Professor Reyes to gives keynote for University of East Anglia conference May 27th @ 1pm EST.
Professor Ana María Reyes gave the keynote for REPAIR, a 2-day online conference hosted by the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia.
More details can be found in the conference flier and abstracts here.
KEYNOTE:
Ana María Reyes, Boston University
To Weave and Repair: On Symbolic Reparations and Institution-Building
One of the main objectives of symbolic reparations in cases of gross human rights violations is the reparation of moral reciprocal relations between the State and a violated community. In doing so, the state and affected communities accept their relation of mutual constitution, that is, their vulnerability and contingency on each other. Judith Butler reasons that vulnerability is a valuable condition of political resistance and can be “a form of activism, or as that which is in some sense mobilized in forms of resistance.” Following Butler, Reyes proposes that processes of symbolic reparations can capitalize on this vulnerability in order to construct sites of commemoration, conflict resolution, and the very infrastructure that addresses the conditions necessary to resist future violations. Through the example of the Casa del Pueblo (1999–2004) in Guanacas, Colombia, Reyes looks at co-creative processes as best practices for symbolic reparations. The success of artistic interventions and architectural structures as means of reparations depends on their form and the form of the process as well as the need for infrastructure that ensures continuing processes directed towards guarantees of non-repetition.