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El Otro Lado: The Other Side|
You have to have yourself before you can give yourself away. Otherwise you will always be bereft of having yourself, and the loss of your unexpressed wholeness to you and your community is immeasurable.” The reason I work as an artist in community is that I learn too — it’s an absolute sharing of experience.
If you have just one person a teacher or friend, whoever who at least stands beside you, someone who just knows, then whatever the burden is, it is shared…. And that is what people do for one another when a story is accepted, received, witnessed. That’s a major function of what we can do for one another. |
El Otro Lado — a community arts engagement project using the creative process to address issues of migration, human rights, boundaries and sense of place was developed and created in Santa Fe by artist Chrissie Orr.
Over the course of a year and a half, starting in 2008, an intensive series of workshops took place with youth at Tierra Encantado Charter School, as well as the Santa Fe Art Institute during their summer intensive for youth. Workshops for the Women and Childrens’ group were held at Adelante, the South Side Library and the Academy for the Love of Learning, as well as at individuals’ private homes. The workshops were designed for families, women, children and individual community members.
Designed to provide a safe space for all to be able to share and express delicate stories and topics in relation to migration, journey and human rights — the workshops were tailored to each site and its participants. Evolving over time and allowing time to build trust needed, the workshops ran once a week at each site for up to six weeks. Community-based organizations, art institutions, educational entities and positive community mentors supported the design of the workshops.
For El Otro Lado participants — the uncovering of their memories, and stories gave way to an experience of identity seen through the distinctiveness of their art, handwriting, and their literal voices in the oral storytelling. Desenvolver —translated from Spanish as the verb “to unwrap” was how several participants described the gradual deepening of their experience.
The participants of El Otro Lado found that cultural boundaries and differences disappear when these stories are told and heard. They learned that they shared much in common with one another — more than they realized or expected. As artist/facilitator Chrissie Orr shares — it is the mutuality of the self-discovery that also fuels her involvement.
For a participant from the Women and Children’s Group, the process of her journaling became such an important means of self-expression that she has continued on her own, filling three more journals since the group ended. Another adult found that the project gave them the courage to connect more easily with others:
“This project helped me a lot because I could not communicate to others, I always went around with a fear that I would be rejected but now do I not. Now I can talk without that fear."
An ability to communicate more freely was also described by several of the youth:
“This was my first experience of being able to express what I had been through coming from another country.”
And “I am not embarrassed any more to express my feelings and to talk out.”
A ten year old girl adopted from China, laughs and says she feels she should wear a “made in China sticker”, while a 14 year old girl of Mexican descent speaks to the uncertainties that children of undocumented families face living in the shadows
“Because you wake up and every morning that that child’s parents go out to work and try their hardest for a better life — that child knows that at any unexpected moment their parents could be deported. I do not think it is right that any child should live with such a great fear of a separation like that.”
Public Art Makes the Invisible Visible to the Community
Presented as a public art installation, the participants’ compositions were displayed in locations throughout Santa Fe. The panels offered the community at large a rare insight into the lives and stories of people who are often invisible or unseen. Through the act of bearing witness to each other's stories, we ourselves, as well as our larger community find understanding and relationship. Instead of holding “the other side” at bay – we are immediately touched and transformed by the other – and move from our separateness to the experience of connection.
The Public Art Installation will find its permanent home on the grounds of the Academy’s new LEED Gold Certified Facility, opening in Seton Village later this year.
Imagine traveling from Guatemala to join your husband in America — traveling with your two young daughters you first cross the border into Mexico, then find out that in order to cross the border into the US, you must entrust your daughters into someone else’s care, someone you have never met before, while you cross separately walking through the desert in the dark. Click here to hear this story.
Imagine coming to a new country at the age of three, and watching your parent’s arranged marriage disintegrate, causing you to loose contact with your father, and the cultures and traditions he kept – and that held you. Click here to hear this story.
Imagine calling Santa Fe home, and as an adult going back to live in Afghanistan — a country you left as a three-year old, crossing over on the Pakistani boarder, your mother disguised as an Indian dancer, and you on her back. Click here to hear this story.
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