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Many Stories at ROBA

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Courtesy of ROBA School

At We-Building we recently concluded an expansion of the already existing River of Blessing Academy (ROBA) which includes six new classrooms. This school provides high-quality low-cost primary education in Koforidua, Ghana. Because of the school’s holistic approach, from time to time they are publishing books where every student can participate with a story or a poem. This is just one of multiple activities like art shows, science presentations, and sport events that are happening throughout the terms to give every child the opportunity to shine.

Some of the benefits of reading for pleasure in children are acquisition of general knowledge, a better understanding of other cultures, and community participation. Consequently, further benefits could be expected if they are also writing for pleasure and representing themselves with their own stories. Representation is crucial, like novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointed out in her 2009 TED talk titled The danger of a single story. “There is an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to ‘to be greater than another’. Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

The danger of a single story is that it creates stereotypes, which for the most part are incomplete, and after a while these stereotypes might become the norm to think about or view a country, a region, a population. With these multiple stories and poems written by the ROBA students, they are not only staying motivated in their learning process and finding their strengths, but are also giving readers, be it their parents, siblings, friends or neighbors the chance to have a ‘balance of stories’, to access many stories, while emphasizing their agency to imagine and tell their own. We leave you here with some of the many stories and worlds from Koforidua, Ghana.

Courtesy of ROBA School

We-Building joins Zero Waste Festival Berlin

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Zero Waste Berlin Festival will bring together individuals, companies, and government actors to share and provide resources and practical solutions in sustainability, zero waste, and circular economy. 

We are thrilled to be part of this festival and that Ivan, one of our co-founders and head of architecture at our non-profit, will participate as a speaker. This festival is a unique space to exchange and learn how to contribute to a greener planet, and since sustainability is one of We-Building’s main goals while developing projects, Ivan will share some knowledge about Sustainable Architecture and how activism can empower local communities. 

It will be two full evenings of amazing speakers, and because Zero Waste can be applied to diverse aspects of society and life, the topics go from, lifestyle, home, fashion and self-care to mobility and activism. The Festival will take place online and you may purchase your tickets here. 

Remember to save the time for From Theory to Practice in Sustainable Architecture by Ivan Rališ which will go live on September 24th from 18:20 to 18:50. 

The River of Blessing Academy, Koforidua, Ghana. 2020

    A thing is a thing

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    María Teresa Hincapié – Vitrina, Bogotá, 1989

    Beginning in the sixties but throughout the following decades several artists from Latin America have adopted performance as their art form, this would include performances, happenings, actions, photo, video, and private performances. Colombia is a country with a varied artistic repertoire, and since We-Building has two ongoing projects there we have been exploring performance artists from this country, and today we would like to share some with you.

    It was in 1990 that a performance work first received a prize at an art event in Colombia, and the award was for María Teresa Hincapié, at the XXXIII Salón Nacional Artistas, which points to her foundational role in the development of this practice in Colombia, as Maria Iovino says in her article from the book Arte [no es] vida: actions by artists of the Americas 1960-2000.

    María Teresa Hincapié – Una cosa es una cosa, 1990.

    According to Iovino, before Hincapié there where two artist who had produced performance pieces in Colombia, María Evelina Marmolejo and María Teresa Cano. Marmolejo’s actions, where influenced by the expressionist lines of Body art, and focused on the topic of the woman as a life-giving body.

    María Evelia Marmolejo / Anonymous 1, 1981, Cali-Colombia. Photo by Fabio Arango.

    Other performance artist that began their work in the late seventies and early eighties, were Sara Modiano, Rosemberg Sandoval and Delfina Bernal.  

    Witnesses to the Ruins (Testigo de las ruinas) by Mapa Teatro group (created by Heidi, Elizabeth, and Rolf Abderhalden) is another of the most well-known performance works from Colombia. Their performance in a non-chronological way synthetizes the groups experience during the process of disappearance of El Cartucho neighborhood in Bogotá. They documented the disappearance of a place, and the appearance of a non-place, to make visible how the residues and traces of what has been lost remain, as well as the narrations that reconfigure the neighborhood’s memory, as stated by the Hemispheric Institute.

    Witnesses to the Ruins
    https://www.instagram.com/mapateatro/

    Finally, Nadia Granados also from Bogotá, has been working with performance since 1997. She develops a highly political art that aims to go beyond the merely aesthetic through audiovisual elements related to pornography, sexualized bodies, and eroticism as a weapon of transgression. On Granado’s website she states that her work is both performative and technological, both art and activism, and a mix of cabaret, public intervention, and video transmissions.

