Madame President, ladies, gentlemen and colleagues, it's an honour and a great pleasure to introduce to you a woman who's played a vital and pioneering role in the musical life of this country. Her work to promote and celebrate Britain's vibrant cultural diversity resonates strongly with SOAS in many ways. She's the founder and CEO of the MOBO organisation. MOBO stands for Music of Black Origin, a broad term that covers a wide range of some of the world's most influential styles like soul and hip hop, which ultimately have roots in Africa, but they've developed in very distinctive ways here in the UK. Her involvement with this comes directly from her own background. Canya King grew up in a large family with a Ghanaian dad and Irish mum in a crowded council flat in Kilburn, a community in north London where people have settled from all over the world. She remembers being surrounded by musicians who were immensely talented but frustrated by the lack of a space to get their music heard. Back in the days before social media, remember those, artists had to rely on TV and radio, and that depended on their being signed to major record companies. This alerted Canya to a huge void in the mainstream music industry, which didn't acknowledge many homegrown forms of music that were emerging out of Britain's communities of black origin. In 1996, while working for TV as a researcher, she decided to stage a televised music awards event that would better reflect Britain's diversity. She only had six weeks to make it happen, and she lacked financial backing, but none of that put her off, so she funded the event herself by remortgaging her own house. Although MOBO was an unknown entity at the time, the idea of a platform for music of black origin clearly struck a chord. Canya got some of the biggest names of American music over, including hip-hop artists The Foojies and soul singer Lionel Richie, to attend that very first ceremony, and that's a measure of her persuasiveness. MOBO soon became the showcase for homegrown styles like garage, jungle, and grime. UK artists, so solid crew Craig David, Miss Dynamite, Gabrielle, Stormzy, Akala, Laura Mvula, and Emily Sande, to name but a few, all gained international recognition, largely thanks to Canya King's initiative. In 1999, Canya received an MBE for her contributions to the music industry, just one of many accolades she's since been awarded. Now, in its 21st year, MOBO has gone from strength to strength, hosting many top music stars, as well as showcasing up-and-coming talent from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as from the African continent. It's branched out into educational and mentoring initiatives beyond the world of music to include fashion, dance, and film. SOAS greatly looks forward to welcoming this inspirational entrepreneur to our own hugely diverse community. She shares with SOAS the idea that music and the arts are a powerful expression of identity, capable of transcending racial and cultural divide, an effective tool for social activism. Music at SOAS is located in our new Cutting Edge School of Arts Department, which offers a multitude of programmes, placing the arts and media in a global perspective, drawing on our long-established regional expertise. The great musical traditions from Africa and their legacy around the world are central to our own dynamic programme of study, performance, and research. To give you an example, one of our most popular music courses is called Global Hip Hop, and it looks at how this art of music and poetry has been re-signified and reinvented by new generations across the globe as a form of hard-hitting social comment. SOAS has only awarded two honorary doctorates in music to date. The first went to the great conductor Daniel Barenboim for his work with young musicians in Palestine. The second went to the maestro from Mali West Africa, Tumanijabate, for his innovative Chora playing. And now we're thrilled to be awarding a woman who's an outstanding role model in so many ways. We applaud her for her commitment and dedication to music and the arts. The importance of this work cannot be underestimated as it's now more urgent than ever to understand and to celebrate Britain's unique diversity. Our new Doctor of Music is at the forefront of music of African origin in its broadest sense and its widest reach. Madame President, it's my privilege to invite to address this assembly and to receive the honorary doctorate in music, Kanya King. Good afternoon everyone, ladies and gentlemen, families of friends, and all you graduates to whom I offer my sincere congratulations. A very, very special thank you to Lucy for her most generous citation. Thank you so much. I'm humbled to receive this honour from Dame Gracia Michelle, who not every day you get presented with a degree from someone whose humility, wisdom and humanitarian efforts are changing the world and enabling so many to speak who are voiceless. I also want to take this opportunity to thank sister Baroness Valerie Amos, a noble role model and someone who I've greatly admired for her trailblazing work over many, many, many years. Now when I