[-empyre-] my translation of Sabelas post

[Ana Valdés]

Please friends I am swimming in deep waters here :(, translating by myself
(a Non-Native English speaker) texts written  by two writers I admire for
their language skills :( It means my English is not going to make their
texts justice but it's only a way to facilitate for those of you who can't
read Spanish at all.
Bear with me! :)
Ana

Dear all,
I am Sabela de Tezanos. Is a pleasure to greet you and intervene in this
forum at the invitation of Ana Luisa, whom I thank again taking into
account my perspective, in which intersect, in unstable doses, my training
in philosophy (licensed by the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences of
education, UdelaR), my work as a teacher (Department of Psychology,
Montevideo) and cultural production (I am a member of the staff of the MAPI
- Museum of pre-Columbian art and indigenous) in  Montevideo and my writing.
Every city has a skin. Its appearance is multiple and mobile, and it's
mobility relates to the socio-cultural context in space and time.
The factors affecting this skin are innumerable, and referred both to the
architectural physiognomy and recent history; to the fast changes that this
"skin" is exposed (technology, communication, globalization, etc.) and
currently to trends imposed by social movements in the world.
Montevideo is the capital of a small country, with a population of
approximately 3,500,000 inhabitants. It's status of peripheric cit is
intermittently reflected in successive urban images.
As Montevideo born and resident, I have lived in different neighborhoods of
the city. My perception, as their climates and peculiarities, have changed
over time.
I can recognize signs of response to these changes, the resistance and
ability of the community to deal with "progress", with political movements,
to fashions.
There are metaphors, reading between lines,  manifestos or
absent-mindedness, giving rhythm to what, in the words of the Paraguayan
critic and current Minister of culture of his country, Ticio Escobar,
called "social skin". He refers to body painting and ornaments of different
indigenous Latin American tribes, they reflect hierarchies, status,
membership, practices, beliefs, traditions.
I must also quote the Mexican muralist Felipe Ehrenberg: visiting
Montevideo (2009) on the occasion of the completion of a work on the walls
of the city, his lecture was titled "The skin of the cities."

At the beginning of this exchange we can transfer the concepts of "the skin
of the city" to the "social skin". We see the urban appereance, the walls
and their graphic tags, how the walls are, how much is recycled, the
simultaneous convivence of large gentrified buildings with squatted places
and forgotten areas. I am going to enlarge these concepts as to individuals
needing express belonging, of being identified and classified, to being
looked at or to  be invisible in a context where everyone is seen as
uniform.
I am in a nexg post to write about the tatoo as extended practice and goes
through all social layers and challenge all those age groups and becames a
"tag" of this time.

-- 
http://www.twitter.com/caravia15859
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/
http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/
http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/

mobil/cell +4670-3213370


"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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