***  Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive  ***
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   [Date]: Mon, 04 Oct 1999 12:41:52 PDT
   [From]: "Raul Ferrera-Balanquet" <ferrera98@hotmail.com>
     [To]: forum1@hkw.kbx.de
[Subject]: Territories

Amigos:

I have been amazed by the velocity in which comments, ideas and actions have 
been taken place in the forum since we started talking about the web after 
Gerhard Haupt's posting.

The web link page is a great. Some of us commented about the maintenance of 
the page. That is very important and we need to find a solution to it. I 
visited the link page of the forum a few days ago and some of the links were 
outdate or the dates for the grants and exhibitions calls were a few months 
old (Gerhad this is constructive criticism, man.) I am worry that the web 
page link will have the same end.

Still, I do know see specific way of creating a marketing strategy. Some 
people has suggested the search engines, but we all know that the web space 
goes beyond the net into other systems and institutions. If our web link 
page is going to be a center of information we need to figure out how 
schools, community centers, art organizations and individuals who are no 
connected to the web could find out about the info we are trying to provide.

Finally, I like to put on the forum a question on TERRITORIES. A few days 
ago we were advised to focus in Africa, Latin American and Asia. I wonder is 
those spaces are actually the geo-political territories or the diasporic 
territories.

The fact is that due to the constant migrations produced by the colonial 
system there a lot of "third world territories" in the "first world."

I like to call attention to this issue because eurocentric cultural notions 
still hooked to those spaces as "authentic third world spaces," to continue 
marginalizing Latinos, Asians and Africans who live outside those 
geo-political territories.
In my case I have been outcast several time from the discussions of Cuban 
art, especially in Europe and recently in North America because I live 
outside Cuba. Nevertheless, my work is produced around my identity as a 
Latino and a Cuban.

I hope that we can tackle this issues because the true is that today there 
are a lot of Latinos living in poverty in the United States, Asians who are 
brought to North America to work under terrible condition, Arabs who work as 
migrant workers on the farms of South Texas, Hindus and African Caribe–os 
surviving in London and these people do not have access to the internet.

Raul Ferrera-Balanquet, MFA
Interdisciplinary Artist and Scholar
ferrera98@hotmail.com
http://www.artswire.org/krosrods/curriculum/index.html