The Inaugural Justice Brandeis Practitioner-in-Residence Limited Series Keynote Address: “Striving to Strengthen Safe Spaces/Brave Spaces Through Collaborative Mural-Making”
Oct 1, 2024
On October 1, 2024, Brandeis faculty, staff, and students gathered in the Zinner Forum of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management to welcome Claudia Bernardi, the Inaugural Justice Brandeis Practitioner-in-Residence and to hear her keynote address, "Striving to Strengthen Safe Spaces/Brave Spaces Through Collaborative Mural-Making."
Bernardi is an artist, educator, and community-engaged activist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. For years, she has centered her work on honoring the truths and traumas of various communities through collaborative art. Now, she brought that work and experience to the broader Brandeis community, imploring the audience to reflect on her experiences and consider what they might offer in their own journeys navigating justice and social turmoil.
The event began with opening remarks by Professor Melissa Stimell, who spoke on behalf of the Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation (ENACT) and the Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT). Stimell introduced the Justice Brandeis Practitioner-in-Residence Limited Series as a way to highlight the work of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life, which closed its doors in 2023. “The breadth and depth of the Ethics Center's work included areas such as international justice and peacebuilding, as well as the arts,” said Stimell. “We’ll highlight some of those areas today through this talk.”
Next, Professor Toni Shapiro-Phim of the Creativity, Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) Department introduced Bernardi, highlighting that Bernardi, “models an ethical commitment to the pursuit of justice, regardless of the particular focus of those efforts.”
Although this was not Bernardi’s first time at Brandeis, it was the first time she addressed such a large section of the community. In November 2023, Bernardi came to Brandeis to paint a collaborative mural with students from Professor Shapiro-Phim’s introductory CAST class. She worked with 18 students to create a vast and vibrant mural, entitled “Waters Breathe, Too: An Anthology.”
However, for this speech, the goal was not to collaborate with the audience – there would be time for that during her second mural making initiative on November 7th. Rather, Bernardi sought to share her personal experiences, which she framed through the question, “What is the role of beauty and ugliness in my life?”
To begin exploring this question, she asked the audience to reflect on the place of beauty and ugliness in their own lives. She shared with the room the very lesson she imparts to her own students: “Try to find what makes you cry from emotion and what makes you cry from anger. Somewhere in the middle is where your passion lies and follow that.” With this, she offered her own understandings of beauty and ugliness.
Bernardi turned to historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt to guide her reflections on beauty. Although Arendt’s definition is not related to art, Bernardi believes the two are intrinsically connected. She shared that beauty lies in “having the conviction that something that doesn’t exist will, because we, artists, are going to make it.” Creativity and the ability to dare to dream and imagine, both integral to art, are also connected to beauty.
It is in this way that beauty and creativity are closely related to human rights: in a field so complex and often negative, creativity is necessary to imagine how things can and will improve. As Bernardi noted, the field of human rights is still young and encompasses much uncharted territory, meaning it continues to evolve as people around the world continue to harm one another. These harms represent the ugliness to Bernardi, making beauty a response to – or something that emerges from – ugliness.
With this framework set, Bernardi took the audience’s hand and began walking them through all the beauty and ugliness of her life, beginning with the military junta which took over Argentina on March 24, 1976.
From the moment she began discussing it, Bernardi made clear the toll of the military junta on and the disbelief of Argentines who experienced it. She read a quote from General Iberico Saint Jean, the self-appointed governor of Buenos Aires a year after the war began: “Primero mataremos a todos los subversivos, luego mataremos a sus colaboradores, después... a sus simpatizantes, enseguida... a aquellos que permanecen indiferentes, y finalmente mataremos a los tímidos.” Translated to English, this reads as “First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then... their sympathizers, then... those who remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid.” For Argentines, they could understand the words 'subversives,' 'collaborators,' and 'the timid,' but the meaning was lost on them. What does it mean, in practice, to kill the subversives? The timid?
A new term – Los Desaparecidos, or "the disappeared" – emerged from the actions of the military junta. This term refers to the tens of thousands of Argentines kidnapped by the military government. One of the most powerful forms of resistance during this time, which Bernardi shared with the audience, was the work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Bernardi showed footage of these women, who were unwavering in their mission to find their children. Throughout the video, they repeatedly asked the same questions of Argentine officials, gathering and searching for their children, despite the forces working against them. Bernardi also shared how, during the war, many women who were forcefully kidnapped were pregnant. The government would wait for these children to be born and then kill the mother, leading to over 500 children born in captivity. Through almost 50 years of tireless work, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have found 139 children and continue their search, even as some of them are well into their 90's.
