tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212352222024-02-07T21:47:02.456-08:00Critical Spatial Practicenicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-42199951852038261942009-07-21T13:44:00.000-07:002009-07-22T15:06:34.446-07:00Critical Outer Spatial Practice?<span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY">"Whitey on the Moon"</a></span><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PtBy_ppG4hY&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PtBy_ppG4hY&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/20/753423/-On-Gil-Scott-Herons-Whitey-on-the-Moon">On Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Seneca Doane @ Daily Kos</span><br /><br />My sense is that if most people know any reference to the music of Gil Scott-Heron ("GSH") nowadays, it would likely be the title of his arch, sardonic proto-rap single "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," from the 1974 compilation album of that name. For many of us who grew up in the mid-1970s, this GSH album was the Richard Pryor concert of music -- the rebellious and pugnacious and smart as hell spirit of Malcolm X in 40 or so minutes. It was a common fixture in the record collections of the hosts of parties I attended then, and one that, when I was hosting, a guest was likely to pull out to play.<br /><br />This song contained not only proto-rap, but some of the most beautiful and haunting songs you could ever want to hear, such as "Lady Day" and "Pieces of a Man." But the one that prompts this diary, on the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11, is "Whitey on the Moon," because I can't think of the events of that day without thinking of that song and the challenge that it offers.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/20/753423/-On-Gil-Scott-Herons-Whitey-on-the-Moon">Continue reading...</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.gilscottheron.com/lywhitey.html">"Whitey On the Moon" Lyrics</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> by </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott_Heron">Gil Scott Heron</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2008/07/extend-white-conquest-of-earth-into.html">Stuff White People Do: Extend the White Conquest of the Earth Into Outer Space</a><br /><br />Read <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gOOnclTiNUkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA141">"Outer Space and Inner Cities: African American Responses to NASA"</a> in Lynn Spigel's <a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gOOnclTiNUkC">Welcome to the Dreamhouse</a>.<br /><br /><iframe style="border: 0px none ;" src="http://books.google.com/books?id=gOOnclTiNUkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA141&output=embed" frameborder="0" height="425" scrolling="no" width="425"></iframe><br /><br />Read Lynn Spigel's <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ulW_biWl77kC&lpg=PA47&ots=MqrXjFq7SD&dq=%22white%20flight%22%20spigel&pg=PA47">"White Flight"</a> in <a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ulW_biWl77kC">The Revolution Wasn't Televised</a>.<br /><br /><iframe style="border: 0px none ;" src="http://books.google.com/books?id=ulW_biWl77kC&lpg=PA47&ots=MqrXjFq7SD&dq=%22white%20flight%22%20spigel&pg=PA47&output=embed" frameborder="0" height="425" scrolling="no" width="425"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Outer Spatial?</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.projectmasa.com/ProjectMASAno2A.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 316px;" src="http://www.projectmasa.com/officialMASA2aSm1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.projectmasa.com/">Project M.A.S.A</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.projectmasa.com/Mission%20Statement.html">M.A.S.A. Mission Statement</a><br /><br />To establish an awareness of outerspace as an integral part of the Chicano(a) ModernMythos/Reality/Iconography.<br /><br />The Purpose of the MeChicano Alliance of Space Artists is revealing the presence of:<br /><br /> * Chicana(o) Issues<br /> * Chicana(o) Culture<br /> * World issues as related to Chicana(o)s in a modern global society<br /><br />...through the use of modern outer space or cosmic iconography.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?SPACEGHOST"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 360px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzDmzhObbYOl0dujqaoIvrSuFa1-vm1WnFfmyCfg4XuWMykwV4zobQrYVrRxrji8eu4qafAwkjbw9DIHmtqz2WSMy5V57X4TszaX_lgFA4krNR9I2xZxRS0_2dA9kRSV9GfJK7ng/s400/spaceghost01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5330979405152802370" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?SPACEGHOST"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 360px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho28cGC963W8HS-CHmm9LUxiE6xGOfrdMlnzXKcIAaRKB8-iCjnUeLeZN-zDvn_o0BURuLR-wPjDPMiy5yBMhr0x3NIPZqIQPs2BYWctwzVeWStIYak-J7ueQYsJJwyLUHitDkZw/s400/spaceghost02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5330981754327203650" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?SPACEGHOST">Space Ghost</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?REYNOLDSL">Laurie Jo Reynolds</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vdb.org/">Video Data Bank</a><br /><br />Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved-ones.<br /><br />Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.<br /><br />The end of the video introduces the notion of the "phantom zone" taken from Superman to describe incarceration as an in between space, a no man's land or a warehouse. A letter from an inmate explains how the space/time continuum can become reconfigured in prison: The time really goes by fast here. You can do years in prison and it seems like no time at all. That's because you don't remember any of the time you did. And that's because there's nothing to remember.