Adam Cooper-Terán
Freelance Video Editor, Animator for Hire, Digital Producer, Media Designer for Spectacle, Theater, and Activism
Category: Artist/Individual
Discipline: Media
Program Affiliations: Arts Foundation Grantees
About Adam Cooper-Terán
As a media agitator, Adam has been creating videos for performance, theater, and spectacle for over two decades. Born and bred in so-called Tucson, much of their work is centered on storytelling, often expressed through a decolonial lens, and implementing tactics more aligned with surveillance culture, psychedelia, and the supernatural. Adam’s work has featured across the globe as large-scale media projections, musical interventions, and installations. As a solo performer, Adam’s interests in live audio and video mixing have led to improvisations that are ritualistic, political, and highly personal.
Adam has toured for over a decade across the Americas and has been an artist-in-residence at Project Row Houses in Houston, Latino/Chicanx arts organization MACLA in San Jose, Teatro Tespys in El Carmen de Viboral, Colombia, Universidad Ciudad Juárez, and the University of Rostock, Germany. They have garnered praise and support from academic and cultural institutions far and wide, and too many to list, while continuing to disrupt mainstream media however possible.
ACT
Preferred Pronouns: them / they
adam@antral.net
http://antral.net
2016. A Profane Totem.
Powers That Be
Hierarchical representation of thee Kabalion ov Elite Baby Eaters, Murderers, Liars, Thieves, Deviants, et al in genuflection to Moloch, Pazuzu, and/or the Devil. Below remains the decolonized landscape of strange fruit & land protectors, desecrated, but never forgotten. Below that the elemental Chaos emerging from a Cosmic Void.
First five minutes of a solo performance, 2019-2024.
ANNIA JEKKA (Intro)
ANNIA JEKKA is a 3-channel video performance exploring the history of the Tucson basin over 500,000 years. This land is riddled with so much history, struggle, and change that goes back to time immemorial, and the landscape keeps that living record & it manifests into the present. Genocide is ongoing, borders keep getting built, and humans today are still living and dying upon the Land. That Spirit is alive and non-temporal, always existing and re-manifesting into what’s at the surface, what is the horror and chaos of Now. The Tucson Mountain Range (encompassing the peaks Chuk Shon and Cemamagi-Do:ag) is the constant backdrop of all the scenes of this multimedia reckoning. ANNIA JEKKA (a blighted reconfiguration of the Yaqui words for “Shadow World”) is in effect a cyber-majikal portal creating time slips for audiences to witness the dichotomies & absurdities around the colonial & capitalist history that made Tucson the city it is today. If we reckon with the past, we can imagine an Indigenous future.
2017 AZ Illustrated feature of a production.
Shooting Columbus
Shooting Columbus was a Borderlands Theater production, but it’s more of an experience than it is a play. Visually stunning and at times overwhelming, this beautiful new work asks a simple question, “If settlers never arrived in this land, how would your life be different?” The creators of the play, the Fifth World Collective, are a group of indigenous and non-indigenous artist. Together they explore this question through installations, movement, dance, video projection, audio recordings and performance. At the center of the production are often overlooked struggles of Native Americans, expressed in their own voices. Shooting Columbus advances the mission and the vision of Borderlands Theater in impressive fashion.
