BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1971, in Rome, Fiamma Montezemolo is both an anthropologist and artist. As a an established scholar in border and urban studies, she has patiently designed rigorous and long-term ethnographic-artistic interventions at the Tijuana-San Diego border where she has also resided and taught for many years. As an artist she situates her work as a critical extension of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art during the 1990s. In addition to ethnography, a research method she also considers an emerging medium for post-art practices, she works with various media, including performance, video, digital photography, archival material and web-based images. Her art practice, one she ironically refers to as that of an Ethnographer-As-Artist, straddles various disciplines, sensibilities and methodologies, including institutional critique, public art, social art, relational aesthetics, indigenous media, visual anthropology, performance. She recently contributed a conceptual map of Tijuana for the 2005 edition of the bi-national, public art event InSite05, co-authored the internationally acclaimed book ‘Here is Tijuana’ (Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006), has performed in Teatro Vascello in Rome in the antropofagic and Guillermo Gómez-Peña-inspired multi-media performance ‘Opera Malinowski’, has co-directed a video on the Zapatista up-rising, winner of the Visual Anthropology Award in Italy, and has collaborated with various indigenous media practitioners in Brazil and Mexico, from the Xavantes community (including Domingos Mahoro’e’o, Caimi, Arquimedes), Vincent Carelli to Carlos Martinez in Chiapas. She is now in the process of reformulating as an installation and institutional critique her past collaborative curatorial project and intervention at the Pigorini Ethnographic Museum in Rome in 1999. She is the author of two ethnographies Faceless, Ethnicity and Gender in the Zapatist Movement and My history not yours! Chicanos/as Identity: between representation and self-representation. She has numerous national and international publications with Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies (UCLA), Third Text (UK), Revista de Antropología Social (Madrid University), La Ventana, Guadalajara University, Letras Libres (Mexico), Avatar, Journal of Anthropology and Communication, Meltemi (Italy). She held several academic appointments: Visiting Scholar at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (2008-2009), Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Cultural Studies at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico, (2003-2008), Visiting Scholar Stanford University (2002).
