EL CENTRO DREAMS
In 2024, Of Grief & Dreams produced a pilot program with the staff of EL CENTRO de Igualdad y Derechos, a grassroots immigrants’ rights and workers justice organization.
For this engagement, we built a temporary vessel on the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, and guided participants on a journey to discover their most sacred dreams.
This film depicts imagery, dream recordings and conversations from this collaboration.
The courage, generosity, and grace offered by these participants are invaluable to this work. It is through a process of bearing witness and learning through engagement, that we can envision the shape of this work in the world.
subtítulos en español
A Wishful Dream/ Dream Translation by Carla Torres
DREAMING IN THE CLASSROOM
“This piece is a visual representation of what my dream is and who has been a key component for me. This piece is a conversation between my oldest son and I as we talk about what our dreams are—with the visuals of my dream world meeting my family world.”
-Carla Torres, student/ Columbia College Chicago
Over the course of a semester, 60 students at Columbia College Chicago embarked on their own personal dream voyages but in the community of the class. The students were then invited to articulate—in written text, or an audio or video recording—what happened for them during the voyage and what they discovered as their dreams.
Further into the course, the students were asked to create an artistic translation or record of one of their sacred dreams.
“As I reflected on what the students wrote and made during the semester, I was struck by the fact that many of them realized that they are already living their most sacred dreams. That though they have suffered loss, have dealt with grief, that they are able to see themselves and their lives as potentially whole, as sacred, as enough.”
-Ames Hawkins/ Professor, Columbia College Chicago
-Araceli Ramirez, student/ Columbia College Chicago
“In terms of my own journey in this class, I have grown in many ways both as a thinker and communicator. Before this course, I really never considered how present grief is in each of our lives. I never thought critically or even considered at all how grief can be both individual and communal. To be completely transparent, I was uncomfortable thinking about grief and did not have the tools to even discuss it. However, through our voyages and discussion post assignments, this course offered me the space to explore grief not only emotionally, but creatively too.”