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  • About the Artist: Adam Cooper-Terán: Multimedia Designer and Performer in the Time of Disaster Capitalism
  • Eva Karene Romero (bio)

Adam Cooper-Terán <antral.net> is a Tucson-based artist of Mexican, Yaqui, and Jewish heritage. He struck me as the best artist to feature in this volume published on and in global pandemic and disaster capitalism, because his body of work is focused powerfully on two specific movements that are productively put into dialogue; decolonializing death and the grieving process, and doing a type of artistic archaeology of power on a specific landscape.

Cooper-Terán refers to his Mexican and Yaqui heritage when it comes to growing up with a kind of understanding and respect for the dead that he credits with fueling his involvement with The All Souls Procession. Cooper-Terán extends this work by incorporating his art into ceremony to express grief around his father’s passing in 2013. “There was a very strong sense of creating some kind of way to process his life and my grief that wasn’t through any typical or rote systems of processing grief,” Cooper-Terán explains, while describing a process that involved scanning efemera and objects, such as pieces of his father’s hair, rocks he collected, even his ashes. Cooper-Terán sees art as a vessel to conduct spiritual practice through, and credits building his own toolkit for this practice through his interest in the occult, nature and healing from religious trauma that may have been thrust upon people. Cooper-Terán also refers to the importance of The American Book of the Dead in his six-year process, building various performances around “confronting the clear light,” culminating in what Cooper-Terán refers to as “a digital send-off” for his father.

When asked about how his process around art and grief is relevant today, he responds, “For those who are dealing with death, there’s a lot of work that can be done through prayer, ceremony, creative work . . . every person that dies is connected to someone, and every life has some level of work required for transiting the soul.” He also refers to the privilege of the period of reflection that we’re in;

This moment is special in that regard, in that once the basics are there, you gotta go within . . . and it’s not going to be pretty. What you thought was normal—we’re never going to go back to that. How do you make something new? Any time there’s a paradigm shift everything gets reset to zero and people have to go to these places to think about where they want to express their identity from. Some of it’s ugly and painful, but in those dark places there’s also always a peace and a solace that can be very comforting and strength-building, that can build up your will and sense of survival. [End Page 4]

ANNIA JEKKA (a rough translation of two Yaqui words that mean shadow world) is another one of Cooper-Terán’s tours de force, connecting Tucson’s past and present in a mediatic collage juxtaposing generational trauma with natural and human flourishing. Contrasted with mainstream denial about for-profit detention facilities, the existence of a brown migrant underclass on which the national economy is built, the United States’s history of slavery, the reality of mass incarceration and the prison industrual complex, ANNIA JEKKA excavates Tucson’s colonial history, placing it side by side with today’s real estate developments, which so often add to gentrification, the erasure of past culture or even its outright cooptation and comodification. The show is a three-channel music and video event centering the Tucson Mountain Range as a scene that changes over time. The event includes the Mercado Annex, the Caterpillar building, other video timelines of construction being done around downtown, Tucson’s settler past. Cooper-Terán describes animating the landscape with a referentiality to historical moments and events, to historical trauma, but also to this landscape as a place where megaflora bloomed and the O’odham farmed. “The show is not meant to be calling-out directly or...

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