Annie Murphy | Journalist

Odey Curbelo is a Cuban painter now living and working in Denmark, and he currently has a solo show at the Skive Art Museum. Trained in traditional technique at Havana’s ISA art school, today Odey juxtaposes that training with his position as an outsider in Denmark, to explore the Danish landscape–and who, if anyone, “owns” iconic spaces.

Odey and I became friends while I was studying in Havana, and I’ve admired his art since I first saw some of his canvases–paintings of the sea–stacked up in a beautiful old studio on campus, where birds sometimes flew in through the windows. I’m really happy to hear about this show, and to check out his current work.

You can read more about the show, and check out more of his paintings here.

Photo: Anthony Cassidy/Getty Images, via NPR

Now that I’ve settled into a new rhythm–mixing a job at UC Berkeley with reporting trips to Latin America–I was finally able to get my radio archive up-to-date. You can check it out here, if you like. And in honor of beginnings of all sorts, here’s the most recent piece I reported, about one Bolivian family’s debate over baby slings versus baby strollers–and part of the NPR series Beginnings. I was delighted to contribute to the series, and had so much fun reporting this piece.

I took this photo in 2005, while on a Fulbright that brought me to Bolivia for a year; the year turned into six, and my research project led to a job as a journalist. Migrating to Latin America has been challenging, and strange, and fun–and taught me to think of America as the whole space that stretches from Canada to the tip of Chile. As of August, I’ll be spending a bit more time further north in that space, as a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Journalism School. Because I’ll be reporting more longform pieces, this space will be lay fallow for a bit. I will, however, be keeping a simple, if haphazard notebook via Tumblr.

After finishing up an intense and very fun month of reporting for NPR in Chile and Peru, I’m taking a few weeks to write, just outside the city of Iquitos. Have settled into my favorite inn, there’s a treehouse to work in during the daytime, and at night, it rains. Slowing down is good.

The nighttime soundscape:

One more photo from the road. En route to Cuz/sco, Upper Amazon, Peru.

The view from the road to Quillabamba, about five hours from Cusco.

During the ride in a local van–which passed through old Inca ruins and decaying cemeteries and streams running across the road–I overheard a saying that seems to reflect how playful Peruvian Spanish can be.

Esa chica no come platano para no botar la cascara.

This girl (in this case, someone named Rosita) doesn´t eat bananas, to avoid throwing out the peels.

A mother & son protest in Santiago against megadams slated for Chilean Patagonia.

Today’s piece for NPR’s Morning Edition, about a wave of ecoprotests in Chile. After visiting both Patagonia (where a megadam project was recently approved) and the capital, talking to Chileans across the country, and considering the growing pressure on natural resources worldwide, I think such ecoprotests are going to be increasingly common all over the globe.

Perpetually grey Lima is full of roving sweet sellers. They’re usually men dressed in white smocks–and they peddle old, three-wheeled bikes, with clear boxes bolted to the front, which are filled with cakes and puffs, oozing pastry cream and dusted with powdered sugar. It makes Lima feel like Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory meets the Tour de France, in sepia.

(Cake from Bolivia--by the time I finish interviews in Lima, it always seems to be dark!)

Some colleagues complain about Lima–too overcast, too sprawling, too much traffic–but I like the anachronistic feel it has. In addition to the sweet sellers, Lima is full of plazas, forgotten beaches, neighborhood bodegas with ornate tile floors, and grand buildings mixed in among modern structures. It was one of South America’s most important colonial centers, and modern Lima still rubs up against that. Maybe it’s healthy to have our historical memories regularly jogged by our surroundings.

In Lima, I’ve been staying with old friends. A few days ago, I covered the presidential elections with one of them, and as we were riding back from a fishing village, we passed a cement factory on the outskirts of the city. Though Lima’s downtown is full of trees, they’re there only because of irrigation, for the city sits in the midst of a coastal desert–sloping dunes broken only by shantytowns and factories and chicken farms. This particular cement factory, however, had planted about half an acre of trees on the dune behind it, clearly part of some “green” initiative. The trees looked like they were choking, and they were walled off so the residents of the shantytown next door couldn’t access their shade, should they manage to flourish. We shook our heads, laughed the way you laugh at things that aren’t funny, and continued the conversation we’d been having, which was, in a way, about those trees.

My friend had been wondering aloud at what possessed the Spanish to pick Lima as their base. It may have great sea access, but because of the desert environment, fresh water is extremely scarce, making Lima among the most unsustainable cities in the Americas.

“The Inca Empire wasn’t on the coast for a reason. They lived where they could most easily support themselves,” he said. “Do you think the Spanish paid any attention to that?”

Patagonian fjords, Chile | Photo: llano/anonimaprod.com

One of the things I like best about working in South America is exploring questions about the environment up close, experiencing the physical places that spur what sometimes seem like abstract debates. And since I first lived in Chile eight years ago, I wanted to get to Aysen, in Chilean Patagonia. The road there was finished just a few years ago, and it’s still difficult to access, so Aysen remains one of the most isolated places in the world. But now, Chile has decided to go forward with plans to dam Patagonia’s biggest rivers, which run through Aysen, and the region has become the center of a fight over natural resources and energy. The piece I reported for NPR’s Morning Edition:

It took three days bumping down dirt roads in a pickup truck to get to the heart of Aysen, which was full of dramatic peaks, fjords, and Jurassic-looking foliage. The region is sparsely populated, and the dams will mainly provide electricity for the capital, and for immense copper mines in the Atacama Desert. According to scientists, the dams will not just change the way the region looks, with high tension power lines and artificial lakes–they will also change the sediment and flow of the river, forever altering the ecology of Patagonia.

Something must be done to address growing energy needs–and lest this seem like Chile’s problem, remember that the copper Chile mines goes into virtually everyone’s high tech gadgetry. The laptop I’m typing this from is full of the metal… But is forever changing one of the Earth’s last true wildernesses really the solution?

Ricardo Lamito, 8, plays in a settlement near Tete, Mozambique | Photo: Vlad Sokhin

My first piece to air from the Mozambique reporting trip, a look at a booming coal mine that’s creating jobs, but also pushing people off their land, and hurting their ability to be self-sustaining. The Brazilian mining company, Vale, which is the second largest in the world, also became a “character” in the larger health sovereignty piece I reported there.

The full print and audio piece from NPR’s All Things Considered can be found here