Slought Foundation (‘Sl-aw-t’) is a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia that engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change. We collaborate with a range of partners including artists, communities, universities, and governments to encourage cultural inclusiveness and social activism. Culture means more than preservation or presentation to us; it means the exchange of ideas, the creation of concepts.
From Kwame Anthony Appiah to Helene Cixous, Werner Herzog to Kazuyo Sejima, our programs feature today’s visionaries in conversation about the role of the artist in society, and the potential transformation of social and political structures. In 2010, 450+ hours of recordings from these programs, available online, were downloaded over 125,000 times by visitors from 100 countries.
Over the course of three weekends in October, 2011, and February and May, 2012, Dia Art Foundation will present a series of Yvonne Rainer’s dance works at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Dia’s retrospective, entitled Yvonne Rainer, will celebrate the depth of Rainer’s contributions to dance and will feature early works of choreography from the 1960s—including both iconic and lesser-known pieces—as well as three compositions created within the last twelve years.
Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.
Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.
KULTIVATOR is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice, situated in rural village Dyestad, on the island Öland on the southeast coast of Sweden.
By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities, near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provide a meeting and working space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival.
Kultivator initiates and executes meetings between idealism and realism, hoping that fruitful cooperation’s should take form.
Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release. Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition. This reinterpretation showcases Kraftwerk’s historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture.
Assembly New York has started a music blog asking creatives to make music mixes to share. They say: For the sake of joining like-minded individuals through music and experience, we ask friends, designers, musicians, artists, stylists, writers & other cultural contributors to share their libraries and thoughts with us.
(1) How do you find the music you listen to?
I have some great friends that are really into music and like to share.
(2) What is your favorite way to enjoy music (live, alone, in the car, bath, work, etc.)? Alone. Loud. In bed. usually at night in the dark.
(3) What do you find exciting about the new music you listen to? To be honest I am really into stoner rock so the new music that I find is usually an old song that I haven’t heard before. When I stumble upon music that is new like Howlin Rain and Black Mountain which is influenced by the 60’s/70’s I get very excited and I listen to it over and over again.
(4) What is it about the songs you’ve been listening to for years that resonates with you? Nostalgia. Music resonate usually with me due to connecting with lyrics in a song from my personal experiences. I think a good song is one that evokes emotion whether it’s dark or brings you joy.
This interdisciplinary study fuses analysis of feminist literature and manifestos, radical political theory, critical vanguard studies, women’s performance art, and popular culture to argue for the animal liberation movement as successor to the liberationist visions of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, most especially the Surrealists. These vanguard groups are judiciously critiqued for their refusal to confront their own misogyny, a quandary that continues to plague animal activists, thereby disallowing for cohesion and full recognition of women’s value within a culturally marginalized cause.
This volume is of interest to anyone who is concerned about the continued—indeed, escalating—violence against nonhumans. More broadly, it will interest those seeking new pathways to challenge the dominant power constructions through which oppression of humans, nonhumans, and the environment thrives. Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde ultimately poses the animal liberation movement as having serious political and cultural implications for radical social change, destruction of hierarchy and for a world without shackles and cages, much as the Surrealists envisioned.
Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation
By: Kim Socha
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2012, XIV, 258 pp.
Pb: 978-90-420-3423-5
€ 54 / US$ 81
Kim Socha is an animal activist and sits on the board of the Animal Rights Coalition in Minneapolis, MN. Holding a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, she works as a composition and literature instructor with publications in the areas of surrealism, Latino literature and pedagogy.
How can objects sometimes be vibrant things with an effective presence independent of the words, images, and feelings they may provoke in humans? This question is posed by Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of “Thingness,” the nature of matter. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center’s programs will focus on the material conditions of our lives. Jane Bennet is a professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. In her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010), she asks how our politics might approach public concerns were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things but the things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects and manifest traces of independence and vitality? Following the tangled threads that link vibrant materialities, human selves, and the “agentic assemblages” they form, Bennett examines what hoarders, people who are preternaturally attuned to “things,” can teach us about the agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff. Professor Bennet is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman’s materialism.
