What made it so engaging was the variety of presentations about a diverse range of cultural manifestations \u2013 street theatre, performance, music, textiles, video \u2013 and of phenomena susceptible to cultural intervention \u2013 conservation in the Colombian paramo, potato cultivation in the Peruvian Andes, conflict over pulp mills on the Uruguay river, shareholder meetings in London. A couple of presentations found me thinking back to the beginnings my own involvement in Latin America in the 1970s. Olivia Ang\u00e9, for example, prompted recollections of the amazing variety of potatoes I ate in the Bolivian Andes in 1973 (apparently there are more than 1300 varieties!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Anna Grimaldi took us back to cultural expressions of international solidarity with Chile following the military coup in 1973, and spoke of the passage from a discourse of state violation of human rights to a more expansive and inclusive discourse encompassing minorities, environmental justice, and questions of sustainable development. I was able to mention the work of the Cultural Committee of the Chile Solidarity Campaign, where I learned so much about cultural politics from the Chileans who came to the UK as refugees \u2013 a good number were MIRistas<\/em> (the MIR was an extraparliamentary party on the far left) and cultural activists, including actors and musicians. I quickly fell into film activism, taking films to screen around the country, and curating a retrospective of the cinema of Popular Unity at the National Film Theatre in 1976. Chilean cinema had already become a creative force within the New Latin American Cinema movement before Allende was elected, engaged in rediscovering the country\u2019s social reality. These included an anonymous documentary short of 1971 on the indigenous Mapuche<\/em> (alternative title: \u2018Natuayin mapu\u2019), perhaps anticipating the turn that might have come earlier if it hadn\u2019t been brutally cut off. Chilean cinema remained a force after 1973: dozens of Chilean filmmakers in exile made something like 140 films of all types over the following ten years, initiating what Hamid Naficy would later call \u2018nomadic cinema\u2019. Jump to the new century, and the discursive turn that Anna spoke of was well in evidence by the time of the huge student movement for educational reform of 2011, which began with ecological protests at the start of the year \u2013 as recounted by a student activist in \u2018Protest Chile\u2019<\/a>, the video I shot there later that year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Aiden Jolly, a musician and activist involved in protest performances in the UK over several years under the banner of the Threepenny Festiva<\/a>l<\/a>, brought it all home by asking how artist activists working in solidarity with indigenous peoples relate to each other across cultural difference, and how to manoeuvre the exchange of knowledge, skills and methods between indigenous peoples and their allies in the metropolis. A recent example can be found on video: an intervention outside the AGM of the multinational BHP Billiton, handing out a spoof mineral water product, Agua Vida, which called into question the corporation\u2019s claims to be safeguarding water supplies in areas of extractivist operations in Colombia and Brazil. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.livingbetweenhurricanes.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Potatoes.jpg?resize=667%2C643&ssl=1\")
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