[-empyre-] Introducing Ana Valdes

[Alan Sondheim]

I'd like to introduce Ana Valdes, guest for the next week of empyre,
ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance

Ana was critical in the empyre discussion we hosted on Pain, Suffering,
and Death in the Virtual; a social anthropologist, her work and writing
combine universes of politics, theories, and media; we have learned so
much from her. Welcome Ana!

*

Ana Vald?s was born in Uruguay, South America, in a family of Spanish and
Italian emigrants, raised by German nuns. She studied Geography with
German maps from 1942 and she believed firmly that Belgium, Netherlands,
France, Norway and Danmark were a part of the Germany. In the maps the
nuns used Germany was almost the whole Europe.

She was put in prison when she was 19 years old for her political views.
Ana belonged to a guerilla group called Tupamaros, at that timeshe
believed in the weapons as a way to change things. She has changed her
views, radically, and has been a member of the pacifist group Women in
Black for years. After 4 years in prison she was deported to Sweden where
she became at least an adult. She studied Anthropology and worked on death
and blood ceremonies as these. 1982 she published her first book with
short stories, awarded by Sorbonne University. She has written and
published more than ten books and some of her short stories have been
translated into English, French, Greek and Italian, Faber and Faber and
Serpent's Tail has published several collections with her work, ?The
Garden of the Alphabet? and ?Columbus's Egg.? She is a bilingual writer
and writes both in Swedish and in Spanish. Ana has also been an
independent curator and worked with Swedish visual artist Cecilia Parsberg
in Palestine, they created the network ?Equator?
(http://www.ceciliaparsberg.se/equator). She has participated in several
debates about violence and representation with Jordan Crandall, ?Under
fire? (http://www.wdw.nl/wdw_publications/jordan-crandall-under-fire-2/)
She has been a member of -empyre since the beginning and guest moderated
several times, her topics related to the representations of the Arabs in
the contemporary world, the Crusades, and to urbanism and resilience. Her
latest book, ?Your time will come, has been published in Swedish and in
Spanish and it's about her time in prison, the torture and the resistance
to break. About that, Counterpunch published an essay where her
experiences were used
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/). Ana has been in
Palestine several times and saw how the civilian population suffers, she
left Gaza one week before Rachel Corrie was murdered, and was in Jenin
with Parsberg when the Israeli army left the town after ten days of
attacks, death and mayhem, it was the Palestinian Ground Zero
(www.ceciliaparsberg.se/jenin).

http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0