Arizona’s new immigration law has sparked fervent demonstrations and activist work of all kinds. Many cite the law as a blatant example of racial profiling, scapegoating, and hatred. Yesterday, Arizona federal judge Susan Bolton attempted to affirm the Obama administration’s position against the bill, but failed to meet the demand for an injunction that would have stopped SB1070 all together. Today, SB1070 officially goes into effect, but without many of the provisions that gave the law ‘real teeth‘.

Music artists have joined the ever- growing backlash against Arizona’s new anti-immigration law. The boycotts began two weeks ago, when Rage Against the Machine threw a benefit concert that raised $300,000 for organizations fighting the bill. More and more artists are joining what is being called the Soundstrike, including Kanye West, Cypress Hill, Tenacious D, Massive Attack, Norteno superstars Los Tigres del Norte, salsa-ska band Ozomatli, Nine Inch Nails, Maroon 5, Ben Harper, State Radio, Anti-Flag, and many more. Though some argue that the bands’ efforts will only hurt businesses in Arizona and disappoint fans, the nature of the boycott reflects the anger felt by those fighting against SB1070, a law they see as legalizing racial profiling and fueling an already thriving culture of hatred. In the video below, Zach de la Rocha speaks about the Soundstrike movement:

A number of other activist and artistic efforts have emerged in the fight against SB1070. On July 28th, a group known as Stop the Hate scaled down a construction crane in Phoenix to display a large banner calling for an injunction against the implementation of the law. In a statement released by the group, the activists point to the true nature of the law:

“We say ‘stop hate’ because SB 1070 is not immigration policy. Like the experience of the Irish, Italian, Chinese or others, SB 1070 is simply scapegoating and targeting of the most vulnerable among us in these uncertain times; times that should call us to stand together as a people. Within days of SB 1070 passing, we witnessed vicious hate crimes against Latinos in the Southwest. We know that hateful laws legitimize hateful acts and that tolerating their passage signals a dangerous direction for the country.”

Ernesto Yerena, a 23 year- old activist leader and artist, creates simple posters reminiscent of anti- war and civil rights graphics of the 1960s. Yerena grew up close to the border, and eventually found a way to blend his passion for art with his passionate resistance of the anti- immigration movement. See more of his work here.

Yesterday’s small victory is only the beginning in a long fight that will likely end up in the Supreme Court. As the fight continues, musicians, artists, and other activists will surely continue express their anger with Arizona and it’s leaders. Legislators and citizens are left with the responsibility to demand that this unjust law be stopped.

Add-art.org, a FireFox add-on that replaces advertising on websites with curated art images, is featuring an exhibit curated by our friends at Groundswell titled “Our Fire and Our Tenderness.”

“Care is a way of asking questions about the longevity and influence of social movements. I’m interested in how we take care of one another, establish new social relations based around those values, and still maintain a culture that’s antagonistic. To say that in a more complicated way, maybe, it’s a way of addressing a set of concerns that focus mostly on the practical delineations of who is involved in the self-reproduction of social movements, but also involves some affective, and moral considerations.

This show focuses on care as maintenance, a very practical question about production and perpetuation, and one that only slightly touches on the questions about affect and morality. Here, the art itself is maintenance labor, or makes caring labor visible.

While these actions look similar and even seem banal, they offer unique questions about caring labor. Services United interrogates human-cultivated energy, in the form of electricity, to find the value of the work, and to dig deeper into the possible historical contingencies of how we do caring labor. Material Exchange’s DIY Coat Check sets an expectation of care, and asks what might happen when it’s unmet; how far caring mechanisms can extend or be extended is at stake in the process. Other artists include Environmental Services, Natasha Wheat, Mike Wolf, Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and Hideous Beast.

This theme is also the subject of a forthcoming journal edited by the Groundswell Collective. [http://blog.groundswellcollective.com/journal/]”

Go to Add-Art.org to read more on David Morgan and Groundswell’s latest exhibit, and while you are at it, learn how to install Add-art.

Note: The following interview documents a mini-residency that took place last fall as part of Provisions’ Balkans Project.

