Seven young emerging artists and two faculty artists from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín will exhibit photography, video, sculpture, animation, 3-D mapping, sound and public performance. Each of their projects will also become part of a research thesis. This is their U.S. debut. Their art engages with themes of water scarcity, the commodification and sexualization of young girls, resisting the commodification and homogenization of public space aesthetics on public buses and in cemeteries, and living in ongoing situations of forced displacement and self-settled neighborhoods. Their art also reveals how they negotiate two intertwining contexts of violence and innovation: (1) being the generation born when Medellín was known as the most violent city in the world and (2) emerging two decades later as young artists when the Urban Land Institute declared Medellín, in 2012, “The Most Innovative City in the World.”
Their art also reveals the empowering agency of community blogs, media and graffiti as alternative and inclusive forms of knowledge production and circulation. Running through the marrow of this exhibit as a whole is a call for us to reflect on what we all have in common: our humanity. One artist’s public performance, for example, reminds us that we all need oxygen to breathe and without it, in minutes, we die.
Their work is a perspective, an intervention, and an invitation for diverse audiences to engage with art and artist. Students, artists, researchers and faculty at three universities in three cities in two countries are collaborating on this exhibit: the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, Emerson College in Boston, and Duke University in Durham. We integrate publications, pedagogies, and practices of writing with those of art, architecture, science and social science to focus on some our world’s most pressing local and global 21st-century problems.
why pmbd?
why art?
We see art as one of the most powerful genres for translingual and transnational communication with diverse audiences in academic and other communities. We experiment with art as a versatile genre of research distilled.
what does writing have to do with it?
We integrate a yearlong translingual first year research-writing course at Emerson College in Boston with students doing their senior art projects at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín. We collaborate through videoconferences and other social media to channel our respective resources to produce an exhibit for audiences in Boston. In Medellín, the artists participate in a translingual writing workshop. The workshop develops our awareness of ways that different genres of writing reveal cultural and political mechanisms of negotiating power in specific contexts and languages. We practice translingual strategies to write artist biographies and project descriptions for audiences the artists have never met on the other side of a border they are about to cross.
This is so that each artist can choose how to negotiate a translingual rhetorical situation. That is, simply exchanging one word for another can require artists to represent themselves and their work in terms of a kind of forced cultural assimilation. When there is no way to way to simply exchange one word for another because there is no cultural equivalent, translation-as-assimilation reduces self-representation to the cultural context of “the other” audience members. Audiences, in turn, lose the diversity of perspectives the artists are forced to cut. Instead, we make rhetorical and artistic space for communicating meaning between cultures and experiences. This process asks the artist to write in a new way. It also asks the audience members to listen and see in a new way too.
The artists then cross the U.S.-Colombia border with their art. We do “pre-exhibition translingual practice,” in which artists present their work in workshops for the first time in English and in Spanish. Emerson students collaborate with the artists on post-production of the art, including subtitling, sound and color. Artist and audience exchange questions, formulate responses and reflect on them. This helps the artists prepare for interacting with the media and audiences at their exhibition openings at Emerson and at Duke. This transnational, translingual exchange about their art also often deeply informs their final thesis project and future iterations of their art projects. Emerson students then go to Medellín to work with the Colombian artists to mount the same exhibit for a Spanish-speaking audience. Finally, we publish a hybrid catalogue-academic journal that documents the exhibition and reflects on what the yearlong exhibition process means to us—as artists, academics and community members.
who are we?
Proyecto Boston Medellín (PBM)
We are a group of about 300 students, faculty, staff and community members collaborating across three cities in two countries in the Americas. We are from 12 different countries and speak 15 different languages. Founded and directed by Dr. Tamera Marko, PBM works between Emerson College’s First Year Writing Program, the Office of Service Learning and Community Action, directed by Suzanne Hinton, the Department of Diversity and Inclusion and the Department of Architecture, Art and Engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín and DukeEngage Colombia at Duke University. We are funded by an Emerson College Presidential Curricular Innovation Fund Grant, matched by funds from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
PBM is part of an ongoing project founded in 2008 by Dr. Tamera Marko and Jota Samper called medellín mi hogar / my home medellín. It is a video and photographic archive project with more than 750 women who were forced to flee their towns due to violence. Through their family albums as alternative feminist archival inclusion, women, men and children narrate in their own words and images how they built 15 neighborhoods over the last six decades in the Andes Mountains that surround the City of Medellín.
The Duke Colloquium (TDC)
PBM 2013 is also the invited presenter at the fall 2013 semester series of the Duke Colloquium – Intellectual Curiosity and the Professional Life. The Duke Colloquium is sponsored by Andrew T. Huang, M.D. The Duke Colloquium (TDC) is a University-based initiative devoted to bringing the humanities into the professions. It began in 2009 as the brain child of Andrew T. Huang, M.D. in collaboration with members of its then-evolving Advisory Board and the University Provost, Peter Lange, Ph.D. Through student-led, faculty coached interviews and smaller workshops with internationally known leaders in multidisciplinary thought and socially targeted achievements, TDC aims to launch the next transformation of post-secondary education to enable broader, deeper and more socially conscious leadership of the professionals of the future. Visiting Scholars are dynamic and extraordinarily effective individuals who come to the Duke University campus with the express purpose of challenging and inspiring Duke students, faculty, alumni, and members of the broader community to become more forward-thinking and globally-oriented in their endeavors.
TDC’s past presenters were: Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, American Symphony Orchestra Music Director and Author; Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Jessica Jackley, Founder and former Chief Marketing Officer of KIVA, the world’s first peer-to-peer micro lending website; and Brian Goldman, M.D., Emergency Department Physician, Broadcaster and Author.