so hello everyone and welcome to iniva's research network event. I'm Tavian Hunter. I'm the Library and Archive manager of the Stuart Hall Library at iniva and I'm here with my colleagues Simina, iniva's Programme Coordinator and Anahi Programme Producer and our translator for today's talk. To give some context the Research Network is the library's public program of monthly presentations and reading groups. It acts as a testing ground for new ideas by providing a meeting place for artists curators and practitioners to discuss aspects of their research-based practice with a wider audience and to seek response from those working in and around their field particularly individuals who engage with iniva's work.
It's an opportunity to critically discuss discourse around specific themes and to frame a deeper conversation utilizing the Stuart Hall Library and archive collections. This year's programme Global Revisions launched during iniva's 25th year anniversary looks to reignite debate and reflect on the concept of globalization and new internationalism expanding on our founding ideas which were articulated in our first conference in 1994 and can be found in essays printed in the accompanying publication 'Global Visions: towards a new internationalism in the visual arts'. In this series of talks, we have examined the legacy of the non-aligned movement explored the iconography of the veil in the works of contemporary female Iranian artists, looked at Caribbean as a place of emergence for so-called global societies and challenged conventional notions of belonging and difference in diasporic art and investigated ways in which migration between mainland China, Hong Kong and the West across generations has been entangled with internationalism, identity politics and globalization.
Today's talk and selected film screening is the final event in our Global Revisions programme. It seeks to explore dialogue on resistance and artistic practices in Latin America and the Arab world. As we partake in the conversation about the expression of protests and artistic production we would like to disclaim to everyone that there may be imagery or discussion present that could be distressing for some people. We completely understand if some of you decide to leave and for those who stay we hope this will be an engaging conversation with mutual respect and care. I'm excited today to have our speakers Larissa Sansour and Regina Galindo and Fortunata here with us today Larissa is a Palestinian-born artist that works mainly with film and produces installations photos and sculptures with the interactions of myth and historical narrative central to her work that has been shown in film festivals and museums worldwide.
Regina is a visual artist and poet that lives and works in Guatemala. Her use of performance as her main medium to explore and denounce the ethical implications of social violence and injustices related to racial and gender discrimination as well as human rights abuses. And Fortunata is an art historian curator activist and art producer based in London. Her research focuses on the interrelation between contemporary artistic practices in Latin America and the Arab countries where she addresses transnational social and political issues. So thank you all for being here um especially across different time zones and I will now hand over to Fortunata Thank you thank you Tavian for this introduction and before I start my reading I would like to thank iniva for this for gathering us all together today. It's very nice to have this kind of meeting
nowadays and a big thanks to Larissa Sansour and Regina Jose Galindo for being here with us and sharing with us their knowledge and the art I'm going to share with you a paper I've written on Larissa and Regina in which I will talk briefly about the video we are going to watch later on and other few works of each of them so we'll start with with Larissa. So Larissa Sansour works developed mainly in the form of videos and photographs respond to the Palestinian questions through her work she redefines issue debated on the subject of Palestine political negotiations ideas of belonging and the Palestinian state Larissa Sansour was born to a Palestinian father and a Russian mother in Jerusalem and raised in Bethlehem like many Palestinians born in the 70s in the west bank she has experienced Palestine under direct military compassion by Israel she had then like many other students who wanted to continue their education to leave Palestine with the first uprising intifada of the 1988 a small school in the west bank closed the idea of one I have to share my presentation before sorry otherwise I cannot show the work sorry let me slide show from the start yeah okay here we are sorry the idea of one of the best known works national estate that she made in 2012 came from the need for an autonomous Palestinian states sanctuary takes the ongoing political situation with the story of Palestine as a direct reference in a work in her words in fact she said it is difficult to separate art from its direct political and social context art never operates in a vacuum it is difficult for me to refer to my personal experience without referring to the political reality of the area in which I'm inserted in a way my interest in Palestine stems largely from being a native of palestine and having experienced first hand one of the world's greatest injustice as I firmly believe that the Palestinian question is at the center of a series of global problems it cannot be isolated as a mere local affliction what you see in the national estate work is a skate scraper where each floor houses