Featuring a post-screening panel discussion panel discussing indigenous rights in the Brazil US and will follow the film and includes Wendy Wolford (Global Development), Renata Marques Leitao (College of Human Ecology), and Eric T. Cheyfitz (American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program).

Check out the trailer below.

Pizza will be served. Showing will begin right away.

Co-sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIIS) along with collaboration by Cornell Cinema and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

The feature documentary debut of director Alex Pritz (“My Dear Kyrgyzstan”), THE TERRITORY follows the vital, inspiring fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people of Brazil to defend their land from non-Indigenous farmers intent on colonizing their protected territory in the Amazon rainforest. Co-produced by the Uru-eu-wau-wau community, the film draws on intimate access to both the Indigenous perspective and the farmers who want their land to chronicle a conflict that has profound implications for the survival of a people and the planet.

Partially shot by the Uru-eu-wau-wau people and filmed over the course of several years, THE TERRITORY offers an authentic portrait of an Indigenous community’s daily life and struggles. With its breathtaking cinematography showcasing the dramatic landscape and richly textured sound design, the film brings audiences deep into the precious ecosystem they are fighting to protect.

Since the Uru-eu-wau-wau were first contacted by the Brazilian government in 1981, their territory has become an island of green rainforest surrounded by denuded farms and ranches — the results of four decades of unchecked deforestation. The community has faced environmentally destructive and often violent incursions into their sovereign territory by nonnatives seeking to exploit the land. Illegal logging and land clearing incursions have become more frequent and more brazen over the years.

Inside Uru-eu-wau-wau territory, there are fewer than 200 people, including elders and children, to defend nearly 7,000 square miles of rainforest. On the edges of the protected lands, a network of farmers organizes to stake their claims through official channels, while individual land-grabbers begin clear-cutting swaths of rainforest for themselves. With the community’s survival at stake, Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau and Neidinha Bandeira — a young Indigenous leader and his female mentor — must find new ways to protect the rainforest from encroaching invaders. But rather than rely on others to tell their story, the Uru-eu-wau-wau take control of the narrative and create their own news media team to bring the world the truth.

More on the film at:

https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-territory

The Territory Trailer (2022)

Co-sponsored by: History of Art Department

With its striking stonework, dramatically sited buildings, and impressive terraces cascading down steep mountainsides, Inca architecture has fascinated visitors to the Andes for centuries. Yet, this lithic architecture was only one part of the complex built environment of the Inca. In this talk, Nair explores how issues of permanence and ephemerality were crucial to Inca building practices and reveal the critical role gender played in creating and giving meaning to place.

Stella Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes. Nair’s book, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero (University of Texas Press, 2015), examines the sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture to impose their authority. She has also published (with Jean-Pierre Protzen), The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2013), which explores one of the world’s most artful and sophisticated carving traditions.

Nair has received numerous research grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Association, the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. More recently, Nair was awarded a Rome Prize by the American Academy of Rome and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Currently, Nair directs the Andean Laboratory and the Architecture laboratory at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

In this talk, conceptual artist Violette Bule in conversation with Irina R. Troconis (Department of Romance Studies) will discuss a series of Bule’s works that engage with the political, social, and cultural dimensions of migration, both in the context of Venezuela’s current migration crisis and in the broader context of Latin American migration. Reflecting on issues such as identity anxiety, jurisdiction, territoriality, nationality, identification, bureaucratic performance, concentric borders, bi-dimensionality, and transitoriality, the talk will analyze the intersections of identity and territory that materialize as shared experiences of living and belonging through art practices.

Violette Bule is a Venezuelan-Lebanese conceptual artist and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. Her work engages with a wide variety of topics—migration, identity, memory, violence, community engagement, digital technologies, the politics of space, and the social and political reality of contemporary Venezuela—and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was selected for the 11 Installations Artist Project founded by MOCA, Art League, and HAA, Houston, Texas. She was also the recipient of a SOMA SUMMER - MEXICO CITY grant awarded by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and of the first artist residency awarded by Cornell’s Romance Studies Department.

Co-Sponsor: Romance Studies Department

This interactive talk will serve as an introduction to the activist forms that make up the arsenal of the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO): a collection of games, techniques, and exercises using theatre as a vehicle for personal, political, and social change. Originally developed in Brazil by theatre innovator Augusto Boal, TO was inspired in part by the educational theories of Paulo Freire, and employed with peasants and workers throughout Latin America. Today, the techniques are used internationally and have been adapted by countless companies and practitioners. Join us to learn about TO’s foundational theories, its growth in Latin America and its practice in the United States, along with some of TO’s most well-known exercises.

In celebration of Halloween: Coffee, Cider, and Donuts served.

