Nao Bustamante’s Innovative Archival Activations: Transmedia – Performance – Art/ifacts

Nao Bustamante’s performance-installations reactivate critical past events with imaginative archival presentations, the development of uncanny experiential environments, and re-performances of racialized bodies in pain. Brown Disco (2023) – a memorial to the victims of the Club Q massacre in 2022 – stages a giant disco ball adorned by golden-brown light, confronting visitors with extraordinary scale, meditatively slowed-down dance music, and relational choreographies of protection and mourning. BLOOM (2021-2024) interrogates gynecology’s historical experiments on women of color, as Bustamante re-performs their pain on a suspended artifactual gynecology table, in proximity to displays of re-interpreted vaginal speculums and related transmedia productions. My presentation analyzes Bustamante’s activations of historical experiences and archives through performance, transmedia, and conceptualism, with an attention to racialization and the significance of flesh in relation to the brown commons (Muñoz, Moten, etc).

The final discussion shares my experiences as an archivist, art historian, and curator working closely with Bustamante’s personal archives, meeting with her multiple times per month from July 2023 through February 2024 (when she leaves for Italy for the Rome Prize residency). I relay my experiences intimately engaging the archive of her entire oeuvre, approaching its materials as documents, performative fragments, traces, mnemonic aids, indexes, narrative pieces, reusable props, historical artifacts, relational materials, haunting devices, and art objects that exceed canonical frameworks (Jones, González, etc). I share details of my research support for BLOOM, as well as our plans for interpreting and mobilizing Bustamante’s archive of past performances and transmedia projects in future curated events.