Art and Music for Resistance

On: April 11, 2011
About Fei An Tjan
After finishing a Bachelor's in communications and Information I wasn't quite happy with, I decided to soak up some more life experience elsewhere before starting my Master. In Bolivia I worked for the newspaper of Santa Cruz (El Deber) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museo de arte contemporáneo). After six months, I changed location to Costa Rica to do a media internship with a volunteer travel agency. Here I gained more practical experience in the blogosphere, social media, and design which all laid the basis for my newly triggered interest in New Media. When I came back in the Netherlands, I signed up for the MA New Media and hope to finish this one happily ever after.

Website
http://cheeseandchina.wordpress.com    

The remaining days of LabSurLab were mainly dedicated to processing the videos and making them into cartographies. At 10:00 AM, the different teams gathered in the library of San Javier (Comuna 13) to discuss their work and outline the rest of the day. Recurring themes that needed to be represented in the videos were resistance, art, citizenship, militarization and displacement.

During my time waiting for the project to advance, I had a talk with Jaime Mahmud lópez and Patricia Velez Fernandez, two of the creative minds behind FRACTALAB. Latter is focused on a multidisciplinary idea to create open space for the youth in the coffee region of Colombia (Eje Cafetero). In this interview (in Spanish) Patricia explains why they have chosen to work as they do. Through art projects and the use of public spaces, they try to generate a view that is different from the mainstream. One of the projects Patricia talks about is for example 5 pieles (5 skins), referring to the different layers that define our existence. The first one being our own skin, the ‘I’; second are cloth, shoes and things you use to carry yourself; the house you live in and the architecture that surrounds you is the third skin; the fourth one is the social environment you live in and the last one is the universe. This idea was based on the idea of the Austrian artist and architect Hundertwasser, who exposed his vision on the world with this theory and our relation to the external world. FRACTALAB accordingly pursues that idea by creating space to exchange ideas and concepts, to support innovation and serve the community better. Digital media in that respect serves as a great tool as it has the ability to connect people, is very much from this time, it’s affordable and has the ability to connect universally and immediately.The inclusion of the citizen seemed to be an important stance of their organization which was also one of the themes of the cartographies, as well as during the event of LabSurLab as a whole.

In the evening we all went to one of the local bars in La Comuna 13 to watch the videos as kind of a ‘preview’ to the big presentation on the 12th. The evening was closed with performances of several Hiphop artists (i.e. Lucía Vargas) that treated many of the themes that I discussed earlier in their songs. There was an incredible energy to it which caused the whole croud to go crazy. It was exactly what needed to happen on a larger scale…

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