a different Palestinian city Jerusalem on the third floor Bethlehem on the fourth floor and so on the artists interpret the possibility of a Palestinian state vertically ironizing about the problem in question and the illegal confiscation of Palestinian land by the Israeli state the struggle is what defines us as a Palestinian say some so if you take that distance what is left individual sensor uses objects such as the kefia and the key as visual references to traditional iconography which are now associated with the idea of the act of resistance a work is a comment on identity politics and they complain about the lack of space where to project the memory of identity which despite the prolonged struggle may lose its value and get trapped within a cliche the symbols then have a formalist complicity within our non-documentary strategy a narrative challenge the value of the symbols the challenge depending upon the context as for example in another work space exodus another video she made in 2009 where the Palestinian frag is decontextualized and associated with progress of futurism by landing on the moon the flag then begins to look different and relates to a new utopia the work referred to the nakba the exodus of seven thousand seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their land in 1948 and the consequence of these events which prevail nowadays the play reflect the fact that the Palestinians are in a stateless limbo and their homeland is reduced to a blur on the old zone landing on the moon reflect the common anxiety of the Palestinians once they leave the land they run the risk of never being able to return home a spice exodus is ultimately an examination of power the blur between utopias and dystopias is a recurring team in some sort of work which she uses ironically behind which some optimism and dot is concealed to address an issue as complex and art as that of Palestine where the law of colonization is still valid despite critics of it elsewhere in the world by the un and to talk about the present trumpet in limbo Sansour plays with the concept of time choosing to work with science fiction which returns to the past and mingled with the future because what we do in the future is the result of what is happening in the present when speaking of time inevitably Sansour commemorates the memory which as such is tied to a concept of space or place the same splat space for which Palestine continue to fight land confiscation order is that is the video we are going to to watch tonight uh in the conception of the Arab world oral language has historically been greatest reservoir of culture identity and pride begin meaning in the 7th century it was the Quran that had the greatest influence on our on Arab culture and literature indeed more importance is given to the promised world than to any promise put in writing the famous expression a kalima sharaf word of honor in Arabic carries the idea that a betrayed promise results in immediate disgrace from these perspectives on sur's land communication order 06 2014 made in 2006 aimed to explore the need to restore in the image conceiving it as a word the substance and the weight that it once embodied both physically as well as metaphorically the video explore the promises made in the context of globalization and the underlying prospect of a future free of geographic and national borders it does so by investigating the increasingly valuable individual and private space a space that is ironically only obtained through public and cognitive bargaining and to what extent communication and social commitment facilitate the rise of individual freedoms land qualification is highly autobiographical short that Sansour made in 2006. the Israeli government sent the letter to her family announcing that the land and the house their inhabitation would be confiscated by the Israeli state to build an exclusive road for settlers to do this it was necessary to cross the property navigated by them and therefore expropriate the surrounding areas it was not just the factual tone of the document that impacted the artist but also the manner in which it was issued instead of being mailed to them the letter was left understood on the family's property this is a common tactic that Israel practices to communicate with the Palestinians in the video Larissa explored territorially as constituted not only of a national identity but also of personal identity land confiscation order is composed of a requiem of a small piece of land and the house made of stone it becomes a terrible to a dream of the viability of a national state revealing the Palestinian identity as an entity eroded day by day not only for political and cultural reasons but also for geographical reasons although it is in Arabic to appear on camera for these works and searches to step aside and tell the story of the dispossession of the family property to her sister and brother through covering the house completely with a black cloth she achieves the effect of making lot the house and the cloth fulfil in the ritual function of the recognition of material and geographical laws the situation of the Palestinian people is crucial in Syria's anomalous the Palestinians possess all the attribute of a national state a common history a language a set of traditions a cultural national culture national institution an official representative but the Israelis refused to recognize it while the international community with its plethora of u.n laws and resolution against Israel played the role of the lucky without risking further measure other than appeasement in a word in which the state of