Casas Voladoras is an ongoing collaborative performance art project focusing on experiences of global migration, mobility, the moving monument and oral histories specifically dealing with communities and recent immigrants from the Americas. It is a one-week intensive workshop using art and performance, ritual and moving theater for the empowerment in telling our own stories.

Caleb Duarte
Lead Artist and Project Coordinator

Locations
Red poppy Art House San Francisco CA-workshops
Meetings and workshops of art and oral history with recent undocumented workers form the rural areas of Chiapas Mexico

Fresno California-Valley sculptural performances
During the workshop a 50-foot portable structure will be constructed. We will then choreograph an attempt of lifting and balancing the structure within the dry farming lands of the central valley.

Artist Statement
My current body of work continues to focus on the “HOME” as a theatrical stage in the creation of mythical images as a way of understanding reality. It focuses on the ritualistic aspects of theater along with public intervention and arts education within community building. The creation of portable platforms as social sculpture, by way of community collaborations, has become the focal point of my “object making” practice. These sculptural platforms become a site for symbolic community actions that address issues like global migration, urban sprawl, and temporary sanctuaries as social protection for refugee and displaced populations.

As opposed to creating a theatrical stage within a gallery or museum in which the drawn figure inhabits the space, I am instead now creating a theatrical situation within communities of struggle where the actual figures begin to create and occupy their own sculptural objects. In this way, the acknowledgment of suffering and joy is "acted out" within events of community gatherings. This approach to art making seeks to integrate all art forms into one practice, celebrating poetic interpretations of tragedy and transforming them into social healing opportunities rather than for political demonstrations and public protest. Within this art practice, process and production are celebrated equally in a web network of artist, educators, and social entrepreneurs while integrated with oral history practices for cultural creation, celebration and preservation.

Project Description
Caleb Duarte’s per-formative video installation focuses on community collaborations created with recent immigrants from the rural areas of the state of Chiapas Mexico that are now recently working and residing in California. These collaborative performances are in conjunction with community performances created in El Pital, Honduras, The Red Poppy Art House San Francisco, and individual performances created in the deserts of California. Casas Voladoras documents and performs the movement of monuments, which provide symbolic public protection to clandestine communities of struggle. These video performances illustrate the issues of global migration, globalization, displacement and forced migration along with ideas of home and place within the changing global political and economic structures. These performances also documents our existential nature in finding place, meaning, a sense of home and purpose both in collective forms and as individual obsession.

Casas voladoras is in part based on the “New Sanctuary Movement,” re-created in the early 1980s where undocumented workers found refuge and protection with in different religious temples from deportation in the United States. This project examines the ideas of a moving sanctuary as social protection as well as questions the ideas behind monuments and their intended role in today’s contemporary societies. Casitas Voladoras is also a form of documenting the current “Underground Railroad” forming in Mexico that protects Central American immigrants from Mexican Authorities while making their way North.

The culminating work involving installations and performances in Honduras and San Francisco has been presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts, The Mission Cultural Center, The Red Poppy Art House MAPP, and is scheduled to be exhibited in Tuxla Chiapas Mexico and at the National Mexican Museum in Chicago.

Oral history
The use of Oral History supports the idea that documentation of intimate conversations alongside creative action as well as story telling through resulting anecdotes and contemplative interactions is vital in understanding the constructs within which we live. Through out the project, interviews and conversation will be documented to be projected along side the collaborative final performance.

Seeking Partnership and Support
The Red Poppy Art House invites you to become a part of “Casitas Voladoras” by investing in the Voladora Fund. Thus far, the project has been developed without institutional or private financial backing. At this juncture, “Casitas Voladores” seeks the support of arts organizations and individuals to sponsor recent immigrants from Chiapas, Mexico in a one-week intensive workshop using art and performance, ritual and moving theater for empowerment in telling our own stories.

Project expenses include: One-week room and board, transportation, compensation for participating undocumented immigrants, workshops on oral histories-story telling for video documentation, materials, and collaborative sculptural performances for video documentation.

Tax Deductible

We need your support! If you would like to make a monetary donation of any amount, checks are the best form of payment. Make all checks payable to "Intersection for the Arts" with "Red Poppy Art House" in the memo line.

Mail checks to us at: Red Poppy Art House/Casas Voladoras, 2698 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94110.

You can also donate online at www.theintersection.org. Please write in "Red Poppy Art House" in the box next to "Intersection Incubator donors only" under "Name of Recipient Project" or we won't get the money.

**Please send us an email when you make a donation so that we can include you in our list of sponsers. Send to: caleb@calebduarte.com

Our growing list of sponsers of joint commisions of individuals and Organizations
Iris Biblowitz, Fran Taylor, Linette Martinez, Mia Eve Rollow, Todd Brown,
Francisco and Josue Duarte, Rachel McIntire
Red Poppy Art House
www.redpoppyarthouse.org
Break Arts www.breakarts.org
Rev- www.rev-it.org
Priya Mohan with Sangha Wellness Foundation

For more information, visit: . . . . .

www.redpoppyarthouse.org