look back on the year I started the mobile organisation, it was 1996, which was a dramatic year for black culture. In America we saw the deaths of Tupac and Ella Fitzgerald, while in the UK we witnessed a significant moment when Nelson Mandela made his first visit to Britain following his release from prison. At the top of the list of places he wanted to see was Brixton, an area closely identified with the struggle for equality. Free Nelson Mandela, a simple, powerful song performed by the British group of specials and their anti-apartheid message made us feel that we're part or something much bigger than the sum of its parts. Music has always had that power to transcend culture divides and stand up to injustices and inequality. At the time, Brit Pop was riding high with the Spice Girls part of the new era in pop, but when it came to reggae, hip-hop or R&B, the powers at B were not at all receptive. These genres were practically invisible to the mainstream despite being used in advertising to promote products and services. When I then started vocalising the need for more inclusive platforms, I was told again and again and again that British acts performing black music don't sell records. Black music events always attract trouble and the police will shut them down. If the media won't want to come, there is no audience for this type of event, why are you putting all your energy and money into this? Media will not get behind it, it will never work. I had to shut out all the outside noise, the detractors and the doubters as I was determined to try and get recognition for all this talent that was being overlooked and wasted so that they could help ensure that the next generation would not be excluded from their into dream and be inspired to achieve success regardless of their background. Dreams are things that fill each and every one of us with hope and excitement. In fact, dreams are so potent they've been the motivating force behind some of the greatest moments in our human history. I recently heard that nearly two thirds of people in the UK give up on their dream career by the time they're 20 years old. Many of these people stated that they gave up due to lack of confidence while others said they didn't feel they had the right skills. Rather like many of you who'll be starting your careers, when I started out all those years ago, I did not have any experience in the sector I went into, the music industry, nor did I have the skills and expertise that you were expected to have. I didn't have any use for contacts or connections at the time, but what I did have, I now realise, was far greater. I had a mixture of passion, perseverance, drive and a clear purpose that gave me the strength and motivation to pursue my goals. My purpose was to empower creative people coming from similar backgrounds to myself to be able to live up to their potential and take control of their own destiny and I was determined not to waver from that ambition. Being able to live my life creatively and express myself is invaluable to me and witnessing so much frustration growing up with my parents, I wanted to help others avoid a future of missed opportunities and regrets. Over the past 21 years, I've been in a position to lead MOBO and celebrate the excellence of talent in music, film and creative arts so to now be recognised myself is not only unexpected but very humbling and I'm usually thankful to be honoured in this way so I'd like to take this opportunity to dedicate this award to a few important people in my life. So first and foremost to my deceased parents who despite their relentless struggles against injustices taught me always to be the best I can be. I would also like to take this opportunity to dedicate this award to my partner for his unwaven support and backing. My son, who is a great inspiration to me, he has shown me how to appreciate the little things in life as one day you look back and realise that they are the big things. And to my dear effervescent friend Diane, who is here, I want to also thank her and to all you graduates I would like to say have the confidence to go in search of your dreams and try not to become a person of success but rather try to become a person of value. And lastly, I'd like to take this opportunity to dedicate this award to the school careers officer I went to see when I was a teenager who told me to be very realistic about my limited career options coming from a humble background and being on free school meals. I want to thank her for putting the fire in my belly for making me realise that only I could influence my own destiny.  Good luck. Thank you for listening.


