The Spring 2008 Monday Nights @ VAP Lecture Series examines the complexity of emergency situations through conversations between artists, technologists, theorists, and practitioners. This series is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amber Frid-Jimenez, Jae Rhim Lee in the MIT Visual Arts Program.
Amar Kanwar presented a talk entitled The Little Museum with reflections on the image that lies between sorrow and resistance. This exploration included extracts from different film projects such as Shrines 1991-2007, which emerges from labor and indigenous people’s resistance movements, The Torn First Pages, which emerges from the Burmese democracy movement and The Lightening Testimonies, which emerges from the search for language to understand the narratives of sexual violence in areas of conflict.
Today, we spent most of the day at 620 Putnam considering how we might bring our research, which has been mostly online, to this physical space. Owned by MIT, 620 Putnam is the site of a paint factory that has been neglected for what looks like years. As we contextualize our research off site without the tools and technologies with which we are familiar, we hope to generate a space for dialogue. Perhaps in this space we can re-examine the concepts of emergency that we have been exploring over the course of the term.
5 to 6 men raped us in rounds - could not forgive me - disowned me
where the men are - skin darker than ours
It is not in the culture of Sudan
It does not exist.
Singing sorrow - My zone of emergency is the genocide happening in Sudan, where the black African population are being wiped out and especially the rape crisis affecting the women and girls in Sudan. When women taking refuge in camps leave to search for necessary food or water, they run the risk of gang rape and mutilation by the Janjaweed. Amnesty International says rape is used as a weapon of war in Sudan. The Sudanese government denies this is happening or that they are involved. Women who report violent attacks risk consequences in their communities and with the law. I want to sing sorrow to acknowledge the plight of African women and for the black African community, Christian and Muslim who are being murdered, raped and violently wiped out. Keening was a tradition in the past, where women used voice to mourn the sorrow or death. I want to use my voice to acknowledge what is happening in Sudan and open up a space of awareness, mourning and dialogue. I gathered texts on the internet. Many of my selected articles were by New York Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof. I edited the texts to create poems to sing for sudan.
“The Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militias, an Arab supremacist movement, have been carrying out a horrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against African tribes. Some 2,700 villages have been destroyed, and as a result of the violence and the related starvation and disease, some 250,000 Sudanese have died, most in 2003 and 2004, and another two million have fled to refugee camps. The Bush administration has called these atrocities a genocide.”
Andrew S. Natsios, U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan in 2006-7 and Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2001-6
How to _____ is a collaborative project with New Urban Arts, a free interdisciplinary arts studio for Providence high school students and emerging artists. The “how to” video was chosen as a medium because of it’s potential to engage large audiences in art as makers through online participatory networks. The act of making a how to video is a creative act in and of itself and cements one’s knowledge of what it being demonstrated. In the context of a nonprofit arts organization, how to videos reflect the work of the organization to the outside world while strengthening student voices. For this project, six how to videos were made covering a variety of creative practices. They were posted on New Urban Arts youtube channel and posted on New Urban Arts wiki, which was created specifically for this project.
Julia Gualtieri, RISD, MA Art + Design Education, Community Tract
Today, May 5, 2008, we are hosting a Zones of Emergency film screening, lecture and panel discussion at a the Stata Center (32-155) at MIT starting at 6pm. Amar Kanwar, filmmaker, and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Professor of Law and Development and Director of the Program on Human Rights and Justice at MIT will speak on the topic of The Human Condition. Amar Kanwar will present “The Little Museum” with reflections on the image that lies between sorrow and resistance. This exploration will include extracts from different film projects such as Shrines 1991-2007, which emerges from labor and indigenous people’s resistance movements, The Torn First Pages, which emerges from the Burmese democracy movement and The Lightening Testimonies, which emerges from the search for language to understand the narratives of sexual violence in areas of conflict. Balakrishnan Rajagopal will talk about ‘normalizing emergency’ in development and human rights terms, drawing on Agamben, but with a specific focus on the condition of Dalits in India.
Can Do is an experiment in gathering a collection of small steps everyone can make to positively change in our environment. It is based in the belief that building a community of people interested in taking some of these small steps can be a powerful motivating tool, and empower us with the knowledge of our collective impact.
The central idea for this project was that small lifestyle changes across many people hold tremendous power to affect my zone of emergency (the worsening environmental situation), and so I designed a web site where I could gather people’s ideas for those types of changes, and then track the aggregate contributions of each member.
The elections are in process. For the past decade Zimbabwe has experienced a tumultuous turn of events: politically, socially, economically. On March 6th , 2008 Zimbabwe’s inflation was reported at 100,000 %. The diasporic experience of the crumbling socio-political fabric is the focus of this project. This project attempts to give agency back to the diasporic dialogue through an insurgent online practice or the manifesto as an ‘utterance.’ The method used for this expression is speech, or utterances, that remain anonymous, yet critical….. enough.
This Is My Providence is a community-building project that aims to show arts events and programs in Providence to visitors, residents, and future residents from the perspective of grassroots community leaders. The emergency that motivated this project is that of the missed opportunity to interact with what’s best about Providence. The purpose of the project is to highlight vibrant arts culture, debunk myths, and improve understanding of the strong cultural fabric in Providence.
Postcard imagery is generated by local community members who share photographic documents of people participating in favorite events and programs in Providence. The images are then made into postcards that include detailed information about the event and people pictured, so that new people can get involved. These postcards are distributed free of charge in the busiest areas of downtown Providence. A web presence with links will be added.
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