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=16349">Astronauts and Prisoners Unite in 'Space Ghost'</a> / Eight Forty-Eight on Chicago Public Radio<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/other_night/index.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.paglen.com/othernight/4.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.paglen.com/">Trevor Paglen's</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/other_night/index.html">The Other Night Sky</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/other_night/index.html">“The Other Night Sky”</a> is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites in Earth orbit, a total of 189 covert spacecraft. To develop the body of work, I was assisted by observational data produced by an international network of amateur “satellite observers.” To translate the observational data into a useable form, I spent almost two years working with a team of computer scientists and engineers at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology to develop a software model to describe the orbital motion of classified spacecraft.<br /><br />With these tools, I am able to calculate the position and timing of overhead reconnaissance satellite transits and photograph them with telescopes and large-format cameras using a computer-guided mechanical mount. The resultant skyscapes are marked by trails of sunlight reflected from the hulls of obscure spacecraft hurtling through the night.<br /><br />In developing this project, I have been primarily inspired by the methods of early astronomers like Kepler and Galileo, who documented previously-unseen moons of Jupiter in the early 17th Century. Like contemporary reconnaissance satellites, Jupiter’s moons weren’t supposed to “exist,” but were nonetheless there. With this series, I want to ask what it means to see the traces of “secret moons” in the contemporary night sky.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/225">The Other Night Sky</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> at the </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/">UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/images/art/matrix/225/MATRIX_225_Trevor_Paglen.pdf">Download the exhibition brochure (PDF)</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/30/DD6R10US53.DTL">Artist Trevor Paglen has his eye on satellites</a> / San Francisco Chronicle<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.wired.com/culture/art/news/2008/06/secret_satellites">Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them</a> / WIRED<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >MISC.</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/archives/space/space.htm">Space is the Place</a> / <a href="http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/">iCI - Independent Curators International</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/space/">space tag @ Danger Room</a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-19909574088268057052009-06-12T03:21:00.000-07:002009-06-12T08:15:17.033-07:00End Torture in Illinois<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/images/TAMMS-mud-SB-4.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html">Illinois Torture Publicized with Ecological Art: Chicago and Milwaukee artists boost Tamms Year Ten message with mud stencils</a></span><br /><br />On Saturday, June 6th in Chicago, local artists partnered with the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.yearten.org/">Tamms Year Ten</a> coalition to protest state-sanctioned torture at the supermax prison in Southern Illinois. And they did it with mud.<br /><br />Artists from Chicago and Milwaukee engaged in a non-destructive type of public messaging called “mud-stenciling.” More than 30 volunteers stenciled their message “End Torture in Illinois” in the afternoon on walls and sidewalks around the city offering fact-sheets about TAMMS supermax prison to curious pedestrians. The teams hit spots such as Navy Pier, The Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jane Adams Hull House, Hyde Park Art Center, the Logan Square skate park, the Chicago Zoo, DePaul University, as well as sidewalks, underpass walls, and numerous other locations....<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html">Read full press release</a><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KpL1izswJ-M&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KpL1izswJ-M&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Mud stencil video by Gretchen Hasse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://art.newcity.com/2009/06/08/eye-exam-mud-slinging/">Eye Exam: Mud Slinging</a> / <a href="http://60wrdmin.org/home.html">Lori Waxman</a> / <a href="http://art.newcity.com/">Newcity Art</a></span><br /><br />Dirt, water, whisk, sponge, bucket, box cutter, tar paper—these are not your typical artist’s materials. Mix the water and dirt in the bucket, lay the cut-out paper against a cement surface, and sponge on the mud, however, and the result is a handsome work of environmentally friendly graffiti.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/images/TAMMS-Chicago-3.