However, the shock Argentines faced did not stop with los desaparecidos. Bernardi then transitioned to discuss the clandestine centers of detention and extermination that were being uncovered in Argentina. Once again, Bernardi shared her disbelief with the audience, echoing the shock felt by Argentines at the time. What does a clandestine center of death even mean? She proceeded to explain how people were murdered extrajudicially, detailing the methods of mass extermination used by the military government – many of which were completely unknown to the public at the time.
By the end of the military junta in 1983 and the introduction of a democratic government under President Raúl Alfonsín, the people of Argentina, including Bernardi, were desperately seeking answers. These answers came through various means. First, Bernardi showed the audience a black-and-white photograph of a small group of undergraduate students, including her younger sister, Patricia Bernardi, and a professor, Dr. Clyde Snow. This team, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, set to work exhuming the many unmarked graves scattered across Argentina, seeking to understand how a government could make such an unimaginable number of people just vanish.
Second, Bernardi showed the audience a video of the legal trials of the former members of the military junta. The Trials of the Juntas were deeply significant, representing a moment of the beauty and creativity Bernardi had mentioned earlier. Argentine judges were grappling with how to transform and integrate the horrors of the military junta into a process of law.
In supporting these trials, Bernardi echoed the sentiments of her fellow Argentines, stating, "We, the citizens, don’t want to do what you have done. We want to make sure that this is acknowledged as a crime. It cannot be repeated." This was a creative moment, a moment of hope – a moment, as Bernardi said, when Argentines declared, "Nunca más” or “never again.”
Even with the end of the military junta, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team kept working. They exhumed graves and examined areas of mass atrocity all over the world. Bernardi, bringing the conversation back to her specific experiences, then shared a specific venture in which she accompanied the team to El Salvador to examine the sight of the El Mozote massacre of 1981.
As the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team began exhuming the mass graves in El Mozote, they uncovered hundreds of skeletons, many belonging to children not even 12 years old. Bernardi described in detail the fragile nature of the bones, the intense emotion she felt while examining them, and her struggle to reconcile this experience with her work. "What can I do?" she asked. Then, "What would it be like to come here and create art with children of the same age as those whom we exhumed?"
From this question came Bernardi's next project – and the work she has been doing for nearly 30 years.
She returned with a team to Perquín, a town in El Salvador near El Mozote, to create a mural with children similar in age to those she had exhumed. Bernardi developed The Perquín Model, a blueprint for collaborative murals that has since been replicated worldwide, reconciling the ugliness of conflict with the beauty of community and creation.
Bernardi shared with the audience numerous murals she conducted over the years. She highlighted the key aspects of the model: Bernardi always only facilitated, participants always constructed the idea of the mural and she never came to any community without a prior invitation. Out of the various murals Bernardi reminisced on, with all their complexities and uniqueness, there was one common thread – each community was not just making art or building connections, they were preserving memory.
Finally, Bernardi shared one of the most personally impactful artworks she facilitated: a mural created on the walls of the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), one of the aforementioned clandestine detention centers, alongside the family members of los desaparecidos. Upon entering the building, Bernardi recounted how she was hit with the question of “how did we get here?” All the efforts of law and activism lead her and her team to this building and this attempt to heal from history.
This moment of levity, and the satisfaction Bernardi felt in how her work allowed her to confront the ugliness of the past with the beauty of a mural, was unfortunately short-lived. Turning to face the audience, she spoke of human rights, saying, "It's one step forward, two steps backward." This phrase, in and of itself, resonated deeply with those in attendance. However, it was what came next that truly impacted everyone in the room.
“I am so sorry to tell you that the Government of Argentina today considers that the military junta was not such a bad idea,” Berardi said. Javier Milei, the president of Argentina as of December 2023, has downplayed the extreme harm caused by the military junta, sparking widespread concern that Argentina may face a resurgence of abuses under his leadership. Bernardi played a video of the protests from June 12, 2024, showing Argentines, many of them elderly and unarmed, flooding the streets to protest Milei’s bill. The room fell silent as the footage showed unarmed protestors being violently repressed and attacked by police forces.
As the video ended, another moment of silence overtook the room. After the pause, Bernardi spoke again: “I am ashamed of being an Argentine today.” She continued speaking with unwavering strength to the audience, showing everyone how history has begun to repeat itself. But this was not a moment of resignation. Bernardi reminded her audience of the lesson she teaches her students and asked them to reflect on the message she shared before her speech began. “I cry of emotion when I see the documentary of the mothers and the trial in Argentina. And I cry of anger when I see these police people harming vulnerable people because this is the start, not the end,” she said. With this, the audience fully grasped her sentiment of one step forward and three backwards. Yet, as Bernardi emphasized, we must continue to take that step forward, with "clarity, empathy, and solidarity."
She concluded her speech by showing footage from the "March of Memory and Justice," which she attended on March 24, 2024. It was a moment of solidarity, where the Argentine community stood together, refusing to forget the atrocities of the military junta and stepping forward in the ongoing fight for a better future.