Tears Matter
Insight Myanmar7 Mar 2023

Tears Matter

Episode #153: Rahel and Damon Lam founded A Cup of Color in 2014. It is an organization with the goal of “bringing art to places where there is brokenness.” They have created art in public spaces in many places in Asia, and recently they carried out a project in Zurich, where they live, about the suffering in Myanmar.

Their involvement was precipitated by a request to them from Raise Three Fingers, an artistic collective resisting the coup. After getting city approval for a large mural, they then went about soliciting Burmese around the world about the messages and images they might want to express. In the end, they designed a mural whose central image features “a woman holding up the three fingers, and it's a woman who is mourning for her family member who got killed.” Calling the finished piece “Tears Matter,” the woman is surrounded numerous words and other images, which came from the many submissions that were sent in from around the world.

Besides the work’s obvious message, they set out to capture a sense of common humanity, represent a sense of perseverance and encouragement, with the hope that the piece would move people to start paying more attention to the situation in Myanmar.

“[Burmese in the diaspora] are really not suffering loudly, but they're very silently suffering…[and it] is very, very deep,” says Rahel. “Myanmar people can make jokes about the darker things. That's kind of a way they survive, which helps you to be with them in the really difficult times. But seeing their silent tears, it's very heavy.”

Episoder(511)

Depicting a Golden Kingdom

Depicting a Golden Kingdom

When films examine a subject in detail, it’s sometimes described as a “meditation on…” that particular theme. Golden Kingdom, a 2015 film by Brian Perkins, fits this expression in more ways than one.B...

5 Feb 20221h 34min

From Burma With Love

From Burma With Love

Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at UC Berkeley, has spent a lifetime studying the history of Burmese films, and is one of the organizers of the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival. He grew ...

31 Jan 20221h 9min

Revisiting the Burma Spring

Revisiting the Burma Spring

For her first post-coup documentary, Padauk: Myanmar Spring, Jeanne Hallacy’s team employed a technique called “in-depth personal storytelling,” and the results were simply stunning. It allows the vi...

26 Jan 202256min

Portrait of an Activist

Portrait of an Activist

Little T’s ongoing nightmare started, as it did for so many Burmese people, with the violent coup launched last year by the military. Soon, the first peaceful mass protests hit the streets. Besides or...

22 Jan 20221h 48min

Sitagu Sayadaw, The Coup, and Burmese Buddhism

Sitagu Sayadaw, The Coup, and Burmese Buddhism

“My own feelings would be that it would be good for Sitagu Sayadaw to leave the country and then speak out [against the military]. If he speaks out now, he would probably be arrested immediately.”Thus...

16 Jan 20222h 28min

The Fabric of Change: Feminism, Art, and Revolution

The Fabric of Change: Feminism, Art, and Revolution

When Chuu Wai Nyein was just eighteen years old, she was with her sister at a Mandalay teashop. As they were leaving, a man sexually assaulted her sister. The event deeply traumatized them, and Chuu w...

11 Jan 20221h 32min

Artists Against Tyranny, Part 2

Artists Against Tyranny, Part 2

The situation in Myanmar continues to be intolerable. Day by day innocent civilians are being killed, maimed, starved, and forced from their homes, and the military continues their campaign of terror....

4 Jan 20221h 49min

The Revolution's Roving Eye

The Revolution's Roving Eye

Moe, a photojournalist, has long chronicled the inhumane injustices that the Tatmadaw had committed in his country. From the jade mines of Kachin to the Rohingya camps in Rakhine, he had seen first-ha...

26 Des 20211h 40min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
aftenpodden-usa
forklart
popradet
stopp-verden
det-store-bildet
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
rss-gukild-johaug
fotballpodden-2
dine-penger-pengeradet
nokon-ma-ga
rss-ness
i-retten
hanna-de-heldige
aftenbla-bla
frokostshowet-pa-p5
rss-dannet-uten-piano
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
rss-utenrikskomiteen-med-bogen-og-grasvik