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Street artists often work with stencils, using them to shape spray-painted statements. But a chemical medium dispensed through an aerosol container reeks of toxicity, so Milwaukee-based <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://mudstencils.com/">Jesse Graves</a>, intent on finding a more compatible way to apply his environmentally and politically conscious messages, evolved an alternate means of tagging: mud. The technique is nothing short of ingenious. Simple, cheap, graphically effective and not necessarily illegal, mud stencils, if protected from the elements, can last up to ten years; or, like all dirt, they can be washed off with water. Consistency is key, however, to achieving a bold visual with sharp edges: the mud mixture must be carefully controlled so that it achieves a viscosity akin to peanut butter or feces.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/images/TAMMS-mud-SB-3.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Yes, feces—like the feces sometimes smeared by inmates at Tamms prison on the walls of their cells. Cells where they are held in permanent solitary confinement, bereft of all human contact, for up to twenty-three hours a day, with breaks only for showers and individual exercise. It’s a supermax jail in Southern Illinois originally designed for the short-term punishment of violent inmates from other facilities, but one-third of whose occupants have now been locked up in extreme isolation for over a decade, with no clearly defined standards for transfer in or out. Widely believed to cause permanent physiological and psychological damage, these conditions contravene the Geneva Convention, two United Nations treaties and various other international human-rights accords. Conditions which have led inmates not only to paint their walls with shit in desperate attempts for attention, but also to mutilate themselves, to attempt suicide, and to require—for one in every ten men at Tamms—regular doses of psychotropic medication. All this for up to $90,000 a year per inmate, three to four times the cost of incarceration at other prisons in Illinois.<br /><br />What any of this has to do with mud stenciling was revealed this past Saturday as some thirty artists and other activists took to the streets of Chicago armed with six-by-nine-foot cutouts, informational flyers and the resolve to help end torture in Illinois. That was the message they broadcast in mud—END TORTURE IN ILLINOIS—bordered with a broken line in the shape of the state, topped with a star for Tamms, the regional capital of cruel and unusual punishment. They hit locations across the city, from the Art Institute and the Board of Trade to the Logan Square Skate Park, Senator Rickey Hendon’s West Side office, the Lincoln Park Green City Market, the University of Illinois quad, the DePaul Student Center and various sidewalks, boarded-up buildings and underpasses in between.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/images/chicago-mud-8.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The campaign was the latest tactical art action by <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.yearten.org/">Tamms Year Ten</a>, and one of its most vivid and accessible yet. A coalition of more than seventy groups throughout Illinois, from mental-health alliances to human-rights advocacies and faith-based committees, Tamms Year Ten was founded last year on the occasion of the prison’s tenth anniversary with the goal of urging the governor of Illinois and the Illinois Department of Corrections to either close or convert the prison, following national trends; to establish transparency and standards at the facility; and at the very least to follow the original legislative intent for the supermax, which was only meant for short-term use.<br /><br />Tamms Year Ten has also worked with Illinois lawmakers to introduce HB2633, which includes provisions for instituting accountability at the prison and prohibiting mentally ill prisoners from being moved there in the first place. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Julie Hamos with twenty-seven co-sponsors, seems like the least the state can do in the face of the grotesque human-rights violations it has been committing for the past decade in the name of law and order. Identical confinement at Guantanamo Bay, whose closure has been ordered by President Obama, has been determined by the Pentagon to be too isolating for prisoner safety. But, according to an editorial that appeared in the Tribune just a few weeks ago, it’s good enough for Illinois residents. Chicago’s newspaper of record fears that the situation at other prisons could get uglier if the IDOC loses its freedom to keep inmates locked up at Tamms indefinitely, despite studies that indicate supermax incarceration increases recidivism and that Tamms has done nothing to reduce violence in other state prisons. Never mind the international consensus that prolonged isolation equals torture—as the Tribune put it, the “worst of the worst” end up there. Read: who cares.<br /><br />Who cares, indeed? With bold public rallies, calls to lawmakers, intelligent press, ever more studies and reports, meetings with legislators and IDOC officials, and some smart art activism, hopefully a whole lot more people. Mud washes off in the rain—years of being cut off from any social contact, being locked up and treated worse than any animal, doesn’t.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://art.newcity.com/2009/06/08/eye-exam-mud-slinging/">Link to full article by Lori Waxman at Newcity Art</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/images/TAMMS-mud-SB-6.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Misc. Resources</span><br /><br />See the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://justseeds.org/blog/">Just Seeds blog</a> for complete details of mud-stenciling.