Monday, April 4, 2011

estados unidos de mexico

Fernando, director of La Escuelita community center in Santo Domingo, with Mojdeh the Mexico City IHP coordinator and Kara, looking over the mural depicting the wreakage of colonization and women as pillars of community.

Overlooking Santo Domingo from the silkscreen studio at dusk

A blurry shot of Santo Domingo by night

Bolivian music and dance festival in the street outside La Escuelita, 2 blocks from my homestay

Sembradores Urbanos workshop and examplary garden space (and murals!)

Container gardening for everyone at Sembradores Urbanos

Arrival in Oaxaca: homestay roof garden and neighborhood

Midmorning in the roof garden after 2 weeks in the homestay-- tomatoes are now orange!

Homestay in Sto. Domingo, Distrito Federal a.k.a. Mexico City:
Un vaso de pedacitos de mango: orange, architectural cut-outs, like the cement city walls of this colonia, haphazardly arising after the Invasion of Santo Domingo. Structurally sound but surprising-- that orange paint is political propaganda, doled out for subversive beautification.
Things I´ve been doing:
-Museum of Anthropology-- did you know the ruins were painted in vibrant rainbow colors?
-walking through Chapultepec park [one of DF´s many green spaces, it´s much less gritty than its reputation], trying different street food snacks like puffed amaranth krispie treats and chili-rolled tamarind balls
-living life in the Juárez family home, sharing a bed with Kara behind makeshift sheet curtains in a slightly exposed second story room, waking up to the man advertising cooking gas via megaphone every morning (and noon, and night)
-getting sort of sick from the dry, polluted air, and sucking on lozanges with some sort of novacaine stuff that makes your whole tongue go numb
-class lectures on Mexican political history, foreign aid policies, and maize culture [mural down the block reads ¨sin maize no hay país¨ without corn there is no country]
-Visited Frida Kahlo´s casa azul full of brilliant colors and giant paper maiche marionettes in bold patterns; a tragic beauty of a shared home of such pain, creation, power
-road the metro a lot-- 3 pesos flat rate!
-learned about ¨the politics of shit¨ aka sewer systems, from the guru of dry composting toilets Cesar Añorve; visited a rainwater harvesting catchment system NGO called Isla Urbana
-silkscreened t-shirts and anything I could get my hands on with designs created by the group and facilitated by Flavio who runs a community studio
-ate PAN Y MÁS PAN [sweet breads and pastries from the panadería] like investigators every night picking, nibbling, sharing
-visited Sembradores Urbanos an urban gardening teaching center and workshop space. super inspirational, beautiful, well organized, doing so much yet very streamlined and accomplished, integrated in the community. Plus awesome informational pamphlets on lombricomposta [worm compost] and container gardening, and I´m a sucker for good graphic design

OAXACA
so far is fun, to say-- split in two syllables like wah-HAH-ka. Universidad de la Tierra [where classes are based] is a rich red color on the outside and topped off with a sweet rooftop garden. Walked to my homestay with my overwhelmingly heavy suitcase, but it was all worth it upon arrival at Laurentina´s home and invited up to the boarder´s bedroom adjacent to the roof-- where dim lights of residences spread in a single story layer before the mountain silhouette. And in the foreground, a potted garden of fruits, vegetables, orchids in bloom, and space for yoga
Classes every morning, afternoon adventures that include explorations of the Zócalo historic plaza and wide cobbled streets of colorful shops and houses that surround it; weaving my way through the 20 de Noviembre street market, following Jessie in pursuit of perfect tamales de frijol; sampling chocolate at each of the shops on the chocolate street; helping some IHP alumni plan a roof garden & composting toilet to renovate their newly inhabited housing

TEOTITLAN del Valle
Mountainous weaving village. Oppressive midday heat. Women´s cooperative. Quedándome con Petrona y Juan y David Hernandez, en las camas (con Majandra) al lado de telar [Staying at the Hernandez home in the beds, with Majandra, next to the loom]. The fabrication of the tapetes [tapestries] is methodic, meditational, rhythmic-- the creaking loom responds to Juan´s foot peddling like it´s saying "a ver, a ver." All hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn with natural plants and cochinilla harvested at particular times of the year from the surroundings; true craft.

