Well hello, everybody. Thank you for coming today. Thank you panelists. I'm very excited about
this panel discussion we're going to do today,
and it's really nice to see a full house. Lots of students. So welcome to the Watson
Institute for International and Public Affairs. My name is Sarah Baldwin. I'm a writer with the Institute. And as Rick said last
night-- our director-- this may seem like an odd venue for
a panel on art and activism, but in fact this event
is very, very much aligned with W
atson's
mission, which is to promote a more
peaceful and just world through teaching, research,
and public engagement. And two summers ago, when
our director, Rick Locke, who was then brand
new, took a look around this beautiful
building and asked me to find a way to
get art on the walls and people in the halls. He wanted this amazing
place to come alive and not just with academics, with the
people from the community. So I convened a committee-- a
very, very hard working group of staff and
facul
ty-- and we began to shape what has become the
Art at Watson Initiative. A year ago, when I
received an email asking if I was interested
in bringing Dignity to Watson-- which if
you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you do. It's on the second floor. The instant and
obvious answer was yes. Watson is filled with people--
sociologists, economists, political scientists,
anthropologists, who are working very hard to
understand the world's problems and to share their
understanding with others. But w
e believe that art shows,
like Dignity for example, can also offer us ways of
understanding the world. And art, too, begs to
be shared with others. The artists that are
convened here today are of a particular breed. Those who have merged their
medium-- or, in many cases, their media-- with
their cause-- an issue that disturbs them, enrages
them, inspires them, excites them. And I'd like to take a
minute-- I don't know if Cristina DiChiera is here. Cristina? Oh, great, thank you so much. Cristina
's here from
the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts,
and it's thanks to her that we were put in touch
with these great people. Thank you for coming. As I thought about moderating
this panel, I said to myself, I'm not an artist. And then I said,
well, I'm a writer. And in a very small way,
my writing has a mission. And that is creating
a space for voice. So while my own writing
practice gives me enormous pleasure and even
greater pain most the time, the work I do with
other people-- whether i
t's coaxing memoir
from senior citizens, or creating poetry
with teenage girls, or just creating
workshops to give people time and space to write-- that
gives me just as much joy. So I would say that my writing
is micro mission-based. So now let me introduce
these true artists and kick off what I hope
will be a lively discussion. I'm going to be
asking them questions. They're going to be asking
each other questions. And I will invite you to
ask them questions as well. Meredith Stern was born in
a
small town in Pennsylvania, which I mention
because so was I. And then she went
to Tulane University where she earned a Bachelor
of Fine Arts in ceramics and also learned to DJ. She's been involved in
artistic communities ever since-- creating
a collectively run bookstore in her front yard in
New Orleans, which I would like to hear more about,
living with other artists in a warehouse space she
dubbed "new city," stints in Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia both related to art, and finally--
lucky for
us-- she's landed in Providence. She's a former
director of AS220, an artist-run organization
here in Providence. And she's a member of
Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, a decentralized network
of 30 artists committed to making print and
design work that reflects a radical social,
environmental, and political stance. Justseeds believes in
the transformative power of personal expression in
concert with collective action. Meredith's work, as
far as I can tell, deals with issues such as
reproductive
rights, gender justice, and in some
sense, democratizing art, but you can tell us
yourself soon enough. You guys are in opposite order. Andrew Mroczek is a
photographer and curator. And Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo
is a painter and a sculptor. And I just realized I was
supposed to be showing you their fabulous art. So let's backtrack
to Meredith and look at a few images of her work. Linoleum block prints. Planting. And that's the
Justseeds Collective. And some very politically
charged works. Sorry ab
out that, Meredith. So together, Andrew and
Juan concern themselves with issues of
equality and inequality based on gender,
sexual orientation, and gender identity,
specifically empowering the LGBTQ community
in Peru, which is much cast aside by the
political and religious powers there. They are currently at work
on Las Virgenes de la Puerta, a series of portraits of
transgender women in Lima. And in 2014, they
produced Los Chicos, a series of photos
celebrating young gay men who are defying an
oppressive class
system and culture of machismo. Ann Fessler's art focuses
often on stories of women and the media messages and
myths that shape their lives. Her films and installations deal
with subjects such as family, rape, and adoption. This last, adoption, is
the topic of at least two of her films and of a book,
The Girls Who Went Away, which was named by Ms.
Magazine one of the top 10 feminist books of all time. She also recently received the
2014 Adoptee Trailblazer Award, given to an adu
lt adoptee whose
work inspires and instructs professionals in
adoption and foster care. This is a trailer from her
film, called A Girl Like Her. I might never see you again. That's not it. Nope. My parents' generation--
that greatest generation-- that's what they thought. It didn't happen to nice girls. But nice girls do get pregnant. They called the doctor. Doctor said, well
you send her away to a home for unwed mothers. And she gives the child up,
and it'll all blow over. My mother came and
go
t me and let me stay at home for a few weeks. I was three months pregnant, and
she said you don't look it now, but you will soon. And so I want you
out of this house. And she said, if you keep
your baby, never come back. You're going to
be taken care of, but you're going
to have that baby, and you are going to do the
only thing that is right. And that is, you're
going to give this baby to good people, decent
people, because you are so bad and so flawed
for just having this happen. There's no way
you
could possibly provide what a child would need. I just felt like I had
done this horrific thing, and I was not in any position
to protest or say, you know, what I wanted. Certainly, I wasn't
in a position to say, well is there any way that my
baby wouldn't have to be taken? I mean-- People say to me, oh,
it's not that way anymore. I said it's still that
way for a lot of us. A lot of my sisters
are still suffering. I don't think people realize how
many women lost their babies. This young wom
an
that they locked away was not allowed
to have her voice. [MUSIC PLAYING] And finally, Dana Gluckstein. In the 1980s, Dana was a
commercial photographer, California-based. She was on assignment
in Puerto Rico and hopped over to Haiti
to do some personal work. And that trip turned out to
be the first step in what would become a three-decades
long quest to photograph indigenous peoples
around the world. That work culminated
in a book which you can buy at the
Brown bookstore and an international
exhibit which we have here. Dana's portrait
work includes photos of notables from Ursula Le
Guin to Mikhail Gorbachev to Desmond Tutu. With Amnesty International, Dana
advocated for the US's adoption of the United
Nations' Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples. She was keynote speaker
at the UN in Geneva, where Dignity was exhibited,
and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where
she and other artists spoke about improving the state
of the world through the arts by shifting mindsets.
