In Braided Memories: An Exhibition of Poetry, Image, and Sound, Chilean Jewish poet and author, Marjorie Agosín, and Chilean Jewish photographer, Samuel Shats bear witness as artists to the striking realities of refugees both past and present, real and imagined. They capture a universal truth of human struggles to find a home in arresting depictions of just a few who have faced such challenges. Agosín’s poems hover between Austria and Chile, shifting from the past of the Holocaust to the present in dizzying transitions forming narrative braids. Shats’s photography forms a dialogue with these migratory poems and expands the aesthetic experience of the audience, providing both relevant visual information and more subtle, complementary metaphors to Agosín’s poetic work. This event will feature Agosín and Shats in dialogue about the creation of the exhibit, followed by a showing of a brief film, and then a conversation between them and the audience.
This event will invite the audience to explore the relevance of artistic representations during times of turmoil and historical trauma, and to rethink the ways in which they have weaved their own memories of departures and arrivals. This program is co-sponsored by the CWRU Departments of Modern Languages & Literatures and Religious Studies, Office of Student Affairs, International Studies Program, Judaic Studies Program, Max Kade Institute, Siegal Lifelong Learning Program, Alianza Latina, and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.