    Some common themes addressed by all these artists are land, life, death, violence, feminism, origin, displacement, and the body. All of which are intrinsic to Colombia’s history, but also connected to the current global political economy. We hope this small collection is enriching and sparks your interest in Colombian and Latin American art.

    São Paulo, Brasil. Enero 18/2013 8vo Encuentro Hemisférico de Performances y Política.
    Nadia Granados: la artista colombiana del performance postporno | Intocables Shock

    Putumayo (not the record label)

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    At WEbuilding one of our goals is to contribute in the development of rural population through education and essential infrastructure that creates opportunities for young people. We are pairing with Catalina Muñoz Foundation to build two new school buildings needed at the public school “Centro Educativo Madre Laura“, located in the Santiago municipality of the Putumayo department in southern Colombia.

    This is a vast and multi-faceted region and its name derives from the Putumayo River, which is born east of the city of Pasto; and as it pours into Brazil it is called Içá. The Putumayo is a tributary of the Amazon River, and it has been written about in fiction and non-fiction accounts for at least a couple of centuries. The area called Putumayo in these writings does not obey however to strict departmental boundaries, but to looser and expansive limits regarding the Amazon region of Colombia, and even beyond political frontiers.

    Perhaps the most well-known narrative about this region in Colombia is The Vortex, a novel published in 1924 by José Eustasio Rivera, a frontier fiction which has also been classified as Latin American Regionalism or “earth novel”. In it, the Putumayo River and the jungle become a set in which the author represents many subjects, like the fluidity of borders, the diversity of identities, culture, and people in Colombia and South America, the importance of local and ancestral knowledge, and the internalized colonization which governments and companies kept imposing on indigenous groups after political independence from European countries.

    In one of W.G. Sebald’s most popular novels, The Rings of Saturn, he talks about Roger Casement, a British Foreign Office diplomat who in the early twentieth century set out to the Putumayo River to investigate allegations against the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC)—of British-Peruvian ownership. All these allegations included but where not limited to enslaving, torture, starvation, murder, and other atrocities towards Putumayo’s indigenous communities and foreign workers, as retold in Casement’s private journal and testimonies he compiled. Both “The Vortex” and Casement’s accounts are unbelievable, the first fiction inspired by truth, and the second truth suitable for fiction.

    A bit to the southeast, yet still in the realm of these natural borderlands, is the series Green Frontier. A thriller about a detective investigating a strange murder in a port town between Colombia and Brazil. With a nonlinear narrative the story unfolds a wealth of imagery and conflict regarding the region. It is centered on a secret that preserves the jungle, hence the world. This series set in current times takes us back to older representations of the Amazon written by foreign and national “explorers” as either an Eden or a Green Hell; researched in Lesley Wylie´s Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: a literary geography of the Putumayo.

    Although this river and region are far away from Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, and even further from the social imagery linked to this country, they have played an influential role in its history and culture and produced powerful texts.  

    Our First Shamba

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    Mozambique is a multilingual country. Numerous Bantu languages are spoken along with Portuguese. Many words and expressions are borrowed between languages, we like one very much: Machamba, from the Swahili term Shamba, which means cultivated land or plot.

    At WEbuiliding we have an ongoing project that involves a Machamba, it’s an ecological farm that will supply the Munti Centre of Khanimambo Foundation. They have been working there for ten years, at Xai-Xai in the province of Gaza, south of Mozambique. They focus on children and families from close-by communities, in education, health, and nutrition support. Everyday four-hundred kids eat at Munti Centre, where they already have a small Machamba, managed by a group of mothers whose children attend the centre. The mothers sell them part of the vegetables they harvest, and thus the program has fresh and healthy supplies!

    In this project, together with Khanimambo Foundation we’re building a larger Machamba of 15 hectares, that’ll generate new training opportunities, employment, and social growth. We’ll oversee the architectural design and construction and will be implementing sustainable techniques and bioconstruction with materials from the region. On October 2019 we had our site visit to Mozambique and we ate loads of delicious plates, one that we enjoyed a lot was Xima, a type of porridge made with water and corn flour. Xima is eaten as a staple carb in most meals, and usually comes with a vegetable or meat stew. Other vegetables that are widely grown in Mozambique, and at Munti Centre’s Machamba, are potatoes, cassava, carrots, squash, chards, spinach, aubergines, and legumes like nhemba beans.

    Even with its high agricultural potential the rate of chronic malnutrition affects 43% of children under five years of age, according to the country’s most recent Demographic Health Survey. So, to ensure a healthy diet, at Munti Centre they have weekly menus based on specific child nutritional needs. In the video below you can meet Guida, the centre’s nutrition specialist who shares their strategy to tackle chronic malnutrition with knowledge and a bit of magic soup😉.