I found Victoria Restler’s work incredibly helpful – I loved how she made connections between care, space and tacticile interaction. There’s something very deep there about how we bond with each other- we bond with each other in spaces and in our bodies. In my life experiences, this connection came to the surface in a powerful way through the ways in which physical acts of care were so connected to me with emotional processing of what was happening. There’s a Jewish saying that being a caregiver is the greatest mitzvah (honor) you can give- I think the mitzvah of being a caregiver is so bound up in the way that in each daily act lies the essence of the experience. What I mean is that Victoria’s images capture those daily moments of care in how they influence the space. That’s so powerful because if you zoomed in on one of those care moments in that, you could understand so much of what it means to be a teacher. For my own experience, I felt in general our culture really abstracts death and makes it something we should fear. But if you are caring for a loved one who is dying, you understand death in a different way. It’s not abstract, it’s not scary in the same way. If you don’t die suddenly, death is a set of steps- steps that exist in your body but also exist in the interaction between your body and the person’s body caring for you. What Victoria helped me think about further is how these tacticle moments show themselves in what a space is like. She helped me think about rubbings as a tool for capturing the physical elements in a space that reflect the physical movement of bodies which reflects the way people are being and acting towards one another out of which identity (ie what it means to be a teacher or a student or a caregiver) grows.

The work that Victoria Restler has created, through her websites “Those who can” and “Re-visualizing care: the digital assemblage” seek to explore and showcase teacher stories, evoke their “care spaces” in a non-conventional manner, and to challenge the perception of what it means to in/visibly educate in individual and unique places.

Through her rubbing of the classroom space, Restler reimagines the classroom space in an abstract but strikingly literal way. In her field notes Restler writes, “I am making these drawings to show that schools and classrooms are real places with real people in a human scale as opposed number or letter scores, which are abstract, sanitized, and identical, one to the next” (rubbing every object and surface in betty’s math classroom, 2017). The rubbings are tactile, varied, confusing, yet organized. They are one piece of evidence of the complicated and layered life of a classroom/school environment. Bearing witness(!) as she writes.

There is a NEED for a multimodality approach to convey the thorniness of the school environment and all that goes with it. Restler speaks of these rubbings as adding shade, depth, and texture to teacher stories and lived experiences in the classroom (witnessing/ evidence, 2017). They are nuancing the story to challenge the narrative gleaned directly from a sanitized evaluation dispossessed from the subtleties of teaching. I am thinking of Pink and her paper on Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing and how it allowed me to open my mind to the limits of traditional senses (Pink, 2011). Restler’s work affords opportunity to become attuned to the living/breathing aspect of a situation in ways that text does not. Restler views her field notes, interviews, and the rubbings as being “textured and bumpy, and in particular and evocative ways, they shape the stakes of my multimodal data” (witnessing/ evidence, 2017). This is an amazing interpretation of her many modes of collecting and conveying information. The rubbings also speak to the impossibility of representation and subjectivity, the “irreducibility of teaching” as she puts is, but adds necessary context and nuance in a meaningful way. Most poignantly, in my opinion, is Restler’s ability to reveal that which was obscured, overlooked, and invisible, in service to the wholly incomplete narrative of what a classroom is and what teachers are.

I have recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book (2005) Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which Gladwell argues that rapid cognition takes place in a matter of seconds, in a blink of an eye, where we draw conclusion without awareness, unconsciously. Gladwell (2005) states that we live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it, however, learning to understand what happens in those few seconds is very important, according to Gladwell. He calls it “adaptive unconscious,” which is a mental process that works rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. Gladwell (2005) considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls, such as stereotypes. Among many examples he uses in the book to explore the phenomena of making such snap judgments, he looks at the idea of memory and verbal representation of memories, which was very interesting to me. For example, he states that recognizing someone’s face is a classic example of unconscious cognition. We don’t have to think about it. Faces just pop into our minds. But, he proposes that, if we were asked to take a pen and paper and write down in as much detail as we can what a person looks like (for example a person who sat next to us on the train this morning), describing their face, describing the color of their hair, what were they wearing, etc., we will do a lot worse at picking that face out of a lineup. This is, Gladwell argues (2005), because the act of describing a face has the effect of impairing your otherwise effortless ability to subsequently recognize that face. This is what her writes:

“The psychologist Jonathan W. Schooler, who pioneered research on this effect, calls it verbal overshadowing. Your brain has a part (the left hemisphere) that thinks in words, and a part (the right hemisphere) that thinks in pictures, and what happened when you described the face in words was that your actual visual memory was displaced… Your thinking was bumped from the right to the left hemisphere” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 55).

