Art and Social Change: Performance Art

Rebecca Belmore is an artist and the recipient of the 2013 Laureate, Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Her art reflects herself as an artist, as a woman and as an Anishinaabe. Her works are filled with reference to gender-based ritual and she provides a foundation for the viewer/audience to be moved to action. What follows is a short video that I found to be provocative and insightful into the act of creating art.

Another piece, Vigil (2002), which she performed on the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in 2002, commemorates First Nations women that were murdered or went missing off the street of Vancouver. Her work seeks to conjure remembrances of colonial oppression and to restore our public memory of those women lost and forgotten as not only women, but First Nations people.

During the performance, viewed here, the passersby participates as witness as she scrubs the street on hands and knees, lighting votive candles, and nailing a long red dress she is wearing to a telephone pole. The curatorial description of her performance goes on to describe her struggle to free herself the dress tearing from her body and "hanging in tatters from the nails, reminiscent of the tattered lives of women forced onto the streets for their survival in an alien urban environment" . . . I invite you to watch this and to follow what the artist will do next.

Kibera Women peacebuilders

Yesterday I ran my first workshop with seven women who had suffered during the 2007 post-election violence. Hosted at the Kenyan office of Interchange, the women arrived at 8:30 and remained until 3pm when they had to pick their children up from school. They are doing a lot to build peace in their homes and in their communities in the hopes of avoiding a repeat in the coming weeks. I asked them to consider what their idea of peace was, how they knew when there is peace in their homes/community and what they do individually to promote peace within their community. They wrote their answers on pieces of paper and placed them in a basket for discussion later.

We spent the day together, talking about their experiences, the concept of peace and what is means to them individually and what they are doing in their homes and communities to promote peace. We worked on a group project that reflected their perceptions of their community before 2007, during the violence of 2007/08, what things had changed from 2008 - 2012 (perhaps the calm before the election of 2013 when they feel tribal tensions are rising again) and their hopes and dreams for the future after the election.  These women are all from different tribes, had never met before and are courageous! They worked as a group and individually.

Using Lederach's concept of Expanded Framework for Peacebuilding we considered re-storying the past and "the past that lies before us" and explored the break in their personal narratives brought on by the post-election violence. (The felt model of the framework is by Jaqui Jesso, Interchange)

At the end of the day, I supplied them with pieces of white cotton, fabric markers and embroidery thread and they were invited to re-explore the concept of peace and to create something that symbolized either the stories that they shared earlier in the day, or reflected peace in some way.  They decided they would take these individual works home with them and they said they would put them on the walls of their Kibera homes.