Please register using this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0ZN8L3EiRY6QvHm7nMnIrgIf you have added this session to you schedule, you will be approved to enter the session. We recommend registering at least 5 minutes before the start of the session.Promoting Women's Health (Wu, Xu) - "For Tashi" is the outcome of a media arts collaboration between research universities to promote women's health awareness. Combing computer program generated visuals, soundscape, voice, and the sound of ancient Chinese instrument Konghou, this project depicts the physical and emotional journey that a woman goes through when losing her baby prematurely, aiming to share this deeply personal, largely unspoken, and often overlooked experience with the public, in the hope to transfer the previously private excursion to a communal experience.
Black Power Station (Crisman) - This presentation will examine lessons learned from the Black Power Station project—a collaboration with the Xhosa community to design a sustainable public performance space and arts programming in an abandoned power station in Makhanda, South Africa. Indigenous artists have informally occupied this ruined landscape of giant brick industrial buildings as an arts space for black youth from the townships. Our creative research seeks to help the community overcome the history of apartheid and its legacies—land colonization, radical economic and social inequality, high unemployment and poverty, violence, political alienation, and environmental degradation. Xhosa hip-hop musician and activist Xolile Madinda and University of Virginia faculty and students in Architecture, Ethnomusicology, and Global Development Studies are co-producing music, poetry, art, and architecture through physical exchanges and virtual connections, while stimulating arts education and arts-based community development at the Black Power Station. The collaborative design process is highly iterative and emergent, treats all participants as socially and culturally situated, and troubles conventional ideas of expertise and divisions of labor. We are generating a sustainable creative process shaped by significant social and cultural difference—while designing arts programming and indigenous cultural space to promote equity, reduce resource use and foster community thriving.