Black Dog Publishing: Critical Dictionary is an ambitious cornucopia of thoughts, images, and illustrations from online art magazine criticaldictionary.com. Inspired by Georges Bataille’s critical dictionary, the project strives to declassify terms in a playful manner emphasizing the open-ended, the provisional and the unfinished nature of language.
The title alludes to the mock dictionary that Georges Bataille edited for Documents in 1929 and 1930. Like its famous precedent from Georges Bataille, Critical Dictionary aims to puncture pretension, bringing words and their referents down to earth using a playful manner to declassify or undefine terms. Abandoning the conventional approach of dictionaries and their solely supportive use of imagery, Critical Dictionary allows images to act progressively and many of the entries are illustrated by several examples leading to an evolving discussion on interpretation.
Critical Dictionary includes contributions from artists, illustrators and photographers including Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, David Campany, Common Culture, Karen Knorr, Ann Lee, Jake Walters and Penelope Umbrico. Entries include Accident, Civilization, Drone, Error, Fragment, Informe, Metaphor, Monument: Mycelium, Portrait, Quotation, Retort, Smell, Touch, Umfunktionierung, Voice, Wander, XXX and Zoo. Critical Dictionary provides a thought provoking take on language and preconception through unique imagery and the playful re-organisation of texts and images.
The sonic environment is an indicator for the quality of life
One crucial aspect, however, remains open and leads to a multitude of questions: Is this, what our hearing is exposed to, satisfying and enhancing our individual, social, functional, biological, economical, aesthetic and existential needs and endeavors? If not, which concepts exist to “orchestrate” everyday life’s cacophony? Which methods exist to successfully evaluate the quality of soundscapes? Which criteria and values have to be developed, which practical constraints and habits to be dismissed in order to design the everyday as a “Hörenswürdigkeit”, which means: as something worth listening to?
How to improve the Global Composition to make the world more liveable?
Within this process: What role does media play and relation to its commodification of sound? Are there valid approaches to or even successful examples of shaping the soundscape in ways that are beneficial or at least acceptable for a majority? Are there strategies for overcoming the societal, political and economic hindrances that inhibit the inclusion of auditory considerations in the making of a sustainable society? What is the role of art in developing paradigms for auditory solutions applied to our living environments?
How to foster listening abilities within the concert of the senses?
Last but not least, what educational concepts and methods exist for integrating listening abilities into the concert of the senses, and develop auditory faculties as important tools for understanding, criticizing, shaping and designing the global environment? More infos on keynote speakers, conference fees and organisational details will be announced soon.
Proposals are invited for papers/posters, workshops, roundtable discussions, applied and artistic contributions, relating, but not limited to the conference’s main topics. (Please, load down the appropriate form from this page and fill it out.)
On March 23rd London will host a unique conference on the neuroscience, psychiatry and interpretation of revelatory visionary experiences.
Mental health professionals frequently encounter people who report experiences of God or supernatural beings speaking or acting through them to reveal important truths. In some cases it is difficult to know to what extent such experiences are best explained as ‘illness’, or represent experiences which are accepted and valued within a person’s religious or cultural context. Indeed, revelatory experiences form a key part of the formation and development of major world religions through figures such as prophets, visionaries, and yogins, as well as in the religious practice of shamans and others in traditional smaller scale societies. Why are revelatory experiences and related altered states of consciousness so common across cultures and history? What neural and other processes cause them? When should they be thought of as due to mental illness, as opposed to culturally accepted religious experience? And what value should or can be placed upon them? In this one day conference leading scholars from neuroscience, psychiatry, theology and religious studies, history and anthropology gather to present recent findings, and debate with each other and the audience about these fundamental aspects of human experience.
Who should attend: This one day interdisciplinary conference will be useful to academic psychologists, neuroscientists and humanities scholars interested in understanding the possibilities for interdisciplinary understanding of complex human behavior; as well as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, nurses and any professionals whose work requires them to make sense of the relations between culture, religion, and mental health.
