Mujer Enterrada: Something Happened Here is a collaborative multi-media installation created for Centro Cultural Aztlan, San Antonio’s 40-year-old Chicano/a arts and cultural center, in celebration of their yearly exhibition to explore the cultural implications (historical and contemporary) of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2nd, 1848. This year (2017) the staff and curator have worked to highlight the treaty’s impact on women (again, historical and contemporary), naming this year’s show Mujeres de Aztlan y El Segundo de Febrero.

After an informational gathering of selected artists (lead by Cultural Anthropologist, Dr. Citlali Maria Zentella) three of the invited artists decided to collaborate on an installation, Laurie Dietrich (ritualist and theatre artist), Amber Ortega-Perez (movement artist), and Dörte Weber (structural weaver and fiber artist). I was brought in to assist on the short movie they wanted to have playing on a loop within the defined space of the installation. I also took it up myself to suggest (and later construct) the manner in which the film would be presented. I decided to place a television set on the ground, tilted up for viewers to look down at the screen. The front portion of the TV was encased in foam insulation, painted to match the dirt spread on the floor around it. Laurie provided photographs and a poem, as well as helped to give shape to the whole piece. Amber created choreography for the dance in the film, which she also performed.  Dörte brought in some of her fiber panels (constructed out of woven plastic bags) which featured earlier in her installation at the border fence in the Rio Grande Valley.

Above is a short promotional teaser I created for the show. And beneath the photos of the installation below is a link to the full video which played in the gallery.

Writers Resist is a national initiative of writers gathering in selective venues around the country on the 15th of January, 2017, and speaking/reading words which better articulate  a just and compassionate society. In San Antonio the literary organization Gemini Ink took it upon themselves to facilitate and organize the event locally. I joined about a hundred others in this public reading. My offering was “Transported: a Journey into the Past.” A slightly modified version of the text portion of the film I presented for Jump-Start’s 32nd annual Performance Party.

This is a little piece I created for Jump-Start Performance Co.’s Performance Party 32. Because the venue of the annual fundraising event was not at their home theater (too small of a space for so many performances), the theme for this year was “Transported.” I decided to write a short low-energy rant about how our present social climate seems to be so hung up on desiring a return to a past which never was. I pulled a couple hundred clips from old public domain newsreels (items from the wonderful Prelinger Archives, lovingly parked at archive.org). I vignetted the one-second clips in oval cameos and played them over an animated nighttime highway (thank you, Liran Tabib, for that great After Effects tutorial!). Add in a minimalist repetitive score. And top it off with a voice-over recording of myself reading the piece. Five minutes is just the right length, before things begin to get too boring. Or so I like to tell myself. As has been the case for the last seven or eight years I have been asked to contribute work for the Performance Parties, it was a great honor to share a line-up with so many extraordinary creative people, from the polished veterans to the exciting possibilities exhibited by the younger crowd of emerging artists and performers. Here’s hoping for many more Performance Parties to come!

What a nice end to a rather murky year. December 29th of 2016 marks the third short story I have had published this year. “Orion’s Feet on the Water” appeared in Maudlin House, an online literary magazine. Here is the link.

This is the fifth year I’ve made one of these little films. This is my year, curated specifically from my Instagram feed. Very pretty and filled with adventure! I’ve set it to the music of Bill Callahan. The song is, Drover.

This was my foray into the world of self-publishing. I had been curious how to go about preparing a manuscript for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. It’s quite easy to not only create the proper Kindle-friendly file, but also to place the item onto Amazon’s database.

The Silverfish Trilogy, three short pieces.

UPDATE: Currently this little item has been removed from Amazon. As I move to upload other books I have decided to take this down until I can create a better cover and make another few editing passes.

Invocation, a performance piece Laurie and I have been working on for maybe 9 months, finally made it’s debut at URBAN-15 on November 4th, 2016.

Here is some information from the press release:

INVOCATION is a new performance art piece by San Antonio artists Erik Bosse (writer, film-maker, and sound artist) and Laurie Dietrich (writer, photographer, and performance artist). 

An experiment in enhanced storytelling, INVOCATION is comprised of sixty short pieces of flash-fiction, paired with photographs and soundscapes. However, at each show the audience will hear only thirty as, taking turns, the artists will randomly draw numbers during the show which correspond to particular stories, images, and pieces of music or sound effects. As projected images appear and disappear and the soundscape builds—evolving, generative—a story emerges. Your story might be the same as that of the artists or the person sitting next to you, but probably not. Invoking the muses to give shape to these seemingly disparate text selections, images, and sound elements means invoking as many different stories as there are people in the room.


This event is part of URBAN-15’s Sonic Provocation series, an experimental project whose aim is to provide a setting for sound artists to showcase original material, taking it out of the laboratory and into the ears of the public. Sonic Provocation offers artists the creative freedom to present their work beyond the constraints of audience expectation—and in turn offers audiences the opportunity to experience something acoustically different and unique.

Below is a full run, recorded during our final rehearsal. As each performance is different, this is just one of numerous possible iterations.

In October I had my first publication in a literary journal. Back in my twenties I had a few items appear in a couple of ‘zines, but those were run by family and friends. So I was quite excited to hear back from The Bitter Oleander. They wanted to publish my short story, “Beyond the Bamboo,” in their autumn issue. That would be Volume 22; Number 2.

No money involved. But I did get a complementary copy in the mail. Opening my mailbox today was very rewarding. I hope this enthusiasm sticks, goading me to continue submitting work out into the world.

Some weeks back I was asked by Julie Marin of the FIRE Collaborative (a new San Antonio-base theater company) to provide the video design for their collaboratively-created play, Rapid Eye Movement. It was staged at Jump-Start Performance Co. as part of that organization’s INKUBATOR program. What an honor to work with these (mostly) young artists. I also ran the video and the sound, so I had the great privileged to see all performances of this excellent show!

Here’s a video documentation of one of the performances.