exception has become the rule Palestine become the exceptional new state synagogue the private of the political and civil rights they used to rule their lives since they become refugees Palestinian has been governed by the united national convention and in and the occasional arbitrary application of international law a country deprived of its culture exists only in an historical emptiness without the sense of an anthology a degree of introspection about our origin and the nature of our being consequently there cannot be theology nor can there exist a development projected towards an end it consists instead of what that end is in the long term without culture in the best of cases peoples find themselves adrift from the very coordinate of history necessary to produce a coherent argument both social and political in the present and even more decisively towards the future both culture and institutions presuppose form of social participation it is in such moment of commitment that aesthetics is able to open a space where plurality indifference merge how to resist the territoriality imposed by the state on the natural landscape as a violent act animal kihano the renova author of the theory of coloniality of power narrates how the center periphery model was conceived to embody global capitalism as a paradigm of power of the second world war Sansour for example in her works talk about the broken world contracts between neighbours and the power play behind this transaction of domination describing it as a land without people for people without land so now let's let's go to Regina. Regina Jose Galindo so despite the increasing democratic
session they follow the long era of dictatorship the Latin American continent continued to show the highest indices of social inequality in the world a true exponent of the loose art of repetition Regina jose galindo repeats action repetition never coincides with the return of the identical but it restores the possibility of what has been it does not return return the past as such but makes it all possible again for this is not a representation of but the kind of theatre of repetition that is at the center of the rituals gagalindo putsel's shade on stage strange ceremonies direct performances and recitation realizing the here and now and repeated in a real action without conceiving of the repetition her extreme actions where the artist puts her body into play are not fully explicable indeed the poetic character of all her works which she calls a psychomagic acts acts a term borrowed from alejandro jodorowsky emphasized the tragic element consequently they possess a strong emotional charge since her first performance in 1999 Galindo has conjurated the space of her body with a social when unheard she recites her poetry suspended the meter above the city square inside Guatemala as we can see in this image her work explore the universal ethical implications of social injustice that are related to racial gender and other abuses that are involved in the inequal power relation that operate in our society galindo's artistic strategy is entangled with their identity and social politics a work makes explicit the connection among social and identity politics galindo performance can be defined as being motivated by raditive belief in the capacity of art to transform human life as a vehicle for social change and as a radical merging of life and art work like pere which in English can be translated as a [ __ ] done in 2005 in which she cuts her tie with a knife or immenoplastia made in 2004 in which she underwent surgery to rebuild her eye men as different reception in Guatemala and elsa were these reflect the varying meanings of bodily representation both in modern Latin American culture and internationally galindo's childhood and teenage years coincided with the most brutal and violent episode of the guatemala civil war especially with the regime of rios month of 1992 and 1993 a reaction to the historical context was to turn a personal and political response to its order into a bodily practice galindo's entire life and artistic practice is linked to the violence of the images of the war crimes of the montreux regime and has a strong expressive formal representation her work refers to a pleasant situation and alarming signs of deep existential discomfort with which our leader struggles although our work always draws references from the lower levels of society and from women in particular it also refers to global issues such as a repentant male violence marginalization subordination and torture it deals with all of those others who have been subjected to violence in her work the body becomes the subject object over performances often pushing her physical and psychological limits toward the absolute threshold she transformed the viewer the viewers into aesthetic strategies that are designed to accentuate the great emotional impact of fragility and suffering on humankind galingo works recall what eric guns define as a sacrificial aesthetics where the aesthetic forms that are born from bloody sacrificial practices have evolved from a necessary future of social organization into intra-psychic element of the human condition as the performance campaign who in english is who can erase the trace the traces which consist both over 37 minutes video and photographic image they were realized on the 23rd of july in 2003 in Sudan guatemala to protest against the unchallenged decision of the supreme court of justice to authorize the candidacy again of general refrain rios mont ex-political leader of the extreme right who was responsible for a cop in 1992 and who as dictator