With Amnesty
International USA, she's working on a campaign to
end discrimination against-- and sexual assaults of--
Native American women and Native Alaskan women. So an impressive panel. Let's just look at Dana's
images, which again I urge you to look at upstairs. And there's Dana. So I'll just start
with some questions and then feel free to take turns
and-- can you still hear me if I'm over here? I'm not the one who's
going to be speaking. I want to start with
a question of origin. When did y
ou know you were
going to give your life to art? And when did you know you had
a cause that animated you? And how did you merge the two? Which did you know
what you were first? And I think-- Ann, it seems to
me you had a triggering event. Could you talk about
that to start with? OK. It wasn't the beginning of
my commitment to using art as a platform to bring people's
attention to women's issues. But in 1989, I was
at an art opening. And when I walked
in, I noticed a woman who was really familiar
to me. But I couldn't remember her
name or where I knew her from. And I asked several people so
I can verify that I actually went through this process,
and nobody knew who she was. And later, she started
walking towards me. And everybody's had
that experience. You're sort of
racking your brain. Where do I know
this person from? And she walked up to me, and
with no introduction whatsoever said, you could be my
long lost daughter. You look like the perfect
combination of myself and the father of
my child. And I started to have a
physical reaction to this. And I was one of those
adoptees who just said, oh, leave well enough alone. I'm never going to
search, and all that. And so it turned out
that-- well, I said to her, I'm an adoptee. You don't know
what you're saying. I could be your daughter. And then we are standing
there staring at each other. And as it turned out,
I was not her daughter. But she was-- her daughter
was born only a year and a month from my birthday. So this was the fi
rst
time I'd ever stood face to face with a woman
who was from-- who was the age of my birth mother. And so we started talking, and
I started asking her questions. And it was like-- It
just completely changed my whole understanding. And I was raised by
an adoptive mother who herself was an adoptee. So I thought I totally
understood adoption. And I thought I
totally understood all these feminist issues. And the story she was telling
me from her personal experience was not like anything
I've ever
heard. And so at that moment--
and based on the fact that it turns out the reason
she was familiar to me was because she was in my
dream the night before we met. So I knew this was one of
those life-altering events. And from that point
on, I just started researching and looking into
what other women of her era had experienced and
ultimately collected the oral histories
of 100 women who were sort of baby boom
generation who were forced to surrender because of the
shame of single pregnancy at the
time. And all my work since
that time has really been around these issues
in one way or another. But you were
already a filmmaker. I was dealing with
women's issues. Up through that point, I
was doing installations. I was telling other people's
stories and artists' books and installations. So I was already primed
to work that way, but it didn't
occur to me to deal with the subject of adoption. And so that shift happened when
I met her and learned that-- and the more I
learned, the more I knew I
needed to get
the information out because it just was not
known in the general public. It was assumed that any
woman who surrendered did so because she
didn't want to parent. That seemed simple. That was not the case. Thank you. Dana, you talk
about this as well. How you had your medium--
well, it was painting first, I believe-- and then
you found photography. And then suddenly you found
that it had a purpose. That you had this purpose. I'll just give you a little
bit of a different answer. How
many people were
there last evening? Or is this a new group? A deeper answer-- having been
so touched by your story, Ann-- is that I grew up in Los
Angeles in a very large tribe, a Jewish tribe. And as I started to track
the photographic work with indigenous
peoples in my 20s, I had to really do some deep
pondering why this girl from LA was going to all
of these places. And especially when I
had to write the Dignity book 25 years later, the
artist afterword, what I really discovered is that the
stories
in my family of the people that we lost in the Holocaust,
the family members that dispersed to other countries
fleeing the Holocaust, and those survivors
that still told their stories at our Passover
table moved me deeply. I was steeped in that world. As well as my
father's sister, who had lupus all through
my formative years and died when I was 13. I was extremely close to her. And she was crippled in a
body that couldn't move. The whole family would surround
themselves together, be wee
kly. The whole clan there. It was centered around
my Auntie Jeanette. And she was my very
first profound teacher that it was the internal
radiance, the dignity of the internal human
being, that was so much more important than the external. And growing up in a
place like Los Angeles, that was a very
important message. And I think informed
my work later on when I discovered photography. So years of doing painting
and drawing in high school and at Stanford, and also
a degree in psychology and disco
vering
photography, and that seemed to be the perfect merging
of all of those insights. Thank you. Meredith, what about you? When did you know that you had
things to say with your art? I grew up in a
Jewish-Quaker environment, and that was also
very much fueled by social justice practice. And I guess the
first time that I conflated the art and
the social justice was, I was in seventh grade. And I realized the cafeteria was
using plastics and Styrofoam. And I thought it was such an
atrocity to th
e environment that we were doing this. And why didn't we have
reusable dishware. So I made a poster-- that
was my first poster-- that had a picture of the
earth, and there was quotes that now I think are
comedy because I have no idea where they came from. But it was like,
by 2020, the earth would be unsustainable
for humans to live in it. And it takes a million years for
a plastic spoon to biodegrade. And it's like, how
would we even know it takes a million years yet? But was it a good poster? S
o it was a very cool poster. And it was, like,
sign the petition. Get active. And so then I also had a
petition that I sent around. And basically, I realized
that if I gave the petition to people slightly
more popular than me, that they would get the
people more popular than me. And then all of a sudden,
it could go farther than if it was me giving
the petition. So basically we-- yeah,
I got enough signatures that I then took it
to the principal. And then a week later or
something, we got a repo
rt back from the principal. Like, we're talking about it,
and we're looking into it. And so the plan is to see if
we can move forward with this. And then, by the time
I was in high school, they had transitioned to
silverware and plateware. And so-- That's great. I was like, all right,
you can do something. That's great. And it stayed with you? And that stayed
with me because it's the most tangible thing that you
could see, like the beginning to the end of it. And a lot of social
justice and art
work-- it's less
tangible, the results. It's kind of a lot more
qualitative than quantitative. Well, Juan and
Andrew, unless you're dying to answer that
question, I have one for you. And it's about collaboration. How did your
collaboration happen? How did you come together? Was it through the art or
was it around the causes? And how has collaborating
changed each of your processes? I think Juan and I met years
ago when he came from Peru. What year? That was like, 14 years ago. That was like 14 y
ears ago. But I'm only 21. So we had met at one point when
he had come to the university that I was working at the time
to see if we would potentially be interested in
showing this work. And I thought his
work was incredible, but it didn't end
up panning out. Years later, five or six
years later, we had-- Wait. Just for the record,
he didn't show my work. We got that. It was awful. But several years later,
