Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro - Canada Research Chair in Oral History Performance, Theatre

Luis Carlos Sotelo-Castro (PhD) is a Colombian artist-researcher. His practice is performance-based. He creates live environments of memory in collaboration with other artists and participants from specific communities and locations. Since 2002, he has done work with and for internally displaced people, Indigenous communities, migrants, and elderly people both in Latin America, in the United Kingdom, and in Canada.

His vision as Concordia’s Canada Research Chair in Oral History Performance (OHP) is to position listening as a subject of study in the context of oral history performance.

His latest work, The Most Convenient Way Out, an ongoing project on listening, performance, and audio-walks in zones of armed conflict was commissioned by the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration and premiered in Colombia in July 2014. A second version was featured as part of the Why? What's Happening for the Young festival at London's Southbank Centre in October 2014. More recently, it has been adapted to Mexico and presented during the 39th Annual Conference in Local and Regional Anthropology of the Colegio de Michoacan, Zamora (October 2017).

His creation-research of the last seven years has focused on exploring creative ways by which to set audiences/participants in motion/action within specific spaces. He frames their actions in space as integral to a remembrance activity. He is interested in what such activities and uses of personal memory might do for the different participants, both individually and collectively. He welcomes graduate students in the following areas: oral history performance and performances of memory, socially engaged art and performance, performance and activism, performance in zones of conflict and in post conflict contexts, performance and migration, performance and Indigenous Peoples in the context of truth and reconciliation efforts, listening research in the context of performance studies, applied performance and theatre, political performance, walking art, participatory performance, site-specific performance, documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, performance and space, performance and cartography and, more broadly, performance studies.    

 

 

Research activities

Listening in the context of Oral History Performance for Social Change

In 2016,  I applied for and was granted a major Canada Foundation for Innovation infrastructure grant worth CAN$526,000 to establish what I call a Performing Listening Lab at Concordia's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (http://storytelling.concordia.ca). This grant offers infrastructure for my Canada Research Chair-ten years research program, which I was awarded in 2016, and which aims at positioning listening as a subject of study in the context of oral history performance for social change.  The Performing Listening Lab will be launched in the Fall 2018 and will become a hub for creation research and for university-community collaborations bringing together theatre and performance studies, public and oral history, sound studies, listening research, and social innovation.