“For the past four years, Mike Wolf has been an itinerant cultural worker, circulating in the upper Mississippi and Western Great Lakes parts of the Midwest, with a home base in Chicago. He helped to organize Mess Hall, an experimental cultural space in Chicago; and contributed to The Compass Group, a group of activists, artists and theorists working to unleash the decolonization campaign of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.
Wolf will present “Drift and Surge: How We Conjure A Radical Culture Corridor” where he’ll draw on images and anecdotes from various collaborative projects such as walking pilgrimages, exhibitions based on Midwestern wanderings, and the campaign to decolonize North America; experiences that brought him into contact with the broader landscapes of the Midwest, beyond the traditional urban cultural centers. He will also discuss the plans of The Compass Group leading up to the U.S. Social Forum, held this June in Detroit, and his encounters with other Midwestern-based groups like “Boggs Center To Nurture Community Learning” and “Unsettle Minnesota.”
[Cross-posted to The Data Stream.Text from Outpost Facebook invitation. Graphic from Google image search for "Midwest map.']
La Casa del Tunél
Calle Chapo Márquez 133
Colonia Federal, Tijuana BC Mexico
Saturday, March 20
Closing Party
2:00 pm: Fallen Fruit: Acción Fruta Urbana
4:30 pm: Lauren Bon: Tia Juana Day
7:00 pm: Portable City Projects: People’s Café Dance Party
7:30 pm: John Geary: A Touch of Evil
“As towns and cities are increasingly overwritten by the needs and desires of globalized capital, so public spaces and the behaviors they support are becoming evermore shrunken and controlled. At the same time however, everyday examples of common usage – a skate boarder curving past a crowd, a girl chopping and bagging melon on the sidewalk, a child dancing up a mountain of steps – counterpoint homogenization and regulation.
Curated by Owen Driggs, Performing Public Space (PPS) is both a celebration of artists who consciously adopt such tactics and instrumentalize their bodies in an effort to bend, expand, or puncture dominant spatial narratives, and an inquiry into the ways in which public space is articulated through real use.
Like tumbleweed, the inquiry is designed to pick up more material as it roams. Understanding that, despite the strategies of corporate commerce, local spatial conditions vary, at each place it visits PPS will work with local citizens to create a city-specific archive. Documenting both quotidian uses of public space and witting artist interventions the archives will be included in the exhibition and become part of a growing website that considers local, national, and international interpretations of ‘public space’ and approaches to its preservation, generation, and augmentation.”
Lauren BON
FALLEN FRUIT
FINISHING SCHOOL
John GEARY
Anne HARS & Bill
WHEELOCK
Ari KLETZKY
Paul PESCADOR
Nancy POPP
PORTABLE CITY PROJECTS
Jane TSONG
L.A. URBAN RANGERS
[Text and graphic from organization. Caption: "'Ryan, Freerunner, 2009.' Owen Driggs." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]
In Los Angeles on any given Friday, you could venture over to Farmlab’s Salon, tuck in a full-on organic lunch and listen to an amazing line-up of art/ecology innovators and activists. Last week I heard Wes Jackson of the Land Institute describe his 50-year plan to restore the depleated soils of America’s heartland. Next Friday historian Robert Bichard presents over 100 images exploring the first movie studios in L.A. starting 100 years ago.
Farmlab, formerly Not a Corn Field, is the invention of artist/urbanist/philanthropist Lauren Bon. It began as a multi-year project to restore a 35-acre industrial brownfield near downtown through the cultivation of corn- not only corn, but a social sculpture and nexus for community action and education.
Recently Bon has been working with a veteran’s hospital to create the Strawberry Flag project.
“I had a feeling that things were about to happen. They were so tense, they were so agitated, in a revolting state of mind. I wanted to use the film to scream against the situation, scream like all the members of the bands I worked with. I wanted to scream along with them, making this film as a statement against the brutal situation we were all under.” -Bahman Ghobadi on young people in Tehran, June, 2009
The script for filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats was rejected by the Iranian Ministry for Islamic Culture and Guidance for three years before Ghobadi took a risk: making an unlicensed film. Shot in just 17 days with a digital S12K camera (all 35mm equipment is owned by the state), Cats is a faux-documentary following two young indie rock musicians (real life band Take It Easy Hospital) around Tehran, fusing humor with the reality of life as an underground musician in Iran.
Here’s a clip from the film, Take It Easy Hospital playing “Human Jungle”:
Although I have yet to see No One Knows about Persian Cats (US release set for April 16!), I find Ghobadi’s statement against censorship and cultural repression (of both music and film) particularly interesting when examined contextually. The film was co-written by Hossein Abkenar and Ghobadi’s fiancée, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi. Saberi was arrested in Iran in January, 2009 and held for months on charges of espionage, initially facing an eight year prison sentence. During her imprisonment, Ghobadi published a letter regarding Saberi’s situation which you can read here.
