[-empyre-] guest this week

[Ana Valdés]

First of all thanks to Renate and Tim for inviting me as guest under April.
I am always inspired and challenged when I participate in -empyre's always
interesting and exciting discussions!
I am a writer and an Art curator and try to use my own life as canvas of my
experiences and thoughts. I was incarcered by political reason when I was
very young (barely 19 years) and spent four years in a prison in Uruguay
before I was deported to Sweden, where I lived for more than 30 years.
The last week I met Angela Davis, who was visiting Uruguay. I had met her
before, in Porto Alegre, when I translated some of her workshops from
English to Portuguese and Spanish. Angela was here to receive a doctorate
Honoris Causa by the State University in Montevideo and to meet coilectives
of young black activists, most girls, fighting for being visibilized and to
reach equality and right to higher education.
We spoke about Agnes Varda's great documentary about Black Panthers,
screened 1968. I was 15 years old at that time and I felt the documentary
woke in me deep questions and convictions. Together with the Italian
filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo "The Battle of Algeria" and the Dutch filmmaker
Joris Ivens and his films about Vietnam they were among the films who made
me an activist and a fighter for freedom.
Vardas esthetic was very influenced by photography and philosophy, she was
contemporanean to the Bauhaus movement, born in Weimar, and she met in the
US several of the German filmmakers who fled from Europe from the Nazis.
Of the four artists we discuss here Varda is the only one I have a direct
relation to. But I think we all share a common link made by small chains of
curiosity and sharing, a kind of cultural mapping where figures as Varda,
Quintanilla, Schneemann and Hammer are interlaced.
Ana

-- 
https://anavaldes.wordpress.com/
www.twitter.com/caravia158
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




<http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/>

cell Sweden +4670-3213370
cell Uruguay +598-99470758


"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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