has promoted the civil war and that a presidency that was marked by a campaign of violence killings rapes torture and oppressive tactics directed mainly against the indigenous people of guatemala and on guatemala on that day galindo dressed in black came out barefoot from a laboratory carrying a white ball full of human blood in her hands before going to her quarter of the supreme court of justice from there she progressed through the city at the end of the performance she reached the earth quarter of the national palace the seat of the presidency of the country where she left the last two footprints and the ball of blood in front of the court building arranged was to ensure that the trace of bloody footprints would remind at least for a short time on the path from the branch of the executive power to that of the branch of the judicial power highlighting the complicity of both in covering up an international policy of genocide with the performance and the body as instrument over artistic practices through a sort of reenactment the artists impersonate the weak and the humble the tortured and the oppressed highlighting the limit of body and mind in this context a regina is seen as a disturber who condemns the shortcomings of the social and political system offering a clear diagnosis of a sick society investigating crimes and deviances that alter policies and tackling controversial issues that others prefer to avoid a personal revolution silence is a conceptual approach immensely poetic and of almost unbearable pain a reaction represent the manifestation of a wooden soul in her words el mundo morgiomi corazon and contagios the word beat my heart and infected me with its anger negotiation in English we can translate it as negotiation in turn is a performance realized in 2013 by the body artist by regina in squaring medicine in colombia and recorded for the 43 international exhibition of artists of colombia one morning in the center of the city a group of volunteers line up to transport a coffin containing the artist waiting for their turn to transfer a delivery to the next participant from the coffin the artists symbolize the sorrow of death and the weight of peace that weights as does peace mainly in a country like colombia although its weight is always greater for some than it is for others through such action and in silence the volunteers transmit the idea of that of death among those who take responsibility historically in the certainty that if they bend their knees the weight will be heavier for others say regina behind this act there is a political reflection related to the peace process in colombia as well as a comparison with the negotiation the guatemala carried out in 1996. every citizen should be aware of the political and economic processes that take place in their country it is a responsibility the basement born and equally accepted by whole highlight regina for galindo the idea of death is much more intense inca in a country like earth which have experienced very acute conflict which are gradually breaking down the coherences of social fabric that is why her work focuses attention on sharing the burden on the concept of equitable responsibility although the act of transporting the coffee containing a living person could be considered macabre for the artist is either it is an act of life and not of death life and that are the most important things in your work or rather they are two sides of the same coins calindo representation are globally considered both shocking and violent but they are not the result of an empty provocation in all of them a manifesto of social criticism is right thank you thank you for tunata we can watch the first video bye larissa i will share my screen so bear with me for a second uh um you um foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign my foreign be foreign hmm foreign do and then now we're gonna move on to regina jose galindo's film negotiation foreign so okay so so hello so so bye hey so oh so so so thank you so uh so so i know uh so is oh so so so wow um so oh so so you so so foreign so uh okay hey great i'll pass it on to you fortunately thank you thank you regina larissa these are very very nice very nice work i would like to start with a question to both of you and then slowly slowly you know to make singular questions i would like to understand how is contemporary visual culture understood in a country with you know civil war and political instability we are all living in a time of political instability but in the specific in a country like guatemala and palestine now it is conceived of this understood contemporary visual culture however or galindo first whatever whoever of you okay guatemala is uh yes so I can do a quick translation of that um so regina says it's actually shocking because um since guatemala signed peace in 1996 there was found that there was actually a lot of manifestations of art throughout the time of conflict and art makers had found different ways of protecting and concealing the ways in which art has been made and was being made um in fact it's quite common that curators or art professionals are actually surprised when they arrive in guatemala um only to find the artists actually work in the campo which is like in the fields or in um areas outside of cities and they're working really well with quite uh kind of established and um complex ways of working um so it's clear that there's not been kind of a a pause on intellectual development due to the political situation in fact it's the opposite it seems that they found different ways of working outside of it thank you and Larissa