A piece of artwork hanging in Bregamos Community Theater summed up the theme of the Festival de la Resistencia, which took place at the Blatchley Avenue arts and community space Saturday afternoon. It made a serious point: A fist smoked down from the sky to smite the people on a city street. The people were not crushed; they pushed back. And someone was there to document their struggle, and let the world see, even as the city burned around them. But the seriousness of the subject was delivered in a colorful, vivacious tone, full of life and action. It drew you in and made you want to be a part of it — and it was the work of multiple artists’ hands.
The Festival de la Resistencia focused on “Colombian culture and community, as well as solidarity against violence and U.S. imperialism,” its official press release stated. It carried a deeper message as well; that political action, even for a serious cause, can be engaging, and maybe even fun.
“We know the arts are an important way to say so many important things,” said Norma Leal, a co-organizer of the festival; art can have political messages and “people accept it” in ways they may not otherwise.
Organized by the Semilla Collective, the Festival de la Resistencia started at 3 p.m. and received a steady stream of visitors all day, reported Rafael Ramos, founder and president of Bregamos. The festival featured art, five women entrepreneurs, a presentation (via Zoom) about cultivation from a campesina in Colombia who was “telling us how to make a plant grow and give you fruit,” said Leal, and a Theater of the Oppressed workshop.
Brian Slattery Photos
As the sun set and the October air got a little chillier, the festival moved fully inside, preparing for an evening’s worth of music and theater performances. Before that, though, festival participants could take in the art that lined the walls of the Bregamos space.
Stewart.
Among the artists was Anika Stewart — one of the artists involved in the collaborative piece at the top of the article — who had a series of her own work on display.
Born and raised in New Haven, “I’ve been making art my whole life,” Stewart said, but “I started taking it seriously in 2016.” She asked Barracuda owner Sonia Salazar if she could do a mural in the Chapel Street restaurant. Salazar said yes. The project “didn’t happen,” Stewart said, “but then I asked if I could do a show.” That project did happen, and Stewart has been exhibiting art and making shows for other New Haven artists to exhibit ever since.
About the subjects of her own art, Stewart said that “I love women. I love androgyny and gender-bending.” Her specific subjects aren’t drawn from life; “I just like to paint from my imagination,” she said. “It’s always this beautiful physique,” she added, meaning not the unattainable bodies of models or Photoshopped celebrities, but the bodies of real women who exist in the world.
In this particular black-and-white painting, “the cracks represent the plight of being a woman in the world. We are not indestructible, but we are perfect in form,” she said, “thick and motherly.”
She noted that her art has gone through a few styles. “I went through a phase in my art when I painted only in black, red, and white,” a palette that suits her, she said, “when I’m pissed off.” She went through another phase of painting entirely in blue, explicitly inspired by Picasso’s famous blue period.
“When I’m feeling in a better place, things are in color,” she said, and she gravitates toward a more ethereal style that still makes room for contrasts, sun and moon, happiness and darkness. She has also developed her own iconography. “I regard a snake how everyone else regards a phoenix,” she said, as a metaphor for going through hardship and emerging transformed. Snakes are “always shedding their skin, getting shiny and new — but first they have to rub themselves against a hard rock.”
Stewart had advice for a younger artist who wanted to try her hand at it. “Dip your feet in everything,” she said. “that’s how you’ll find your thing.”
Some of Anthony Barroso’s art is already familiar to Fair Haveners who have seen it as part of the city’s vaccination campaign. (He was also a collaborator in the piece at the top of the article.) Barroso’s art at Bregamos was meant to encourage people to get vaccinated, but also to think about the factors that have made vaccination more difficult — and that have abetted and prolonged the pandemic in the first place. “There are so many social conditions that have to change before we get out of this pandemic,” Barroso said.
The availability of the vaccine is, of course, a major game changer in society’s ability to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control. But there is a way that all our hopes have been pinned to it that Barroso wanted to satirize — the idea of “vaccine as messiah,” he said. “I want them to really think about the messaging of vaccines and what we’re hearing.” Without lessening the way the vaccine has saved lives, Barroso also wants to point out that a society that’s truly resilient to disease is one that’s healthier, with better housing, better access to health care, and higher wages; in short, a society that’s more equitable. In that sense, Barroso’s art is also about hope and transformation.
“I was inspired by labor art I’d seen in Central and South America,” Barroso said (he is Ecuadorian), as well as religious iconography. He’s pleased that his art is part of a public campaign. “When you look at something every day, you get to think about it.” That gives Barroso a chance to deliver a deeper message, and invite viewers to shape that message for themselves. “Is it telling me to just get vaccinated, or is it telling me something more?” he said. “I want people to have their own interpretations.” Though, on first impression, he also hopes that people feel supported by his art. “It’s validation. We’re not crazy. We know the world’s messed up.”
The musical part of the evening began with Ramos, Brian Jarawa Gray, and a drummer named Elvin performing an improvised piece on percussion. It was a warm-up for things to come – both in the deep cultural connections it pointed out among numerous oppressed peoples, from across Africa and the Americas, and in the warm welcome it received from the audience. Though the initial focus had been on Colombia, participants, who ranged from poets to speakers to musicians, took the time to express their solidarity with the people of Palestine — currently suffering from the effects of ongoing waves of violence — and oppressed peoples everywhere.
Javier Villatoro — a.ka. Ene de Nadie — had been serving as translator for the entire event. He next took the stage for three original raps, and brought down the house with his easy charm and sharp delivery.
Everyone then rotated their chairs 90 degrees to the right to face the screen and take in the work of Colectivo de poetas y poetizas Tertulia, beaming in via Zoom to a large screen mounted on the wall of Bregamos. The rapturous applause the audience gave to the live performers at the Fair Haven theater continued for the more distant ones, who delivered impassioned and good-natured sets of poems and songs from Colombia. At the end of every piece, the crowd roared, and the performers beamed.
Camila y Ismail, who said they’d only met the day before, brought down the house with a rendition of a Celia Rodriguez song. For their second number, Rafael Ramos joined them on cajón to fill out the sound, though Camila’s powerful voice had no problem filling the space.
Leal then owned the Bregamos stage with a piece about freedom and oppression that moved from sly to harrowing (a sequence involving her fleeting — unsuccessfully — from a helicopter gunship was particularly effective) to heartfelt and strong. If the applause for the previous performers had been boisterous, the response to Leal’s piece, a cry from the heart and a call to action, was deafening.
The last performer, Kelli, turned out to be an extraordinary belly dancer. She performed a series of pieces that showcased her ease with the rigors of belly dancing, as she executed them with and without balancing elaborate candelabras on her head. One sequence involved fire eating as well. In the end, she unfurled the flag of Lebanon and after whirling it over her own head, beckoned a volunteer from the audience to do the flag waving while she drew even more volunteers from their seats. She turned the crowd, one audience member at a time, from seated viewers to dancing participants, ending the event in a circle dance that took up most of the space inside Bregamos.
Leal thanked everyone for coming, and reminded them all why they’d been there with a final cry: viva la resistencia.