Speech Acts

Maria Gaspar discusses her recent project, Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, which culminated in a public site intervention at the Cook County Jail this past fall. At the intervention, Gaspar illuminated the north end wall of the jail with projected animations developed through workshops she held inside the jail with men who were incarcerated, collectively named the Radioactive Ensemble. Original audio recordings were broadcast on site, through the wall, and across the city. Speech Acts references the power of sound as a force and form and the strategy of fictive narration as liberatory and subversive. Gaspar traces how she instigates body, site, and sound in her ongoing individual and collective artistic practice.

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations in order to generate liberatory actions.