do you want to say something yeah i always think that a kind of think of say european and american arts development have kind of reached it's kind of the most intense moment after world war ii and i feel like uh in um countries that are experiencing um um war or uh uh or have been dislocated or um have had um occupation as in palestine you can see that there's a real uh need to actually create work uh that comes out of that environment so can you cannot really um kind of expect an artist that comes from uh those kind of regions to uh be working on something that is like you know um unrelated to what's going on because that just feels dishonest um so i think a lot of the work that's coming out of palestine is uh quite potent it's um it's very engaged with the political dialogue and it's not because of you know a uh that people need feel that or artists feel forced in that position but that's because it's kind of an organic way of um developing the art scene um the art scene is also very kind of fractured in palestine because uh different cities are palestinian cities are hard to reach so for example when i go to bethlehem i have a hard time you know communicating with people in uh in rawan lab because it's a very um uh long way and you have to be interrogated and stopped by israeli checkpoints so um so it is fractured and in the end you end up talking to people over email or you know on the phone so it doesn't really matter where you are in in the end and and like um of course palestinians are kind of dispersed all over the world so it is just very normal for palestinian artists to just be speaking from very different countries i've been living in many countries myself and i've been living most of my life outside of palestine so i think it's the story of so many palestinians thank you and about what you said larissa you said it is almost almost a responsibility of an artist to talk about it's natural no to talk about the situation in palestine in palestine um do you think somehow unconsciously you feel forced to talk about it i mean it is something that limitates the way you do art because you have mainly no you have to but you choose to no as an artist to talk about what is happening um but do you think this this can limitate your creation somehow um i i think it's it depends on how you kind of uh proceed with um or how how kind of the process develops i mean in the kind of in the very beginning i felt uh when i i started working um say in the early 2000s with um i had a very urgent need to document what was going on there was the siege of bethlehem you know israeli tanks invaded palestinian towns they destroyed everything there was a complete discrepancy between what was going on on the news and what was what really was happening on the ground um and so it felt like you needed to kind of be like almost like a second eye as an artist to document what's going on and also for myself like i wanted to make sure that you know my the town that i'm from didn't get erased so i used a lot of my family my friends as well that we were actually existed there because that's a real threat for palestinians that to be you know to be historically uh erased um so um i think that was kind of how i was functioning on this kind of you know guerrilla style you know um filmmaking and trying to just get information uh in in those tapes but um i think now i have kind of stepped back and i have a distance from it all and i just find that artists always develop different strategies and revisions of how they work so i feel that i'm not really limited by it rather that it is um it has developed into a much more elaborate way of working that it's not uh where it actually my work kind of understands how to frame itself not in a local dialogue but it actually it is something that is focal to uh world structure well actually it's something you always underline and i agree with your work because uh for example the video we just we just saw is a kind of historical documental and then your work and the change a big change because you you started to use science fiction and i think you are you are still using it so i think this is like a result of what you you you are saying somehow now that you you step aside and you you change the way also of narrating something but this this change was volunteer i mean did you choose to change of being like historical and documentary and perhaps also autobiographical um and to to talk in a way in in a make in a made-up way like using fiction was a choice you made or was um because of the response you had to your work i don't know if i got into the poem um not really it was i wasn't um it wasn't the response it was actually more of a um i think that uh it's kind of a very complicated problem to get into in a way it's a a very um you know basic problem that you know there are people there's an occupying power and uh the palestinians are oppressed and uh it's a continuation of colonialism and israel is uh doing that uh so it's kind of you know pretty straightforward but at the same time what happened psychologically to the the oppressor and the oppressed it's something that becomes intertwined and and for me that became something that's um very interesting to explore was part of understanding what forms of palestinian psyche that became much more interesting and i found that working with sci-fi kind of allows me not to be dictated by the current political dialogue and uh to kind of create a a platform by which i can kind of set up my own terminology and find a new kind of value system and so it's um kind of a natural development of how to um to find an alternative way