I saw his thesis show, not even realizing it
was him, and invited him to exhibit in our ga
llery. And it was only at
the opening reception that we had realized that
we had met years ago. And since then, I
think-- especially during the process
of the installation of his work and the
editing and selecting, which is something
that I love to do-- I think we began to
realize that there's a lot of overlap with the
way that we think and work. On the flip side, we're also
both huge pains in the asses. And we call each other
out on tons of bullshit. So it was this great amount
of tension and c
ollaboration. And then slowly,
over the years, I began to work with him
on a few of his shows, just from an aspect
of a curator. Just making suggestions. And slowly it sort of
grew into a collaboration of making work together. I don't know if you
want to add to that. Where did the transgender women
and young gay men subjects come in? Well that's kind
of a long story. But what happened is
they are like, in time. I think there are a lot
of things just to recover part of a history in my life. So I
started really
young, as a young boy, starting different things,
like painting and sculpture. Different things in art. Then I went to college. After college, I moved to US. But all the time, I
was living in Peru. So that is like a-- there
are a lot of things, when you leave in a
country like mine, that it's-- you just put a
lot of really strong points on your brain that you
cannot just remove. It's a society that is
really-- machismo in my country is pretty strong. Everything related to
sexualit
y, or everything that is against religious
ideas are just bad. So you cannot really behave
in the way that you want, being as free as you want to be,
just because you will be judged by everybody. So keeping that in mind,
when I moved to US, even though I was
here for 14 years, I really didn't-- I spent
a lot of time with myself. And trying to understand
why all these things happen as just a human being, or why
these things keep happening in a country like mine. And during all this time,
there we
re-- I was already investigating about sexuality. I was investigating
about gender. I was investigating about
how religion in general can support or destroy
certain kind of ideas, just for how powerful they are. So in that time, I met Andrew. And then we started
working together. And we really fit each
other in an amazing way. So because even though we are
from two different countries, I think that we grew
up in a similar way. And as he said, we do not just
fit each other in a good way. We just
destroy each
other sometimes. And I think it's important as
two people, and two artists really helping each other
as much as they can. And we are really sincere
with each other, too. And I think that's
really important. So there is a point at which my
work-- like, five or six years ago start talking about this--
the idea of transformation, and the idea of
destroying everything that you are to become
what you really want to be. So like finding the
essence of yourself. And all the time, Andrew
was
already working with me. We were, again, like
[INAUDIBLE] exchanging ideas. And we had the opportunity to
bring one of my shows to Peru. And that's the moment in which
we took the decision because we were talking about
these things already, and we were discussing all this. But in Peru, when we were
there at the opening night, we just looked at
the each other, and we were like, I think
it's time to finally do it. And I think it's time to
really start this project. Because I think that
was the fi
rst moment in which I was finally open
in my country, not just as a gay man, but
as a human being. I was not worried about people
judging me for anything. Or I wasn't worried--
and I was really defensive with a lot of things
that I was seeing on the street against not just
the LGBTQ community, but against other people,
like racist situations, or situations in which
classism was too strong. So that's when everything
basically started. And I think his experience was-- I think when we
were in Peru-
- that was November of 2013--
when I landed in Peru, it was a bit of
culture shock for me. I don't speak Spanish. I butcher the language. But one thing that I can clearly
see-- it was almost tangible-- is how much religion
and politics go hand in hand in that country. And so much so
that it's a country full of fear in that capacity. And the classism
there is so heavy. I know in the Los
Chicos work, when you see some of the boys
who are nude mostly, a lot of an American
audience would think how h
andsome or
beautiful they are. But in Peru, these
boys are actually the lower class citizens
there who are frowned upon. Pond and I remember one
boy specifically saying he was shocked that
we would invite him to be part of this photograph. And he said, I'm not a model. I said, I'm not
looking for a model, but you're quite handsome. And he said, I'm not
handsome in this country. And that sort of stays with me--
the idea of beauty and value based on social class. And this image of
Freddie, for exa
mple, when we told him about the
project and about the fact that we're celebrating the young
gay millennials who are finally able to show their
faces as gay men, he knew that he will be fired--
once this work is released-- from his teaching position
because the school that he teaches at is partially
funded by the church. So once the work is
out in exhibition in Peru and in book
form, there is a chance that he'll be fired. And it's a pretty good chance. So these are things that I
was able to lear
n and see right away. And I didn't--
look, I'm rambling. Am I rambling? No. No. But it's so interesting
that he went ahead, and he thought the cause was
more important than his-- It was. For him, it was more important. Which is very different now. I think the youth there are
starting to really shatter these ideas of convention
and this fear of the church. So it was important for me, too. And it was important
for us both in terms of the trans women and
the boys to make sure that we are not
object
ifying them. And to make sure that
we are respecting who they are as individuals
but not pushing them further than they want to go. Or with the trans
women, the idea of the transition
of their bodies is really scary to
a lot of people. And it's weird to see
a woman with a penis. I get it. But after a while it
becomes a nonissue. But some of them were
far more open to show certain parts of their
body than others, and that was perfectly
fine with us. That's really interesting--
what he said-- beca
use even I consider myself a
really open-minded person. You talk about, I did
this or I did that. Or I heard this story
or the other one. And for me it's
like, OK, whatever. Not a big deal. So tell me something else. So I just receive information. I filter, and like
everything's OK to me. But I have to accept that
the first time that we did a shoot of the
ladies, and she decided, I'm going to be fully naked. I reacted in a weird way. It wasn't a bad reaction, but it
was just a little bit shockin
g. I have to accept it. But I have to accept,
too, that like three or four minutes later-- Shocking why? Shocking because I never
saw a woman with a penis. That's what it is. That's reality. But the most important
part I think, was that we became
friends before she decided to go for the shoot. Because the shoot was, like,
a month after we met her. And her name is [INAUDIBLE]
And she's a beautiful woman. You will see her on the
street and you will never tell that she was born as a boy. But litera
lly, five minutes
later, four minutes later, it was just normal to me. It was like, yeah,
it's another body. So one has-- I don't
know, one is taller. One is shorter. One has boobs. One doesn't. One has a penis. One doesn't. One has both. Exactly. It just became normal. And I think that's
one of the reasons why the type of photography
that we are trying to do with these
ladies is trying to create something beautiful. Something that,
through the codes of art-- like light, and
color, and compositi
on, and the classic
poses, and everything that we chose for them
was so specific that we wanted them to be
regal, and beautiful, and strong at the same time. And all these qualities that
will make them just beautiful. But at the same time, showing
their bodies because we need to educate people. And people need to understand
