Conversations on the Border

In conjunction with Pidgin Palace Arts’ current exhibition, COMPLEX artist David Taylor
will be in conversation with activists, poets, scholars and writers. This is a free event.

Sunday, December 1 st , 2:00pm

Artist David Taylor will be in conversation with Susan Briante, Javier Duran, and Dora
Rodriguez.

Susan Briante is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. She is the
author of Defacing the Monument, her most recent publication in which Briante began
taking graduate students to the US-Mexico border in 2016 to research and write about
migration issues. What began as essays documenting the crisis turned into a reflection
on documentary poetics: the act of witnessing and writing about the suffering of others.
Defacing the Monument shows what happens to those who do not hold the “correct”
documents and highlights how the archive bears the marks of power. Part documentary,
part lyric essay, part primer,Defacing the Monument is an exploration of the many ways

we might tell stories and a guidebook for anyone who believes in what documentary
poetics, and all art, can and should do in this moment of crisis.

Javier Duran (PhD) is Professor of Latin-American and Border Studies at the Center for
Latin American Studies and the founding director of the Confluencenter for Creative
Inquiry at the University of Arizona. He is a specialist in cultural and interdisciplinary
studies along the U.S.-Mexico border and a native of the Arizona-Sonora desert region.
Dr. Duran is currently working on projects dealing with US-Mexico interdisciplinary
transborder collaborations, border culture, necro-politics, human security, migrancy,
checkpoints, cultural place-making and Indigenous Humanities.

Dora Rodriguez: In a life-saving attempt to flee El Salvador’s civil war in 1980, Dora
Rodriguez was one of thirteen survivors found near death while crossing the border
through the Sonoran Desert. By bravely publicizing her story of migration and through
her unwavering support for migrants' rights, Dora’s image has been propelled to the
forefront of the sanctuary movement in Tucson, AZ. Dora’s focus is to educate
communities about the harsh realities migrants face in the desert and to inspire
transformative changes to the immigration injustices plaguing our border towns. She
serves as the Director of Salvavision, a nonprofit offering aid and support to migrant and
deportees.

Thursday, December 12, 7:00pm

Artist David Taylor will be in conversation with Beth Weinstein and Kenny Wong.

Beth Weinstein is an architect and associate professor at the University of Arizona and
Co-founder of ReSI (Remembering Spaces of Internment). Her research investigates
(dis)appearances and (in)visibilities related to climate catastrophe, states of exception,
labor, and collaboration. She continues to ask what forms of architecture, and
associated invisibilites, are produced through executive order and under states of
exception. Working with archival documents, situated practices and architectural modes
of representation, she constructs and choreographs performance-installations that
render “sensible” razed sites and spaces of internment in the Southwest US and
France.

Kenny Wong is a lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning. He
carries experience in the diverse facets of housing design and policy, with a
concentration on affordable housing and community development. Driven by
commitments to spatial and social justice, he has practiced as a housing advocate,

multifamily designer, nonprofit developer, financial consultant, policy analyst and
academic researcher between Southern California and the Oakland-East Bay Area. He
was most recently the assistant director of design research at cityLAB, where his
research explored connecting schools with housing development in the School Lands
for Housing project and envisioned future scenarios of housing for the California 100.
Creative design research and collaborative multidisciplinary approaches are crucial to
his investigative and problem-solving methods as a teaching collaborator and former
student in the Urban Humanities Initiative.