of not talking about a very heavy uh political dialogue that already has a set of uh of ways to talk about it and you actually feel trapped in in that and i wanted to kind of escape from it and actually talk about it on my own terms yes of course without using the same narrative that we are we are full of um regina you said i have a few questions also for regina and you said that every citizen should be aware of the political you know of the political process of the political and social and economic process happening in their country actually the same you were saying larissa and that we have to be responsible for it i have a few questions do you think we should be responsible also for what is happening elsewhere and you as an artist both of you actually you have a tools you know you have the tools to to respond to these to this fact to these political economic and social uh events happening and how a citizen should answer our citizen should use is their conscious to to be active you know and to do something as you do with your work we don't we don't have the same tools we are not so creative so how we can be useful and um be responsible of it and being in our country and as well elsewhere i really wish if i can answer in english but it's difficult to me so i will answer in spanish in two or three phrases situation um i do not consider that anyone or anyone at all is responsible for the politics of their country or indeed internationally of the world no one is responsible for for their own for those politics um they are responsible for their consciousness and for their awareness though um we cannot be responsible for any of the politics in any of our respective countries those are not in our or my hands but we can be aware and conscious of them we are talking about conflict countries that are full of conflict in the case of palestine it's a conflict that was brought about by external forces and in the case of guatemala it is a case of conflict brought about by internal forces we cannot be responsible for either of those conflicts h is i believe that uh we are responsible for the historical memory um we are responsible for the why asking the why of our countries why they are in these situations and i believe that we are responsible for finding ways in which we can confront and resist the forces of these countries of these states and these dynamics um i do not consider that an artist has an innate ability to be political or has any innate tools to resist um some artists might be able to do this and will be able to reproduce this in their in their work however individuals are also able to do this by channeling kind of creative means and i don't know if you want to open the question to the audience first and then we can add new so if you want to answer there are two for you know in guatemala the question that was asked was do you think that latino art is being presented by latin critics and artists or more by western voices and the response is that in guatemala we are not represented by anyone but ourselves in guatemala it is a case that it is hard to leave and in some ways we're somewhat obliged to stay in the country um it's also true that the mayan artists do not need actually other voices they can explain and express their own art in their own voices and as a mestiza uh mestiza is the term used for people with mixed heritage um uh rohina also does not need a voice um does not need a voice to represent her in that way and actually there's a lot of pride in the fact that in guatemala they have managed to create a space for their art um by using their own voice rather than that of anyone in the west or any western platforms um i would like to ask a very actual question to both of you and we were talking about before with larissa how did you what what was your reaction to the time we are living you know it's more than one year that our lives changed the art field actually is in an impasse because all the institutions around the world or almost in all around the world are closed the galleries the the museums that's why actually we are all here online so um did it have an impact in your work in your uh artistic process or on the contrary i mean did it uh stop your creativity or was it on the contrary and impulse you know to do more because you have this this feeling of overcome this this time and to use it somehow to to new production and new creativity or you or you have a crisis i don't know how did you do it yeah in my case i just in the beginning obviously it was very stupefying the whole process the whole uh pandemic because you actually for me it became kind of a um a materialization of everything that i'm talking about in my own work and if you um i i i finished a work that i showed in venice called in vitro that's um basically means life outside of its own of its natural habitat and it was all about a group of scientists that escaped a disaster and they ran to a bunker under the city of bethlehem and so for me uh with the with the pandemic it just felt that this scenario is actually uh becoming um is re-edified you know in this uh um in this moment and so i got uh it became too real for me to continue with a project that was actually based on this project uh and so i completely changed the film to something completely different because i felt i needed to to free those people from the bunker to go outside but the idea of the bunker is basically this entrapment of um that palestinians find themselves in uh of um of being in a limbo where they constantly remember 1948 and the nakba and you know palestinian exodus and constantly speaking of a future a palestinian