Canoas, cayucos y balsas

Posted on by J.Arbona

Recent award, thanks to the Center for Craft in North Carolina!

CANOAS, CAYUCOS Y BALSAS (CANOES, CAYUCOS AND RAFTS)
Diego de la Cruz Gaitan, MAOF (Materiales y Oficios, or materials and crafts)
Javier Arbona, Assistant Professor

Canoas, Cayucos y Balsas is a materials and process research project for the construction prototypes of a fleet of Caribbean nautical vessels utilizing materials form natives trees constructed with techniques from pre-Columbian times to the present. Our research intents to re-frame our current knowledge of materials and crafts in search of multi-vectorial interactions with other islanders. This research will allow MAOF to reactivate practices of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean archipelago, with the intention of returning the gaze and body to the sea and broaden the understanding of an island that has finite resources. The results and findings of the expedition will be published periodically through notebooks/publications and a website, which will function as a logbook and reference material for other artists and craftsmen.

Event | The Conversation – “Memorials and Monuments: Lessons from Charlottesville, New Orleans, and Port Chicago”

Posted on by J.Arbona

Time: 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: 24th Street Theater, Sierra 2 Center,
2791 24th Street, Sacramento, CA 95818

Join us for “The Conversation,” a new public event series hosted by the UC Davis Humanities Institute that invites professors and public intellectuals to consider current issues of the day. The Conversation will offer an open format, including short remarks by each participant as well as plenty of time for questions and discussion by the audience.

In our first installment, we reflect on recent events in Charlottesville and New Orleans, among other places, that have wrestled with how we remember and memorialize the past. Monuments and calls for their removal have become flashpoints for wider debates about our history and identity.

Panelists will include UC Davis Professors Gregory Downs (History), a leading historian of the Civil War and a leader in the effort to create the first National Park site devoted to Reconstruction and emancipation, and Javier Arbona (American Studies and Design), who is completing a project on memorial landscapes, Black Resistance, and World War II in the San Francisco Bay Area. “The Conversation” will be moderated by Professor Jaimey Fisher of German and Cinema and Digital Media, who has written about contemporary Germany’s relationship to its difficult past.

The event is free and open to the public. Please come and join the conversation!

This event is sponsored by UC Davis Humanities Institute

For more information please contact: Becky Wilson, rjwilson@ucdavis.edu

RSVP here

Explosive Cultures: Bombscapes and the Order of Law

Posted on by J.Arbona

I’m happy to mention I’ll be one of a cohort of 2018 DHI Faculty Fellows… Here’s a quick blurb of the project:

“Explosive Cultures: Bombscapes and the Order of Law”
Javier Arbona investigates the ordo: the shared spatial, imaginative, and cultural ties between the order of the explosive and the order of the law. Specifically, this project seeks to reveal the cultural landscapes—or “bombscapes”—produced by the seeming opposition, but actual co-evolution, of explosions and the legal attempts to control them.