The Creating Safer Space Exhibition was hosted by the Institute of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio) between 12 and 23 August 2024. The exhibition was on display at the Department of Art and Design Hall.
Victória Monteiro da Silva Santos and Christian Cantuária from IRI/PUC-Rio report on the exhibition:
IRI/PUC-Rio hosted the exhibition as part of a series of activities that marked 10 years of its project Global South Unit for Mediation (GSUM), which was supported by two Brazilian research foundations (CAPES and FAPERJ). During the period, IRI also held several activities led by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Creating Safer Space Principal Investigator), Laura Jimenez (Creating Safer Space Research Assistant), Amaya Querejazu and Christine Andrä, many of which were associated with the exhibition itself.
The exhibition explores the unexpected power of nonviolence in the protection of civilians living in the midst of violence, featuring experiences from Cameroon, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Palestine, the Philippines, South Sudan, and Thailand. More information about the exhibition is available here. In Rio, it was accompanied by descriptions in English and Portuguese.
The exhibition was officially launched on 14 August 2024, including an inaugural talk and an exhibition tour dedicated to IRI/PUC-Rio’s undergraduate students that are part of its Research Initiation Program. At the launch, Berit, Laura, and Amaya led various groups around parts of the exhibition, prompting reflections on the diversity of culturally-specific relations to nonviolence and peace.
A series of other guided tours and associated debates were also held with different undergraduate and post-graduate student cohorts in the exhibition space. On 15 August 2024, Berit and Christine welcomed IRI/PUC-Rio’s Graduate students from an International Security class. Three questions were offered as prompts for the group’s reflection: 1) What are conflict-affected communities’ vulnerabilities beyond physical violence, and what does that tell us about security perceptions? 2) Which forms or actors of protection caught your attention and why? Can you think of similar examples from Brazil? 3) What are the specific qualities of creative methods in studying security-related topics; what are their possibilities and limits?
Over about two and a half hours, the group explored the space and discussed various strategies of resistance, ambivalence, and the role of nonviolence in the context of armed conflicts and situations of extreme violence, reflecting on how the three questions could be tackled through the exhibited strategies and beyond. For instance, IRI’s professor Maira Siman and master’s student Eduarda Lopes inquired about the strategy of not wearing school uniforms by students in West Africa. This interest stemmed from the contrast with dangerous communities in Rio de Janeiro, where school uniforms can mean the difference between life and death during a police operation. Professor Berit explained that, in those conflicts in West Africa, school uniforms would allow for the tracking and personal identification of students, especially girls. Therefore, it was wiser not to be identifiable.
Another master’s student, Christian Cantuária, asked about the illustrations of men wearing blue helmets and whether they symbolized the UN “blue helmets” or peacekeepers. Given the distrust and scepticism of IR critical theory towards UN operations, Christian inquired whether those communities worked in partnership with international peacekeepers. Professors Amaya and Berit explained that the illustrations were created in the context of the Creating Safer Space project, and our other project colour, yellow, is the colour of the King in Thailand and could carry a different meaning for Thai society. Despite its association with the UN, they chose blue in that specific context to represent local peacebuilding efforts.
Moreover, on 22 August 2024, Berit and Laura worked with two groups of undergraduate students of the modules Methodology I and Methodology II, who were brought by the courses’ lecturer Victória Santos and their teaching assistants Luisa Mercedes, Eduarda Lopes, and Raíssa Caliano. The students were invited to identify the various research methods that could be identified in the exhibition, notably those that are creative or arts-based (such as participatory drawings, textile-making, the production of podcasts, and others) but also traditional ones, such as interviews. They reflected on how these various methods could be situated within different stages of the research, from project design, to the data generation and analysis, to the dissemination and impact stages, with different implications.
As students from both courses will be developing research over the course of the semester in collaboration with civil society activists in the field of Climate Justice, leading to the production of an encyclopaedia and a podcast season, this was an opportunity for students to reflect on the possibilities entailed by producing scientific knowledge that aims for impact in a way that does not isolate the university from society; and also to consider the possibilities posed by other forms of results dissemination beyond written articles and reports. Moreover, especially in the case of Methodology II students, the group discussed the politics of knowledge production in these kinds of projects, with an attention to how equitable relations can be maintained in North-South research collaborations.
Another guided visit was led on 19 August 2024 by IRI’s lecturer Luisa Lobato, who took her undergraduate students from the Security and International Relations course to the exhibition. Professor Luisa requested the students to study and reflect on the exhibition. Then, based on the image that captured their attention the most, each student had to answer three questions: 1) What conceptions of security does the selected work present, and in what way? 2) What ideas of threat, implicitly or explicitly, can be identified in the work? 3) How does the artist communicate these ideas of security and threat?
Overall, the exhibition was a rich opportunity not only for International Relations students but also for visitors from various other disciplines and fields, who were continuously prompted to reflect on the possibilities of nonviolent action and the resonances with Brazilian contexts marked not only by various forms of violence but by a wealth of resistance practices.