state and and the protracted um uh pandemic felt like uh very real in that sense so for me it was kind of uh my uh a a universal lockdown that i kind of actually speak about in in the film where whatever um if we're left for the events to take place and continue uh a natural disaster uh will happen and um so um so so it kind of was a a prediction or a you know reality became stranger than fiction in that way um and and thinking about uh how i usually talk about time and the fact that with the erection of the state of israel palestinians have been kind of catapulted into a historical time they kind of exist in this bubble that's outside of um homogeneous time and i just felt that with uh the with the lockdown it felt like we're all kind of experiencing this yeah yeah and we think with the lockdown sorry regina now i give you the the voice to answer do you think when we look down people can perceive better the palestinian situation uh as locked or yeah i think the claustrophobic yeah now it is impossibility of moving or the impossibility of moving the uh the claustrophobia of just kind of being controlled by something bigger than you i mean that's this is something that i was born with you know so i escaped the lockdown in palestine too and then this is coming this but uh what happened uh with work is actually even though a lot of shows got postponed or cancelled some institutions actually will never reopen now as it's very sad that some commissions were withdrawn but um at the same time because um i started the project i was just continuing with the project and working on it and i'm currently actually working on two so in in a way it actually was a very intense working time for me as well okay so you didn't lose your karate and what about you regina um um i have had as so in the past 15 years i have not been in guatemala for more than one month at a time so actually this past time in the pandemic has been a huge change um crisis ends up motivate me and when i feel i am about to lose a battle is when i am most able to find motivation so i've actually had a quite a productive period um given that circumstances currently is in some way uh being locked in guatemala has locked me to my roots which is where i originally come from and it has kind of re-shown me the precarity and the situation of where i live um i feel a lot of empathy with larissa because during this time i feel like we felt very close to palestine um and due to the precarity that the countries both share in guatemala it's still one of the few only countries that hasn't received a vaccine and the only vaccines that we have received have been um 5000 vaccines donated by the israeli state which actually directly came from them went to the military in guatemala this is my country it's not something i'm particularly proud of and i may not be particularly happy to live here but being in guatemala has really shown me what the country is it has brought me back to my roots and it has motivated me to continue to work here to continue to work with people here and think about what this means thank you very touching what you're saying and i share the same the same view because also for me was a way of reconnecting with myself and with my growth i think it's some kind of process we all went through during this this time i don't know if you want to say something in particular larissa regina if you want to talk about something in particular about the video we show i know it they are both old video all the work but if you want to add something or want to say something about the videos or about anything of your work if you want to add something to this conversation not just to step stuck on my question maybe we can answer um a question um about uh mourning and grief yeah oh that's being in chat yes yes i'm i'm reading it and i i think i would like to see how actually larissa and regina saw it if they saw it and if they can both see actually regina just said that she felt empathy with larissa and probably also with the work we just we just saw i would like to know also if this question if larissa saw you know parallels with the work of regina on in general you know with guatemala with latin american and guatemala in particular because of course i see these parallels that's why i am talking about all of them but i would like to see if you see this as well guatemala um i would like to do like draw a basic uh relationship between the two places that we've been talking about of course whilst respecting all of their differences all conflict is due to land earth or earth whether it's been ransacked in the case of guatemala or whether it's been occupied in the case of palestine this act of stealing land the process of stealing and occupying land is what has resulted in precarity and in fact um both of these places are currently um in the hands of external international forces that do not belong to the people that are currently living there yeah you larissa do you see any parallels um yeah um maybe i see parallels and how as an artist you kind of try to um speak i mean find ways of talking about um an emotion or a um what all these structures kind of um end up doing to your psychology or uh what what's the emotive aspect of that and find different ways of um trying to transgress the normal um way of talking about these things and i think that's this the similarity similarity i see in in the work where um it's always this kind of trying to find this um a very specific platform by which one can speak of these things which is quite hard uh i think in in land confiscation order for example uh it was very difficult for me to just