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Finally Blogging about the Germany Residency!!
Posted Apr 8, 11:34 am
We are back from Germany and very happy with the installations and the turn out. We are so grateful to Vaago Weiland for the invitation and all the help and support while we were there. The community of Korschenbroich and Monchengladbach-Rheydt was very kind and interested in Day of the Dead as well as the altars. We lectured at the Hochschule Neiderrhein, whose cultural pedagogy department had a whole semester dedicated to death, mourning and remembrance. The project was led by the professor Mona Meis who invited us to lecture and help the students with their altar projects. The main one was dedicated to the hundreds of missing children in the European Union. We also lectured at the intergenerational Faust Academy, as well as two high schools. The first altar was a traditional altar dedicated to priests, nuns and WWII soldiers of the San Andreas Church in Korschenbroich and was raised the Tower Room. This was a purely traditional altar, with no contemporary elements, we brought some items from !home but most of the food and flowers and altar offering were found in the community of Korschenbroich. The second altar installation was called Fortress Europe: The Human Cost. 
This was a multimedia altar and the whole room of the gallery at Kulturbahnof was used. Here is the description:
Fortress Europe: The Human Cost
A multimedia altar by Laura Varela and Guillermina Zabala
This altar is dedicated to immigrants and political refugees who have drowned, suffocated and been beaten to death in their quest for a better life. As borders are made more impermeable in and around European countries, people are forced to take more and more dangerous routes. These deaths are attributed to border militarization, asylum laws, detention policies, deportations and carrier sanctions.
These individuals are victims of a global economy that oppresses the workers of third world countries and forces them to migrate to industrialized nations.
Similarly, in the United States, hundreds of Latin American immigrants have perished crossing the US-Mexico border due to the unjust immigration policies. These “free-market” economic treaties enrich multinational corporations by exploiting human labor in all many parts of the world. The altar Fortress Europe: The Human Cost honors the lives of those individuals who have left their homeland and sacrificed their lives in route to Europe.
Specials thanks to Vaago Weiland, Gisela Willems-Liening, Derya Uestebe, Paul Klatt, Fritz Wiebel and Dr. Angela Wilms-Adrians.
During our stay in Rehyt/Monchengladbach Germany, we were so busy with the shows/installations and lectures, but we did manage to get away to Barcelona for a few days. I was amazed by the amount of Latin Americans there. At one restaurant I saw this young man that looked just like a person I went to high school with, he was from Ecuador, and it shows me that we Xicanos and all indigenous people from the America’s are all related. 
I was also pleased to see that the Catalonians have the same view of the Spanish conquest as us, as they themselves feel that Catalonia is still occupied by the Spanish. They have their own language and are very much tied to the land. To see pictures please click here.