Good afternoon. My name is Tatiana Flores from Rutgers University, and I'm introducing Florencia San Martín. Florencia has a BA in studio art from the Catholic University in Chile, Santiago, Chile. And then she came to New York and did an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU before coming to Rutgers where she earned her MA and is a soon-to-be PhD degree holder. She just defended her dissertation last Monday. Florencia has held fellowships from the Coniceed, the Chilean National Entity, from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, from the Smithsonian American Art Museum where she was a Patricia and Philip Frost Fellow in 2017-2018 and dissertation completion grant from Rutgers. Her dissertation is titled The Decolonial Project of Alfredo Yar, and it sheds light on the intersection of decolonial theory and art history and also discusses the early work of Yar and how it has informed recurring themes over the course of his career. She will be teaching Latin American film and Latin American art this fall at the School of Visual Arts, and she will also be working on a monograph on the Chilean artist Jorge Tecla in collaboration with the Archives of American Art, as well as turning, of course, to turning her dissertation into a book. And lastly, she's in the process of editing a special issue for Arts Journal on Decolonizing Contemporary Latin American Art. Thank you. Thank you so much Tatiana, it was a pleasure and an honor to be your student in seven years, and thank you so much for the organizers and also Gracia Mi Papaque Tanaka, my parents are here. Okay.  South ends were killed, millions were imprisoned, tortured or forced to exile. An entire society is still looking for truth and justice. As is well known today in critical memory studies in the southern Cone, the systematic violations of human rights during the 17th year dictatorship led by General Gusto Pinotet in Chile, which formally ended in 1990, was not isolated from the implementation of neoliberalism, an advanced form of capitalism. Just as happened with capitalism in the 16th century in the laboratory of the so-called New World, in the 1970s Chile, although with obvious different historical proportions, neoliberalism was imposed through a massive human and epistemological destruction. As Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galliano, sarcastic liquid quote, Pinotet was torturing people so prices could be free. In 2010, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the military going to Chile, an unprecedented number of artists, writers and filmmakers look back at the past to denounce the humanitarian crimes committed during the regime. The majority of these practices, however, turn human rights violation into spectacle aiming to close the issue of the dictatorship through neoliberal policies embracing pardon and reconciliation. Using the ongoing suffering of an entire society through different forms of spectacle, the task of these practices was to forget, to look forward, to sell. In so doing, they made visible precisely the continuity of a more durable and ghostly regime, the free market, whose origins just as that of the dictatorship was the military coup of September 11th of 1973 in Chile. Such was the case, for instance, in the screen of Chile, the Forbidden Images, a TV series broadcasted on prime time on national television and advertised by large corporations. Erroneously claiming to show for the very first time to the Chilean audience images of the dictatorship and thus ignoring the many documentaries made cynical by filmmakers of the third cinema movement, such as Patricio Guzmán, the series hosts a famous, if not the most famous soap opera actor in Chile, called Benjamin Vicuña, following a neoliberal script asked the viewer, quote, can we erase this episode from our memory? I hope we can, he remarked. Similar practices emerged in Chile around the same time. Using Primo Levi's concept of the gray zone, dozens of books by former victimizers recalling their crimes with Catholic regret were published, challenging the category of the victim and even asking for reparations from the state. A famous case was the many TV shows, journalistic records and films using the infamous figure of Helmosito, a victimizer who worked alongside the head of the Chilean intelligence, Manuel Contreras. In Chile, however, as writer Diamele Altid explains, the roles of victims and perpetrators were fairly clearly delineated. This was not the case in Peru, Colombia or Mexico, where the victim, victimizer binary is much less rigidly defended and in which issues such as race, ethnicity and indigeneity strongly came into play. But to be sure in Chile, Primo Levi's concept of the gray zone has been misused as a neoliberal tool to pardon those who collaborated with the regime and that today are repentant, showing the problems of imagining concepts, ideas and experiences as universal. Borrowing the term from the literary boom of the 60s and 70s in which writers from Latin America such as Gabriel Varsilla Marques or Julio Cortázar sought to replace the region's social backwardness by repudiating any link to tradition and the championing newness and gaining the approval of an international market, Chilean cultural critic Navi Richard coined this 2010 phenomenon in Chile as the Chilean memory boom. Although I generally agree with Richard, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge the aesthetic, historical and political relevance of representational forms that both took distance from spectacle and repentance and also criticized these practices. One example is Alfredo Jarre's The Geometry