PBM | Proyecto Boston-Medellín

About PBM

PBM is a multi-media transnational exhibition produced and hosted by students, faculty and staff at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín and Emerson College in Boston. We seek--through translingual art and research writing--to complicate the rhetorical landscape of Medellín in the global imaginary. Our exhibitions feature photographs, video, written word and interactive multi-media installations. More than 150 Emerson students in Dr. Tamera Marko's First Year Research Writing classes at Emerson College have collaborated with 11 young emerging Colombian artists in the Universidad Nacional's departments of art and architecture to host four exhibits in three cities in the Americas. The youth communicate most of the year via Facebook and video-conference to bring the art and the artists to their debut in Boston and then back to Medellín again.

This is a collaboration between the First Year Writing Program and the Office of Service Learning and Community Action at Emerson College, DukeEngage Colombia at Duke University, the Departamento de Facultad de Arquitectura, Arte y Construcción and Departamento de Extension y Investigación and its Escuela del Hábitat-CEHAP at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, MIT, el AULA in Medellín, the Alcaldía de Medellín, the Secretaria de Bienestar Social, Programa Medellín Solidaria, Agencia de Cooperación e Inversión de Medellín y el Área Metropolitana.

About the Artists

Why are we doing this?

Hollywood movies, the media and the majority of academic publications tend to focus on Medellin and Colombia in terms of violence, narco- traffic, and poverty. I am an historian of youth movements in Latin America. I am director and co-founder of a bi-national historical memory project in Medellín. I have been teaching writing and community-based research projects for more than 15 years. I am the life partner and mother of a family who crosses borders with two different passports. My mission is to collaboratively channel the vast resources of U.S. and Colombian universities, art institutions, and community groups to empower bi-national human rights projects. These projects are about listening and seeing— exchanges that we hope lead to a deeper consciousness about the ways our actions affect each other, about the ways we move through the world.

2011

2010

For more than 4 decades, the most well known Boston-Medellín connection has been cocaine. We seek to create a more complicated, more accurate connection and image of Medellín: art and education as peace process. The main theme of the exhibit is “la vida cotidiana como fuerza de paz / everyday life as peace force.” We want youth to show their city in their own words and images. We do not seek to hide violence. Rather we believe that to show any city only through the lense of violence makes invisible to the world the efforts of our communities and families at everyday life as peace force. This invisibility is also a violence. It reduces Colombia and Colombians to nothing more than violence, poverty, and drugs. It makes it easy for us to fear this country, this city, “them.” Fear makes it easy for us to choose not to know. We, as citizens of our city, our country, our world, believe that we need more than just fear of each other; we need to see ways we are connected to each other. This is why we want to show you that in Medellín, violence is not the whole story. Bienvenido a Medellín.