Angela Pastorelli-Sosa

This dissertation focuses on four Latinx artists: Enrique Chagoya, Sandy Rodriguez, Firelei Báez, and Juan Sánchez, whose works consider historical and cultural material objects as entry points for linking overdetermined constructions of geographies to essentialized notions of identity. These artists reconfigure normative representations of space to subvert their discursive power and explore how space continues to be contested via racialized, gendered bodies. This project reads its objects of study as alternative spatial practices that address diasporic conditions and map futures where spaces and identities are no longer subject to discipline and control. In short, it analyzes how aesthetic engagements with multiple iterations of space become the active grounds for generative possibility.