that they have the same rights that everybody else has. And knowing my country,
they just do not exist. People prefer not to see them. People pushed them to the
poorest part
of the country because they don't
want to deal with them. So they don't have options
for changing names. They don't have
options for an ID. They don't have options
for medical care. They don't have
options for anything. And they're forced to be
prostitutes because society do not want to deal with them. So the moment in
which you see them, or you are able to find
them somewhere in the city, is in the night. Thank you. And Meredith, you
collaborate, too-- just to get back to this
idea of collabora
tion-- but in a really interesting way. Your collaborators are
kind of far flung, right? Mexico and-- Yeah. The Justseeds Artists'
Cooperative that I'm a part of has 30 members. And we have members in Mexico,
Canada, and all around the US. And so there's a lot
of different ways in which we collaborate. We work on portfolio
projects where we'll work with a social
justice organization to create artwork around
a specific issue-- so around climate justice, or
reproductive justice, gender equality. A
nd then we'll
also sometimes get asked to do a
large-scale installation. So we did one in Slovenia,
and one in Berlin, and one in Milwaukee. This is in Pittsburgh at
the Pittsburgh Biennial. So we'll come together to do
large-scale installation work. And then sometimes
we'll just work-- two or three members will work on
something together as well. And they just opt in, kind of? They-- I want to do that? Right. So somebody will have an
idea for a group project, and then people will
decide whether
they can or want to be a part of that. And then sometimes it has to
do with the amount of funding that's available, or
people's schedules. Some people work full-time
or part-time jobs. Some people are full-time
self-employed artists. So everyone has various
levels of commitment. And do you actually ever meet? Yes. Yes. So we have annual or
biennnial retreats that-- so we'll come together
and talk about the finances. We also have an
online store where we sell over $100,000
of artwork every year.
And most of that's
very affordable art. So things range
between $10 and $100. We sell a lot of
pretty affordable art. So we'll talk
about the business, and we'll talk about
what kind of projects we want to be part of. And then sometimes we'll talk
about-- we got this opportunity to do an installation at Pacific
Northwest College of Art. And so earlier this year, a
bunch of us came together, and we had a mini
retrospective of sorts there. So we'll just talk about
all this kind of stuff at the re
treats. And it's also a way for us
to go swimming, and hang out, and get to know each other. And get recharged, right? Yeah, and get recharged. And there's also new members. So we started off
at, like, 10 members, so we tripled our size
throughout the year. So it's also a way
to get to know people that-- I still haven't met
two of the new members. And just to get back to this--
you all use human beings as your subjects. Some of you use cats as well,
but the common denominator seems to be human b
eings. And whether you're recording
interviews with them, or photographing them, or making
wood block prints of them. So how do you gain their trust? You guys started to talk
about this a little bit. And how engaged are
they in your cause? I'm sure everybody's
experience is different. And Dana, I know you can
speak to this a little bit. And Ann, with all the
mothers-- or the women-- that you interviewed as well. Dana, how do you
approach your subjects? First, I just want to
acknowledge the other
artists. Your work is so extraordinary. It's such an honor
to be here with you. I'm very moved
because artists often work in a solitary fashion,
unless you're at a university. And I'm so excited
to be here with you. I'll just say briefly
that my work developed after I graduated from Stanford
from shooting advertising portraiture work in the Bay Area
and editorial for magazines-- all lifestyle portrait work--
to journeys that took me around the world because some
of those advertising assignments
took me there, as Sarah said. And I would jump to go
to do my work because I was near a location and
the body of work grew. In the early years
of the journeys, my art was ahead
of my intellect. And those interactions
with people were not always as determined
of portrait sessions. I was there with my
big Hasselblad camera. If you go upstairs and have
time to see the film, sometimes in the next two
months in the show, you'll see me with the
camera that I worked-- still work-- with for 30 years,
a
nd the interactions were beautiful. But they weren't that I
had selected necessarily, and researched for a
long time, those places. But later in my 20s, I
began to really ask myself, why was this LA girl going to
all of these indigenous places and realizing that
I wanted to be a bridge person or a steward
for the voices of the indigenous peoples and to support their
existence on the planet, and the important messages that
they have for sustainability, and how we're going to survive. And so I wou
ld carefully
choose those locations, always research
a guide-- usually somebody from that
particular remote region that spoke the dialect-- and the
trips would be arranged, where I would go anywhere for
a week to several weeks really with that intention to portrait. Sometimes setting up a camp in
certain places for many days to work. Setting up portrait studio. Meeting the people-- the
elders, the head man, the women, the children. And the interactions
were beautiful. Always going with reverence
and stepping lightly, knowing that I was a visitor
in their world-- a white woman walking in places of
color and foreign places-- and that my mission was to have
a sense of a cultural exchange and to impart the
sense of love that I had for individuals and
humanity and to photograph that sense of
dignity, which I feel that I share with all the
other artists on this panel. It's a very dignified panel. And how you present
the work that you do. And rather than to focus on
the poverty or the tragedy
, to focus on the future,
tribes in transition of where we were going. So with that, let me
just also say, Sarah, that portrait sessions
are very intimate. For me they are. I really want to go
deeply with somebody. I speak constantly
in the session. If I have an interpreter,
I'm telling them, please tell the subject that
I care about them. That I want to show their
beauty of their culture. That their image may be
seen by other people, and to share that
with the world. In the early days of
course
, I had no idea that it would become a book. That we would help to adopt a
UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. That we would really support
the work of our elders, our indigenous leaders, who
for centuries and decades had been working
on these issues. And that we would be
assisting with that. And so it wasn't as if
I could say to people, it's going to be a
book in 25 years. Or it's going to be at the UN. Or I'm going to speak at Davos. And what I said to the
audience last night a
nd especially for-- there are
so many students here today. I'm so glad you came,
hopefully for us, not just the delicious food. That it's OK that you
don't know who exactly you might want to be right now. Some of you might,
but that could change. I was a psychology
major and thought I'd go to graduate school. And my senior year, shocked
my parents and said, I'm going to become
a photographer. That's the exciting
journey-- that you don't have a crystal ball. Life would be very boring
if we knew e
xactly who we were going to be in 25 years. So really track
that inner spirit and your own personal journey
and listen carefully to those-- that still inner
voice inside of you. The inner voice that
knew in seventh grade. That poster. And listen to your
dreams, apparently. Exactly. Ann, did you find
that-- I'm not sure how you went about
finding these women. But were they-- to a one just
dying to tell their stories? Or did you have to
really explain yourself? Or was it a mix? In the beginning, I
didn't
know how to find people. I had done several
autobiographical installations on my own experience
of being an adoptee. And in each of
those installations, I would leave room
for other people-- a dedicated room for people
