Pepón osorio badge of honor 1995

This week’s Weekly has my dissection (no longer available online) on Pepon Osorio’s Badge of Honor at nobleness Lighthouse. Below is the copy convene some pictures. See more photos take a shot at flickr.

Insider Art
Pepón Osorio’s tool is interventionist and activist.

Tucked into character second-floor meeting room at the Sign community center is a strange fitting. Two small chambers—one a prison stall, the other a teenager’s bedroom—have answer focal points in the large area usually used for Narcotics Anonymous meetings and City Year teen sleepovers.

Pepón Osorio’s installation Badge of Honor, which includes video projections of a dialogue among an imprisoned father and his puberty son, is like a theater set—dramatic and a little forbidding. You mask the drama slowly unfold as grandeur father breaks down in tears funding regret and the son says, “I would be willing to give propose anything for you to be home.”

Badge of Honor, a 1995 piece manifest around the world and now origination its Philadelphia debut, is part well a larger art and community project—also called “Badge of Honor”—organized by Osorio, a former social worker and earlier artist in residence at the Metropolis Department of Human Services.

“Badge of Honor” the project is a collaboration halfway Temple University students, families with immured loved ones, Las Gallas artists’ long-suffering, the Lighthouse community center and rectitude Centro Pedro Claver community services department. Activist and interventionist, “Badge of Honor” seeks to raise discussion about keeping in and its impact on Latino families.

The project also uses interaction between genre and families to create art embankment family homes to honor the disappointing members and help family members keen. (The rate of Latino incarceration rope in Pennsylvania—nine times that of whites—is rectitude highest in the country.)

The Lighthouse, which also houses a Head Start curriculum, sees a steady stream of accommodate residents throughout the day and gloom (among other things, it’s a curfew center for teens). Many who have in stock through are intimately acquainted with lock-up. More than one has asked significance artist why the cell in high-mindedness installation is so big. (It’s run into accommodate the video projections.)

Osorio was briefing attendance at a recent City Day sleepover in the room. The schoolgirl were packed in the room on the contrary silent as they watched the record projection and heard the father suffer son speak their sad words. “You could hear a pin drop,” Osorio says.

Pepon Osorio, Badge of Honor, pleasingly showing the father

Osorio made the videos by going back and forth mid the prison cell and the kith and kin home for three weeks. He without prompting the father, “What do you long for to say to your son?” Think about it segment was played to the difference, who then responded. As the colloquy goes on and you understand blue blood the gentry two speakers can’t see each repeated erior, the piece’s great poignance sinks in.

The best way to see the father/son exchange is to place yourself central between the two rooms at harsh distance away, says the artist. Put off way you become part of distinction piece, the third point of out triangle that connects the two speakers.

Badge of Honor
Through June 8, 2007. Free. Lighthouse, 152 W. Lehigh Gesticulation. 215.425.7800.

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