I suppose that this is what I was trying to say when I told you in class that our memories are destroyed when we use words to describe them. I have moved to a much happier place thinking about memories since then, as I now look more at transformation of memories and creation of new memories, new images in our minds. However, I think, it applies to many of us as we try to get the pictures out of minds and create art, often supplemented with some verbal representation. In turn, we try to appeal, I think, to the right hemisphere of those who are looking at our art, who will interpret our work by experiencing the art, the images, and only then trying to verbalize what they see by bumping the impressions about art to the left hemisphere. For example, in our last class, I was very moved by Amanda’s presentation of her work in progress. I feel that the etchings of her house resonated in my right hemisphere, which was followed by strong emotional reaction. I was in tears even when I was trying to tell my husband about it later that evening. I couldn’t quiet explain it in words though.

Now, I don’t think that there is a clear dichotomy between words and pictures, the same way that there is no clear separation between the two hemispheres in our brain, information is constantly exchanged, but it is still interesting to contemplate these ideas.

Update:

I have printed the images on fabric. Thank you, Lauren, for your wonderful suggestion. I have also recorded another conversation between my children about them images. They felt obligated to participate in my project, so I don’t know how useful it is. I also asked them to paint a picture. I left the video running as my daughter was painting and left the room (had to transfer laundry to the drier). The conversation that took place between them as I left the room was a lot more interesting than the one forced by me. Time will tell what this sums up to.

Oh, and I took one picture of them walking. 🙂

We were walking my son to the train, as he went back to college on Sunday.

Kahlo’s Demons Reinterpreted

In preparing for my presentation this coming week, I have questioned what made me use Frida Kahlo’s Two Fridas (1939) as my inspiration. When I saw this work of art for the first time, I deeply related to what I perceived as an identity struggle at the time, the identity struggle that Latin Americans and Latin America as a whole have been burdened with for centuries. Maybe Kahlo’s artwork was meant to exorcise the demons of physical and emotional pain inflicted on her by her experiences and by Diego Rivera, her former husband at the time. However, the Two Fridas for me is about how an entire culture keeps trudging along trying to find its own identity. I may have derived a meaning from this artwork that was not intended but I guess this is how art works. Patricia Levy (2017) states that to art “[o]ur response may be visceral, emotional, and psychological, before it is intellectual.”

I had lived in Colombia my entire childhood and part of my adolescence, and while living there, I never questioned the inclusiveness of the Latin American culture. If you had asked me about racism, I would have told you that we, Latin Americans do not suffer from this ailment. It was only when I went back for a visit about five years ago when I realized how wrong I was and that this ailment was of the worst kind. Its main symptom was self-hatred. It wasn’t been easy to delve into Latin American commercials, mainly Colombian, and find beauty products that people buy in large quantities in their quest to become more attractive (read more European looking). The main beauty products are those that promise straight hair and lighter skin. I also noticed that most of the people on Colombian television do not truly represent the typical Colombian. Most of the time they have lighter skin and are quite young, but for a few exceptions in which they present the stereotypical Afro-Colombian women dressed as maids and talking in a certain uneducated manner. I was surprised to find that a cousin of mine, who has a typical indigenous nose, had plastic surgery to look more attractive (meaning more European), and that another cousin who has beautiful dark skin like my mom’s burned her face while trying to lighten it with a cream that has hydroquinone, a depigmenting agent. Latin American politics reflect this self-hatred as well. Time and time again many Latin Americans vote against their self-interests. I have had many conversations with Colombian compatriots who support policies that belittle people of color as well as their culture. In the words of Freire (2000), “for them, to be [human] is to be oppressors.”

My project may not accomplish in others that awakening and recognition of self-hatred that Kahlo’s Two Fridas had for me. However, exorcising my demons, as Kahlo did through her art, may be good enough for now.