Confirmed Speakers
Dr Quinton Deeley, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry Kings College London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, SLAM
Professor Stephen Pattison, Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Practice at the University of Birmingham
Dr Mitul Mehta, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London
Dr Eamonn Walsh, Post doctoral Researcher, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London
Professor Chris Rowland, Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture from Oxford
Professor Roland Littlewood, Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at University College London
Professor David Oakley, University College London
The Very Rev Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral San Fransisco
Dr Piers Vitebsky, Head of Anthropology and Russian Arctic Studies, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Professor Geoffrey Samuel, Religious Studies, University of Cardiff
Who knew that a forkful of food could have such a far reaching effect? Science Gallery’s first foray into food, EDIBLE, tackles this vast topic from the perspective of the eater, probing how our actions as eaters shape what is sown, grown, harvested and consumed.
Thanks to Design Goat we are able to hear some food. They say:
For the preview party we were asked to do a multi sensory event using sound and jelly. We had three different jellys and three sounds. We asked guests to listen to all three sounds and pick the most appetizing one, essentially tasting with their ears. We told nobody what was in any of the jellies and we are putting it up here for people to find out. We have also posted the sounds below so they can listen again.
In-House Festival, Jerusalem Season of Culture, 2011. [Photo via Jerusalem Season of Culture]
Hospitality begins at home — but it also describes our relation to each other as peoples, territories and nations. In his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” which is the basis for the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights, Kant argues that the stranger’s right to hospitality is a universal right, and that it is derived both from the right to self preservation, which emerges from the law of nature (gesellschaft), and from the right of association, which is part of the law of society (gemeinshaft). For Kant, society might not be natural, pleasant or desirable; but it is a real condition of a populated world. Humans by nature are strangers who travel from an original solitary or familial place and are confronted by association. The only alternative to hospitality or exchange is aggression or war.
This right of hospitality exists only between equals; for the stranger must be capable of returning to his own house, where he would then preside as host. How then does the rule of hospitality extend to those who cannot claim their reciprocal right, such as the refugee, who is not a guest because he is not also a host? Without the wherewithal to reciprocate as a citizen of a nation, the refugee must present himself as merely human, or rely on a third party, such as the United Nations, to demand the rights of hospitality for him. How does the rule of hospitality extend to a stranger who is not a guest because he harbors aggression in relation to his lacking the status of host? It is tempting to recast Jerusalem as a new, singular space of hospitality, where inhabitants are simultaneously strangers and hosts in a continual state of reciprocity. Giorgio Agamben similarly describes a variation on the two-state solution whereby Jerusalem is an extra-national and simultaneous capital of both Arab and Jew — a new topological space, like a Mobius strip singular and dual at once. And beyond the intractable divisions of Jerusalem, perhaps hospitality offers us language with which to describe our emerging geo-political spaces and the aspirations we have for them.
Unknown Fields is a nomadic studio that throws open the doors of the A A and sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science-fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.
This year the Division will be heading off on a reconnaissance road trip to chronicle a series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes of the United States. From the ‘illegal aliens’ of the New Mexico border towns we will head north exploring territories of negotiation and conflict, zones of transgression, suspicion and speculation. We will rumble along the UFO highway, past the mythic territories of Area 51, listening to tall tales from conspiracy theorists amidst the sonic booms crackling in the quiet desert air. We will visit covert military test sites and the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry as we shape our own experimental craft to launch in the skies above the psychedelic community of the Burning Man Festival, where our journey ends. By the bonfires we will examine the mysteries and conspiracies that surround what lies off the map, off-grid and below the radar as we propose new truths and expose alternative fictions.
Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction. Together we will form a traveling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in an annual publication and traveling exhibition. Throughout our journey the Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention as we examine the unknown fields between truth and fiction.
Applications
The deadline for applications is 6 August 2012. All participants traveling from abroad are responsible for securing any visa required. After payment of fees, the AA can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop. A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.
Fees
The AA Visiting School requires a fee of £695 per participant, which includes a £50 Visiting Membership. If you are already a member, the total fee will be reduced automatically by £50 by the online payment system.
Eligibility
The workshop is open to architecture and design students and professionals worldwide.