kind of um address what was going on without using documentaries so in a way this combination of the two was um um a way for me to tell this story in an uh in an emotional or emotive way um and i can see that uh with uh regina's work it's um it's also even though it's um kind of you can call it a political reaction to uh uh what's going on it's also it's very laden with emotion i mean i mean what i for example from the last film uh kind of kept on thinking is like how is regina herself is uh doing in the coffin uh and you can't help but notice the people that are you know for a long time carrying this coffin so you start thinking about it in a in a very kind of personal way and i think that's quite tricky and it's it's hard to get there in new york i think it's also interesting to see as a two different you know national representation of uh of the national reality can mingle no you know we are talking about guatemala palestine palestine palestine and uh actually they express in a different way the same poetic as well no both works are very poetic and they both express uh national problems but you reflect in the other as well no um as i i see myself in in both you know in both reality and i'm not palestinian i'm not latin american i'm italian so i see a piece of myself there so perhaps it's as regina was saying before that we when you have an a conscious towards the problem that are from your country or from outside diseases is expressed as well in your case in in your work in my case in my words perhaps or in this kind of of meetings but both both are very very strong very strong work with a very strong meaning and narrative to me i actually get emotional when i when i see your work i'm very fond of both of you so for me it's very nice to be here with you and really really thank you for giving me this this chance you know to have both of you here i think we reached the point in which we have to close perhaps the meeting now davian is telling me yeah we are we are coming coming to an end but if there's any fine one final question that anyone in the audience um would like to answer please go ahead and um take yourself off me or um add to the chat otherwise i have a final question to both of them if i can in the case of of larissa it is more more political question and perhaps i don't know you choose what to say do you think the political situation in palestine as richer than empaths or do you think behind up because we all hope we all have the same hope or do you think something we can something can we ever change that's it um i mean i think negotiations on the ground have reached an impasse but there are certain ways of how things are developing there that kind of cannot stay like that any longer so in a way something will happen i'm not really sure if it's going to be for better or worse but i'm just speaking about the latest development for example regina saying that guatemala received 5 000 uh vaccinations from israel uh to guatemala but they're refusing to give palestinians any uh vaccinations so that so palestinians are held imprisoned by you know an occupying power but israel israel the argument is that well they have their own country so they're not responsible yet they are the ones imprisoning these people so in that sense i think it because it's becoming much uh kind of clear or blatant to the world that um israel is actually uh breaking uh human rights law um so i think it kind of you know public opinion matters in that way uh and i hope uh things will change for the better soon we always we all hope thank you and and and in guatemala regina do you think guatemala is changed do you think the situation will get better or or whatever is in an empath and the situation will get stuck in guatemala we currently have one of the most corrupt governments of all time and uh actually the reason that guatemalan was able to receive those vaccines from israel was because guatemala has now for a long time been under the training or the schooling of the israeli military and the reason that they sent us those vaccine was because of that and those vaccines went to military only and that's because israel has been training the guatemalan military for a long time now so those vaccines will never and did not see kind of the community or serve the community of guatemala and rahina also wants to share a poem um that speaks i think a lot to the rel the relationship also the situation both in palestine and guatemala multiplication i will not try my best to translate this uh bear with so multiply yourselves only if you want to multiply your tragedy or be born to only immediately die make of your hands of assassins make up your hands of your own assassins or give us reasons to be able to kill them it is not anyone's fault that which happens in the world that the hunger is yours and that the earth is ours that we will always continue to be the ones of forever and you will always continue to be more thank you thank you it's actually a great place to um to end i want to thank everybody who's present here with us tonight and um our speakers larissa regina and fortinata um we're gonna put um a feedback form in the in the chat and we would like if anybody um would like to fill that out and just give some feedback on the event um and this is obviously like i said at the beginning our last event in our research network um series global revisions and we'll be announcing um the next programming in our newsletter so you can sign up for um from without via our website so thank you very much thank you thank you thank you bye thank you bye yes regina thank you larissa italian bye bye
2021-07-15