A new exhibition at The Shed in New York is a colour-soaked, eye-opening look into Yanomami life – an Indigenous culture in the heart of the Amazon rainforest
FEBRUARY 13, 2023
TEXT: Violet Conroy
Elina Chauvet’s red shoes are worldly. They’ve been in Milan, Italy, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not just one pair, but hundreds — red boots, red heels, red toddler shoes. They’re not there to see the sights, but to take up space. Especially when the women or girls who would have worn them no longer take up any space, except in the lives of their loved ones.
"Los Palcos del Descubridor" (The Discoverer's Box Seats) was a project created by Sebastian Burga and José Aburto in 2012 that consisted of a large-scale installation on the street and a media campaign on the Internet.
The work simulated the upcoming construction of an apartment building that would replace Lima's Teatro Colón, a historical landmark.
El Antimuseo es un proyecto curatorial que questiona los mecanismos de legitimación del arte. El grupo considera su trabajo " el proceso social donde se produce el valor simbólico y económico de la obra de arte, así como en el análisis de la estructura y límites de la institución."
En las palabras de ANTIMUSEO:
Parió Paula is an all women’s percussion group based in Lima, Peru. These women are truly artistic renegades defying the social norms of Lima’s predominantly male music scene. With a bold message on emphasizing female expression, these ladies have transformed their countless styles of drumming into something effective for their city.
(see full article and short documentary at link below)
Marisela Escobedo was 52 when she was shot dead on a sidewalk outside of the Government Palace of Chihuahua City, northern Mexico. She had set up camp in one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities – a place where people won’t leave their homes at night to protest day and night against corruption and impunity in her daughter’s murder case.
"The walls of the streets of downtown Santiago are covered with stickers, art, words and posters.
The messages are varied and range from "Feminist power" to "All cops are bastards". They have taken over the walls of Zona Cero (Ground Zero), the name given to the area around Plaza de la Dignidad, where anti-government protests have been held - and at times brutally repressed by police - since 18 October.
The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi's Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment.
Thousands took to the streets in Lima, Peru, on March 11 to protest conservative presidential frontrunner Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, and demand that her candidacy be revoked amid accusations of vote buying.
I think this is a very interesting project that is intended to pay hommage by showcasing portraits of survivors of the Cuban revolution. They are displayed in the streets of Havana and, as the artists explains, this is a place that lacks commercial advertising/ billboards in the streets. So they are displaying the courage and strength of those, people who should be admired, earned their place in a sense.
Boricua artist Castorillo discusses the crisis, diaspora, and the enduring significance of the Young Lords Party for Puerto Rican social movements today using illustrations:
Hundreds of taxi drivers gathered together on the streets of Mexico City protesting against Virtual apps like Uber and Cabify. They formed a caravan and stopped the traffic for hours, as a way of denouncing unfair price competition.
During 2011, students around Colombia decided to create a National Student organization that would organize thousands of them to reject a harmful educational reform (Reforma a la ley 30). Before this year, student organizations were characterized by their segmentarity and old fashion yet violent ways to protest.
More than 20 years ago, a psychology student doing his training at one of Argentina's oldest psychiatric wards kept being asked by his family and friends what it was like to work in there. So he came up with an idea: to let the patients explain in their own words.
The first radio station to broadcast from inside a mental hospital was born.
An artist in Culiacan, Mexico—which has the highest rate of gun deaths in the country—has found a way to transform the agents of death into seeds of life.
In 2008, artist Pedro Reyes started running television ads urging locals to exchange their guns for food coupons to be redeemed at local stores.
The campaign—Palas Por Pistolas, or “Shovels for Guns"—collected 1,527 guns, which Reyes publicly smashed with a steamroller.
"A week-long party characterizes Brazil’s Carnival, the Mardi Gras of the southern hemisphere. Celebrations and parades are held throughout the country, most notably in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Carnival celebrations vary in length and content, depending on the area.
Doris Salcedo talked extensively with victims of the violence in Colombia. For the project titled Unland she spoke specifically with children who had witnessed the murder of their parents. This piece was a poetic response and representation of their testimony. Salcedo combined halves of tables together to make a whole. In the seam where the tables joined Salcedo meticulously sewed the tables together using white silk thread, dark hair and bone.
Prison inmates in Mexico have suffered from coronavirus infections at a higher rate than the country as a whole, and pandemic lockdowns have reduced their already limited contact with the outside world.
But one group of women inmates at a prison west of Mexico City have managed to benefit, as the lockdown spurred a wave of professionals with time on their hands to donate online classes.
In May of 2009 lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was murdered in Guatemla City. A video was released of Rosenberg directed to the Guatemalan public. If you are watching this, he said, I have been murdered by the president Alvaro Colom. The video caused an uproar and sparked protests throughout the city.
HAVANA — It’s the latest challenge for computer gamers, in Cuba at least:
Fight your way through mangrove swamps shoulder-to-shoulder with bearded guerrillas clad in the olive green of Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Your mission: Topple 1950s dictator Fulgencio Batista.
The Canadian artist collective General Idea found its drive in the AIDS epidemic, becoming aesthetically and conceptually refined in the in the 1970s and ’80s, after long forays into absurdity and performances evocative of Dada and Fluxus.
Regina Galindo is a Guatemalan performance artist that uses her body as a means to explore many of the human rights violations in Guatemala. In one of her performances, " no perdemos nada con nacer," or " we don't lose anything by being born," the artist "disposes" of herself in a plastic bag.
As part of USAID's "My Comunidad-Mi Agua" program in Peru, "Pamparadio" was a radio show run by two adolescents from the community of Iquitos, a jungle province. Armed with a gigantic speaker on the top of a community center and an AM radio frequency, Marco Jhastin Anchec and Cledy del Aguila Mozombite single-handedly ran "Pamparadio" as a celebration of potable water, how to make it, and how to take care of it.
Palas por Pistolas initiated in the city of Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with a high rate of deaths by gunshot. The botanical garden of Culiacán has been comissioning artist to do interventions in the park and my proposal was to work in the larger scale of the city and organize a campaign for voluntary donation of weapons.