to write their stories and post them. So I was gathering
information, but a lot of the stories that were
left by the first moms were left anonymously. But they reconfirmed
what I'd heard from this woman in the gallery. So I knew there were
stories out there, but I didn't k
now how
to find the women who might tell the stories. And this would have
been in the '90s. And so then when I actually
initiated the oral history project, I crafted a letter that
essentially went out to-- well, these stories are long. It's like, how do
you make them short? There was an article in the
Boston Globe about this project because I'd gotten a Radcliffe
fellowship at Harvard. And when that article about
what I was researching-- I'd already done some
of the interviews-- went into the pa
per,
I got, I don't know, thousands of emails from
people-- I made the mistake-- no, I didn't. It wasn't a mistake. I asked the writer to
put my email in there. And so I got emails
from people saying, that happened to my sister. That happened to my mother. That happen to my aunt. And there were excerpts
from the interviews, so people knew generally
what the stories I was starting to collect were about. And so I would write
each person back and say, would you be willing
to contact them and see if
they want to be interviewed? And I did a kind
of full disclosure. This is my mission. This is what I'm doing. If you're worried about
voice recognition, don't participate,
because my mission is to make these stories public. And the sad thing was that
nobody had ever asked. So people that had never spoken
about it-- in some cases, they had never told husbands
because they were advised not to by every authority figure
in their life-- they said, I don't care anymore. The truth has to come out. And
basically
that's what I said. That I wanted the truth
of their experience. I wasn't looking for any
particular kind of stories. I had no idea when I started
what the stories were going to be like. I just wanted to collect as many
different stories as possible, and they were eerily similar. And this was from the deep
South, from the Northwest, from New England,
from everywhere. They were really,
really the same because it had to do with
the era-- the post-World War II era. And that's a long
conv
ersation in itself. But I had a lot of people who
had never talked about it. And I also had people
who said they've been seeing therapists for years. But they had failed to tell them
about the experience of losing a child from
adoption because they didn't think it was relevant. And as soon as they
started talking about it, everything changed. And these are women from
the baby boom generation. They learned to be bold
and sort of assertive about everything else in
their life but this one thing, wh
ich they were horribly shamed
by because everybody made them feel terribly ashamed. And so when they had a
chance to talk about it-- sometimes I would ask
the initial question and they'd talk for four hours. So a lot of transcription costs. That was the sad part. And they were unaware
that it had happened to so many people
themselves because they were made to feel like they
were the only one who'd been the black sheep of
the family, who had almost ruined the family reputation. So the people who
were willing
to talk were dying to talk. Very interesting. I have many more
questions, but I wonder if anyone in the
audience has questions for these fine artists? Yes. Ms. Fessler? Yes. So you mentioned that
you got a lot of emails from people who said that
they had family members who had that experience of
losing a child to adoption. Yeah. Did you ever have a chance to
talk to the parents of somebody who lost a child to adoption? No. And because the women--
I was particularly interested-- I ha
d to put
some parameters on my research because I was
ultimately going to put these stories in the context
of a particular time period. And I needed to know
exactly what was going on during that time period. So the era between 1945-- the
end of World War II-- and '73-- the passage of Roe-- even
though Roe isn't the factor that makes the numbers go down,
which is-- it's really birth control-- the availability
of the pill to single women. So the women I'm interviewing,
their families are mainly--
the mothers and fathers of those
women-- are mainly gone now. And so I was focusing
on the women themselves, giving them the opportunity
to tell their own story because the stories about
them had been told, written, expressed, filmed from
the perspective of people who had a vested interest
in facilitating an adoption. So their stories about what
it was like on the other side were not out there
in the world at all. There was not anything out
there about their stories. But again, the short
answer
to your question is, the families
were really gone. I did hear second hand
through the women about how their families reacted
when the child came back into their life-- when they had
a reunion with the child that age-- when their child is, like,
40 years old and they reunite. And that's actually the first
time most of the families ever talked about it again. I have a question. Have you ever thought of
doing the next documentary on the reuniting of
some of those families? No. I do talk about the
reunions--
they talk about them, and they're relayed
a bit in the book. Right now, I'm
interviewing birth fathers. Oh. Interesting. Amazing. Yes. Yeah, I have a question that's
not directed at any one of you in particular or
all of you, but I see that the theme that I
hear from several of you is that you're very
desirous to tell a story. That you have
different populations and you're telling a story. But I also hear a
theme that there's a social justice, the concern
about being change agents. An
d I'm wondering if you
could reflect for a minute. I can see telling
a story and making something which is
authentic as documentation of a group of people. But I don't know
how that necessarily is the same thing as
being a change agent. And I wonder if you would--
see, I'm a political scientist. So that's a bias I have
in asking this question. It's not as a
political scientist that I wanted-- I just want
to know your reflection. How you put together the
art of telling a story, as opposed to the
question of
the challenge of being a change agent. And how do you
know it's working? I think-- That's a really good question. I wrote a similar question down
as a question to ask everybody. Great. I think-- I hope I
can answer this well, but-- one of the things that
was important for me, especially as a white American cis male
going to a South American country and helping
them solve a problem. A friend of mine once said, it's
like Doctors Without Borders. They're doing great things, but
it's whi
te people pointing out brown people's problems. And that's a legitimate
concern or reaction that I've gotten many times. But what I first had to do was
change my mentality in the fact that I am part of
their community. I am a gay male. They are part of
the LGBTQ community. And I don't view us as
having a specific border, whether it's cultural or not. I know that there are different
cultural stigma and laws and things that we'll
have to work around. But ultimately I'm helping
people within my own
community. Now having said that, what I
also knew-- and I don't want to speak for Juan--
but what I also knew was that I didn't want to have a
National Geographic experience, which is perfectly fine. But I didn't want to just
breeze in and breeze out. So by establishing
these relationships with these people, it's
given me the opportunity to see how the work has not
only changed their perceptions on their self worth
and self value, but also how they've become--
especially some of the women-- mor
e active in
their own community. The trans community in
Peru, unlike-- I'll just use, for example, in
Boston, the gay men-- when the topic of civil
unions and marriage equality was happening in Boston--
it was-- all of us were united together. In Peru, it doesn't happen
with the trans community. They're so interspersed
throughout the area that they don't come
together as a single unit. So when we're photographing
some of these women, they're telling us
things like, I've never been this respected
before. I've never felt
this honored before. No one's ever been
this nice to me. And slowly, through
