Last Friday (January 24th) we had our first meeting of the K’acha Willaykuna Our Unlearning Hour. During our hour together, as we took this moment to pause amid the business (and busyness) of the new semester, we took our time to introduce ourselves. Amid sips of coffee and the noise and bustle of the Wexner café, with school groups arriving and gathering behind our table, we shared our reflections on the week that had just passed.
- Tania Espinales Correa, Layla Muchnik-Benali and Guillermo Paredes Orozco introduced their research interests (across three OSU departments: Spanish & Portuguese, Arts Administration, Education and Policy, and Sociology).
- We heard updates on the overall K’acha Willaykuna project from Michelle Wibbelsman, including her and Ann Hidalgo’s experience at the CLAS (Center for Latin American Studies) K-12 Teachers Workshop (“How the calabacita tallada transformed our teaching and learning about Latin America”).
- Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar delivered his inaugural lecture (“Cultural Agency in the Amazon. Indigenous Amazonian Painting on Extractivism”).
- Anna Freeman described her experience at a tour of the current Global Gallery exhibition Identities and Resistance on the Walls of Quito, organized by the Abya Yala Student Organization in coordination with the artist Andrés Ramírez, who visited OSU last semester.
- Richard Fletcher offered his blog/website Minus Plato for sharing these newsletters, readings and links from our discussions at the following link: https://minusplato.com/kacha-willaykuna
Readings:
- Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2017) The Decolonial Turn (shared by Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar)
- Elsa Dorin (2017) ‘To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence’ (shared by Richard Fletcher)
Links:
- La Tanya S. Autry exhibition Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom, opens on Friday January 31 at MOCA Cleveland. The exhibition honors the discussion that artist and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Canadian poet and scholar Dionne Brand forged in their 2018 article of the same title reflecting on colonialism, anti-Blackness, Indigenous and Black liberation struggles, and the importance of ephemeral expressions and the arts in creating freedom (shared by Anna Freeman)
- Last semester’s K’acha Willaykuna Artist in Residence Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste (pictured below) participated in the 2-day Indigenous performance artist event Knowledge of Wounds at Performance Space New York, with review in ARTnews (shared by Richard Fletcher)
