WEbuilding

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Many Stories at ROBA

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.

A thing is a thing

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nadia Granados: la artista colombiana del performance postporno | Intocables Shock