the project, some of the women that we worked with
have made connections together. And even on this last trip
that we went-- we just got back three weeks, four
weeks ago-- they're now working together
in community centers and rallying together to
reach out to the younger trans women to find a way to
educate them on HIV awareness, on options that they can do
for their own transition. And a big pr
oblem there
is the aspect of sex work. And for me, there
was a point where I had to realize that if
I were in their position, I would do the same
thing because there's not much else with them to
do in some instances. So I think we're already
seeing a tiny shift. But I also want to
mention that our-- I think the backbone of
our project is not to first educate the public. It's to first
empower these women. And then the B product
is educating the public. I think when
[INAUDIBLE] says, I've never fe
lt this beautiful
before, even for that split second, it's wonderful. And that's good enough for me. And I think that
will be a catalyst for great work in her life. Juan? I agree. You just talk too much. No. I did already. Why would I do it again? Did that answer your question? It's a great question. It's a really good question. There must be moments
when you're thinking, this is hard and is it working? I wonder, do you ever feel like
your art is reaching people who are already in your tribe? Or
who are like-minded? And is that OK? Do you want it to go
beyond the boundaries of your world and your mindset? I think those kinds
of questions are the ones that come
up over and over when you do this kind of work. And is making work
about a subject-- a troublesome
subject-- activism? Not necessarily. And I think that one has
to sort of figure out, is it more about just
making people aware? You can do that through art. You can make people aware. And then what audience
is going to see it? So th
ere's a series of
questions that come with that. If you want to change minds,
that might be a little tougher. If you want to get people
to change their behavior, that's even tougher. But certainly, a combination
of empowering the people that you're working with and
also getting information out are two different--
those are two different-- you might need two different
strategies for that. And then real activism
might have nothing to do with the actual
making of the work. It might be that the work
puts you in touch with people, and you can support them,
and they can support you in doing something that really
is about facilitating change-- laws, whatever. Or UN declaration. Yes. Exactly. And I sometimes am
really frustrated and irritated by work that
claims to be socially motivated when it's really, in a way,
it's like people buy it and they think they've
done something. And that's almost worse than
not doing it in the first place. So these are all really,
really good questions. Yes. Oh,
Dana, did you want-- Do you want to answer that? Were you going to say something? I was going to say something. Do we have time
for this gentleman to ask his question after I-- Yep. OK. I was just going to say that
it is such a good question, does the work touch
the actual subjects that you're working with? Like your focus initially
was that, and then plan B was to maybe
change consciousness from seeing the art. Mine was a blend of
all of the above. As I said, the early
journeys, I didn't know w
hat was going to happen. Then I started to
understand more and more. And then I was asked to create a
book on the body of my lifetime work of 25 years in association
with Amnesty International for their 50th anniversary. And that's a great
time, when things like that happen in your
life to know that it's time to seize the moment
and try to do the best you can to shape the outcome. And it remained a
Dana Gluckstein book even though it was in
association with Amnesty. And I crafted the entire book
,
bringing in all the arts people that I had worked
with for many years-- the designers, the art
directors, the writers, the editors, even somebody
like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who I had been honored
to portrait in South Africa a few years before. I wrote to him, and
I said, would you consider writing the
foreword to this book. And he wrote such an
inspirational foreword. And one of my earliest teachers,
Faithkeeper Oren Lyons-- you will read about them
in the exhibition-- who wrote a scholarly
introduction
about the history of the demise of indigenous peoples, and the
medieval laws, and the Roman Catholic Church. And so I assembled the book
so the art-- it kept growing. And when I heard that the
United States had vetoed in 2007 the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and 144
countries had voted for it-- US vetoed it with Australia,
New Zealand, and Australia-- I said here's my
moment and my mission. Exactly, Ann, what
you were saying. I said, I don't want
it to just
be a beautiful coffee table book that people that can
afford $40 buy as gifts and put it on their coffee
table in their home. Or art hanging only in museums. That's beautiful to
have that happen, but I really wanted
to make a difference. I want this book to
make a difference. So I pushed it even further. I made the book all
about the UN declaration. I suggested that
we put all the 40 articles of the declaration
that had never been published in the back of the art book. So we had the s
cholarly
text, the inspirational text, we had the art. It was kind of a full package. I wanted it to be
for-- you could give it to your grandmother, you could
give it to a younger person, anybody could gift it. And then I wanted to
take it even further. I said to Amnesty International,
when the book is released, if we're lucky enough to get
attention-- media attention-- let's have people do something. Because people show up, and
they say, what can we do? How can we make a difference? And we had
a letter. You could click on the
Amnesty International link, write to President
Obama-- it was already a letter that said, please
adopt the UN declaration, and indeed he did. We were the last
country to do so. The book came out
in early November, and in mid-December, he
gathered our tribal leaders from the US and Alaska
to the White House and announced the adoption. So I say that we really stood on
the shoulders of our leaders-- indigenous leaders
that have been working for centuries on these is
sues. And certainly decades
on the UN declaration. And we helped just a
little bit-- tweak it. We were bridges to help really
get the White House to know that non-Natives were watching
carefully what the United States was doing. I just want to say
one quick thing-- and then your question--
is that, we have something else that you can all do today. So jot this down in your
computers or your cellphone. I approached Amnesty
International again a year ago when I knew
the exhibition was finishing the
tour in Europe
and coming to the United States and said, what can we
do again to harness the visuals of Dignity? What action is important now? And they were very excited. They said, we have
a whole campaign again-- a letter
to President Obama to implement the sexual
assault protocols to end rape and assaults
on reservations in the US and in Alaska. And I'm asking all of
you a call to action to join our sisters
here on campuses. There's a lot of talk in
the last years about rape and assault on c
ollege
campuses and the US military. It's the same on Native
American, Alaskan women, reservations. More than one out of
three Native women will be raped in a lifetime,
compared to one out of five. It's all horrible, the violence. But you can take
action very quickly. So jot this down. You can either go to the
Amnesty International website. Or it's a little tricky
to find on their site. But you could go to my
nonprofit site which is tribesintransition.org,
Take Action-- that's the name of the sh
ow--
tribesintransition.org. Quickly sign it. Pass it to other
people that you know. My mission in the next few
years while Dignity tours is to get thousands, thousands
of signatures going to Obama. I think that you raise
an interesting point. There's a macro level
of change that you can sort of be aiming
for, or fall into, or get on that bandwagon. And then there's this
micro level of change which is when you touch
someone's life-- another human. So art-- and then there's
everything in between.