Alexander Santiago-Jirau (he/him/his) is Director of Education at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). In this role, he oversees all of NYTW’s education and engagement initiatives, including the Mind the Gap (MTG) intergenerational theatre program, student matinees, in-school teaching artist residencies, after-school programs, master classes, administrative fellowships, and community-based programs. A Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner who studied and worked with Augusto Boal, Alex has facilitated many workshops throughout his career, particularly with youth, educators and immigrant communities. He is Past-President of the Board of Directors of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc., a national organization devoted to the work of liberatory educators, activists, artists, and community organizers, and a current board member for the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, a service organization for arts education practitioners.

Alex has presented his work at numerous conferences and his writing has appeared in The Indypendent, TYA Today, The Cross Border Project Blog (Spain), “Come Closer”: Critical Perspectives on Theatre of the Oppressed, The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed, and Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism. He has taught Latin American and Latinx Theatre at Drew University and currently teaches TO for the Department of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Educational Theatre program at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He holds a BS in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University and an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU Steinhardt.

Change in Time to 4:30pm and room to 312 Uris Hall.

This talk discusses identity formation in the Andean world through a study of the Quechua suffix -ntin/ -nintin. It also raises the suffix’s broader philosophical and political ramifications for questions of unity, collectivity, and the relationship between part and whole.

Vanessa Gubbins is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell.

This event is co-sponsored with LACS by the Cornell University and Ithaca College Jewish Studies.

Marjorie Agosin will speak about the complexities of writing about her own family. Mirroring the history of displacement of Jews across the world and especially in Latin America, she will highlight coexistence with SS who found refuge in Jews south of Chile, a small and vulnerable Jewish community in the region. Marjorie will also discuss some writers in LA that have engaged in memoir writing.

Marjorie Agosin is the Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities. She is an award-winning poet, memoirist, and Human Rights activist. Her creative work is inspired by the theme of social justice as well as the pursuit of remembrance and the memorialization of traumatic historical events both in the Americas and in Europe. She has written about the Holocaust through the portrayal of Anne Frank as well as the history of Bosnian women during the siege of Sarajevo. Marjorie is also a literary scholar whose work has focused on major writers such as Pablo Neruda, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Gabriela Mistral. She has done extensive research and written about the role of women in Latin America during authoritarian regimes in the seventies and eighties. One of her works, the Arpilleras of Chile, has been a pioneer work on this subject. In her career, Marjorie has written essays, autobiographical memoirs, and a young adult novel with a unified theme of the pursuit of social justice and human rights.

Marjorie is a recipient of the Pura Belpre award, the Gabriela Mistral award for life achievement issued by the Chilean government, and the United Nations Leadership award.

Zoom link: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DygtSQ8YSNKfE1Hwa_FvDQ

In 2008, the people of Ecuador approved a new constitution that establishes that nature has rights. The rights of nature (RoN) are the product of a biocentric conception defending nature's intrinsic value. The RoN differs from the environmental law because it uses a different approach to the tolerable limits of the impact of human activity. While environmental law is the compromise between business and conservation, RoN creates scientific redlines based on the capability of the ecosystems to self-regenerate. If there is a species extinction risk or permanent damage to the ecosystem cycle, the risky activity should be forbidden.

How are RoN working after ten years? Do legal institutions play the expected role in protecting nature? Does an individual member of a species have rights? Or is the whole specie the right holder? Is it the entire ecosystem? Or is the earth entitled to the rights? The Constitutional Court of Ecuador has been discussing these questions in its jurisprudence for the last three years. We will analyze those decisions that recognize the personhood of rivers and forests and their implications on the broader discussion about sustainability, climate change, and development. Finally, we will discuss the enforceability and impact of the aforementioned jurisprudence in Ecuador.

David Cordero-Heredia is an Associate Professor of Law at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE). He has been visiting professor at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB), Universidad de las Americas (UDLA) and Universidad del Azuay (UDA).

David has represented indigenous peoples and individuals against Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court HR). The cases include a vast number of topics, including forced disappearances, torture, illegal detentions, massacres, migrants' rights, indigenous peoples' rights, access to free health services, force eviction, mass incarceration, oil & mining industries, fair trial, police brutality, and rights of nature.

Professor Cordero has an LL.B. from PUCE, master's degrees from UASB and Universidad de Alcala, and an LL.M. and a JSD from Cornell University. He is a visiting scholar in Cornell's Latin American and Caribbean Studies program (LACS).

How can we think about the relationship between cinema and the environment beyond the realm of representation? Building off the "material turn" in media studies, which attends to the substances that compose media, in this talk I explore Mexican cinema through a material lens. As an industry that has long been funded by state oil revenue, what would it mean to decarbonize Mexican cinema? To get at this question, I spotlight recent efforts to disentangle cinema and oil by filmmakers and film distributors.

Carolyn Fornoff is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Romance Studies department. She has coedited two books in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021).

Cosponsor: Romance Studies Department

Zoom Link Registration:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ydjJblhpSm6vEy09qxoN4A