Conference: Politicizing Trauma: Mourning Before Art and the Body in the Work of Penny Goring: "Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City

Saturday, March 7, 1:00 p.m.

José Clemente Orozco Room
Speakers: Sandra Sánchez and Brian Smith

Free admission

This talk offered a critical reading of Penny Goring’s work, considering the social dimension of trauma and focusing on the structural, affective, and power relationships that underlie it.
The discussion will explore how, through the use of domestic and low-tech materials, Goring approaches the beautiful, the intimate, the vulnerable, and the unspeakable as forces capable of destabilizing the normative languages of sexuality, femininity, identity, and pain.

The talk drew on references from feminist writers such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Hélène Cixous, and Anne Dufourmantelle, alongside ideas from Cornelius Castoriadis’s “radical imagination,” to consider her work as an act of reappropriation of the body within a system that expropriates it.