This Is Not America

Faena Art launches the inaugural Faena Festival, a new multidisciplinary platform that will be presented during Miami Art Week. The first edition of the Faena Festival, This Is Not America, is keyed to Miami’s enduring role as a port that welcomes migrants, refugees, and tourists from across the US and the Americas, and from countries throughout the world. The festival engages with the multiplicity of communities and cultures and the palimpsest of histories that have created the Americas while responding specifically to Miami as its hemispheric hub. All programming is free and open to the public.

“It has always been my dream to have our international cultural festival—a polyphonic platform to amplify voices and bring together practitioners from different artistic fields. Artists are not limited by geopolitical divides, so in this inaugural edition, we’ve decided to explore diverse interpretations of the Americas, what unifies and ultimately connects us. Each future edition will have a unique theme, organized under a different concept that I personally find relevant and will develop working in collaboration with the worlds most recognized and emerging talents, artists, thinkers, and curators,” stated Alan Faena. 

A series of newly commissioned installations and performances will explore how we choose to define our sense of place in ways that encourage dynamic identities that transcend—and even resist—the imposition of physical, historical, and political borders. The Festival proposes a new curatorial format that occupies and engages the entire Faena District and extends beyond into public spaces of the city of Miami Beach as an experiential platform. The diverse venues of the Faena District Miami Beach will be activated, including the public areas of the street and beach; the Faena Hotel, including its theater and screening room; and Faena Forum—the OMA-designed cultural centerpiece of Faena District Miami Beach.

Organized by Zoe Lukov, Curator for Faena Art, This Is Not America is anchored by Alfredo Jaar’s groundbreaking work, A Logo for America (1987), and features major new commissions of installations and performances by renowned artists, including Derrick Adams, Miya Ando, Cecilia Bengolea, Joseph Beuys, Ana Teresa Fernández, Eugene Jarecki, Isabel Lewis, Boris Mitić, Luna Paiva, George Sánchez-Calderón, Tavares Strachan, Wu Tsang and boychild, Agustina Woodgate and Rev. Houston R. Cypress.  

“This is Not America addresses America as a concept more than a place, a contested and powerful idea that is greater than the waters and borders that frame it,” noted Ms. Lukov. “Artists in the Festival have been invited to explore the concept of America as a myth and a narrative that has at times bound and divided us but ultimately has the power to unify. By occupying the interstitial zone between land and sea many of these site-specific installations seek to reimagine porous and transitional spaces as places of refuge and safe harbor that are representative of what our ‘America’ is and can become. Miami as the iconic city of the Americas—its gateway, its sanctuary, and its playground—is the ideal place from which to speak to new ways of defining ourselves our communities, and our global identity.”

Grand Opening: Monday, December 3 at 8pm, rsvp [​at​] faenaart.org
8pm: Installations on view at Faena Beach 
9pm: Performances by Isabel Lewis and Cecilia Bengolea at Faena Forum
10:30pm: Performance by Wu Tsang and boychild at Faena Theater RSVP

Free and open to the public. More info

About Faena Art
Faena Art is a nonprofit organization that houses and produces post-disciplinary and time-based experiences. A catalyst for innovative, site-specific, and immersive creative practices, Faena Art is a transformative bridge across the Americas, between the south and the north, the popular and the experimental, activism and research. Faena Art fosters new models for performative social interaction that transcend the traditional boundaries of art, science, philosophy, and social practice.