The exhibition “Mengele’s Skull” is structured around a specially commissioned book of the same title co-authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman. Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has been commissioned to respond to the proposition laid out in this book. Next to major new works by Hito Steyerl, this exhibition presents documentary and source materials.
The publication Mengele’s Skull discusses the forensic identification of the remains of infamous Nazi-doctor Joseph Mengele after his exhumation in 1985. The forensic investigation and identification of Mengele’s remains marks a transition. From now on, the “era of the witness”, centered around human testimony and trauma, gradually gives way to an “era of forensics”, in which things – such as bones – act as the witnesses of past events. How do bones act as witnesses? What role do technologies such as 3D scans and biomedical data play in the making of forensic evidence? And what is the role and politics of images?
Woman, Art & Technology is a new series of interviews on Furtherfield. Over the next year Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will interview artists, designers, theorists, curators, and others; to explore different perspectives on the current voice of woman working in art and technology. I am honored to begin this series with an interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a true pioneer in the field who has recently produced !Women Art Revolution- A Secret History.
Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. She has been honored by numerous prestigious awards including the 2010-2011 d.velop digital art and 2009 SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Awards. Hershman also recently received the 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an award which supported her latest documentary film !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History.
Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic aims to explore the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the exhibition, acquisition and preservation of feminist artwork by Ontario’s public art galleries. In December 2008, the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG), in collaboration with Carla Garnet, organized a symposium that invited women curators, museum professionals and artists to bring attention to this topic, “Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic.” Nine Canadian women visual art professionals were invited to speak at the symposium.
An additional presentation from Carmen Mörsch, an international arts educator and researcher, is also included, presented in February 2010. The purpose of this website is to publish the transcripts, video and audio recordings of this symposium online, making them publicly available to engage a wider audience. We encourage visitors to engage with these critical practices and important presentations, as well as the additional resources and links provided by the presenters.
Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics presents reviews, essays and features to investigate the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation. The Journal comes out 4 times per year in English and Norwegian.
This issue of Seismopolite Journal brings texts about art and politics from a number of localities worldwide.
Only light and memory: the permeable cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Through a local framing May Adadol Ingawanij and David Teh shed a rare light on the many tensions that are channelled, yet somehow balanced, in the films of the Palme d’Or-winning director
Details on contemporary fascism
The exhibition Details at Bergen Kunsthall focuses on the political potential in art as an archaeology of the politics of perception: it specifically inquires about everyday repositories of contemporary fascism.
Fear of Speaking
Curator June Yap discusses the conditions for freedom of speech in Singapore under the so-called ‘new normal’ after the parliamentary and presidential elections, with reference to a recent theatre play entitled Fear of Writing.
Interview with Övgü Gökçe, Project Coordinator of Diyarbakır Arts Center
The Diyarbakır Arts Center (DSM) is the Diyarbakır branch of Anadolu Kültür, an organization which helps discovering the local cultural and artistic potentials of cities all over Anatolia, and works to form bridges between diverse cities in Turkey and to international cities and art scenes.
On the Fallacies of “Useful Art”: Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International
Chris Mansour discusses the implications of performance artist Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil, which she opposes to an idea of aesthetic autonomy.
The political matrix: The 12th Istanbul Biennial
This year’s Istanbul Biennial deconstructs the idea of the art space architecturally, and simultaneously reclaims it as a pure function of the visitors’ bodily and intellectual possibilities of navigation.
NYFA speaks with 2009 Digital/Electronic Arts Fellow: Hi Leila and Cary, please tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you’re currently working on.
We are an eco-art/theory collaborative and former New Yorkers now based in Rochester, NY. Leila’s academic training is in literature and Cary has made new media and performance-based art for over twenty years. We bring together our separate disciplines, histories, and practices through a shared interest in nature and the environment. For us, the “environment” encompasses a wide variety of networked systems, including biological habitats, global exchanges, industrial grids, digital networks, and the democratic imagination. Our works merge primitive with emergent technologies and navigate the intertwined terrain between nature, built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. We are particularly excited right now about a residency program we are creating in the central Maine mountains where new media practitioners will be invited to make art in networked treehouses in the remote woods.