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://mudstencils.com/">Mud stencils (Jesse Graves)</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.yearten.org/">Tamms Year Ten</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/06/letter-illinois-representative-julie-hamos-reforming-supermax-confinement">Human Rights Watch public statement about Tamms</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/042/2009/en">Amnesty International public statement about Tamms</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande">New Yorker article about Tamms supermax</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande">("Hellhole" by Atul Gawande)</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/images/TAMMS-MS-Chicago-2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-73766146853410860572009-04-28T10:41:00.000-07:002009-04-28T11:50:50.530-07:00There Goes The Neighbourhood<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/cover%20image%202.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/cover%20image%202.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/">There Goes the Neighbourhood</a> is an <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/">exhibition</a>, residency, <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/public%20programs.htm">discussion</a> and <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/book.htm">publishing project</a> for May 2009. The central element of this project will be an exploration of the politics of urban space, with a focus on Redfern, Sydney. The project will examine the complex life of cities and how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. While urban change itself is not always a bad thing, gentrification often happens at an accelerated rate, out pricing the lower income and marginalized communities from the neighbourhood and dislocating them from their existing connections to urban space. The project brings together artists from Australia and around the world whose work addresses these issues.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/rakowitz.htm"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/chock_protest.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">White man got no dreaming</span>, Michael Rakowitz (2008)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >The Politics of Urban Space...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >What exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships?... The study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself<br />– Henri Lefebvre.</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/">There Goes the Neighbourhood</a> is the ironic chorus to the 1992 Body Count song which lamented the invasion of the once poor (and Black) into the neighbourhood of the rich (and white). But an alternative destruction of “The Neighbourhood” can happen when the poor get pushed out of their local community as part of the process of gentrification. This issue is particularly relevant for the suburb of Redfern, an inner city suburb of Sydney which has been home for a large working class and Indigenous community, and which is undergoing a process of rapid development and change.<br /><br />The Block, Redfern, has been described as the "Black Heart" of Australia and occupies a unique place within Sydney's urban landscape as a centre for the Indigenous community. It was the site for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, and has been the gathering point for many protests and community events. Just minutes from the second busiest train station in Sydney are the open camp fires and communal use of public space of the community on The Block. The Aboriginal Housing Company has had a long standing dream, just recently given the green light by the government to build The Pemulwuy Project; a new community housing project and cultural centre for Redfern's Aboriginal community. Redfern is also home to a number other non-Indigenous community housing projects such as the Department of Housing buildings (known as the "Suicide Towers") which the government is trying to redevelop. The suburb was once a strong working class neighbourhood and was the starting point for the 1917 general strike for a shorter working week: but in the 1980s the rail yards were closed down and transformed into a new cultural centre (where one of the exhibition venues <a href="http://www.performancespace.com.au/">Performance Space</a> is based). Redfern grabbed headlines in 2004 when riots erupted when the police killed a 17 year old Aboriginal boy after chasing him in police cars as he rode his push-bike home. In that same year the Redfern-Waterloo Authority was established - a special government committee to oversee the rapid development and gentrification of the area. Redfern thus involves a complex, contested and controversial overlapping of uses of urban space.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/">There Goes the Neighbourhood</a> is an <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/">exhibition</a>, residency, <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/public%20programs.htm">discussion</a> and <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/book.htm">publishing project</a> for May 2009. The central element of this project will be an exploration of the politics of urban space. It will explore the complex life of cities and how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. While urban change itself is not always a bad thing, gentrification often happens at an accelerated rate, out pricing the lower income and marginalized communities from the neighbourhood and dislocating them from their existing connections to urban space.<br /><br />As Henri Lefebvre reminds us “the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself”. The tussle over space is always one over the social relationships which are generated within the logic of place: revolving around people occupying, owning, seizing, developing, losing or transforming this space.