papermaking workshops
Making paper by hand, sheet by sheet, is an ancient practice. Papermakers are part of a long and rich lineage of crafts people that began hundreds of years ago, long before American's began mining tree's for industrial machine made paper in the 1870's. The photo's here are from special workshop for Shelley McConnell's Government class, Truth, Torture, and Memory, at St. Lawrence University. The pulps I made for this project were a blend of corn, blue jean, abaca (banana), cotton, and shredded CIA documents.
Making paper can be for peace, for education, for awareness, and for healing oneself, a community, or a whole world. (Check out http://peacepaperproject.org to learn more!)
"My course Torture, Truth and Memory, on state terror and transitional justice (mostly in Latin America) looks at public art and performances as one means of constructing social memory as victims, abusers, and so-called bystanders try to come to terms with the “dirty wars” of the 1970s ad 1980s. I use Chile, Argentina and Guatemala as cases. Students are assigned in the week before Thanksgiving break to carry out a public memorial project on the Guatemala case, where genocide occurred against the Maya indians. The idea is to educate the campus about state terror in Guatemala, but also to have rites that will help them process the emotional burden that comes with reading first person accounts of torture, etc.
I have about 24 students who will divide into 6 groups to carry our this outreach on campus and I would like some or all of them to do art projects. This term, in addition to studying art and memorials we are reading a book called Paper Cadavers about the recovery of archives in Guatemala that are now being used to prosecute human rights abusers. Students also will be reading from the declassified CIA and US State Department and Pentagon documents. I therefore would like paper to be at the center of the student memorializing/outreach project.
Having seen the paper making for peace today, I am inspired and would like to have students do that as part of their memorial/outreach project. I could imagine them shredding CIA documents, mixing in corn husks (maize is symbolic of life in Guatemala), blue jean, banana, and adding in things meaningful to them as memory triggers to make paper. They could engage other students in shredding, and have the students read some of the US documents in the process so it is clear that the US government knew of the repression." -Shelley McConnell, Government professor, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York.
Making paper can be for peace, for education, for awareness, and for healing oneself, a community, or a whole world. (Check out http://peacepaperproject.org to learn more!)
"My course Torture, Truth and Memory, on state terror and transitional justice (mostly in Latin America) looks at public art and performances as one means of constructing social memory as victims, abusers, and so-called bystanders try to come to terms with the “dirty wars” of the 1970s ad 1980s. I use Chile, Argentina and Guatemala as cases. Students are assigned in the week before Thanksgiving break to carry out a public memorial project on the Guatemala case, where genocide occurred against the Maya indians. The idea is to educate the campus about state terror in Guatemala, but also to have rites that will help them process the emotional burden that comes with reading first person accounts of torture, etc.
I have about 24 students who will divide into 6 groups to carry our this outreach on campus and I would like some or all of them to do art projects. This term, in addition to studying art and memorials we are reading a book called Paper Cadavers about the recovery of archives in Guatemala that are now being used to prosecute human rights abusers. Students also will be reading from the declassified CIA and US State Department and Pentagon documents. I therefore would like paper to be at the center of the student memorializing/outreach project.
Having seen the paper making for peace today, I am inspired and would like to have students do that as part of their memorial/outreach project. I could imagine them shredding CIA documents, mixing in corn husks (maize is symbolic of life in Guatemala), blue jean, banana, and adding in things meaningful to them as memory triggers to make paper. They could engage other students in shredding, and have the students read some of the US documents in the process so it is clear that the US government knew of the repression." -Shelley McConnell, Government professor, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York.