Event details
Saturday, December 2, 2023
2 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Register for the event here.

We Can’t Sleep is an opportunity to collectively reflect on ideas of home and homelands from a space of discomfort and awareness. Building off Carmen Boullosa’s poem “La patria insomne” (2011, translated as “Mamaland Can’t Sleep” by Katherine Hammond)—a multilayered, intimate reckoning with grief, memory, violence, and yearning—this immersive, bilingual English and Spanish event features a new animation by artist Magali Lara. Together Boullosa and Lara aim to invite and incite the audience to respond in their own languages, individually or communally, with materials to be provided for those who wish to express themselves visually.

Carmen Boullosa is the author of a dozen volumes of poetry; 19 novels, including most recently The Book of Eve (2023); 4 essay collections; and 10 plays, 7 of which have been staged. A distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, she has received fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and has won numerous prizes including the Casa de América de Poesía Americana, Premio Excelencia en las Letras José Emilio Pacheco, and the Rosalía de Castro. Boullosa lives in Mexico City and Brooklyn. 

Magali Lara was born in Mexico City in 1956. A leading feminist visual artist, Lara is also an essayist who uses text and image, in her words, “as Siamese twins” that “have developed different personalities but that, in the end, share a vital nucleus.” Her visual art is in collections such as the Banco de México; Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico. Lara lives in Mexico City and Cuernavaca, Mexico.