<br /><br />The project will bring together a smallish group of artists who have worked in various artistic projects which have explored the relationship between community and space and invite them to develop these issues further in the contested local environment of Redfern.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/book.htm"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/TGTN-Cover.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/book.htm">There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/TGTN-eBook.pdf">To download a PDF of the book click here</a><br /><br />There Goes the Neighborhood begins with a close study of Redfern before expanding into international examples to provide a detailed exploration of how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. This book has been published in tandem with an exhibition of the same name and many of the contributions come from participating artists in the exhibition: <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/artists.htm">Brenda L. Croft</a> (Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/16beaver.htm">16beaver</a> (USA), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/daniel.htm">Daniel Boyd</a> (Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/temporary%20services.htm">Temporary Services</a> (USA), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/jakob.htm">Jakob Jakobsen</a> (Denmark), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/lisa%20kelly.htm">Lisa Kelly</a> (Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/squatspace.htm">SquatSpace</a> (Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/claire%20and%20sean.htm">Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro</a> (Germany/Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/ned.htm">Evil Brothers</a> (Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/2016.htm">You Are Here</a> (Australia), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/rakowitz.htm">Michael Rakowitz</a> (USA), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/miklos.htm">Miklos Erhardt and Little Warsaw</a> (Hungary), <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/bijari.htm">Bijari</a> (Brazil) and <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/democracia.htm">Democracia</a> (Spain). The book also includes contributions from key thinkers about the complex life of cities such as the Situationists, Mike Davis, Brian Holmes, Gary Foley and Elizabeth Farrelly.<br /><br />There Goes The Neighbourhood is edited by <a href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/contact.htm">Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg</a> from <a href="http://www.youarehere.me/">You Are Here</a>, a Sydney based art collective which focuses on social and spatial mapping.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 425px;" src="http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/TGTN-LOGO.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-64554486540663014652009-04-23T12:41:00.000-07:002009-04-23T13:52:50.869-07:00Discover Kauai<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0EAe1s3vi_A&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0EAe1s3vi_A&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zNTjGA0ZBhM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zNTjGA0ZBhM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090316/mander_paik">Surfers vs. the Superferry / Jerry Mander & Koohan Paik</a> / <a href="http://www.thenation.com/">The Nation</a></span><br /><br />We don't ordinarily seek inspirational models of grassroots uprisings--especially against global corporate-military boondoggles--from surfer beaches on luscious tropical islands. So it surprises colleagues on the left when we tell them they might check out some surprising events on the small "outer" islands in Hawaii that may have an impact on grand US aspirations for military domination of the Pacific basin. Few mainlanders have heard about it, but Hawaii is up in arms.<br /><br />It all started in 2001 as a purportedly modest "local" effort to offer inter-island ferry service to "help local people more easily visit their relatives on other islands, and carry their farm produce to market." Most locals liked the idea but soon found that this ferry, the gigantic Hawaii Superferry, was an environmental nightmare. It uses far more fuel (in total and per person) than big planes. It races at high speed (40-45 miles per hour) through zones teeming with endangered humpback whales, dolphins and rare sea turtles. It could transport dangerous invasive species to pristine islands. And it carries hundreds of cars to tiny places already choking on traffic.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090316/mander_paik">...CONTINUE READING...</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.thehawaiiindependent.com/opinion/2009/03/20/coup-de-superferry/"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Coup de Superferry</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" > / <a href="http://www.thehawaiiindependent.com/">The Hawaii Independent</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/155/id/101417/tues-3-03-09-boatload-trouble">A Boatload of Trouble</a> / <a href="http://www.againstthegrain.org/">Against the Grain</a></span><br /><br />The Superferry is not some benign way of connecting the Hawaiian islands. According to Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, the massive boat is closely connected to US military plans for a new Pacific fleet. It also endangers whales and other wildlife. Paik was part of momentous protests in Kauai that rebuffed the Superferry.