Closing the HAMPI exhibition, Coello and their collaborators will reflect on the process behind this multimedia project in an artist talk and panel event at Jack Straw Cultural Center. Featured collaborators include Matt Austin and Kiki Lechuga-Dupont from For the Birds Trapped in Airports (Los Angeles, CA/Mendocino, CA) as well as Hope Wang from LMRM (Chicago, IL). A YouTube livestream will be available.

Chicago Graduate Conference

Today’s catastrophic times place the category of “the Humanities” in a thorny position. On the one side, the institutional dismantling of the Humanities, evidenced by funding cuts and closure of programs, as a symptom of political and epistemic crises. On the other side, the unacceptable defense of the “Human” as Man (Wynter)—European, white, land-owning, secular—ntenable in our contemporary times. The structural disregard of the Humanities is synced with the precarity of those lives who have been “inhumanized”, dispossessed of political subjectivity and reduced to the conditions of objects. What emerges, then, is the need for a lexicon capable of naming the two crises—the institutional and the conceptual.

It is within this context that the framework of The Inhumanities becomes crucial, as it shows how these two dimensions are interconnected: modern Humanities have always grounded themselves in the exclusion of the inhuman, and their current crumbling exposes that constitutive wound. The Inhumanities (Yusoff) introduce an analytical framework that makes visible the double historical life of the inhuman as matter and as racial category, which constitutes liberal Humanism and its institutions. Thinking from the standpoint of The Inhumanities opens a transversal terrain that sees the struggle for racial and gender equality, extractivism, and colonialism as intersectional paradigms of the present; where the connections between genocide and ecocide, matter and subjectivity, and land and politics emerge as historical conditions of Humanism, and, at the same time, as fissures through which to find other ways of thinking and inhabiting.

Work Presented

On Becoming a Health “Arthropologist”: Reflections from an Andean, Queer, Trans, and Disabled Artist-Scholar

In this autoethnographic photo essay, I trace my journey to and through applied cultural and medical anthropology as an Andean, kuir (queer), kariwarmi (trans), and disabled artist-scholar. I first reflect on my process of self-actualization between Ecuador and the United States. I then explore how my research practice began to transform from solely the positivistic to include the humanistic. I highlight HAMPI (Coello 2024), a multimodal autoethnographic project exploring my reconnection to my homeland, my Indigenous roots, Andean traditional medicine, and the Quechuan languages in my journey to holistic healing. Finally, I explore how this early “arthropological” work now informs my more recent work, as I research the practical social functions of Ecuadorian queer and trans subcultures, especially as vehicles for the holistic wellness of their members. Throughout this essay, I pay attention to the inherent responsibility of being a holder of these often-marginalized stories.

The exhibition features photographs and artifacts collected by Coello during their travels in Ecuador and Peru, along with the project’s various collaborative elements, including handmade physical poetry art books with For the Birds Trapped in Airports, illustrations with Kiki Lechuga-Dupont, textile samples with LMRM, and a Quechua-language soundscape with Jack Straw Cultural Center. Coello will also perform poetry on opening day. The exhibition will be on display through June 12, 2026.

In this writing- and performance-based workshop, you will be invited to channel your own experiences (personal and professional) in a medical setting to devise "scenes" around a scenario that medical providers often confront: delivering difficult news to their patients. The workshop is designed with an arts-in-medicine lens, so come prepared to explore your creativity as it relates to your medical practice!

This workshop is adapted from a course of the same name previously taught at Ohio University as part of its broader Arts in Health Initiative.