Dr. Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.
Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture.
As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage.
In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom.
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small cafè near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.
But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Sègur and walked home as the sun rose. The mission had been so easy that one of the youths, Natacha, seriously asked herself if she had dreamed it. No, she concluded: “In a dream, it would have been more complicated.”
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
THE GAMBIT OF THIS EXHIBITION about 9/11, which includes sixty-nine works by forty-two artists, is deceptively simple: to eschew any images of the attacks and any made in response to them. (As if to prove the rule, there is one exception, a 2003 proposal by Ellsworth Kelly to reconfigure Ground Zero as a giant trapezoidal park of bright green grass.) Instead, MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey writes in his brochure, “this exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.” This is a strong thesis—one that asks to be taken seriously. As for the ban on images of 9/11, Eleey regards the attacks as an intervention in spectacle that was a spectacle in its own right: 9/11 “was made to be used,” he argues, with the Bush administration no less than Al Qaeda in mind. “Why would I want to repeat such transgression?” His catalog essay begins with an epigraph from Wittgenstein—“A picture held us captive”—and his purported aim is to release us from this captivity, to despectacularize 9/11, a little.
View of “September 11,” 2011. Foreground: Christo, Red Package, 1968. Background, from left: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1991; Willem de Rooij, Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000–July 2002), 2003. Photo: Matthew Septimus.
In recent weeks it has become public in Argentina, the project initiated by two artists from Buenos Aires, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicholas Goldberg, consisting of a loan moving the meteorite “El Chaco” to Kassel, Germany, during the international art contemporary art exhibition Documenta 13.
“In Argentina, a rich and complex debate has recently arisen about the loan of this object. dOCUMENTA (13) therefore suspended its loan request on January 16 in respect of the positions stated by experts and local communities. Furthermore, dOCUMENTA (13) would like to state that no loan of the El Chaco meteorite will be further requested without a full endorsement by the peoples of the land of Chaco, by the local community as a whole, and in careful consideration of the beliefs and principles of the traditional custodians today. The artists are currently meeting with all concerned parties to discuss the matter together.”
Could this be one of those tactical, post-colonial, and anti-paradigmatic works of conceptual art banning?
Cultural astronomer Alejandro López, among his colleagues, promoted the opposition to this project, which seriously violates the rights of Aboriginal Chaco. The writings of ancient chroniclers and investigations carried up from the Aboriginal worldview, clearly show that for these people meteors scattered on Campo del Cielo, are very important milestones in its territory.
Since the project was announced to move the meteorite Chaco aborigines have voiced opposition to it and want to work to make their voices heard. Click HERE to read and sign the petition. The petition is written in Spanish. However, you don’t read Spanish to sign it.
El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina
Click HERE to read the statement written by Documenta 13 suspending their request for the exhibition.
Interview with Guillermo Faivovich in La Voz, an Argentine publication.
From Cairo to cyberspace, from Main Street to Wall Street, today’s social movements have a creative new edge that’s blurring the boundaries between artist and activist, hacker and dreamer. But the principles that make for successful creative action rarely get hashed out or written down.
Until now.
Beautiful Trouble brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action. Among the groups included are Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, Code Pink, SmartMeme, The Ruckus Society, Beyond the Choir, The Center for Artistic Activism, Waging Nonviolence, Alliance of Community Trainers and Nonviolence International.