She was released just as Cats was about to premiere in Cannes, where the film received the Un Certain Regard prize, a grant to aid distribution in France for an innovative and daring work. Upon returning to Iran from Cannes, Ghobadi was arrested and held for seven days, accused of “severe criticism” of the Iranian Government during the film festival. Ghobadi was even offered between $1-2 million in exchange for all the material and rights to the film. He refused, and was ordered to leave the country.
For more on the film’s plot, I suggest this New Internationalist article. The Village Voice interviewed Ghobadi eight days after his release from prison, four days after Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election. In the interview Ghobadi says, “The youth have seen how they can hurt the government. This three or four days has shown them that they can rush out to the streets and say what they want and take it all in their own hands. And if the government is not going to listen to them, it is going to be a bloody future. The government cannot control the people any longer..and this was the last big lie. The people were ready to erupt.”
And in case you were what the film title means, it refers to an Iranian law that bans cats and dogs from being outdoors.
Avatar has become a pop culture nexus for Palestinian rights activists. The film portrays the struggle between a heartless interstellar corporation and the Na’vi, lithe and luminescent aliens indigenous to a planet rich in the lucrative mineral “unobtanium.” The Na’vi live atop a rich deposit of this shimmering ore, so the corporation and its thugs want to remove them, by any means necessary. For activists, the film is an apt analogy to Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory. So what do these idealistic youth do? Dress up like the aliens.
The protestors appeared in Bil’in, a Palestinian town cut in half by the Wall (whatever adjective, security or Apartheid, no one on either side disagrees that the structure is a wall) and Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem which Israeli settlers have laid claim to and from which Israeli authorities have evicted Palestinians.
When I was in Bil’in in April 2009, the buzzword on the banners was “Occupation Flu,” play to the now-almost-forgotten H1N1 craze. Demonstrators gathered every Friday after prayer to confront Israeli soldiers who meet Palestinians’ stones with tear gas and flash-bang bombs. I was there to write a story, here, which explains more about this weekly protest.
A protestor shields his nose and eyes from the effects of tear gas.
The most striking aspect of this re-appropriation of a distinctly American, Avatar meme, is the irony. And right across the barbed-wire fence opposite from Bil’in are Israeli soldiers whose weapons supplied by American taxpayers. So, as Joseph Nye would explain, that’s an example of U.S. “hard power.”. Then, on the other side, the Palestinians to score by appropriating imagery siphoned with sophistication from the mighty currents of American “soft power.”
Michael Swaine mends clothing for free in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. In the past, he has collaborated with Futurefarmers, a socially engaged arts collective, and views his work as a way to explore and expand the commons. The Financial Times included him this week in their First Person column.
Jess Baines has an excellent new article in Afterall on the history of radical graphics beginning in England in the 1960’s. It’s a great introduction/reminder of how a previous revolution in technology, namely broad access to low-cost printing equipment, fueled global resistance to war and helped spread alternative social justice movements.
A wiki has been started to collect information on the topic.
“Begun while working as an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Lucy Raven’s video “China Town” traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in East Ely, Nevada to the Yangtze River in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted, refined, and spun into wire and used to electrify the nation. The video consists of an animated sequence created from more than 7,000 photographs, along with ambient sound that Raven recorded along her journey across the globe. China Town offers a stunning view of the relationship between the industrial landscapes of two countries, whose economies are intimately linked due to China’s increased demand for resources and electricity.”
Through May 9
Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation Director, will be part of CCAI’s March 2010 Nevada Neighborsproject, and will give a public talk on Wednesday, March 31 at 7 pm at the Carson City Library.
[Text from Museum website. Graphic from Mass MoCA web site. Click on image to enlarge.]
By the end of 2010, Google’s operations in China (www.google.cn) may be over and done. A presence in China’s carefully state controlled fiefdom in cyberspace since 2006, Google has reacted to a mid-December breach of its security, which, according to Google, the Chinese government orchestrated. Google and 20 other companies (including Yahoo) suffered the indignation of similar hacking incursions.
The attack targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, though Google assures the hacking attempt was unsuccessful. As a result of this ungracious behavior on the part of their host, Google will stop its self-imposed policy of censoring searches as per Chinese law. In a letter from Google’s legal office, the internet firm stated that it is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.” As of press time, Google has granted its employees in China an extended holiday furlough.
The internet has always been cumbersome set of golden chains for China, essential for its economic expansion but also a powerful forum for political dissent and expression. While has been disappointing to see Google entertain Beijing’s requirements for censorship since 2006, it will be pleasing to see Google follow through on its indignant exit. By demonstrating that China can’t bully forms of foreign direct investment that require a degree of privacy and intellectual freedom to operate, Google’s departure from Chinese cyberspace may make other American and European firms less reluctant to show the same boldness in negotiations with the government. Unfortunately, China will probably respond by creating its own tamed search engines like www.baidu.com, which beats Google’s share of the Chinese market by a wide margin. So there’s a long road ahead for any truly unrestricted internet in China, and the cat and mouse game between government and dissident will continue. To distort Deng Xiaoping’s quote concerning free market reforms and economic development (”it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice”), no matter how determined the cat, it can’t catch all the world’s mice.
Outpost for Contemporary Art
