Julia Barbosa Landois’s Praise Music Sonogram is a live performance that combines spoken word, video, and experimental sound to tell a story of motherhood, miscarriage, and abortion access across national and state borders. Contrasting an unexpected experience in a European haven for healthcare seekers with the medical scarcity and the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., Barbosa Landois delivers a narrative that is both deeply personal and unexpectedly comedic.

Supporting and collaborating with Julia Barbosa Landois in the Rubin Center performance and micro-residency is UTEP dance professor Sandra Paola López Ramírez. In addition to supporting the logistics on campus, Sandra Paola will work closely with Julia to create a safe container for students to explore their personal stories through performance drawing from her expertise and decade-long experience doing this work in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Furthermore, Sandra Paola will act as a bridge before and after the Julia’s on campus workshop and performance to maximize student impact and support their processes.

Also collaborating with Julia Barbosa Landois on this production is experimental multi-instrumentalist Andrew Javier Martinez. The performance is accompanied by a storytelling and knowledge-sharing zine, Tía Sabiduría, co-designed with Julia by Tina Hernandez and informed by the DIY aesthetic of the two artists’ youth.

Praise Music Sonogram exists where storytelling, community medicine, and transnational healthcare persist as resistance to geographic borders and limits on bodily autonomy. Supported by a 2023 NPN Creation Fund grant, the work premiered at DiverseWorks in Houston before traveling to Links Hall in Chicago and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of El Paso.

ABOUT THE ARTIST JULIA BARBOSA LANDOIS

Julia Barbosa Landois is a Houston-based multidisciplinary artist whose work teases profundity and absurdity from the everyday and examines the relationship between the intimate and the public. Her unsettling and sometimes funny performances often use commonplace technologies like a cell phone or stationary bike in unexpected ways. Landois’s videos, installations, and works on paper have been exhibited internationally and her live performances have been presented at Fusebox Festival (Austin), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Blaffer Art Museum (University of Houston), and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, among others. Awards include grants from National Performance Network (NPN), National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC), and Houston Arts Alliance, and residencies in the USA, Mexico, Norway, and Germany.

ABOUT UTEP COLLABORATOR SANDRA PAOLA LOPEZ RAMIREZ

Sandra Paola López Ramírez (MFA, EdM) is an interdisciplinary dancemaker, cultural organizer, improviser, and mother. She was born and raised in the luscious Andes mountains in what is currently known as Bogotá, Colombia and her relationship to the Andean landscape, the music and dances from this territory and her mixed heritage deeply influences her artistic work and activism. Sandra Paola now lives in the Chihuahuan desert straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, another beautiful and complex region that has shaped her understanding of the connection between body, ancestral memory, and land. In her decades of work, she has developed her practice to radically integrate her creative process and her community organizing efforts creating works that activate public spaces, non-traditional and formal performance venues, and natural landscapes. Her commitment to transformation and healing is mostly manifested in the work of the Institute for Improvisation and Social Action (ImprovISA), an organization that she co-founded in 2011 now active in El Paso, TX. Sandra Paola is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction at The University of Texas at El Paso.

SUPPORT

Praise Music Sonogram is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks, The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org

The Rubin Center performance is also supported through a grant from the Warhol Foundation.