Miami Performance International Festival (M/P '26)
Richard Vergez
Edge Zones will present the 15th edition of the Miami Performance International Festival (M/P '26) on September 3, 4 and 5, 2026, at its Miami art center and on Edge Zones' YouTube channel. This year's edition, titled Rituals for Uncertain Futures, will feature more than 20 performance works, along with artist talks, workshops, and outdoor performances. All events are free and open to the public.
SCHEDULE
Thursday, September 3, 2026 - Video Performance
| 5:00 – 6:00 PM | M/P '26 Video Festival — Online via YouTube
Video Performance: Participants: Mileydy Artiles | Roxana Barba and Claudio Marcotulli | Beltran & Deniz | Nicole Combeau |William Cordova | Karma Davis | Cinthya Escorcia | Hazile-Barris | Bea Kaufman |Seiko Kitayama |Guilherme Peters |Jatun Risba | Quintín Rivera-Toro | Slaytwins | Lucia Von Sprenger
Friday, September 4, 2026 - Talk
| 6:00 – 9:00 PM | M/P '26 Artist Talk — Edge Zones Art Center
Talk Participants: Lisa Kusanagi , Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Jurj Kojs, Richard Vergez & Carlos Bonil. Moderators: Estefanía Papescu and Charo Oquet
Saturday. September 5, 2026 - Live Performance
| 6:00 – 10:00 PM | M/P '26 Live Performance - Edge Zones Art Center
Live Performance Participants: | Richard Vergez & Carlos Bonil | Dimitry Chamy | Nicolás Dumit Estévez | Girl Heaven | Juraj Kojs & Sun Young Park | Katelyn Kopenhaver | Lisa Kusanagi | John O’Donell | Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara | MyFiStudio | Thalia |
Co-Curators: Estefanía Papescu and Charo Oquet
Estefanía Papescu is a writer, editor, curator, and artist born in Argentina and currently based in Miami. She studied Social Communication and holds a degree in Journalism. Since 2019, she has directed the artist's book publishing house Simetría Doméstica, a project that brings together five generations of Argentine and Latin American visual artists in a collection of 150 unique books and five printed volumes. She is the author of the poetry books Vertical de agua (2016) and Morir un rato (2025). Her first solo exhibition, Los poemas son para llevarse, was curated by Nicolás Robbio, and her performance work includes Hilvanar un cuerpo (in collaboration with Sofía Sartori) and a piece presented within María Moreno's Células Madre project, featuring costume design by Marina De Caro.
Over the past year, as a resident at Dimensions Variable (Miami), she directed Simetría Doméstica Space, a project that housed a bookstore and where she curated several exhibitions, displays, and small book fairs. Among her prominent curatorial projects are the Independent Literature and Art Fair organized for the 15th anniversary of the MALBA Museum, the curatorship of the editorial sector at the Pinta BA Photo fair (2023), and the co-creation of "La revolución del deseo" alongside Fernanda Laguna, the first printed feminism fair in the country. Additionally, for years she organized and hosted El movimiento escondido reading series across various galleries and art spaces in Buenos Aires.
la foto es de Evelyn Sosa
Mi Instagram es @verticaldeagua
I am Charo Oquet, a Dominican-born, Miami-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans social practices, performance, installation, painting, photography, sculpture, ceramic and historical research. I have been reworking visual references drawn from my research on Afro-Caribbean culture, Taíno heritage and rituals, revising historically-loaded representations of sacred spaces and symbols of healing and resistance.
I have worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for more than 43 years. In 2004, I founded the non-profit organization Edge Zones, which has hosted numerous curatorial projects and international artist collaborations, including the Miami Performance International Festival, Zones Art Fair, Edge Zones Press, Art of Uncertainty, ReMapping the Caribbean, Index-Miami/Santo Domingo, and Reassessing the Diaspora. Through these initiatives, I have woven together a dynamic network of artists and researchers, creating year-round programming that features the works of hundreds of Florida and international artists.
LIVE PERFORMANCES FROM
Dimitry Saïd Chamy is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, and cultural producer. He creates hybrid generative systems that draw on collaboration, process, and play to evoke what is lost, examine the present, and explore the possible. His practice is rooted in a love of nature, science, and storytelling—grounded in his diasporic experience as a queer Haitian-Lebanese American immigrant.
GIRL HEAVEN is an experimental noise choir that is semi-improvisational, working between dance, sound, theater, and each other, to create an always different happening, moment, experience.
Sun Young Park
Juraj Kojš (Slovakia/USA) is an artphibian exploring the fields of music, sound art, theater, poetry, mixed media, multimedia, bioacoustics and technologies as a maker and performer. Kojš’s commissions include The Knight Foundation, Meet the Composer, Harvestworks, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami Theater Center and Live Arts Miami. He received awards at Europe—A Sound Panorama, Eastman Electroacoustic Composition and Performance Competition and the Digital Art Award. Organized Sound, Leonardo Music Journal and Computer Music Journal published his research. Kojš directs FETA Foundation and is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. www.kojs.net
Katelyn Kopenhaver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Miami whose work spans text, installation, performance, photography, and public intervention. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and is a studio resident at Bakehouse Art Complex.
Lisa Kusanagi is a Tokyo-born interdisciplinary artist working across choreography, film, and visual arts. Her performances, films, and visual installations have been presented in over 30 countries at venues including Film at Lincoln Center, Harlem Stage, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Miami Light Project, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Cineteca Nacional México, and the BAFTA-qualifying 10th Aesthetica Film Festival. Her work pursues visceral vulnerability that merges rigorous form with quirky humor, bold physicality, and social commentary.