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.superferrychronicles.com/">The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism, and the Desecration of the Earth</a> / Jerry Mander & Koohan Paik</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.dmzhawaii.org/?tag=hawaii-superferry">Hawai'i Superferry News</a> at <a href="http://www.dmzhawaii.org/">DMZ Hawai'i / Aloha 'Aina</a></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.akaku.org/ondemand/?cat=11&v=8Hs8So">An Interview with Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander / Akaku: Maui Community Television</a></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYZHHaVJJDQ">The SuperFerry Chronicles I of V</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/video-challenges-green-shoppers-and-globalization/">A Video Challenge to Green Shoppers</a></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" > / </span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/">Dot Earth</a></span>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-78928624210389696262009-04-23T12:30:00.000-07:002009-04-23T12:43:04.953-07:00The New Geography<span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >The New Geography: A Roundtable</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">By Jeffrey Kastner, Tom McCarthy, Nato Thompson, and Eyal Weizman</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">bookforum.com / Apr-May 2009</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.</span><br /><br />—Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1967</span><br /><br />The practice of geography is by its nature a ticklish, paradoxical enterprise. It is at once the study of objects and of subjects, of things and of behaviors, of the world around us as a phenomenon producing human activity and produced by it. A realization of the generative potential in such dichotomies—between the material and the symbolic, between places as conceived and places as experienced, between spatial and temporal models of existential understanding—has long influenced the academic discipline of geography. And in today’s world, where the familiar order of things seems increasingly contingent and fluid, destabilized by political and military turmoil, economic upheaval, and rapid technological development, a similar impulse among artists, writers, architects, and other cultural producers to interrogate and reimagine conventional notions of the physical and social landscape we inhabit grows only more vivid.<br /><br />Each of the participants in this roundtable has developed innovative and unique practices that engage questions of space. Tom McCarthy’s role, since 2000, as a conceptual provocateur in the “semi-fictitious avant-garde network” known as the International Necronautical Society (INS) finds literary expression in his first novel, Remainder (2007), in which an unnamed protagonist, almost killed by a piece of high-tech debris that falls from the sky, awakens from a coma with his worldview permanently altered. Obsessed with finding a sense of heightened authenticity in the world around him, he’s driven to replay, to literally reenact, certain resonant moments that challenge his (and the reader’s) notions of space and time, as well as the kinds of activities—mundane and exceptional—that necessarily take place in both constructs. Nato Thompson’s work as a curator and writer has consistently examined the potential of social space as an arena for the artistic production of meaning. He persistently probes the idea, as he’s written, that, “ultimately, all phenomena resolve themselves in space. Cultural and material production are not simply abstract ideas, but are forces that shape who and what we are, and they do so in places we can walk to, intervene in, and tour.” Architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, meanwhile, has long focused his scholarship on the relationship between architecture and planning and the intractable social, political, and military conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis. Weizman is the author of Hollow Land (2007), which, he writes, “looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribed themselves in space, analyzing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them.”<br /><br />The four of us, two in London and two in New York, held a conversation within the spatially indeterminate surroundings of the Internet over the course of a week early last February from which the following transcript is taken.<br /><br />—Jeffrey Kastner<br /><br /><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3511"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >...CONTINUE READING...</span></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-20926349522247973742009-03-08T15:20:00.000-07:002009-04-23T12:30:15.440-07:00Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/theredproject/3380253541/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjubjmpFTKC2gnGVCkqkykrvw1lcwiPv2HoucNfw_nRQ_YaEMnFNMxq4M816h8p74seTD4Bkleu8m0EKXS-ExTu9u4USxFPED6SZSOfTNIoapoktyLhC5ChIc_geXVMv6T6EDS3iA/s400/3380253541_055e071e93.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5327969219499808402" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/03/express/experimental-geography-from-cultural-production-to-the-production-of-space">Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space</a> / <a href="http://paglen.com/">Trevor Paglen</a> / <a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/">The Brooklyn Rail</a></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br /><br />When most people think about geography, they think about maps. Lots of maps. Maps with state capitals and national territories, maps showing mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, or maps showing population distributions and migration patterns. And indeed, that isn’t a wholly inaccurate idea of what the field is all about. It is true that modern geography and mapmaking were once inseparable.