by Andrea Lira, Black Paint Curriculum Lab Alumni Fellow The prompt for this week was to explore a public memory project. Those of you in NYC were invited to go to THE WAY WE REMEMBER exhibition at the Wallach Gallery, a site that “explores memory, trauma, postmemory; and the power of art to represent the past”.
When wondering about where to go in my city I thought about a house in downtown Punta Arenas. Since I have been here in 2016, and before, people are working on turning it into a memory museum. The house was a torture center during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1989. It was known as the Palace of Smiles, ironically of course, and functioned as an administrative building. The house looks abandoned, but it’s not. It is caught up in discussions and red tape about what to do with it as a place of memory. During the social uprising that ran through Chile in 2019 it was set on fire. The building is still there, but parts are burned. Last week a tree that was growing in one of the cracks of the building was removed and taken to a rehabilitation place for plants and trees. The tree has become a symbol of resiliency in the face of inhospitable conditions. (See image 1) Instead of exploring the house from the outside, I decided to walk along the edge of the water. (See image 2) We live on the Magellan Strait. Interspersed at the edge of the walkway there are structures that look like boat prows, that commemorate the arrival of boats from across Europe. (See images 3 & 4) This water is the center of human life here. It is where the indigenous Aonikenk, Selknam, Yagan, and Kaweskar lived, and explored. I love walking to the water. It’s different every day. The water of the strait is where the kaweskar and yagan people lived and traveled before Chile made the land into property and the estancieros, cattle and sheep land owners, used state-sanctioned strategies to try and exterminate them. Walking along the water and thinking about place and the ways we remember, I thought of this tweet by Zoe Todd in her thread on the lineage of indigenous thought and the respect and care of citation. The work requires humility from settlers: you don’t know what you don’t know. The water you currently swim in is shaped by white supremacy, colonialism, capital, imperialism, extraction — these drive the urge to exterminate (erase) & replace Indigenous voices. (Wolfe 1999) Curriculum is also a choice of citation, and whose knowledge we reflect with and reflect on. In my explorations I thought of the curriculum of water, how we relate to it, how this relationship has changed, and what we can learn from watching it. One relationship comes from exploring and wandering in and at the edge of the water. The affective experience of the wind, sand, trash, weeds, and shells. There is the salmon industry. You can’t see it from the water´s edge in the city, but we know it’s there, contaminating the water and killing other species. It is also a major source for jobs in the region, and of covid contagion. Workers travel and live in the sites for weeks for the minimum salary with little government oversight on safety, sanitary conditions, and environmental care. Salmon farms cause major environmental disasters in Chile, with blooming algae, massive amounts of dead fish, and poor waste management. Across the strait, is Tierra del Fuego, the big island called Land of Fire. When I first arrived I assumed the name came from the bright red sunrises that happen often during the year. But it was the name the Spanish gave the land, when they first arrived, from the fires the kaweskar lit on its shores. The island is partly Chile and part Argentina, the Chilean side has one small small town, and villages born from estancias. It is large bushland, an expanse with small hills and valleys and wild guanacos. The main sources of employment are cattle, and sheep, and mining which is now mostly fracking. Across the island, along dirt back roads, the small pipes that pop up from the side are the only evidence of the fracking sites. I am only able to recognize them as signs of fracking because of the coverage and documentaries made in and about the US and fracking. There is little public knowledge of the fracking happening here. The pipes are so small and seem insignificant as if the damage to the water and land was small, instead of the probable widespread underwater contamination going on. In the city, the downtown area is oftentimes compared in looks to Europe.Not that I would know, I have never been.But there are mansions that are now offices, banks, and hotels, and cobble stones and wide streets. Unlike the rest of Chile's main cities, the architecture shows the wealth that came into the city when the strait was the only way to cross into the Pacific Ocean, which lasted until the construction of the Panama Canal. The water also brought people from the north of Chile. By water, was the shortest way before there were airplanes, so they travelled in small boats at great risk. Between this region and the rest of Chile there are huge ice fields that make it impossible to cross by land. The largest migration from Chile was from people living on the island of Chiloe, a big portion of them, Mapuche. The migration began in the early 1900s. Looking for work, they established themselves and built houses that are still standing and made their lives here. One of the issues they faced here is the constant cold and wind, which frequently blows up to 100 km per hour. An inhospitable climate. One of the solutions that can still be seen across the city was to cover the housing structure with tin. I don’t know how common this is, but my husband´s family, who mostly migrated from Chiloe as well, describe using the tins that were left over from storage cans used to transport petrol to cover their houses. (See images 5 & 6) There is so much to explore about water, memory, stories and ways in which we relate to it. In this initial attempt, I tried to explore some entryways for a curriculum of water to see what kinds of pathways it can open up. References Todd, Zoe. https://twitter.com/ZoeSTodd/status/1451930463023501320
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This fall, we received a TC Provost Investment Fund grant to broaden the reach of the Curriculum Lab. Our project titled, Knowledge Flows: Curriculum Lab as a Space for University Collaboration, will bring together members of the broader Columbia University community for discussions about neighborhood spaces and what different spaces teach amidst a cross fertilization of professional knowledge. To that end we have recruited a wonderful group of TC and CU graduate students and alumni to attend our weekly meetings and outings. In the spring, we'll share some of our adventures in a roundtable exhibition open to all. And in the meantime, you'll start to hear from our fellows in this blog space, which will remain on this URL until the end of November. You will be able to find bios of our new fellows on our brand new website, which we are planning to launch on December 1st!
Black Paint Curriculum Lab Fellows Current Graduate Students Nir Aish Jenny Flaumenhaft Chinyere Harris Emilie Johnson Tay Leppik Jonggeun Park Benjamin Sinvany Xinge (Cindy) Zhang Teachers College Alumni Dr. Andrea Lira Dr. Seth A. McCall Rachel Mewes Lisa Stubenrauch Raquel Vigil |
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November 2021
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