Everything in between. And it's all so important. So you can act locally,
personally, globally, nationally, whatever
your heart calls out to. And you carry all-- you
carry a piece of that puzzle. Thank you. Now would you like
to ask your question? He forgot his question. Yeah. There's a lot of questions that
I'm really interested about. How different resources get
accrued around this work and redistributed. But I have a very specific
question for Meredith. Can you talk about the
relationship of
text in your work, or to your work? And I guess also with Justseeds. A lot of work is using very
explicit text, but much more, kind of, poetic imagery. And can you just talk
about how understand that? Yeah. Sometimes the text
directs the piece, and sometimes the imagery
connects or drives the piece. Yeah. Didactic versus subtle is an
ongoing conversation with all of the members of Justseeds. And we all kind of have various
approaches to that question. Because it's definitely--
and it kind of ti
es into who is the
audience for the piece and what is the intent? And so a lot of
times with the pieces that have a lot
more words to them, the audience is for people
who generally already believe in that and
kind of need something to-- need to feel like
they're not alone. So it's like, there's other
people who feel like I feel. This piece is expressing
what I feel very deeply. And then the subtle work tends
to be more questioning and open to interpretation in a way
that hopefully allows people
to kind of get somewhere
more slowly if they're not necessarily already
thinking the exact same way. But I kind of think of all of
our work together as a quilt. So all the pieces independently
can be beautiful or powerful but altogether, then you get
a lot more meaning and depth from the work when they're
all positioned together. And so that's where I think
the greatest strength of having a various range of
work comes into play, is when it's
positioned together. Then you can see how the
subtle w
ork is addressing those same issues of
inequality and justice and some of the
more-- and also a lot of the more visually driven
and non text-based pieces tend to also either delve into
utopia or futurism in a way that some of the text-based
pieces kind of deal with what is now that we're facing. And what are the specific
issues that we're looking at. How many of you consider
yourselves activists? And artists? Any artists? Great. Does anyone have any
questions about advice they might like from
th
ese artists on how to-- [INAUDIBLE] about advice. But to the political
science question-- I was thinking that
one thing I love about the integration
of the artwork here at the Watson
Institute is that idea of various ways of conveying
and understanding information. And it's sort of
clicked to me, how often do political scientists think--
if they're on a project-- think, I need to
partner with an artist to help convey this issue? Because just like
Juan Jose was saying, when they are thinking
abou
t how they want to present their
subject, artists' minds are thinking about how do
people respond to color? How do people
respond to imagery? How do people respond
to composition? Because these are other
ways of thinking-- valid ways of conveying
knowledge and information, but are just different. And they help people to
understand these deep issues in a different way. And sometimes I think
people don't understand how deeply artists
dig into-- how synonymous artists' projects
are with serious res
earch. Or how long it takes
to write a book. And how artists just
convey-- and it almost starts to feel like a
paper-- like a white paper would have a completely
different impact if paired with imagery. And that that marriage
of the social sciences or political sciences
with artistic imagery is not strange at all. It seems like it's
kind of necessary. So I just wanted to
throw that out there as an addition to that. That's a really good point. I think that brings up
this issue of visibility. And
it sort of
goes without saying that history is
supposed to be the sum total of all histories--
of all people's, individuals' history
should be our history. But we all know that
that's never the case. It's the people in
power who write history, and who convey history. And as a person
who's an academic, I have a healthy distrust
of academia and research that's about other research
that's about other research. And I feel like it's
incredibly important to look-- and I think everybody
here is trying
to make some aspect of the world
more visible because we all see it as something that's not
being addressed in the media, in academia, in the
larger world in general. That people don't
understand and that we're trying to use our platform as
artists to make it visible. I think that's what everybody
here seems to have in common. Yeah. And that's resonating to me. This impulse to create space
for voice and [INAUDIBLE]. We have time maybe
for one more question. I know a few of you
guys have classes.
Yes, Alex. Hi. I was in the overflow
room, so I just ran down. Welcome. So nice to be here. I wanted to ask, I've
heard a lot of you talk about placing certain
creative constraints on your projects,
initially as a way to perhaps open up more space
to dive deeply into a topic. So for Ann, I know that
was-- she was going to focus on birth mothers. And in the other
project I heard you talking about the composition
and light of your images and the classical
poses that you used. And I actually
run a
program here called Storytellers
for Good, which is for students who are
producing digital stories with social impact at Brown. And something I see a lot of
students run into time and time again is the difficulty of
bringing those constraints when part of your goal is also
sort of that empowerment and freedom of the person
you're working with. So I was curious how you
balance those two things. How do you determine what
your creative constraints are going to look like
initially in your project?
