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 We received a generous TC's Provost Invest Fund grant to expand the activities of the curriculum lab!
We are interested in sharing our work with a larger network of graduate students across Teachers College and Columbia University, as well as with TC alumni. Fellows will join our weekly lab meetings and occasional outings, bringing interdisciplinary connections to our create dialogue prompts and design ideas. We hope to recruit widely from other graduate divisions across the University, so please help us get the word out. All the information you need and the application are linked on the flier below. Curriculum lab meetings have restarted for the Fall 2021 semester and we are hybrid - meeting on zoom and in person in 227 Thompson Hall on Thursdays, 4-5pm.
We will take brief hiatus on Thursday, October 7th and resume on Thursday, October 14th to continue a series of wandering activities that create options for slowing down, using the senses, and engaging with the spaces around us. We will have a curriculum crafting activity over the next two weeks, to wrap up the semester! Join us in exploring relationships between materials, meaning, and memory - and some meandering conversations about curriculum throughout the process. Materials kits have been sent out to those who signed up. If you didn't receive one, you can use whatever craft supplies you have on hand.
Here's a few more steps to prepare for Thursday!:
On April 1, join us to discuss Black Gotham's audio walking tour, Fighting Dark, which is in dialogue with Howardena Pindell's show Rope/Fire/Water, at the Shed. Here are some ways to experience Fighting Dark and Pindell's show, depending on where you are, how much time you have, and what interests you:
Over April 8-15th, we will engage in an art-making activity inspired by these pieces, and our conversations over the past year - stay tuned for more info, and check out the Padlet to see a trail of those conversations!
This week is our discussion about the film, Minari: "A Korean American family moves to an Arkansas farm in search of its own American dream. Amidst the challenges of this new life in the strange and rugged Ozarks, they discover the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home."
Head over to this padlet, to reflect on belonging and home, as a warm-up to our conversation. There will be plenty of entry points if you haven't seen the film yet, but we can't promise there won't be spoilers!
Didn't get a chance to watch Minari over Spring Break? It's available on demand on a variety of platforms (Google Play, Prime, etc). For a shorter commitment, consider listening to an interview with the lead actor, Steven Yeun, on the Daily.
We began with a scavenger hunt, sharing objects that we wanted to get rid of: the things in the ‘just because it’s free, doesn’t mean you need it’ category, the clutter, the stacks of old travel books, the kids’ artwork and cat toys, the mixtapes that we can no longer play but still keep in binders and boxes. We thought about the objects that have a hold on us, that we can’t seem to part with. We wondered if teachers learn a particular attachment to objects, always anticipating some potential use. We thought about the accumulation of objects that embarrass us - those childhood home videos! - and wondered what today’s youth will think when they look back on all the media they produce. Of course, that led to a rabbit hole -- researchers’ play - looking at archived web pages using the Wayback Machine.
Our intentional play has inspired us to continue thinking about the ways we play and what we play. Next week, we’ll think about playlists and “play” lists -- Think about the mixtapes you made as a kid or teen. Map the sounds and songs you hear throughout the day or week. Bring a song or sound to the next Curriculum Lab on 10/22! In the meantime, join the sprawling conversations on padlet:
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