MacDowell Downtown

Tatiana Arocha, a visual artist who makes installations tying together natural materials with digitally altered components that examine political and cultural dynamics, will present the final MacDowell Downtown of the season on Friday, November 3rd, at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. Beginning at 7:30 p.m., Arocha, who is in town for her first MacDowell residency, will present slides and video of her work as she explains how and why her unique practice of creating physical manifestations of the forests of her native Colombia inform her growing body of work.

At MacDowell, Arocha is experimenting with “visual vocabularies” she’s developed from research into how colonization and the so-called scientific discovery of cocaine in the 1800s overshadowed and replaced Indigenous knowledge and sacred uses of the plant with its own vocabulary. She’s developing a video animation based on modern society’s marketing of cocaine as a toothache cure for children, then as a fortified wine by the Catholic Church, and, of course, putting the pep in Coca-Cola. She’ll “reverse engineer” the brand management she sees as going in to those campaigns, as well as the War on Drugs. The doors of Bass Hall open at 7 p.m. of Friday with light refreshments served; the presentation starts at 7:30 p.m.

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MacDowell Downtown is a free series of presentations open to the public by MacDowell Fellows. It typically takes place on the first Friday of the month from March to November in downtown Peterborough. Each season of MacDowell Downtown features a wide array of programming, including film screenings and workshops, readings, and writing seminars, art exhibitions, performances, talks, and more. MacDowell Downtown begins at 7:30 p.m. typically at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough.

(Below, see a slideshow of the 2019 season. Keep an eye out for our “At MacDowell” monthly column appearing the first Thursday of every month in The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, and visit our Facebook Events page for the latest information on upcoming MacDowell Downtown events.)