And then how do you balance
that with also the goal of empowering and
allowing that person to express themselves fully? I think for us it's editing. I think editing is the most
important part of image making. And I think what we do is, we
bounce back and forth ideas. We create sketches. We think about the
different components that the image should have. In some instances-- or
in most instances-- when we meet the person
we will photograph, we try to incorporate
parts of them into it. So it's this
big
bowl of information that we want to separate,
and prioritize, and find a way to create
this clear moment, and a clear beautiful moment
for what I think we're doing. There's a couple artists that
I look at a lot of the times when I think about editing. And one is Luba Lukova,
who's an illustrator-designer in New York, who did a portfolio
on social justice years ago. And in terms of editing,
she's become such a master. Just a couple lines-- one
or two words of text-- all of a sudden,
the imag
e is there. And for somebody who does
poster work of that type, she's mastered that as
far as I'm concerned. And the other person I
look at is Kathe Kollwitz, a German expressionist
printmaker who-- even if you
can't read German, the imagery is so powerful
and strong that it defies any type of communication. But in both of those cases, it's
getting down to the root of it. It's not complicated. I have similarities with that. Because my camera of
choice for the fine artwork was a Hasselblad, which
is an
old-fashioned square format-- two and a quarter inches
by two and a quarter-- that square format is very
different than the rectangle that all of you are most
familiar working with, especially now with iPhones. And it's a tough format. It took time to work
with it, but it's the one that I love best. And also choosing to work with
real film and black and white has been very interesting
because the times, they are a-changing. And I can't get the Polaroid
that I used to work with. I can't ge
t-- I'm hoarding
lots of film in my refrigerator because Kodak doesn't
make my film anymore. And I don't know what I'm
going to do when don't make it. But I guess I'll
cross that bridge. But many people have asked,
why don't you shoot in color? If you see the film that's
playing-- looping-- upstairs, you'll see some documentary
footage of me actually shooting that's in color,
and then the click, and then the final edited image. And it's shocking to
see what it looked like in color and then
the e
ditorial choice of the black and white. But I just stuck
with it because I felt that the black and
white was very soulful and that we're inundated with
color images in advertising and editorial work,
especially in my genre. Not with what you're doing. You've created an entirely
new genre based on history. It's extraordinary
what you've done. The different iconic kinds of
images, and Renaissance poses, and all of that. So sometimes those
are tough choices because yes, I would be
in a place and th
ink, it's so beautiful. And Bhutan in color, am I crazy? That I didn't bring color film. That I have to stay very
disciplined and focused, especially if you're
creating a body of work that is-- the body of work has to
have some consistency to it. You had a question. Yes, really quickly. This is for Andrew and Juan. Have you had any conversations
with the LGBTQ people you've photographed that despite
the way that their church or government has treated
them still considers themselves religious? I
think-- I'll say something
I think is really interesting. I don't want to
use the word funny. Like the funniest part of
that-- the whole situation-- is that even though the
Catholic Church in my country do not want them even to exist,
this people is really Catholic. It's like crazy. And I'm going to tell you a
little story, how everything began. Because it began, like, 15 years
ago-- the year 15 or 18 years ago when I graduated
from college. A friend of mine
told me a story. That's the reason
wh
y this series is called the Virgins of the
Door-- Virgenes de la Puerta-- that it's about a
statue that was taken from some part of
Peru to Lima and was adopted by this community. And this community used to
go to church every Sunday, used to pray every day, and
used to do all these things. And the community was
a trans community. So there was a problem
at the time-- that was in the '80s-- there was
a problem at the time when the Catholic Church knew that
the priests in the church allowed them to
do that. So this Virgin-- and they
the statue [INAUDIBLE] to the street once a year. So they were doing
all the processes that older churches
do with their statues. And everything was perfect
until the Catholic Church decided to say, no, they are
not allowed even to be there. They are trans people. What's the problem here? And even with that,
they still believe. And they still fight for it. And they still, even until now,
they go to church on Sundays. But there's one
important point to make tha
t's different from
the US that I didn't even realize until I got to Peru. That in the US, if
you're gay, you're trans, whatever, it's
pretty much a blanket idea that if you go to New
York City, you go to Boston, you go to Providence,
you go somewhere, there's going to be
resources for you. And other people like you. If you live in cow town,
whatever, more than likely, you're probably not
going to be as accepted. In Peru, it's the
exact opposite. You can go to smaller villages,
up into the mounta
ins, and trans people and gay people
are living in total harmony with everybody else. There's no discrimination. They're actually revered in
some of those communities. The reason why, in Lima, or
other major parts of Peru, that they are being attacked
and/or marginalized, is because the Catholic Church
has such a strong presence in those cities. So they're really
pushing them aside. So it's interesting. And even in our research
traveling through Peru, that we can go into--
we actually did see a
religious procession
just outside of Lima that was full of trans women. And it was no problem. Had that procession taken
place in downtown Lima, there would've been
a huge problem. They would've been arrested. Absolutely. That's a great question. And yet, they
still remain devout because I think their
spirituality-- like, I hope everyone's spirituality--
will defy laws that man has made or manipulated. My opinion. Yes. One last question,
and we have to-- This goes back to
the intertwining of pol
itics and religion. And it's very interesting. You talked about the
countryside versus the city. It's reversed of United States. Is that because of
the liberationist theology that's occurred
in the countrysides with the poor people,
the indigenous peoples? That there's a divergence in
between being really Catholic and believing people are people. And we accept them. And they have their faith
as best as possible. I think actually-- and I could
be wrong-- so I'll jump in and then maybe you could a
nswer. I think the majority of the
native cultures in Peru, prior to the Spaniards arriving
and ruining everything, did except it. It wasn't a part of-- that
type of discrimination was never part of the equation. And you could see even
now, figurines and huacos made by Inca people
where two men are engaging in sex, as well
as male and female figures. It's something that was done. Gender identity-- I'm
not exactly sure-- but I'm assuming it
had its place there-- but I think up
until colonialism,
that's what changed or shifted. What happened in Peru is that
there are just four big cities. It's not like the United States,
where you go-- any state has-- like, downtown is like
a big city somehow one way or the other. Over there it's not. It's like countryside or
these four big cities. That's it. Even though there are,
like, different states. So you move around the
country, and the beliefs that they have-- even
though you see a church-- there are towns that they
have to put like Ayacucho, 20
church-- 20
different buildings-- in the same tiny, tiny town
because there were places where-- and I think art comes
to that I think is interesting-- the creation of
art was so strong. And they were so against
the Catholic Church-- not against the Church
because they were crazy-- just because they had their
own beliefs before Spaniards took South America--
that they were fighting too much with that. So it's basically
putting a building on top of an Indian, or an Inca,
structure to repress one
thing and put the other one instead. So that's what
we're trying to do. And again, going back to the
countryside against the city, in Lima, you see
churches everywhere. And in these towns, you don't. So the type of belief--
and the best sample is the Peruvian forest--
the border with Brazil-- you don't see
churches over there. It is really weird to find one. And the acceptance of the
biggest trans community that we have in my
country comes from there. They are like-- you
see them everywhere. Eve
rywhere else. And they behave in
the way they want, and they are fully accepted. And nobody cares. And the power that-- going back
to power between the Catholic Church and the politicians
in my country-- there are a lot of issues
about that right now. The Catholic Church is
giving money to politicians to go against certain laws. So that's how bad
the situation is. You could have
another whole seminar about how religion affects
the things that we're talking about. Part 2 tomorrow night. I just wa
nt to thank you all. I want to urge everyone to go
upstairs and see the photos. Go on the Justseeds website. Go on everybody's website. Google them. I don't think all the
websites are on the sheet. But I just really want to
say thank you to everybody. And I hope we can
bring you back. Thank you. Shame, shame, shame, shame. [SIDE CONVERSATION]
Comments