Weekender Feature | Yucuaiquin and Sudanese Art

As civil war wrenches a country apart, forced migration is often inevitable. While migration may thwart immediate danger, the enduring consequences of leaving one's homeland are extensive. This month in the Slater Concourse Gallery at Tufts, two anthropology-based exhibits aim to bridge the chasm between traditional culture and new life, invoking memory while simultaneously looking towards the future.

The two exhibits are on display until March 30, "From Yucuaiquin to Somerville: El Baile de los Negritos" and "Leave the Bones and Catch the Land: South Sudanese Art from Kakuma Refugee Camp," and were installed as part of the Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium Student Conference held in Aidekman last Friday. Each exhibit is the culmination of an anthropology class at an affiliated university. While the exhibits are both smaller excerpts from earlier exhibitions, their location parallel to each other in the Slater Gallery provides for a unique and interactive joint show.

From El Salvador to Somerville

"From Yucuaiquin to Somerville: El Baile de los Negritos" has its roots here at Tufts. Senior Sebastian Chaskel developed the exhibit as an offshoot of Urban Borderlands, an anthropology class focused on Somerville's Latino community. The exhibit traces a customary religious dance from its home in Yucuaiquin, El Salvador to the community of Yucuaiquin immigrants in Somerville, many of whom migrated here during the repression and ensuing civil war of the 1980s. "Their dance allows them to connect with their traditions," Chaskel said, "while helping them build community in their new home, the U.S."

"Leave the Bones and Catch the Land: South Sudanese Art from Kakuma Refugee Camp" hails from the Brandeis University class "Museums and Public Memory," taught by Dr. Mark Auslander. Auslander's course emphasizes student-community interaction to create a collaborative community-based exhibition.

This year, Auslander's students curated an exhibit of paintings created by displaced Southern Sudanese at a refugee camp in Kenya. Auslander said that he and his students sought "to develop an exhibition that really reflected the interests of the refugee community."

In order to reflect the interests of their partner communities, the curators of each exhibit listened to their respective community's voice in the form of an oral history. An oral history approach involves conducting interviews with community members in order to provide first-hand accounts.

These community voices did not only serve as a basis of anthropological studies, but were also present in the final exhibitions of each project.

Yucuaiquin dance the night away at Somerville Museum

Chaskel's initial exhibition was held at the Somerville Museum last April. The exhibit provided a background of Yucuaiquin and the community in Somerville, with an emphasis on Saint Francis of Assisi. "People pray to Saint Francis for all kinds of things," Chaskel said, "and they often pay back by dancing el Baile de los Negritos. When people from Yucuaiquin immigrate to the U.S., they often pray to Saint Francis for help. Once they are here, they feel an obligation to dance for him."

But at the Somerville Museum, "El Baile de los Negritos" was not simply an informational exhibit. On opening day, a crowd of Yucuaiquinenses and guests gathered in the main room to watch the annual dance take place.

"The thing that excited me the most was that we had the masks under glass, but then when the Yucuaiquinenses danced, they took them out of the glass, and danced with them," Chaskel said, "So people saw the same objects that were presented as art behind a glass then used [them] for dancing." With that, barriers between the art and the audience were broken and the exhibit became a genuine cultural interaction.

In addition, Chaskel valued the Yucuaiquinenses' opinions in the construction of the exhibit. While the Somerville Museum focused on the aesthetic aspects of his pictures, the Yucuaiquinenses saw this exhibit as a way to share their culture. Sebastian recalled that if a photograph depicted someone unfamiliar, they would ask him: "Who is this person in this exhibit? Why are we including him?"

In the exhibit at Slater, Chaskel was careful to use only pictures of important community members. The Yucuaiquin partner community also donated their masks, costumes and instruments used in the dance.

Southern Sudanese make their voices heard

The voices of the Southern Sudanese shine through "Leave the Bones and Catch the Land" in a more direct way. "The students really didn't want to impose simply their understanding of the art," Auslander said. "The students were very interested, as much as possible, in allowing the refugees' understanding of their own history to predominate."

This understanding began in the initial stages, as the Southern Sudanese refugees in Kakuma created the paintings that hang in the final exhibit. Atem Aleu, a refugee resettled to Utah, traveled back to the Kakuma camp with art supplies. He provided the refugees there with lessons, a museum label explains, "allowing them to capture their memories of home and to express their hopes for the future."

These memories and hopes are clearly captured. The brightly colored paintings cover a variety of topics ranging from lost traditions to the atrocities of war to prayers for the future. Each painting has its own powerful style and message.

To allow for an even greater Sudanese voice, Auslander's class paired the paintings with responses from Southern Sudanese refugees who had been resettled in the Greater Boston area. The result was a series of museum labels comprised of Sudanese interpretations of the paintings. As Auslander said, "The paintings inspire amazing stories."

The resettled refugees' voices were actually heard in the initial exhibit at Brandeis. Museum-goers could browse the exhibit while listening to recordings of the interpretations. These clips are now available as audio commentary on the exhibit's Web page.