Beautiful Bogotá: Part II
September 27, 2009
One of the most inspiring aspects of attending the conference in Bogotá was the opportunity to see the appropriation of space on the university campus. Any flat surface was fair game to explore the political and social climate in Colombia. I’ve included a few of my favorite pictures. The two photos above show the artwork of Pedro Lasch in his piece, Latino/a America, at the beginning of the conference and at the end of the conference ten days later. Lasch encouraged local graffiti artists to contribute to his piece.
Beautiful Bogotá: Part I
September 15, 2009
Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá
This August I had the pleasure of attending the Encuentro, a conference organized by the Hemispheric Institute at NYU, in Bogotá, Colombia. It was an amazing ten days filled with performances, roundtables and work shops. I participated in a work group led by Peter Kulchyski and Edwin E. Corbin Gutiérrez where I presented my research on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada. The other presenters were artists, activists and academics who are working in communities around the world on issues ranging from the right to education, social justice, the re-appropriation of public spaces, and art as activism. It was amazing and inspiring.
Some of the highlights from the conference include Andreas Huyssen’s keynote address on “Natural Rights, Civil Rights and the Politics of Memory,” Mary Louise Pratt’s keynote entitled “Language Ecology, Language Politics: Towards a Geolinguistic Imagination,” and the Roundtable addressing “The Struggles Over Citizenship.”
There was also plenty of controversy. Performer Tania Bruguera, for example, incorporated cocaine into her performance, inviting audience members to partake in the drug. In a roundtable discussion a few days later she tried to explain her motivation behind the performance, linking this performance to a series she was doing in Cuba and a planned performance in Palestine. For the most part, the audience seemed offended by her work, charging her with being irresponsible and self-indulgent.
IRS TRC Heading West?
September 6, 2009
With the appointment of the new Chair, Justice Murray Sinclair, there is talk of the IRS TRC moving from Ottawa to Winnipeg. An excerpt from a recent article in the Globe and Mail:
“The residential school population is primarily a Western Canada population,” [Justice Sinclair] said, estimating that about three quarters of the schools were located in Western and Northern Canada. “And so the survivor population is primarily in the west. Locating it outside of Ottawa was an easy decision.”
Justice Sinclair is also based in Winnipeg and so it seems like a natural choice. At the same time, others are concerned about the potential move. Mr. Cachagee, Executive Director or the National Residential School Survivors’ Society, worries that survivors that are not based in the west will feel isolated:
Specifically, Mr. Cachagee points to the fact that the headquarters will be in the west and that a 10-member advisory “survivor committee” does not include anyone from Ontario and Quebec and has only one eastern representative from Nova Scotia. The three commissioners are also from the west and north.
Debates regarding the make-up and location of the commission continue. The full article is available here.
