Art

ART EXHIBITION:

Tuesday, October 16th – 19th
Lobby SSMU Building, 3480 McTavish (metro Peel)

Conversations With the Earth

Conversation With the Earth (CWE) is a way of listening closely to traditional custodians of the world’s biocultural diversity. CWE’s opening conversation brings Indigenous Voices on Climate Change to convey their local climate change experiences, unintended consequences of mitigation efforts, and the values of traditional knowledge in developing appropriation responses.

Grounded in respectful long-term partnerships between indigenous-led organizations and award-winning experts in participatory video, journalism, photography, and audio, CWE conveys local accounts of the impacts of climate change on indigenous communities, stories of the unintended consequences of imposed mitigation efforts of local livelihoods, and examples of traditional knowledge and its values in developing appropriate responses to climate change.

CWE asserts indigenous peoples’ inherent rights to their territories, lands, and resources as a necessary condition of maintaining and enhancing their resilience to converging global crises, including climate change.

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Vernissage
Saturday, October 20th – 5pm-7pm
Le Cagibi, 5490 Saint Laurent Boulevard

Discussions about Migration and Art with Favianna Rodriguez and Jesse Purcell

Co-sponsored by No One Is Illegal & Just Seeds

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ART EXHIBITION
October 20th -21st, 2012
Back Room, Le Cagibi, 5490 Saint Laurent Boulevard

Migration Now!

Presented by co-organizer of Migration Now! Favianna Rodriguez and No One Is Illegal-Montreal.

We want to re-imagine migration as an inevitability, as a social practice that is not to be prevented but to be related to, like weather. All migration starts with social relationships. When people move, they are going either towards their families or communities, or more often, away from them. They move to help their relatives, or support them by leaving. People migrate because their homes stifle them, because those homes become burdens they need to shed in order to have full lives. They move in search of opportunity, or to escape their past, or to simply survive. They move because of lies they are told and that they come to believe, and they move to fulfill the most beautiful and fragile of dreams. Migration is fundamentally about our right to move freely across planet Earth, in search of our fullest and best selves.
Art and culture are the realm of ideas, images, and stories; it is where people make sense of the world, where they find meaning and forge community. History shows that when the culture changes, politics follows. Art has a crucial role to play in transforming, redefining, and reimagining the global phenomenon of migration. When it comes to migration, the discourse rarely focuses on the stories of real people trying to succeed; instead, the frame is dominated by criminality and punishment. We believe that when we share our images and tell our stories, we illustrate the human struggle and win over broad audiences. Art drives ideas home in a way that is unmatched by any other medium- movements soaked in art can bloom, grow more powerful, and establish deeper roots. Many of the artists involved in the Migration Now portfolio are students of the great traditions of political printmaking, such as Mexico’s Taller de Grafica Popular and the inflammatory street graphics of revolutionary France in 1968 – graphic traditions which inform the works included here.
For more information go to migrationnow.com