Introduction: Latin American performance and the reconquista of civil space

It is December 31, 1998, and I am sitting on the malecón, a stone wall that runs along the Caribbean sea in a tiny colonial village on the Venezuelan coast called Choroní. Nestled between sprawling cacao plantations at the edge of a magnificently dense rain forest, Choroní thrives on fishing and hosting ecotourists and birdwatchers from Northern Europe. The clay-roofed houses built around interior courtyards here distinguish themselves by the inventiveness of the ironwork that covers their windows and entryways, the boldest of the designs resembling the hard-edged geometric patterns of the Kineticist art for which Venezuela became famous in the 1960s.