The SFB welcomes this year's Mercator Fellow, Marcela Alejandra Fuentes.

Fuentes is a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include feminist theory and performance, theories of embodiment, affect theory, queer-of-colour criticism, practice-oriented research, and digital humanities. As a performance theorist and practitioner, she explores how embodiment, liveliness, eventfulness, and site-specificity are being redefined in the age of digitally mediated communication. A particular focus is on the intersection of performance and technology in contemporary protests and activism.

Her monograph Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (2019) and the accompanying Spanish-language and expanded version Activismos tecnopolíticos: Constelaciones de performance (2020) use case studies to demonstrate the intertwining of digital activism and street protests.

Fuentes has also published numerous essays and articles on feminist theory and transnational and digital performance, including in the journal Text and Performance Quarterly. From 2016 to 2018, she was a member of the Argentine collective “Ni Una Menos”, a feminist movement campaigning for an end to femicide and gender-based violence. Her latest performance, #Mar. A Nomadic Lecture, opened the academic part of the 2021 Performance Biennial in Buenos Aires.

Fuentes has been in close contact with SFB 1512 since the 2024 annual conference at SAVVY Contemporary, where her lecture Performance Constellations met with great interest. In particular, subprojects A01 “Participation and Dissociation: Tensions of Political Theatre in the 20th Century and the Present” and B05 “Acoustic Disturbances: Postcolonial and Queer Potentials of Sonic Interventions” have since been pushing for deeper collaboration with Fuentes. The possibility of a longer-term exchange with Fuentes is also extremely promising for the Working Group: Academia and Activism. The project planned for the Mercator Fellowship is entitled Technopoetics and other Constellative Dramaturgies.