<br /><br />Renaissance geographers like Henricus Martellus Germanus and Pedro Reinel, having rediscovered Greek texts on geography (most importantly Ptolemy’s Geography), put the ancient knowledge to work in the service of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Martellus’s maps from the late 15th Century updated the old Greek cartographic projections to include Marco Polo’s explorations of the East as well as Portuguese forays along the African coast. Reinel’s portolan maps are some of the oldest modern nautical charts. Cartography, it turned out, was an indispensable tool for imperial expansion: if new territories were to be controlled, they had to be mapped. Within a few decades, royal cartographers filled in blank spots on old maps. In 1500, Juan de la Cosa, who accompanied Columbus on three voyages as captain of the Santa Maria, produced the Mappa Mundi, the first known map to depict the New World. Geography was such an important instrument of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism that early modern maps were some of these empires’ greatest secrets. Anyone caught leaking a map to a foreign power could be punished by death.<br /><br />In our own time, another cartographic renaissance is taking place. In popular culture, free software applications like Google Earth and MapQuest have become almost indispensable parts of our everyday lives: we use online mapping applications to get directions to unfamiliar addresses and to virtually “explore” the globe with the aid of publicly available satellite imagery. Consumer-available global positioning systems (GPS) have made latitude and longitude coordinates a part of the cultural vernacular. In the arts, legions of cultural producers have been exercising the power to map. Gallery and museum exhibitions are dedicated to every variety of creative cartography; “locative media” has emerged as a form of techno-site-specificity; in the antiquities market, old maps have come to command historically unprecedented prices at auction. Academia, too, has been seized by the new powers of mapmaking: geographical information systems (GIS) have become a new lingua franca for collecting, collating, and representing data in fields as diverse as archaeology, biology, climatology, demography, epidemiology, and all the way to zoology. In many people’s minds, a newfound interest in geography has seized popular culture, the arts, and the academy. But does the proliferation of mapping technologies and practices really point to a new geographic cultural a priori? Not necessarily. Although geography and cartography have common intellectual and practical ancestors, and are often located within the same departments at universities, they can suggest very different ways of seeing and understanding the world.<br /><br />Contemporary geography has little more than a cursory relationship to all varieties of cartography. In fact, most critical geographers have a healthy skepticism for the “God’s-Eye” vantage points implicit in much cartographic practice. As useful as maps can be, they can only provide very rough guides to what constitutes a particular space.<br /><br />Geography is a curiously and powerfully transdisciplinary discipline. In any given geography department, one is likely to find people studying everything from the pre-Holocene atmospheric chemistry of northern Greenland to the effects of sovereign wealth funds on Hong Kong real estate markets, and from methyl chloride emissions in coastal salt marshes to the racial politics of nineteenth-century California labor movements. In the postwar United States, university officials routinely equated the discipline’s lack of systematic methodological and discursive norms with a lack of seriousness and rigor, a perception that led to numerous departments being closed for lack of institutional support. The end of geography at Harvard was typical of what happened to the field: university officials shut down its geography department in 1948, as CUNY geographer Neil Smith tells it, after being flummoxed by their “inability to extract a clear definition of the subject, to grasp the substance of geography, or to determine its boundaries with other disciplines.” The academic brass “saw the field as hopelessly amorphous.” But this “hopeless amorphousness” is, in fact, the discipline’s greatest strength.<br /><br />No matter how diverse and transdisciplinary the field of geography may seem, and indeed is, a couple of axioms nevertheless unify the vast majority of contemporary geographers’ work. These axioms hold as true for the “hard science” in university laboratories as for human geographers studying the unpredictable workings of culture and society. Geography’s major theoretical underpinnings come from two related ideas: materialism and the production of space.<br /><br />In the philosophical tradition, materialism is the simple idea that the world is made out of “stuff,” and that moreover, the world is only made out of “stuff.” All phenomena, then, from atmospheric dynamics to Jackson Pollock paintings, arise out of the interactions of material in the world. In the western tradition, philosophical materialism goes back to ancient Greek philosophers like Democritus, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, whose conceptions of reality differed sharply from Plato’s metaphysics. Later philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx would develop materialist philosophies in contradistinction to Cartesian dualism and German idealism. Methodologically, materialism suggests an empirical (although not necessarily positivistic) approach to understanding the world. In the contemporary intellectual climate, a materialist approach takes relationality for granted, but an analytic approach that insists on “stuff” can be a powerful way of circumventing or tempering the quasi-solipsistic tendencies found in some strains of vulgar poststructuralism.