Rituals for Uncertain Futures asks what it means to practice ritual amid ongoing instability. The works in this year's festival treat the body as both a site and an instrument — a place where memory, ancestry, and belonging are held, and where displacement, migration, and environmental change are confronted. Through collective actions, processions, and participatory pieces, alongside improvisational and durational works, the program engages themes of care, healing, and resistance as contemporary ritual practice.
Performances, video screening and conversation take place both inside Edge Zones' gallery, virtually and in outdoor and non-traditional spaces, responding directly to the city's cultural and ecological landscape. Participating artists work across performance art, movement-based practice, sound, installation, and socially engaged art, and represent both emerging and established voices in the field.
Live Performance Participants: Mariana Angels | Dimitry Chamy | Girl Heaven | Jurj Kojs & Sun Young Park | Katelyn Kopenhaver | Lisa Kusanagi| MyFiStudio| Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara | Richard Vergez & Carlos Bonil
Video Performance: Participants: Mileydy Artiles | Roxana Barba and Claudio Marcotulli | Beltran & Deniz | Nicole Combeau |William Cordova | Karma Davis | Cinthya Escorcia | Hazile-Barris | Bea Kaufman |Seiko Kitayama |Guilherme Peters |Jatun Risba | Quintín Rivera-Toro | Slaytwins | Lucia Von Sprenger
Talk Participants: Lisa Kusanagi , Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Jurj Kojs, Richard Vergez & Carlos Bonil. Moderators: Estefanía Papescu and Charo Oquet
ABOUT MIAMI PERFORMANCE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
Founded in 2012 as Miami's first performance art festival, M/P has become a central platform for the city's crossover between performance and sound and noise experimentation, connecting established noise musicians with younger artists exploring similar territory. This unique event gives Florida and international audiences the opportunity to learn from and be exposed to some of the finest contemporary international artists creating performance art today.
Throughout the years, M/P has featured the work of artists from around the world, including Japan, Germany, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Panama, China, Poland, Austria, Guatemala, USA, Romania, India, Spain, Iran, Korea, France, and Brazil.
MyFi Studio is a Miami-based artist duo formed by Dr. Josh Eisenberg and Aimee Rubensteen.
Imagine a world where using a computer feels less like Excel and more like expressive gestures. MyFi Studio is building this reality through video art installations, real-time computation, and Live performances. MyFi programs custom tools to make their art, and distributes the tools online. The duo work with an open-kitchen concept: exposing their process in the belief that access to art, music, and tools should be a public good. MyFi, short for Mycelium Fidelity, draws from the interconnected communication embedded in mycelium networks, computer systems, and human relationships. MyFi is formed by Dr. Josh Eisenberg and Aimee Rubensteen. Josh and Aimee met on the internet and married in Miami. They explore chance encounters that shape their world.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara - My artistic practice takes shape through a range of forms, including drawing, sculpture, performance, installation, interventions in public space, and collective actions. I was born in Cerro, Havana, in 1987, and my training has been primarily self-taught, complemented by experiences such as the workshop series at the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, organized by Tania Bruguera (2017–2018). My work explores the tensions between art, power, and freedom of expression, using the body, public space, and political irony as central elements.
In 2018, I launched the Cuban Artists Against Decree 349 campaign in response to restrictions imposed on independent artistic creation. That same year, and out of this campaign, I co-founded the San Isidro Movement together with artists, activists, journalists, and curators.
Between 2019 and 2021, I developed works and actions such as Case No. 1 of 2019 and A Thousand Ways to Die by Accident, the latter created with photographs by Anyelo Troya and published by El Estornudo. My work during those years also included interventions such as The Flag Belongs to Everyone, Drapeau, For Use. Homage to Daniel Llorente, and Children Were Born to Be Happy, Not to Die in Building Collapses.
I have participated in artistic residencies including El Ranchito-AECID-Artista X Artista, Madrid (2016); Anahata, France and Cambodia (2016); Metal at Chalkwell Hall, United Kingdom (2018); Resistir para existir, Laboratoire nomade ANAHATA, France (2019); and the Tallera International Residency Program, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2019).
My work has been presented at institutions including MACBA in Barcelona; Belvedere 21 in Vienna; Centre Pompidou in Paris; Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in New York; and the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires. In 2022, I presented Alcántara at The ArtSpace in Miami, curated by Claudia Genlui.
In 2021, I was imprisoned for political reasons and sentenced to five years in prison. That same year, Amnesty International recognized me as a prisoner of conscience. During my incarceration, my work continued to circulate through collaborations with artists, curators, and friends.
I have received the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award (2018) and the Oxi Courage Award (2021), was included in TIME 100 (2021), and received the Rafto Prize for Human Rights (2024) and the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent (2025).
After serving five years in prison, I arrived in exile in the United States on July 18, 2026. Most recently, I presented Luis Manuel Otero, nos encontramos at Miami’s Freedom Tower, an exhibition bringing together installations, drawings, and performances.
Richard Vergez (b. 1983, Philadelphia, PA) is a Cuban-American multi- disciplinary artist based in South Florida. His practice focuses on mixed media collage, sound composition, Intermedia video installation, and performance.
Carlos Bonil (b. 1979, Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian visual artist, sound artist, and educator whose practice merges sculpture, installation, experimental music, and kinetic sound objects.