The Loft Hour: Iggy Cortez + Juan David Rubio Restrepo

Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; racialization in relation to labour and technology; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment. He is currently at work on a book project entitled Wondrous Nights: Global Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023). He has also curated exhibitions and film series at  The Slought Foundation, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Penn Humanities Forum and The Lightbox Center. https://filmmedia.berkeley.edu/people/iggy-cortez/.

Juan David Rubio Restrepo’s research interests include theories of the human; decolonial theory; media studies; cultural and ethnic studies; critical theory; ethnomusicology; and Latin American, Chicanx, Caribbean and African-American thought. He is currently using multi-sited archival research and auto/ethnography in his current book project, which focuses on placing the music and figure of Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo in a dialogue with popular music in its literal translation. In his own creative pursuits, he has performed at Angel City Jazz Festival; Festival Internacional de la Imagen; Festival Altavoz; and the Rock al Parque and Jazz al Parque festivals. Rubio Restrepo earned his BMus in jazz studies and drumkit performance from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, before studying in California, where he received his MFA in integrated composition, improvisation, and technology from UC Irvine and Ph.D. in music with a focus on integrative studies from UC San Diego. https://artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/juan-david-rubio-restrepo-joins-department-music-assistant-professor.

Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor, is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni’s first book Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Terracene engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Research for Mameni’s second book project engages histories of medicine, in particular that of Transmedicine and the endocrine system. Mameni is currently conducting archival research to understand visual representations of fluid bodies within Islamic manuscripts prior to the rise of the scientific discipline of endocrinology in the early 20th century. https://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/people/sara-mameni/.