Ciclon Olivares

Ciclón is the co-founder and co-director of Sin Kabeza Productions and SK Symbiotic, research platforms developed across diverse media and in communication with both organic and inorganic life-forms within and beyond the technosphere. As a diasporic Latinx and non-binary transmedia storyteller they* engage technologies of consciousness that contend with the conflicted affects of Terran pleasure and strife amid mass extinctions. Other names that they have embraced in diverse contexts include Lissette-Tatiana Olivares and Coco Rico. Ciclón acquired critical research skills from study programs at Vassar College, Peking University, and the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program where they were a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Critical Studies. Their theoretical training was profoundly influenced by a durational research residency where they pursued intradisciplinary and intrasectional studies in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of Santa Cruz as a former doctoral candidate (2007-2014). Between 2010-2012 Olivares was an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies supported by a NYU Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity. In 2012 Sin Kabeza Productions presented five separate experimental videos in The Worldly House: An Archive Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Multispecies Writings on CoEvolution at dOCUMENTA(13) as well as a performative lecture at the DisOwning Life Conference. There SKP produced their first bioarchitectural intervention, SEEDBANK: An eco evo devo design fiction in the SF Mode, a posthumanist research site. Recent multispecies architectures have been displayed at the NGBK gallery in Berlin’s Animal Lovers exhibition and are featured in the article “Promethean CoEvolution: The Eco Monstrous Aspirations of SKP and SK Symbiotic,” edited by Praba Pilar for Women Environmental Artist Directory(2019). Between 2017-2019 SEED: Visualscapes from the Future was exhibited at the Edith Russ Haus for New Media Art in Oldenberg, Germany, and at Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. Coming out as a Trans*Animal, from the series We Architectures was recently presented at the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania in 2019. Their first publication of experimental poetry was published in Modified: Living as a Cyborg (Routledge 2021). Their research has been funded by the Fulbright Fellowship, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, ICI-Berlin Fellowship, and A Blade of Grass’ Artist Files Fellowship, which recognizes socially engaged art production. Currently SKP & SK Symbiotic are researching 18th century architectural methods to restore a Georgian stone house that will become their eco art laboratory. Since their relocation they have been rewilding multispecies communities who both breathe and respire while performing radical necromancy to unearth stories that contend with the site’s colonial history and to honor the extinctions and rebirths witnessed by inhabitants from the past, present, and future. They are currently in the pre-production of a visually striking story that highlights extraordinary witchcraft in pre-revolutionary America.

B.A. Vassar College
M.A History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz
Critical Studies Program, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program
Former PhD Candidate(ABD) History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz 2007-2014
Parenthetical Notation in Latin American & Latinx Studies