LAMAS: Latin American Media Arts Symposium 2026

Presented by Southern Currents

Claudia Bernal, Entre niebla y cicatrices, resistir, 2023. Image credit: Paul Litherland.

LAMAS: Latin American Media Arts Symposium 2026

October 14 – 17, 2026 | Toronto

The 2026 edition of LAMAS explores the intersections of affect, memory, futurity, and decoloniality within media arts practices shaped by Latin American* diasporas across Canada. This year’s symposium brings together translocal collaborations, care-based methodologies, and speculative approaches that imagine alternative cultural futures, reclaim histories often left out of dominant narratives and support processes of decolonial transformation within Canada’s arts ecology.

Over four days, the symposium features panels, performances, presentations, and workshops led by artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners. Together, they consider how media arts can become spaces for reparation, reclamation, exchange, and collective reflection. This edition invites us to rethink how knowledge is produced, shared, and circulated, opening up conversations around embodied knowledge, reciprocity, relation, and care.

This year, we are also grateful to welcome artists and researchers based in Montréal and across Québec. Their work reflects the vibrancy and complexity of Latinx cultural and artistic production and contributes to broader conversations about Latin American diasporic practices across Canada. Welcome to LAMAS 2026!

Laura Acosta and Santiago Tavera, The Embrace of the Saw, 2026. Image courtesy of the artists.

Locations

October 14 – 16, 2026
Friends House, 60 Lowther Ave, Toronto

October 17, 2026
Dundas West Studio, 837 Dundas St W, Toronto

Programming

Day 1 – Wednesday, October 14 | Friends House

5:30pm | Presentation + Workshop
Fertility Stories presented and facilitated by Karleen Pendleton Jiménez

Day 2 – Thursday, October 15 | Friends House

3:00pm | Panel
Care-based, Inclusive Practices within Latinx Diasporic Communities
Cristal Buemi, Natalia Ruiz Cuartas, and Viviana Santibañez, moderated by Paola Gomez

5:00pm | Panel
Trajectories of Latin-American Art in Canada
Francisco-Fernando Granados, Hugo Bonilla and Jorge Lozano, moderated by Luísa Cruz

Day 3 – Friday, October 16 | Friends House

5:00pm | Panel
Creating New Archives of Resistance
Claudia Bernal, Michelle Peraza and Soledad Fátima Muñoz, moderated by Nuria Carton de Grammont

7:00pm | Performance
Entre niebla y cicatrices, resistir/ Between Fog and Scars, Resist
Claudia Bernal

Day 4 – Saturday, October 17 | Dundas West Studio

4:00pm | Panel
Echoes of Memory: Counter-Narratives in Digital Media Arts
Laura Acosta, Lucia Rojas and Santiago Tavera, moderated by Victoria Carrasco

6:00pm | Performance and closing ceremony
Brown Dolly
Lucía Rojas and dssPow

We invite you to review our full programming details.

Latin American Media Arts Symposium, 2023. Image credit: Magda Arturo.

About the Guest Curator

Claudia Arana is an independent curator and cultural connector whose practice brings artists, communities, and diverse cultural perspectives into dialogue. Grounded in an ethics of care, her work attends to the relationships through which contemporary art is created, presented, and experienced. Her projects explore kinship, memory, displacement, and collective resistance, considering how these experiences inform questions of belonging, coexistence and contradiction. She studied Art Theory and Critical Thinking at the School of Visual Arts and Advanced Critique at the International Center of Photography in New York City and currently she is pursuing a master’s degree in cultural management at HEC Montréal. Claudia is curator in residence at the Centre d’exposition Lethbridge in Saint-Laurent, Montréal, and has been curating independent projects across Québec for the past three years.

About LAMAS

Founded in 1995, Southern Currents is a Toronto-based non-profit media arts organization committed to amplifying the voices and creative practices of Latinx and diasporic artists.

As the presenter of the aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival, we create spaces where artistic expression becomes cultural resistance and community building. As the first arts organization in Canada to focus on Latin film and media arts, we’ve built an enduring network of artists, curators, and institutions.

Our ethos values process over product, collaboration over hierarchy, and cultural specificity over assimilation. We seek to promote inclusion, innovation, and experimentation by presenting important works by established and emerging Latin artists. We encourage critical discussion and understanding of the diversity of Latin film and media arts culture in Canada and around the world.

Together, Arana and Southern Currents are aligned in cultivating platforms that reflect the evolving concerns and imaginaries of Latinx and diasporic creators while advancing cultural equity in Canada.

aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival
PO Box 1161, St. Clair Avenue West, Suite 22
Toronto, ON M6E 1B2
alucinefestival.ca/LAMAS2026
lamas@alucinefestival.com / curatorlamas@alucinefestival.com

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* We acknowledge that Latino, Latina, Latinx, or Latin American terms can be restrictive. Whenever using the term Latin American, we refer to anyone with Latin American ancestry, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, and legal status.

Southern Currents Film & Video Collective and LAMAS, promote accessibility and inclusion and are a safe and welcoming space for media makers and fans worldwide. We respect, reflect, and celebrate our communities’ diversity and strive for the inclusion of all persons.