Hector Aristizabal—one of the pioneers of performance activism—was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia, when it was the most dangerous city in the world, and his country was suffering through a bloody fifty-year civil war. Educated as both a psychologist and a theatre artist, as a young man, he was arrested and tortured by the military and later forced to flee into exile in the U.S., where he worked as a therapist, primarily with the marginalized and traumatized. In 2000, Aristizabal founded ImaginAction, an international network of artists and facilitators using performance and imagination as tools for social justice and community healing. It has worked with communities across the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. When the torture at Abu Ghraib, Iraq was exposed, he created Nightwinds, in which he reenacts his arrest and torture. His performance then flows into a participatory workshop in which the audience, turned participants/performers, engage the traumas in their lives and communities. Aristizabal has brought Nightwinds to 50 countries, including many war zones from Afghanistan to Rwanda, Northern Ireland to Palestine, Ukraine to India. As he puts it, “We can heal only in community. We can’t heal on our own.” The civil war in Colombia ended in 2017 and after 28 years in exile, Aristizabal returned home to use performance to help ex-combatants on both sides of the war and their victims find “the medicine in the wound.” He founded Re-conectando which creates healing rituals and brings participants deep into the forest—“the womb of Mother Nature,” as he puts it—to reconnect with life, human and other-than-human. In this beautiful conversation with host Desire Wandan, Aristizabal shares his life story, focusing on his current work on social healing in Colombia. www.reconectando.org www.Dreamingaction.com www.Imaginaction.org ----more---- Welcome to All Power to the Developing, a podcast of the East Side Institute. The Institute is a center for social change efforts that reinitiate human and community development. We support, connect, and partner with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers, and healers all over the world. In 2003, Institute co-founders Lois Holzman and the late Fred Newman had a paper published with the title “All Power to the Developing.” This phrase captures how vital it is for all people—no matter their age, circumstance, status, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—to grow, develop and transform emotionally, socially and intellectually if we are to have a shot at creating something positive out of the intense crises we’re all experiencing. We hope that this podcast series will show you that, far more than a slogan, “all power to the developing” is a loving activity, a pulsing heart in an all too cruel world. ----more---- The East Side Institute is a hub for a diverse and emergent community of social activists, thought leaders, and practitioners who are reigniting our human abilities to imagine, create and perform beyond ourselves—to develop. Each episode will introduce you to another performance activist or play revolutionary from around the world. To learn more about the East Side Institute you can go to https://eastsideinstitute.org/ Made possible in part by Growing Social Therapeutics: The Baylah Wolfe Fund.
