Annette Koh
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“Surely, such singing* takes place on the street, but the street is also exposed as a place where those who are not free to amass, freely do so. I...”
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This little company from Kenya makes toys from slippers that...
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Contingent Continents: The World Over
Hundreds of ants industriously eat away at a map of the world in Rivane Neuenschwander’s video work, ...
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By Justin Hillgrove.
Absolutely delightful!
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I love the filthy, unlicensed, off-brand characters hustling Times Square. It’s just perverse that 20 years ago, the neighborhood transitioned from...
18mr:
Join our pals at the Center for Asian American Media at 7 PM EST on Wednesday, May 22 for an online screening of Marco Williams’ doc “The Undocumented.” In addition to streaming video, a panel featuring Williams and members of undocumented advocacy organizations will be available to answer questions.
RSVP on Facebook.
Check out the online screening page for more info.Please reblog! This should be a great screening.
How to go 10,000 pounds of kalo for the Kohala community.
Video found after reading this quote: “In talking about health, you must talk about food, so you must talk lo‘i—and so you’ve got to talk golf courses, and so you’ve got to talk foreign investments. It’s not just a ‘‘cultural perspective’’; it’s who we are as a people, as political and socioeconomic thinkers.” (Gomes 1993)
Hewitt & Jordan and Dave Beech: www.hewittandjordan.com
An amazing session at the upcoming Nordic Geographers’ Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland: Public art and accountability: whose art for whose city?
Presentations by
Lesley Murray
Placing murals in Belfast: Community,…
An audio version of a talk by critical geographer Lynn Staeheli on student activism and how it expands the concept of “good” citizenship.
“Young people may well represent the greatest potential and greatest challenges for democratic participation and change. In countries around the world, they are imagined as capable of effecting dramatic social and political change. As a result, a range of institutions and agents expends considerable effort to foster, but also to direct that potential. Citizenship education and civic engagement programmes, for instance, often promote pedagogies of active and responsible citizenship to be enacted in families, communities, and civil society. Yet recent youth-led protests in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East make clear that youth often take the ‘lessons’ of active citizenship into the streets, challenging and making demands on the state. The result is often an activist, insurgent pedagogy of citizenship, as compared to the active but depoliticised citizenship developed through education and civic engagement programmes. The paper draws from examples of student activism in Lebanon and the UK.”
Forms (2012), Quayola & Memo Akten. (2013 Ars Electronica winner)
GIS party tricks via National Geographic’s Phenomena blog. Or, really really cool things you can do with maps. Top image is walking patterns from Oliver et al’s 2007 study, bottom image is the geographic range of meth use over time in the state of California.
Continued from Sick of Ruins, from John Cunningham, “Boredom in the Charnel House: Theses on ‘Post-industrial’ Ruins” inVariant No. 42.
This is used to good effect by the artist-photographer Jorge Ribalta who reconstructed and photographed scale models of the ‘urban decay’ of working class districts of Barcelona prior to their gentrification.
As John Roberts writes, this is an elegy to “an area that once had a rich and variegated social and economic history” now designated by capital as “unproductive”. Such an approach mobilises the ‘opacity’ of urban decay – and memory – against the transparent homogenisation that capital desires for city space while emphasising the simultaneous production of both.
Often known as 518 in reference to the date the nine-day uprising began, May 18, 1980, the rebellion against military rule briefly saw the southern city of Gwangju taken over by civilian protesters. There’s no consensus on the number of people killed by the military–estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands–but the brutal suppression of the protests is remembered as a dark time in modern Korean history. (WSJ, 2011)
One thing that stuck clearly in my mind has been the mingled joy and defiance on the faces of the people for those days when they controlled the city. The two images I’ve added below are of the women of Gwangju, the top one I need to find more information on - reverse image search hasn’t helped me yet, but the bottom one is of civilian food distribution. The logistics of protest.
Gwangju, May 1980
(이미지 출처: 518 기념재단 홈페이지 www.518.org)역사를 잊은 민족에게 미래란 없다.
(via deepfriedcoconutbutter)
An animated run-down of food security issues by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
[Image attribution/links to further info: Top photo is “Oil Palm Disaster in Sarawak” by Mattias Klum (via Rainforest Action Network), second photo is via Global Investment Watch, third photo is by photographer Michael Yamashita, fourth photo is via Greenpeace, fifth graphic is from the article “Surging Demand for Vegetable Oil Drives Rainforest Destruction”, and final text is from Heather Rogers’ book Green Gone Wrong.]
A friend recently teased me about how my desire to do no harm via the market economy/everyday consumption is really gunked up by my complete lack of pioneer self-sufficiency. In a barter economy, would I be able to trade my speed reading skills for homespun cloth? But it’s not asking too much to make sure that Girl Scout cookies don’t lead to deforestation.
As a start, Rainforest Action Network has a campaign to get snack food companies to stop using palm oil.
As a counterpoint to the earlier post on Budapest’s ruin bars…
From John Cunningham, “Boredom in the Charnel House: Theses on ‘Post-industrial’ Ruins”in Variant No. 42.
I find it easy to share this bored, angry scepticism towards the fetishism of crumbling concrete, cracked windows and hidden wastelands. In the image world of hopefully ‘late’ capitalism the industrial ruin has acquired a fair amount of cultural capital and such spectacular over-determination is a major reason for ennui with corroded concrete.
Psychogeography often functions as an index of dissatisfaction with contemporary urban space… Psychogeography has always thrived upon such juxtapositions between a projected image of the gleaming ‘new’ – heavily regulated spaces sponsored by capital – and the human remnants, memories and ruins of urban space.
[As always, photos hotlinked with image sources]
Budapest’s Ruin Bars. The characteristics of “guerrilla hospitality” according to Lugosi and Lugosi (2008), “Guerrilla hospitality - urban decay, entrepreneurship and the ‘ruin’ bars of Budapest.”
- it is entrepreneurial and opportunistic;
- it requires less formal investment of economic capital than corporately branded and operated venues;
- it may be temporary in its manifestation in a particular space, but then may re-emerge elsewhere — the relationship these venues had with the broader forces of regeneration in the various districts of Budapest meant that their existence in any one location was limited by the demolition or redevelopment of those buildings;
- it often occupies buildings that were not hospitality venues previously as the reuse of unusual premises adds to the novelty and appeal;
- guerrilla hospitality draws on alternative forms of symbolic capital for its appeal and existence — the deployment of the ruin aesthetic in enables operators to leverage a particular form of (sub-)cultural capital which embodies a particular commentary on/relationship to processes of regeneration and post-industrial urbanism — in Budapest, this is inflected by the particular histories of post-socialist urbanism
From RuinPubs.com: Every place has a unique style and atmosphere. In Szimpla kert (Simple Garden) you can have a beer in a cannibalized old Trabant car. In Instant you can stroll around in the labyrinth of the tenement house. In Kertem (My Garden) you can feel the atmosphere of a socialist beer-garden of the 1980s.
From Drink Europe Drink: Most ruin pubs are located in the Seventh District, which is the old Jewish Quarter, on streets like Kiraly Utca and Dob Utca, alongside coffeehouses, wine bars, and remnants of Jewish life found in small family owned restaurants and bakeries.
Image attribution: Top photo, second and third photos, fourth photo