>>>>> more to come <<<<<<

Thursday, February 24, 2011

wellington looks like this:

INTERIOR SPACES:
[I will go take some actual photos of the city]
View of the valley of Karori suburb from my homestay
Can you see the windmills turning in the southerly breeze?

Michel Foucault, anarchist cat asleep in the window of the yellow living room

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Hapa --> Hapu

Hapa is kiswahili for "here," and I was finally starting to feel that understanding seeping into my brain and being
when a 40 hour whirlwind landed me in Wellington, to meet a new hapu-- Maori for family. Touchdown had me feeling totally adrift.
Took an A380 Air Emirates flight from Dubai to Sydney and it was like the Titanic of planes. (We were safe; no icebergs at altitude). A fully double-decker marvel of metal and engineering, the biggest passenger plane to date. Pioneering, you could say. Oh, and the Dubai airport is like Foxwoods casino with more windows, confused foreigners, and an indoor forest. It's also a lot like one of those gerbil cages with tubes connecting different activity centers and concourses. A four hour layover came with a complimentary Emirates buffet-- feeding frenzy!
So, Wellington. Swellington, Jessie and I had taken to calling it. We acknowledged the positionality of our New Zealand daydreams-on-a-pedastal:
we will drink TAP WATER!
do YOGA!
wear (jean cut-off) SHORTS! possibly while riding BIKES!
The streets were mighty windy but that wasn't as affecting as the navigational disorientation of things like CROSS WALKS. Those ones that chirp at you ? Had forgotten the urban landscape fixtures that add extra components to be accounted for. I used to be so good at crossing the street.
And eating in restaurants. I knocked over a glass of water after we had ordered matching salads (...just like in Never Let Me Go, as seen c/o Air Emirates personal entertainment swankiness, when the Donors can't function in the "real world" and instead become a conglomerate of copied cultural cues). But it's discombobulating when all of a sudden the background dialogue and streetlife is in a language you understand. When swahili surrounds me, those bits of conversation don't quite register.
Strangest of all: sarcasm. And street style.
Disoriented, I awoke at 3 AM depressed, took a walk, read until sunrise, then slept again. That afternoon it was like that surface was sanded away and I was delighted. And I thought I'd determined the culprit for this alternating emotional continuum:
jet lag.
BUT THEN
time wore on in New Zealand and I realized my reaction is about my own reflection within this place. It's uncanny:
A likeness to home at first, and recurring, glances, but its differences-- the in-actuality unfamiliarity, create distances and longing.
A doppleganger? The discomfort of recognizing oneself in the other.
And there I was, after 4 months, confronting an idea or impression of my own reflection: same old lifestyle and surroundings, resurfacing   ?
So 'ow is Aotearoa? Say it: ow-tear-oh-ah
Sunny. That hole in the o-zone? It's overhead. A bit glaring and overbearing at times but it's balanced by the misty gray mornings of sweaters and second-brew cups of tea.
And the IHP New Zealand team is inspirational in a subtle but permeating way. We're learning Maori songs to engage in the traditional greeting exchange where each person introduces themselves by their human and land-based ancestry ("that is my mountain, these are my rivers"). They say that Maori culture moves through time like walking backward, eyes on the past as it's all laid out before you. We're having a crash-course introduction to "indigenous ways of knowing."
And other ways of RETHINKING:
Spent an afternoon touring a permaculture farm, had an amazing and super-saturated presentation on Transdisciplinarity (thinking, education, systems modeling), learned about water quality issues in NZ, a lecture from an IPCC contributor on the role of technology in mitigating climate change, an extensive overview of Maori koauau (wooden and bone flutes) from the most energetic ethnomusicologist.

[The lighter side]
Other things I've been doing:
going on lots of long walks-- kiwi slang for "out in the boonies" is "in the walks," where we were staying at lodge
draining the blisters that result from said walks
reading: Guns Germs & Steel, and also The Golden Compass (6th grade nostalgia?)
Trying to get my act together to make art
frantically preparing applications/resumes when the rare and elusive internet is available (to the neglect of this blog..)
cooking a lot! This trip is like a traveling co-op hapu
Counting sheep on the busrides... just kidding, jet lag puts me to sleep before I could even start
refreshing my wardrobe with ridiculous secondhand store clothes.. faux-silk onesie, I'm looking at you...