Anna Kalinina: Let’s focus our discussion on the time you spent in the Balkans and how your impressions from the region might be reflected in your work as an artist. First however, I would like to know which countries you visited and how long where you there.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: I was able to visit Bosnia, Turkey, and Macedonia. I was there for close to two weeks. I flew to Istanbul and from there I traveled to Sarajevo with Olivia Georgia and John Feffer. In Sarajevo we met Donald Russell, then I went on my own to Skopje, in Macedonia.

Anna Kalinina: I understand that you want to practice all the faiths of Sarajevo – can you tell me more about this?

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: This is an idea for an art and life experience that I have been developing and which relates to my upbringing in the Spanish speaking Caribbean. I grew up in a very diverse environment, religiously speaking. Part of my mother’s family came to the Dominican Republic from Lebanon. My father’s side of the family is from the Dominican Republic. Lately, I have been tracing my background to Haiti through both sides of the family, maternal and paternal. But going back to the subject of religion and spirituality, I had the most pluralistic childhood in this respect. I remember going to Jehovah’s Witnesses primary school, attending an evangelical summer camp and then going to Catholic school from fourth grade until my last year in high school. At home, l was also introduced to Afro-Caribbean spirituality. So at the age of seven I had a fairly elaborate altar in my bedroom. My mother has had and continues to have an ecumenical understanding of spiritually, so it was a blessing to have this kind of upbringing. Now she goes to an evangelical church.

(more…)

Anti-Racism World Cup 2010
July 16-18

Donegal Celtic FC
Suffolk Road
Belfast Northern Ireland BT17

“For the last three years teams have traveled from across the world to play against teams from various ethnic minority groups and from local communities in Belfast and across Ireland.

Last years tournament involved over 500 local people and 100 international guests and was a showcase for Anti-Racism against a backdrop of an upsurge of racist attacks in Belfast.

This year we intend to bring more teams to Belfast, including for the first time a Palestinian youth team, and we intend to make the tournament the largest anti-racist event in Ireland in 2010.”

[Text and graphic from ARWC website. Thanks to Andy Hudson in northern England. Cross-posted to the blog of Goal 2010!, a World Cup soccer and social media project. ]

Foreign Policy has published Dulce Pinzón’s streotype-busting photograpghs.

I saw a Spiderman costume in a store in November 2001, and that’s when everything came together in my head. Comic-book superheroes have an alter ego, and so do immigrants in the United States. They may be insignificant or even invisible to much of society, but they are heroes in their homelands.

The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.

The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”

With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.

Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.

Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:

Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities

Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance

Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model

Ending Mountaintop Removal

Creative Think Tank

Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign

And many more

Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.

If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.

In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”

As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”

Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.

Smack Mellon’s Summer exhibition surveys approaches to the creation of socially engaged art projects.

Image: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978-80. City-wide performance with 8,500 NYC Sanitation workers. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

The D.C. based organization Men Can Stop Rape has come up with an interesting and simple way to engage teenage boys- free pizza. Kedrick Griffin, the Senior Director of Programs, leads the year long programs, gently titled “Men of Strength” or MOST Club. The activist organization keeps things intentionally vague in the beginning, so as not to scare off the teens with their true intentions: to challenge the patriarchal structure the boys have grown up in. The weekly club meetings begin with, of course, pizza and soda, followed by a “check-in”- a time for the teens to reflect on what is going on in their lives. Griffin uses this open dialogue to segue into heavier topics, like understanding rape culture and respecting women. The idea is to slowly change the perspectives of these young men, in hopes that gender relations in D.C. schools will begin to shift.

More here.

For more on male feminism and men’s work against sexual violence, check out the work of Jackson Katz.

Arizona’s racial profiling law, also know as SB 1070, is raising deep questions about American ideals of equality and fairness by making racism and racial profiling the law of the land in Arizona.

Sweet Honey In The Rock, the critically acclaimed and socially conscious a capella group is bringing out a song for Arizona: Are We A Nation?

The Center for Community Change is offering a free download of the new song here.

The purpose of this piece is to visualize the vast network of altruistic human organizations in every country, city, and community around the world, all working in parallel together. Despite their enormous diversity of size, focus, and geographic location, these organizations are all united around a core set of values in which compassion and stewardship are made highest priorities. The hundreds of millions of individuals who are creating and running these organizations bring a nourishing richness of passion, imagination, and integrity to this process. In that way I think of this piece as being like a compass, pointing toward a true source of hope and inspiration for our times.

Link.