Catherine Filloux is an internationally recognized award-winning playwright who has been writing about human rights and social justice for over 25 years. Her new one-person play “Under the Skin” is about the internationally acclaimed visual artist and human rights activist Claudia Bernardi, who is part of a generation that grew up in Argentina under a military junta, Filloux and Bernardi show clips from the virtual workshop of the play and share how they embarked on this collaboration of trust, having first met in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
They discuss aspects of the play including its historical perspectives, Bernardi’s participation with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, as well as the community art model Bernardi has shared with communities that suffered political violence in many parts of the world. The conversation is moderated by Toni Shapiro-Phim, PhD, a Brandeis University professor whose work focuses on efforts at the nexus of the arts, human rights, and social justice concerns, and who has worked with Filloux and Bernardi in theatrical, educational, and community endeavors.
Resources
The Disappeared Are Appearing: Murals that Recover Communal Memory
International Journal of Transitional Justice
Oxford University Press
Published: 26 November 2019
Claudia Bernardi: Author
Abstract
Article (free access)
Argentinian Artist Claudia Bernardi Visually Unearths Brutalities Of Past Present
By Jackie Abramian
FORBES Magazine
“La Bestia/ The Beast”
Claudia Bernardi: Author
Voices On The Move: An Anthology About And By Refugees
Edited by Domnica Radulescu and Roxana Cazan
Solis Press/ England 2020
Cartography
Claudia Bernardi: Author
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Second Chances
Claudia Bernardi: Author
WEAD, Women Eco Artists Dialog
“The Tenacity of Memory” by Claudia Bernardi
“Doubling the Voice, Expanding the Frame: Re-imagining Witnessing Against Torture”
Bringing together the voices of torture survivors from TASSC International with non-survivor academics, clinicians, and advocates
Edited by Elizabeth Swanson, Ph. D. and Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Horrors and Dreams
Claudia Bernardi: Author
Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley,
Fall 2015.
“Urdimbre de Historia”
Claudia Bernardi: Author
Aesthethika, Revista
Internacional de Estudio e Investigación Interdisciplinaria sobre Subjetividad, Política y Arte
International Journal for the Study and International Investigation of Subjectivity, Politics and Art.
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Vol 8, No 1, Septiembre 2012
ISSN 1553-5053
Version online
“An Angel Passes By: Silence and Memories at El Mozote”
Claudia Bernardi: Author
“Inhabiting Memory: Essays on Memory and Human Rights in the Americas”
Edited by Marjorie Agosin
Wing Press, San Antonio, Texas
“The Moral Imagination Embodied/ Insights from Artists Navigating Hybrid Identities In Scholarship and Practice” by Kathryn M. Lance
The International Journal of Conflict Engagement and Resolution
2016 (4) 1 55 doi: 10.5553/IJCER/221199652016004001004
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BIO: Catherine Filloux
Catherine Filloux is an award-winning playwright who has been writing plays about human rights and social justice for over twenty-five years.
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BIO: Claudia Bernardi
Claudia Bernardi is an installation artist and printmaker whose artwork is impacted by war and the post war period. Born in Argentina, Bernardi was affected by the military junta (1976-1983) that caused 30,000 “desaparecidos”. Bernardi participated with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team exhuming mass graves in investigations of human rights violations. In 2005 Bernardi created the School of Art and Open Studio of Perquin, El Salvador, a community based art project where children, youth and adults work collaboratively. Bernardi is a Professor at the California College of the Arts where she designs classes on art and human rights in Latin America. Her website is www.wallsofhope.org.
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BIO: Toni Shapiro-Phim
Toni Shapiro-Phim is Assistant Director of the Center’s Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts and Associate Professor of Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) at Brandeis University.
Dr. Shapiro-Phim is a cultural anthropologist and dance ethnologist whose research, writing, community work and teaching focus on the history and cultural contexts of the arts in discrete regions of the world, particularly in relation to violence, genocide, migration and refugees, conflict transformation and gender concerns.
She’s held teaching and research appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, Yale University and Bryn Mawr College, and worked in Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese refugee camps in Indonesia and Thailand. She’s also conducted years of ethnographic research inside Cambodia. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Cornell University.
Dr. Shapiro-Phim has dedicated her professional career to nurturing the arts as part of social justice transformations. Co-author of Dance in Cambodia and co-editor of Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, she has also contributed to Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide and The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement, and Neuroscience, among other publications.
Before coming to Brandeis, Dr. Shapiro-Phim served as Director of Programs at the Philadelphia Folklore Project, an arts and social justice organization. There she conducted ethnographic research, curated exhibitions, and produced performances, humanities forums and publications highlighting aspects of the cultural practices of Philadelphia’s diverse communities in the service of countering injustice and nurturing local knowledge and cultural equity.
