La Congelada de Uva's Between Menopause and Old Age

Rocio Boliver (La Congelada de Uva) has been active on the international art circuit for the last 20 years. In 1991, she began her performance career with the reading of porno-erotic texts, focusing her critique on the repression of women. Boliver's work is historically situated amongst the most radical of Mexican Body Art.

The Hemispheric Institute's 9th Encuentro, held at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, sought to explore the multiple valences of the term MANIFEST! How are performances mobilized and syncretized in civic, community, and cultural contexts to create manifold forms of political expression? How do public, theatrical events produce 'evidence' that manifests ideas otherwise invisible, hidden, or unspeakable? What new manifestations, manifestos, festivals, and manifs emerge via our changing visions of political spaces, intellectual arenas, and the everyday street? The 2014 Encuentro invited artists, activists, and scholars to engage with and investigate the aesthetic, social, and choreographic techniques that transform political ideas into collective images, through actions, embodied utterances, and ways of being. Such questions resonated in the host city of Montréal, where la manifestation has a rich and ongoing history. Between Menopause and Old Age aims to demystify the horror of old age in an ironic way, inventing a deranged aesthetic and a moral solution for the 'problem of age.' Rocio Boliver hopes that her mockery of this absurd contemporary reality exposes a broken society based on looks, and challenges the ways in which old age has become synonymous with insult.