Social justice through collaborative artistic expression: The state of Iberoamerican Studies Series: human rights across the disciplines and Voice to Vision project

This project weaves a crosshatched path in multiple directions between performance art, civil war narratives, cultural studies, theater, human rights, and all manners of political activism. Struck by Colombia’s civil war, and by how visually rich the conflict and its artistic responses were as intellectual groups actively responded to violence and its fractured memories, this project developed a proposal to record the cultural responses to the conflict, and to turn those responses into non-ephemeral images, increasing the possibilities of an artistic language, and providing a fuller expression and understanding of complex human rights violations. At Minnesota, Voice to Vision and The State of Iberoamerican Studies conducted artistic workshops and critical fora bringing together traditional scholarly approaches as well as the powerful political voices of contemporary non-canonical cultural narratives. After having produced several art pieces on Latin American theater directors and human rights activists, directors of the 50-year-old La Candelaria Theater and members of the Corporacion Colombiana de teatro will visit Minnesota in 2017. In 2018, a Minnesota delegation will travel to Colombia to exhibit its art installations, and to research on how political theater and the arts could form a symbiotic alliance to become a tool against war, genocide, impugnity, displacement, and amnesia.