Our Week with Claudia Bernardi

Our weeklong journey with Claudia Bernardi opened on Thursday, April 7, at McCune Conference Room with a warm welcome from countless students, faculty, and community members. We were all captivated by Bernardi’s meticulously planned presentation, as she took us on a journey from her experiences in Argentina that inspired her activism, to her work throughout Latin America, and beyond. The Zapatista worldview that asserts “otro mundo es posible,” another world is possible, rings clearly in my mind after spending a week with Claudia.

Bernardi’s art, along with the artist’s work she shared with us, teach us, with their keen sensibility for beauty, that in the face of destruction, we must create. I found various students of mine, whom I teach a discussion section with, present at the talk. Through reading their written reflections, I learned how many of them were moved by the power art making has to help us remember and transmute pain into something beautiful. For that was in the name of that first talk, The Instinct of Justice, The Practice of Beauty, where the experiencing of such extreme injustice calls one to action.

Claudia Bernardi at Las Maestras Center after Graduate Student Seminar on Monday, April 11, photo by: Maya Gomez

Bernardi shares, humbly, that she shys away from the word “healing.” She intentionally does not tease the idea of whether her work is healing, rather she is more interested in art making as a practice of memory. During a more intimate graduate student seminar Cartography of Memory,  hosted at Las Maestras Center on Monday April 11, Bernardi asked us to consider the question, “why must we remember?” She shared with us a deep account of her own losses during the military dictatorship in Argentina, the disappearances of students, children taken from their birth mothers in captivity, countless individuals never to be seen again. She mentioned to us how her peers that went missing were students just like us, around our ages. 

In her community art practice, she has traveled throughout Latin America and beyond, working with communities who have faced similar traumas. Through collective art practice of mural making, she asks us to consider why we must remember the violence of civil wars in places like El Salvador, Colombia, and Ireland. Stories emerged from the participants, Colombian students reflecting on their relationship to ongoing civil conflict, others sharing their Mexican family’s migration stories, and another about the Iranian diaspora being children of war, unable to return home. 

I am reminded of the Xicana feminist philosophizing of Coyolxauhqui, the sacred symbology of the moon as a dismembered body, adorned with shells/bells. The dismemberment of Coyolxauhqui has been tied to a feminist critique of patriarchy and colonization, causing a metaphyiscal yet very physical dismemberment of the body. I am haunted by Bernardi’s pigmented pieces pulled from scans of human remains done by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that have taken her to places like Perquín, El Salvador and the border city of Juárez, Mexico. The personal reflection and impact of these conflicts, the exhumation of bodies, the deep scars left on communities left me full of tears and grief. Perhaps Bernardi’s call to re-member is an act of putting back the pieces, to reconfigure a new sense of wholeness after immense loss.

Celia Herrera Rodríguez introducing Claudia Bernardi at El Centro Santa Barbara on Thursday, April 14, photo by: Barbara Parmet

Reflecting on what the practice of memory means for our work at Las Maestras Center, I am reminded of our task of memory that Maestras like Cherríe Moraga and Celia Herrera Rodríguez continually urge us to do. We must not forget our own stories of resilience, of strength, of survival. Memory helps us to not only remember but to be witness to both the beauty and injustice that exists around us. We bear witness to the ongoing separation of children from their families, of the incarceration of migrant refugees in detention centers all across the U.S./Mexico border. We bear witness to projects of extraction, displacement, ongoing civil conflict throughout the “third world.”

We remember, we bear witness, we are called to action.