of Conscious, a permanent memorial of the Museum of Human Rights in Santiago, memory of human rights in Santiago. They have been on the conceptual strategies used by Jarre in this memorial and on the political and historical context in which it was created. I will first explain how Jarre interrupts the frozen past of the majority of commemorative monuments, critiquing human rights occurred during the dictatorship and recognizing the ways in which the neoliberal legacy of the regime is manifested in today's Chile. To develop this argument, I will first examine an early and little known work made by Jarre addressing this relationship in the dictatorship of Chile as an antecedent of his 2012 memorial. And secondly, I will center on The Geometry of Consciousness, delving on a counter narrative of the boom to think about memory today as well as in the contingency of this memorial within current political demands. In his early series of work from 1974, Jarre on a White Sheet simply writes four times the Spanish name Pablo, creating a vertical column at the center. Three pavlos in the drawing represent pavlos who died from different circumstances in 1973. One is the Chilean Nobel Prize of Literature, Pablo Neruda. The other one is Picasso. The third one is the Catalan-Teles Pablo Casals. The identity and the date of death of each of these pavlos is handwritten by Jarre at the bottom of the drawing. Casals and Picasso were outspoken critics of Franco's military dictatorship in Spain. So was Neruda, who was consul in Paris in 1939, helped more than 2,000 Spaniards from the Republican left to flee Franco's regime. Moreover, Neruda himself was an outspoken critic of the relationship between neoliberalism and human rights violation. In his last collection of poems, incitación al nexon y civil avance a la reducción chilena, which was published in English in 1980, Neruda embraces the violent imposition of multinational free markets and the catastrophic consequences of this economic model in the life and dignity of an entire society. Neruda died only two weeks after the coup for reasons until under investigation. It is telling that as soon as 1974, Jarre was taken as historical point of departure to the death of Neruda as Neruda himself was a victim of the dictatorial neoliberal regime. It is within this narrative that we can better understand the meaning of the fourth pavlo in Jarre's drawing. This pavlo in Jarre's words, quote, symbolizes all the pavlos who disappeared after the coup. This information is also provided in the drawing at the bottom right, Jarre writes, quote, anonymous 1973. Through a conceptual strategy, Jarre turns a word, a personal pronoun, into a concept embracing anonymity, disappearance, and collective ongoing mourning and dictatorship and post-dictatorship chilling. This is why Jarre titled his work, Pablo, Pablo, Pablo, Pablo. It is not one, nor two, but many. And those many are not only framed in the strict period of the dictatorship, but within its neoliberal aftermath, or better, within its neoliberal continuity. In Jarre's pavlo, past and an ongoing present, and the individual and the collective fuse together, remembering us about a neoliberal state that ever since implementation and dictatorship chilling, has not only prevented victims and their families to access to information and to achieve justice, but has also promote pardon and forgetful. Not surprisingly, Jarre has described Pablo as his first memorial. Indeed, not only this work demonstrates that the representation of memory in Chile and Latin America more broadly began way before memory debates entered academia in the late 70s and throughout the 80s. Memory, Jarre seems to tell us, is not a practice that emerges after periods of violence, but one that parallels these periods. Furthermore, the interlacing of past and present and the individual and the collective, that is a stake in Jarre's pavlo, would remind in the artist's thinking and aesthetics a show in his 2010 memorial, The Geometry of Consciousness. Commissioned by the newly inaugurated Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago at the end of Socialist Michel Bachelet's first term in office, Jarre's The Geometry of Consciousness is located underground at the Museum Plaza. Viewers access to the memorial by descending 33 steps. Once inside the cubic like installation after one minute of full darkness, hundreds of silhouettes, heads created by Jarre after photographs of living and death Chileans starts to light up on the front wall, rendered in the form of a grid of silhouettes multiplied to infinity in mirrors located in continuous wall. The process lasts for 90 seconds, projecting an increasing intense light. Sadly, all punch back into darkness, creating a strong imprint on the viewer's retina. Jarre's memorial thus refuses the possibility of passive spectatorship, interrupting the frozen past of commemorative monuments and resisting a fixed temporality that remembers the past as past. To the juxtaposition of silhouettes head, Jarre's work embraces the idea that the regime has not finished. In turn, as the silhouettes are multiplied to