In this intimate conversation, Emilio Rojas speaks with artist, educator, and social choreographer Ernesto Pujol, one of his longtime mentors and former professors, about the evolution of his performance practice. Drawing on their shared history—from Pujol’s performance workshop at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to their travels and work together in Japan—the conversation moves between mentorship, memory, and artistic practice . Pujol reflects on witnessing Rojas’s early practice and its transformation from work driven by the individual body, endurance, and rage toward a practice increasingly grounded in listening, community, pedagogy, poetry, and collective healing.

Together, they consider the body as archive, wound, scar, and site of memory; the relationship between performance and activism; Indigenous and queer artistic lineages; nakedness, vulnerability, and the ethics of collaboration; and the role of artists in moments of social and ecological crisis. Throughout the exchange, Pujol draws connections between Rojas’s earlier and more recent work, while Rojas reflects on a practice increasingly fueled by curiosity, love, and what he describes as embodied poetry. Their conversation offers both a reflection on Rojas’s artistic trajectory and an intimate record of the mentorship, teachings, and relationships that have helped shape it.