Sarah Møller Christensen is a MA student at SAI, and she conducted ethnographic research among amber artisans in Mexico's Chiapas. Recently, Sarah was awarded a scholarship by the UiO Energy and Environment initiative, that will allow her to return to Chiapas to make a short ethnographic film about amber.
To help Sarah, and discuss the case of Chiapas amber, the AMBER team organised a small workshop at SAI. Beside Alessandro, Leni, Yayi, and Laur, SAI colleagues and Latin America experts Christian Krohn-Hansen, Arnd Schneider, and Maka Suarez took part in the workshop.
To begin, we watched the film "Land of Amber," a 2014 production that follows the tension between miners and traders in the towns of Simojovel and San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas. Following the screening, we discussed how Sarah's film project might depart from this story to make a different contribution, while also showing how the situation in Chiapas has changed over the past decade.