Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

At first the roundtable was dedicated to the presentation of the
participants, each one trying to synthetize his cultural background and
current preoccupations. Especially complex and significant were the
experiences and points of view developed by Rasheed Araeen (Pakistani
artist living and working in London), Homi Bhabha (Indo-British scholar
living and teaching in Great Britain), Bernice MUrphy (Australian curator
working for a long time with Aboriginal people and so-called cultural
minorities), and Piedad de Ballesteros (Colombian curator insisting on the
emergency of restoring a positive image of Colombian culture now
tragically reduced to political violence, M:=dellin cartel, and drug war) •
Impatient, as many of us, with the multiplication of "international
exhibitions" and the globalizing vision they imply, de Ballesteros
proposed a methodological reflection and a new attention on unexpected
cultural issues and contexts created by diasporic conditions as well as by
nee-nationalistic ones. As she pointed out:
"The binary notions of
cultural process, expressed and recycled continually in the regular
oppositions of such tenns as periphery/center, region/capital,
village/metropolis, east/west, rural/urban, colony/imperial power, need a
radical restructuring -- in fact, to be exploded open -- to begin to
accomodate the more complex conditions of a vast variety of circumstances
in contemporary cultural experiences."
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