Upon returning to America in February 2016, after shooting Artivism and India, I began speaking to friends about the events unfolding in India and found similar issues and artistic outbreaks to be mirrored across continents - in the U.S., Brazil, Chile and South Africa.  

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Though the film is continuing in its own wright, in that moment, in early-Trump U.S.A, it didn’t feel right to only speak about India or to limit such a sensory, creative movement to the confines of a screen. I wanted to provide a tangible experience for the audience to feel the transformative effects of artivism. As a response, I created People's Portal, an immersive installation which interwove the footage from "Artivism and India" with visual and live performance works by Indian and U.S. based artivists. The goal was to break down what seems like isolated injustices and to help the audience draw connections across physical boundaries - to uncover global patterns and find empathy with the "alien".

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By experiencing the emotional roller-coaster curated by the artists' walk-through collaboration, Peoples Portal, allowed the audience to physically follow the artivism journey as it unfolded for us. In a sense the audience was inside the documentary. Selected clips, paired with newsreels on the political context in India, were projected on every surface interspersed with pages from the travel journals I kept, newspaper articles, archived photographs and sacred objects collected. Woven between the footage of Indian artivists were works by Providence based artists, speaking for the Black Lives Matter Movement, calling out against the rise of Donald Trump. An artist shared footage of the student’s movement in Chile, footage that so closely mirrored what was happening in India you could barely tell them apart. There were handcrafted butterflies stating absurdities from the U.S. immigration policy, beautiful photographs of female fighters in Cuba, a giant painting of George Bush with his satirical resume out on display.

 

For the three days of the event, the house became a community space where all were welcome to view the work and join in an open conversation on artivism. What was it? How could it help us understand our global interdependence? Though our situations may feel incredibly different, how can it help us communicate across language, class, caste, and continent? There were live performances by local spoken word artists and intercity youth, group cooking lead by Mama Dreads Missions of Love, a homeless community’s catering company. And when What Cheer!, a local LGBTQ brass band came and mashed it up in the parking-lot, the neighborhood poured out of their houses and wandered up the stairs and into an installation that engaged them in the political situations of India, Chile, and USA. Art became the instrument to connect again the heart and the mind and to move the audience into action.

 

In early 2017 I collaborated with Shey Rivera, Artist Director of community arts space, AS220, in Providence, RI to create People's Portal 2.0 which brought the installation to a city wide scale and included works by artivists from across Latin America. 

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