COURAGEOUS VISIONS
March 19 at 5-6:30PM
Courageous Visions celebrates the works of three sibling participatory media projects: Shooting Cameras for Peace, the AjA Project, and Little Saigon Stories. The exhibit coincides with the launch of a new book about Shooting Cameras for Peace and the twentieth birthday of the AjA Project. The threads that tie the three projects together are visual and narrative explorations of identity, community, migration, and belonging. The students' works show a courageous commitment on the part of youth to speak their truth in poignant photo-narratives of life in the multiracial neighborhood of City Heights, San Diego and to create counter-visions to dominant representations of war and its aftermath.
The event will take place in a virtual exhibition space and feature presentations by co-curators Beto Soto, Rasha Asfour, and Alex Fattal, as well as Rizzhel Javier, Managing Director of the AjA Project, and also include commentary by Karen Strassler, author of Demanding Images.
The exhibition is funded by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, an initiative of the University of California Office of the President, with support from the Changemaker Faculty Fellowship Program at the University of California, San Diego.
Photo by Cindy, 2007
SHOOTING CAMERAS FOR PEACE
Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz is a participatory photography project based in Colombia that taught photography to youth as a means of recording and reimagining their daily lives in the context of a civil war. The project was founded by AjA Board of Director Vice-Chair, Alex Fattal, as a young Fulbright scholar in Bogotá in 2001. Courageous Visions coincides with the launch of a new book about the project titled , “Shooting Cameras for Peace: Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz: Juventud, Fotografía, y el Conflicto Armado Colombiano.”
Photo by Joseph Haquang, 2018
LITTLE SAIGON STORIES
The Little Saigon Stories is a community arts program facilitated by Media Arts Center San Diego, the AjA Project, with the help of the El Cajon Boulevard Business Improvement Association and Little Saigon San Diego Foundation. As a youth educational program, the Little Saigon Mobile Museum trains Vietnamese American youth to capture the stories of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants that make up San Diego’s designated Little Saigon District on El Cajon Boulevard. Such stories provide first-hand perspective on the process of migration, resettlement, and home-making amongst old and new residents who have chosen City Heights to call home.
THE COURAGEOUS VISIONS TEAM
Alex Fattal started teaching photography to young people when he was in college and was immediately struck by the power of their images. Like his friend Shinpei Takeda, he had been heavily influenced by Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. In 2001, he graduated and began a participatory photography project with young people in Colombia, many of whom were displaced by the war. That project became a Colombian NGO, Shooting Cameras for Peace, which lasted for seven years and worked hand in hand with AjA.
He returned from his one-year Fulbright scholarship to Colombia in 2002 and helped launch the AjA Project. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Fattal is an academic and filmmaker and focuses on questions of war and mediation in Colombia. Fun fact, his last film, Limbo, was shot entirely in the back of a truck that he transformed into a giant camera obscura.
Beto Soto is an artist, youth advocate and educator. His ongoing project Undocuqueer shines a spotlight on LGBTQ Undocumented Americans living in San Diego, California. Through his portraiture, and use of lighting and props, Soto is able to create mystical landscapes that often portray his subjects as surreal. He is able to make his subjects radiate with confidence and perseverance. It is the hope of Soto to elevate the voices of this community, to advocate for himself, and others like him that strive to be visible, treated with equality and respect. Undocuqueer has been exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and Soto’s works have also been seen locally at Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego History Center and along the San Ysidro border at The Front Gallery.
Rasha Asfour was born and raised in Palestine. After she received her BFA of photography from Bezalel Academy of Arts and design in Jerusalem, she moved to San Diego to pursue her passion in art and photography.
She believes photography became very powerful nowadays, and can be used to discuss social and psychological issues to make a change.
Through her photography, she aims to observe, to discover what’s hidden, to learn, to feel, to touch people’s hearts and to tell unique meaningful stories.
Her first documentary was about Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes in 1948 “Nakba”.
She has been documenting her weight journey for few years now, that she built an archive out of her food and self-portraits, sharing her experience to inspire women to have a healthy relationship with the food they eat and the body they have.
The exhibition is funded by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, an initiative of the University of California Office of the President, with support from the Changemaker Faculty Fellowship Program at the University of California, San Diego. For more information visit: www.criticalrefugeestudies.com