Contributors include Rae Abileah, Ryan Acuff, Celia Alario, Phil Aroneanu, Peter Barnes, Jesse Barron, Andy Bichlbaum, Nadine Bloch, Kathryn Blume, L.M. Bogad, Josh Bolotsky, Mike Bonanno, Andrew Boyd, Kevin Buckland, Margaret Campbell, Doyle Canning, Samantha Corbin, Yutaka Dirks, Steve Duncombe, Mark Engler, Simon Enoch, Jodie Evans, John Ewing, Brian Fairbanks, Bryan Farrell, Janice Fine, Lisa Fithian, Cristian Fleming, Elisabeth Ginsberg, Stan Goff, Arun Gupta, Silas Harrebye, Judith Helfand, Daniel Hunter, Sarah Jaffe, John Jordan, Dmytri Kleiner, Sally Kohn, Steve Lambert, Anna Lee, Stephen Lerner, Zack Malitz, Nancy Mancias, Duncan Meisel, Matt Meyer, Dave Oswald Mitchell, Tracey Mitchell, George Monbiot, Brad Newsham, Gaby Pacheco, Mark Read, Patrick Reinsborough, Simon Roel, Joshua Kahn Russell, Leonidas Martin Saura, Levana Saxon, Maxine Schoefer-Wulf, Nathan Schneider, Kristen Ess Schurr, John Sellers, Rajni Shah, Brooke Singer, Matt Skomarovsky, Andrew Slack, Phillip Smith, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Starhawk, Eric Stoner, Jeremy Varon, Virginia Vitzthum, Harsha Walia, Jefferey Webber and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
Beautiful Trouble puts the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change-makers. www.beautifultrouble.org
Welcome to Designing Civic Encounter an initiative by ArtTerritories, engaging in existing and potential forms of urban development and public culture in Palestine. The event which took place between July 21-24, 2011, unfolded through an URBAN BUS TOUR traversing urban locations within and around Ramallah city enabling debates and conversations at different stations, a two-day SYMPOSIUM on questions of urban transformations in Palestinian and Arab cities, and a full day WORKSHOP with visionary social architect Teddy Cruz.
Designing Civic Encounter opened a forum in the real for the inquiry and discussion of the public urban experience under the current trends in planning, financing and building practices. Attracting an active local and international roster of architects, artists, educators, environmentalists, community activists and politicians, this online publication compiles video documentations generated from the events and also features art works and newly commissioned texts and photographs.
You can navigate the web publication through the names of the contributors listed on the right hand column and the listed summaries on the left hand column.
Germany’s famous Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933 forged new boundaries in the art and design world and remains highly influential today. But its brand and legacy has been under threat for five decades from a large German-Swiss home goods retailer that took the title and trademark “Bauhaus” in 1960 and now has 190 stores around Europe.
Architect Walter Gropius and his group of communal craftsmen put a radical stamp on architecture, design and art education during Germany’s Weimar Period between the two world wars. He even claims he coined the term “Bauhaus” as the name for his atypical art school.
Along the way, though, he forgot an important thing: to protect the name.
As a result, up to 40 companies in Germany and myriad others abroad have taken the word “Bauhaus” as a brand or title. The imitators include a furniture label in the United States, a rumored bordello in Japan, a chocolate variety that touts its form and function, a real estate company and the early British gothic band led by Peter Murphy.
“Bauhaus sells,” says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Museum in Berlin. “That’s the point.” When someone is copying you or your name in a corporate context, she says, “then you see that you really have a brand.”
But the greatest squatter of the moniker is a do-it-yourself retailer based in Mannheim, which trademarked the Bauhaus during postwar divided Germany. It happened before Gropius and others moved to established archives and museums — in Dessau and Weimar (in the former east) and Berlin — to explain and protect the historical Bauhaus and its legacy. Now, it’s causing confusion to the general public and frustration to Bauhaus design aficionados.
Written by Paul Glader at the Spiegel. Continue HERE
This photograph documents the performance piece ‘Street suspension’, which took place in New York on 21 July 1984. © Stelarc Photograph: Nina Kuo
In-House Festival, Jerusalem Season of Culture, 2011. [Photo via Jerusalem Season of Culture]
Maya Zack: Living Room, 3D computer generated anaglyph. [Courtesy of the artist and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv]
27 Mar 2000, Manhattan, New York, New York, USA – Author Maya Angelou hosts the 2000 annual conference for the Children’s Defense Fund. – Image by ©Najlah Feanny/CORBIS SABA
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
View of “September 11,” 2011. Foreground: Christo, Red Package, 1968. Background, from left: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1991; Willem de Rooij, Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000–July 2002), 2003. Photo: Matthew Septimus.
El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina
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