I'm Not There

Throughout the event, however, the occasional sign kept popping up. "Where is Madhusree Dutta?" they read. Abreu and Acogny had both been introduced to the audience by a short biographical film about their work, and it was announced from the stage after the session had ended (and a chorus of children had sung us "America the Beautiful") that Dutta's film had contained some material (related to Bush and the current wars) that she was asked to remove. It seems she instead declined to attend. Regardless of what the material was, during a conference at which the focus is on coming together across disciplines and listening with sensitivity to our colleagues about their own struggles and challenges, it was alarming to some of those gathered that Dutta was treated in this way. There's probably a lot more to this story than the censorship angle presented to me, so I don't mean to pass any kind of judgement here, but if that's exactly what happened, in a way Madhusree Dutta made her point quite poetically by where she was not.