“I’m really thinking about these questions of intellectual property for the present and how that’s very much linked to a question of ethics, as opposed to representation.”
Artists and Rights, Episode 5: The Brown Ceiling and Possible Futures
Artists and Rights, Episode 6: Behind the Closed Door: Intimacy, Collaboration, and Access
Latipa (née Michelle Dizon) is a visual artist, theorist, and Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her work summons sites of memory and resistance in the wake of historical dispossession, migration, and diaspora.
Latipa’s projects include Gaza Before the Law, a film about failure of the US legal system in matters of justice for Palestine, The Archive’s Fold, a multi-image slide installation that explores the violence of the US colonial archive by reading its images through past and future ancestors, and White Gaze (with Viet Le), an artist’s book and photographic installation that poses a decolonial counterpoint to National Geographic and its legacy of imperialist visuality. Past projects of note include Perpetual Peace, a multichannel video installation about extractivism and ecological disaster in the Philippines, Basing Landscapes, a single-channel video installation about the gendered violence of neocolonial occupation, and Civil Society, a three-channel video installation that considers cultural memory through the lens of two events: the 2005 uprisings in the French banlieues and the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles. Most recently, Latipa has co-edited an issue entitled On Being Included on the politics of inclusion and gave the Keynote Lecture for the 2019 Singapore Biennale Online Symposium.
Latipa’s work takes place in both the contexts of institutions and grassroots organizing. She has lectured and exhibited across the Americas, Europe, and Asia in significant cultural and educational institutions such as the Center for Feminist Studies in Zagreb, Croatia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, SalaSab, Bogota, Colombia, Caixaforum, Barcelona, Spain, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, The Cooper Union, NYC, NY, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, and the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden. She has also founded and developed grassroots initiatives to build and nurture community such as at land’s edge (2015-18) an autonomous pedagogical platform based in South and East Los Angeles and the Memory and Resistance Laboratory (2019- present) which partners with grassroots organizations to create media based in social movements. Latipa has received grants from the University of California Humanities Research, the Human Rights Center, Art Matters, the Fulbright Foundation. She has been honored with a 2017-18 Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles.
Latipa earned an MFA in Art with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.
You can also find Latipa here:
On Being Included: The Issue of Art Practical Latipa guest- edited with Yusef Omowale.
The 2nd edition of White Gaze by Latipa and Việt Lê available from Sming Sming Books.
Selected Work
Latipa, White Gaze, 2018, Artist’s Book with Việt Lê.
Latipa, White Gaze, 2018, Artist’s Book with Việt Lê.
Latipa, The Archive’s Fold, 2018. Multi-Image Slide and Sound Installation.
Latipa, Gaza Before the Law, 2018. Video, 23 minutes.