Teza Soe "A Female Revolution"

04/29/21 • 106 min

Teza Soe is a Burmese visual storyteller with a doctorate in photography, who received her PhD with a project focusing on the role of women in Myanmar society.
After reading the preface to her thesis, I felt that it would be a much better introduction than I could ever hope to craft for her. So, just this one time, I took the liberty of copying her own words, rather than write an introduction myself:

I left my country, Myanmar, when I was 16 to attend a university in Thailand. The reasons for me to leave home, a familiar environment, at such a young age to study abroad did not come easy. I vividly remember getting into the biggest argument ever with my parents just after the matriculation examination results came out. I still remember my total score was 2 points short of the cut off point for the University of Medicinethat year for women. That year the Ministry of Education had decided to raise the entry requirements for girls and reduce the requirement for boys because they felt that there had been too many women and not enough men in the country’s most pivoted profession. Up until that point, all my life I was told that the best thing I could achieve or the best profession I could get into as a woman in Myanmar, is the medical profession.In that moment, I felt like my whole world had ended as if everything I had worked for the past 11 years counted for nothing. And then I learned that my friend who got a lower score than I did could apply for the medical school, although his total score was 15 points lower than mine, just because the requirements are set much lower for boys. That was the first time in my life I felt so angry for being born as a woman. It wasn’t that I had failed; it wasn’t that I didn’t try hard enough; my only shortcoming was being a woman.

We will be talking about the historic role of women in Myanmar, why women are at the forefront of the democratic movement, and why female revolutionary leaders are a reason for hope.
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In the face of the current Burmese struggle, please support the initiative Print For Crisis, founded by my friends Chiara Luxardo and Olga Stefatou:
https://www.printforcrisis.org/
On their website, 80 photographers offer their limited edition fine art prints for a very affordable price. All net proceeds from the sales go to journalists, photographers, and artists in Myanmar. Print For Crisis will last another two weeks and prints are selling fast.
Choose from the works of amazing photographers like Chris Steele-Perkins, John Vink, and Nikos Economopoulos - just to name a few. Go get yours now and catch me if you can.
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SHOW NOTES
Print For Crisis Website
Print For Crisis Facebook
Print For Crisis Instagram
I Support Myanmar
Teza on Facebook
Thuma Collective
Yangon Photo Festival
Lensational (a collaboration for free photography education for women)
"Disclosure", Netflix, 2020
History Of Myanmar
Get Jim Kroft's Song, "Love In The Face Of Fear"
Mind the Bump

Support the show

Yellow Van Stories is a Mind the Bump Production.

Support the show

Yellow Van Stories is a Mind the Bump Production.

Previous Episode

Chiara Luxardo "Print For Crisis"

Chiara is an Italian visual storyteller based in the UK in London. In her work she explores identities, relationships and gender issues.

She is an active member of Women Photograph, a non-profit launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of women* and nonbinary visual journalists.

The roots for her interest in identity and the power of relationships can be traced back to a farm near Milan, I believe, where Chiara grew up. It is a place that has been in her family's hands for many generations and her love for the place finds expression in her ongoing project Family Farm.

The Family Farm is an examination of the visual residue of previous generations in the form of old pictures, juxtaposing the findings with new original visual concepts and, thereby, galvanizing a new interpretive, dialectic space that speaks of history as a living process - never complete in its evaluation and heavily dependent on the viewer's current perspective and emotional state. History, after all, is narrated.

Chiara lived and worked in Myanmar from 2015 to 2019, where she focused on LGBTQI+ projects and the organization of Yangon Pride.

In her project Burma Love, Chiara places gay couples in front of romantic studio backgrounds, heavily borrowing from the aesthetics of Burmese wedding photos, expressing the yearning of gay couples to be accepted into the common standards and rituals of society to be regarded, ultimately, as equals amongst equals.

Her love for Myanmar is still very strong. In the light of the current democratic uprising against the military junta with rising death tolls every day, Chiara and her friend Olga Stefatou, whom you might already know from a previous episode of the Yellow Van, launched the initiative Print For Crisis.
We at Mind the Bump want to support this great idea as much as we can. In this episode, therefore, we want to focus on what it is that made Chiara fall in love with Myanmar, why we should care about what is happening there at the moment, and how help can be as simple as hanging a beautiful photo up on your wall.
SHOW NOTES
Print For Crisis Website
Print For Crisis Facebook
Print For Crisis Instagram
Chiara's Website
Chiara on Instagram
Myanmar
Yangon
Aung San Suu Kyi
Get Jim Kroft's Song, "Love In The Face Of Fear"
Mind the Bump

Support the show

Yellow Van Stories is a Mind the Bump Production.

Next Episode

Print For Crisis "Looking Back and Ahead"

Today we come to you with the, for now, last episode about Myanmar. The initiative Print For Crisis, which has been on the road with us for the last four weeks, has come to an end and we thought it would be a nice opportunity to have a small retrospective of the conversations we were lucky enough to have in support of the initiative.
Through my conversations with Teza, Chiara, and Minn, I learned that there are a lot of reasons for hope and optimism for the future of Myanmar. One reason in particular is the role of the Burmese women, who are not only fighting for political freedom but for a society built on equality. Their blossoming self-esteem is a weapon and there is no turning back of the clock.

If we continue to support Myanmar, change will come sooner rather than later.
This isn't my optimism, it is the optimism of the Burmese people.
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SHOW NOTES
Print For Crisis Website
Print For Crisis Facebook
Print For Crisis Instagram
I Support Myanmar
Teza on Facebook
Minn on LinkedIn
Chiara's Website
Chiara on Instagram
"How Democracies Die", Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018
"Coup D'Etat: A Practical Handbook", Edward Luttwak, 1968
History Of Myanmar