate in Creative Practice at UNSW, Sydney, and a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (Postgraduate Diploma in Performance Creation 2012) and UNSW, receiving the University Medal at UNSW in 2017 (BA Honours in Theatre and Performance Studies). In 2018 she was awarded the Philip Parsons Prize from The Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA). Her work has been presented at Kaffee Kuchen-Action Art III (Weimar International Performance Art Festival, 2018), MCA ARTBAR (2018), Venice International Performance Art Week: Prologue I (2017), Performance Studies international (2016), and Art + Activism month at FCAC (2016). Her PhD research was recently presented at the Queer Art of Feeling conference held at Cambridge University (2019).