infinity, Jarre's memorial, just as his 1974 Pablo, portraits not only one or a certain fixed number of victims, but an entire society that is still affected by the dictatorship and its neoliberal continuity. In this sense, Jarre's memorial highlights a conflict that has not been settled. It highlights the fact that disappearance and torture are not just individual problems and that crimes did not just happen in the past, and they have a serious impact in the survivor, their families, the social environment, and the society overall. Plural pertains to a national coming to terms of the legacy of the dictatorship in the present that connects, on the one hand, the famous models such as don't understand where are they used in street protest since the very beginning of the dictatorship by families of the disappeared, and on the other hand, testimonies of former victims in the transition and post-transition period. It is known, for instance, that in the vast desert of Atacama in northern Chile where the world's largest radio telescope is located in a world-known facility called El Alma, or The Soul, the military boards thousands of bodies in secret graves. While this happened historically 20, 30, or even 40 years ago, the families of the victims, themselves victims of the regime, go every day to the desert and they want to search. I wish the telescopes didn't just look into the sky, but they could also see through the air so we can find them, said a mother of a disappeared in nostalgia for the light, a 2013 film by third cinema filmmaker, Patricia Guzman. I wish we could find them, she remarks, revealing that her searching is not individual but collective. Her search is shared by an entire society whose politics, social and cultural paradigms change drastically after the coup. In dialogue with this practice, George's Memorial invites the viewer to participate in an ongoing politicization in the post-dictatorial struggle in which the announcement of the neoliberal system of reconciliation, pardon and oblivion is a stake. Distancing from the, indeed, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the coup, other voices which are linked to the traumatic past and its legacy also emerge repoliticizing society and achieving important advances within the justice system. This is exemplary shown in the student movement of 2010 where thousands of students went out to the street demanding free education. They criticized the educational reforms made during the dictatorship in which education, just as every aspect in the citizens experience became a private good for a small privileged sector in society. They criticized, in a word, the neoliberal legacy of the dictatorship in the present. Other type of protest in the current post-dictatorial neoliberal streets are public space protests known as FUNAS. This type of protest began in Chile in 1999 coinciding with Pinochet's house arrest in London and his release a year later when he was received in Chile as a hero. This protest was carried out on the street protesting impunity back by both the neoliberal government and the justice system. Protesters exposed perpetrators crime at the residences chanting their names and their IDs. They carry out signs that read quote in Chile se sigue torturando in Chile torture continues complimenting this metaphor with that of sinrae justicia if there is no justice to turn victimizers into victims and thus to close the issue of the dictatorship. Victimizers are still incriminated within society and despite neoliberal efforts to even resignified memory sites critical memory practice continues. This practice resists declarations such as Chilean writer Mauricio Rojas 2015 statement explaining that quote more than a museum the museum of human rights in Santiago is a farce and quote considering that in August 2012 Rojas was named minister of culture by the current president of Chile the conservative millionaire Sebastián Piñera cultural workers organized by the poet Raul Zurita organized a massive act at the museum of memory and human rights. The title Volvera pensar por el corazón go back and thinking with the heart one of the organizers of the event said quote as cultural workers we are here to confirm our commitment to human rights and culture and to invite all citizens an entire political spectrum to a great national agreement for human rights, truth and justice we are making this act to celebrate life and to say that without memory there is no future. The aesthetics politics and poetics of George's memorial are certainly not boring despite the memorial being located underground beneath the museum plaza George's memorial just as his 1974 Pablo and the representational act addressing memory in the problematic context of the memory boom are always political. They are practices about survival resistance and building something for the future instead of boring the past in the realm of neoliberal spectacle pardon and reconciliation. George's memorial at the museum of memory is a testimony of resistance, existence and an energetic tool to continue the struggle. George's memorial is a testimony of dynamic memory. Thank you.