Creative Soups for the Soul: Stories of Community Recovery in Talca, Chile, After the 2010 Earthquake

Abstract

This study, conducted in Talca, Chile, a year and a half after a massive natural disaster, focused on creative thinking and art production as manifestations of resilience. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants through community leaders and programs. Ten survivors whose houses were damaged or destroyed during the 2010 earthquake were willing to participate in semi-structured interviews that included verbal narratives and an art response. Systematic analysis illuminated conscious and latent psychological content. Three overarching themes were identified as central to survivors' recovery process and were then contrasted with data from New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, exploring universality and contextual factors in post disasters' creativity and resilience. Specifically, in Talca, the creation of craft for sale, instead of art making for emotional expression in New Orleans, was observed; idealism and future-oriented thinking were heightened in Talca, while humor and spirituality seemed more pronounced in New Orleans; and connections to natural surroundings in Talca were juxtaposed with New Orleans' residents' strong neighborhood affiliations and cultural festivities.

Widening our lens: The implications of resilience for the professional identity and practice of dance movement therapists

“…Two researches were conducted in order to enquire about the relationship between creativity and resilience in the survivors of natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina in USA and the 2010 earthquake in Chile (Bender, Metzl, Selman, Gloger, & Moreno, 2014;Metzl, 2009). Flexible thinking, originality, art making, writing for processing events and participating in city's cultural traditions and events, were perceived by survivors as important to bouncing back regardless of socio-economic status and ethnicity.…”

Representing Recovery: How the Construction and Contestation of Needs and Priorities Can Shape Long-term Outcomes for Disaster-affected People

“…While Mohr was careful not to assert a cause-effect relationship between the arts and post-traumatic healing, she found that her respondents drew on the arts to attribute meaning to their traumatic experiences. Further research is needed to understand the mechanisms by which arts interventions can shape recovery processes and support post-disaster wellbeing in different socio-cultural contexts (Bender et al, 2015).…”

“…While Mohr was careful not to assert a cause-effect relationship between the arts and post-traumatic healing, she found that her respondents drew on the arts to attribute meaning to their traumatic experiences. Further research is needed to understand the mechanisms by which arts interventions can shape recovery processes and support post-disaster wellbeing in different socio-cultural contexts (Bender et al, 2015). In comparing arts interventions and recovery outcomes in Talca, Chile (after the 2010 earthquake) and New Orleans (after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina), Bender et al (2015, p. 11) found ‘essential differences’ in community solutions and the ways in which the content of artworks ‘linked to cultural and contextual narratives’.…”

“…Further research is needed to understand the mechanisms by which arts interventions can shape recovery processes and support post-disaster wellbeing in different socio-cultural contexts (Bender et al, 2015). In comparing arts interventions and recovery outcomes in Talca, Chile (after the 2010 earthquake) and New Orleans (after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina), Bender et al (2015, p. 11) found ‘essential differences’ in community solutions and the ways in which the content of artworks ‘linked to cultural and contextual narratives’. For example, while New Orleans residents approached art-making as a means of personal self-expression and of depicting individual attributes related to their survival, in Talca participants preferred to collaborate in their art-making and depict their survival within the context of a shared journey in a collective environment.…”

Gender and leadership in the wake of the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile

“…The aim of this paper is to examine this issue in more depth with respect to the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred in Chile in 2010, comparing the leadership [2] undertaken by women and by men in the response and recovery processes [3]. This catastrophic event was selected for study as it is one of the most devastating to have ever occurred in the world, and it also allows us to extend scientific knowledge about this geographic area (Bender et al, 2015;Moreno and Shaw, 2018;Engel and Warner, 2019;Valenzuela et al, 2019).…”