Javier Cardona Otero

As a teaching-artist invested in the interplay between the arts and education, I see myself as an art maker whose interdisciplinary and multimodal performance work is both a process and a product shaped by creative and intellectual curiosity. My hemispheric artistic and pedagogical scholarship proposes a poetic intervention to counter hegemonic narratives that have historically othered those deemed outside society's norms and traditions.

In my work, the human body and mind as a whole become the site-specific, where imaginaries and metaphors are organized in space and time to aesthetically stage an interactive site of engagement for story-making and story-sharing. This enactive art laboratory invites diverse people to shed their accustomed passivity to become "spect-actors." As a holistic body-mind that constructs knowledge from my interactions in the world, I acknowledge in my praxis an experiential body-self that becomes a live sociohistoric archive in constant emergence, through a layered system of accumulative experiences and memories.

My embodied practice in this animated archive revisits the past, inquires the present, and enacts hopes for a present future. I am neither an art-producing nor an art-consuming machine. Instead, hailing from the global south, I partake in humanizing processes of acumulación sensible, in which periods of enactive contemplation propel my indivisible body-mind to ensemble a performative testimonio.

Javier Cardona Otero is an interdisciplinary performing/performance artist and a facilitator of art experiences as education. His artistic and pedagogical endeavors intersect multiple literacies to critically inquire about and perform on sociocultural capitals. As an energetic child attending Puerto Rico's public schools, where the arts were absent from the curriculum, Cardona Otero found physical education to be an embodied form that allowed him to create through play. His body became an aesthetic instrument with which to read, write, and perform worlds within and beyond himself. His parents instilled in him and his six siblings the dream of education as the key to social mobility.

An independent art experimentalist, Cardona Otero crafts original conceptual events in which spectators are invited to break the fourth wall to co-narrate a singular story that becomes plural. In Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen (2018), an autoethnographic performance that premiered at The Back Door in Bloomington, IN, Cardona Otero’s body-self becomes a receptacle of and for emerging narratives. The work engages audiences in problematizing Euro-American taxonomies through a series of actions they enact with and on Cardona Otero, including holding the ends of a measuring tape, offering their glasses so he can read from a piece of paper, and drawing on his body with markers. As a responsive tool and decolonial tactic, Taxonomía disrupts capitalist imaginaries of Black and Caribbean Otherness as commodities for education and marketable consumption. 

Cardona Otero’s other works include Destierro (por ahora) (2022), Hasta al Cuello (2016), The Talk: A Work in Progress (2012), You Don't Look Like… (1996), and Ah mén (2004). These pieces have been shown in theaters, classrooms, museums, prisons, outdoor spaces, and academic venues throughout the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America. A series of images that are integral components of You Don’t Look Like... are now part of the permanent collection of the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Cardona Otero also co-creates through meaningful collaborations with other artists in theater, dance, music, performance, and visual arts.

Cardona Otero holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington, where he currently teaches. He also earned an M.A. from New York University and a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico.