Arts activists call out to human trafficking victims

At the “Globalization and Human Trafficking”
symposium held Friday, professors of the World Arts and Cultures
Department, art students at UCLA, and a number of representatives
from a wide array of organizations met to discuss the issue of
human trafficking as a global phenomenon and demonstrate the ways
in which art can be used to spread awareness of this issue and in
the broader context of social activism.

In his keynote address, WAC Professor Peter Sellars spoke of the
urgency to collaborate across ethnic lines and transform the issues
of globalization and human exploitation, and of the role art plays
in doing so.

Human trafficking, which Sellars calls “modern-day
slavery,” is the sale of human beings, often across national
borders, for the purpose of involuntary servitude or commercial
prostitution.

“For me, one of the most important things about looking at
the possibilities of the arts is, first of all, just to look at the
economics of slavery now. And if I could just emphasize ““
many, many things can be legislated but just because you’ve
legislated it, doesn’t mean it’s over,” Sellars
said.

“Slavery has been officially made illegal in all kinds of
places, and it carries on. And this is where we get to the cultural
dimension of going beyond legislation and reaching into a place
that has to do with people’s hearts,” Sellars said.

Throughout the remainder of the day, representatives of
different organizations conducted round-table discussions, in which
they spoke of what was being done to spread awareness about the
issue in addition to what the next steps will be.

Karen Chan, co-coordinator of the UCLA chapter for the Polaris
Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.,
discussed the ways in which the organization’s “Slavery
Still Exists” campaign, held at UCLA last May, advocated
student involvement in spreading awareness of human
trafficking.

This photographic campaign consisted of students, committee
members and politicians holding up signs saying “Slavery
Still Exists,” and having their photos taken and put on
display in various locations on campus, including Bruin Plaza and
Northern Lights Cafe. It also encompassed recorded testimonies of
victims, which were played alongside the photos on exhibit.

“It was a very powerful and effective medium in which
people could see that it’s an issue where you don’t
have to be some government official or civil-service provider
necessarily to work on this,” said Kaitlyn Lim,
co-coordinator of the UCLA chapter for the Polaris Project.

Professor Victoria Marks of the WAC department spoke of her
collaboration with Dr. Kenneth Chuang of the David Geffen School of
Medicine in exploring connections between the young artists
studying at UCLA and the clients of the Coalition to Abolish
Slavery and Trafficking, a nonprofit organization based in Los
Angeles. They constructed a two-quarter course entitled “Arts
Activism and Human Trafficking,” which began fall quarter
this year.

During the first quarter, students became acquainted with human
trafficking as a global phenomenon and considered the role of arts
activism within the context of this issue.

During the final two weeks of fall quarter, students designed
projects that would engage trafficking survivors, and they are now
spending this quarter putting their projects into action. The
projects include weekly cooking events in which survivors share
their favorite dishes from their homes of origin, as well as weekly
dance parties in which students share dance experiences with a
multinational group of survivors and their children.

Students go to a shelter located in Los Angeles once or twice a
week in addition to their class meetings. This shelter houses many
of the coalition’s clients, those who are victims of human
trafficking.

“We’re talking about a phenomenon which is about the
erasure of identity and about the erasure of culture, and about
seeing the body as some kind of material labor only,” Marks
said.

Mythili Prakash, a first-year graduate student enrolled in
“Arts Activism and Human Trafficking,” expressed the
appeal that a collaboration among many different artists can have
to the public.

“A lot of us are artists. Dancers, musicians, painters,
choreographers, actors, all sorts of things. So it really allows us
to be inspired by it in our work. We all work with different modes
of expression, so I think that really creates an opportunity for us
to communicate to a wider audience,” Prakash said.