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The Cultural Frontline: How can art help reconnect us to the missing?

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How can art help reconnect us to the missing?

10/12/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, How can art help reconnect us to the missing?

We hear from artists telling the stories of the disappeared

Zuzanna Pieczynska on painting the loss of the missing, plus Ramon Ayres, Andrés Velásquez and Eyglo Belafonte discuss their play REWIND about the disappeared in South America

This week we discuss how art can help reconnect us to those who are missing or have been disappeared.

It’s estimated that around 20,000 people go missing in Poland every year. Artist Zuzanna Pieczynska explores the impact of this in her work, with her paintings often focusing on the lives of the people left behind. She tells Tina Daheley more about her project ‘Each year in Poland a small town disappears.’ 

Thousands of people were disappeared during the dictatorships in countries across South America. A new play, called REWIND, by physical theatre company Ephemeral Ensemble, has been inspired by testimonies of South American political refugees who fled the dictatorships, as well as the more recent stories from young migrants caught up in violent repression following demonstrations in the region. Performers Andrés Velásquez and Eyglo Belafonte along with director Ramon Ayres talk to reporter Constanza Hola about the show. 
 
Loss and disappearance have been topics across much of Hisham Matar’s work. The Pulitzer prize winning writer has been inspired by his own life experiences, after his father was kidnapped in Egypt by Colonel Gaddafi’s regime, taken back to Libya and never seen again. Hisham shares a piece of art that changed him, a film from a director who has influenced his thinking as an author, the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, and in particular Bresson’s 1959 film ‘Pickpocket’.

In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by dominant Hutu forces in 100 days. For her piece, The Book of Life, Rwandan playwright and director Odile Gakire Katese, known as Kiki Katese, tells the story of that conflict and the remembrance of those who died, through the letters of ordinary Rwandans. 

(Picture: Julia by Zuzanna Pieczyńska. Credit: Zuzanna Pieczyńska)

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