<br /><br />Geography’s second overarching axiom has to do with what we generally call “the production of space.” Although the idea of the “production of space” is usually attributed to the geographer-philosopher Henri Lefebvre, whose 1974 book La Production de l’Espace introduced the term to large numbers of people, the ideas animating Lefebvre’s work have a much longer history.Like materialism, the production of space is a relatively easy, even obvious, idea, but it has profoundimplications. In a nutshell, the production of space says that humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn, created by the world around them. In other words, the human condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings. In this view, space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively “produced” through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.<br /><br />To illustrate this idea, we can take the university where I’m presently writing this text. At first blush, the university might seem like little more than a collection of buildings: libraries, laboratories, and classrooms with distinct locations in space. That’s what the university looks like on a map or on Google Earth. But this is an exceptionally partial view of the institution. The university is not an inert thing: it doesn’t “happen” until students arrive to attend classes, professors lock themselves away to do research, administrative staff pays the bills and registers the students, state legislators appropriate money for campus operations, and maintenance crews keep the institution’s physical infrastructure from falling apart. The university, then, cannot be separated from the people who go about “producing” the institution day after day. But the university also sculpts human activity: the university’s physical and bureaucratic structure creates conditions under which students attend lectures, read books, write papers, participate in discussions, and get grades. Human activity produces the university, but human activities are, in turn, shaped by the university. In these feedback loops, we see production of space at work.<br /><br />Fine. But what does all of this have to do with art? What does this have to do with “cultural production?”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/03/express/experimental-geography-from-cultural-production-to-the-production-of-space">...CONTINUE READING...</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >MISC.</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2448">Media Studies: Experimental Geography Reading List</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://againstthegrain.org/program/158/id/111418/tues-3-10-09-place-matters">Place Matters</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://againstthegrain.org/">Against the Grain</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=166">Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/exhibitions/experimental/experimental.htm">Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://blog.art21.org/2009/01/31/international-geographic-interview-with-nato-thompson/">International Geographic: Interview with Nato Thompson</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://blog.art21.org/">Art21 Blog</a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-39599169934664482822009-01-12T19:21:00.000-08:002009-06-12T08:25:52.141-07:00The City From Below<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cityfrombelow.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 418px; height: 576px;" src="http://cityfrombelow.org/files/images/city3.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://cityfrombelow.org/main"><span style="font-style: italic;">The City From Below</span><br />March 27th-29th, 2009<br />Baltimore</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://cityfrombelow.org/liveblog">!!! VIDEO DOCUMENTATION !!!</a></span><br /><br />This <a href="http://indyreader.org/content/springsummer-2009-issue-12">special national issue of the Indypendent Reader (Spring/Summer 2009 Issue 12)</a> comes out of the Baltimore conference.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://indyreader.org/content/springsummer-2009-issue-12"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://indyreader.org/files/cover_images/indycover.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The city has emerged in recent years as an indispensable concept for many of the struggles for social justice we are all engaged in - it's a place where theory meets practice, where the neighborhood organizes against global capitalism, where unequal divisions based on race and class can be mapped out block by block and contested, where the micropolitics of gender and sexual orientation are subject to metropolitan rearticulation, where every corner is a potential site of resistance and every vacant lot a commons to be reclaimed, and, most importantly, a place where all our diverse struggles and strategies have a chance of coming together into something greater. In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below.<br /><br />To that end, a group of activists and organizers, including <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://redemmas.org/">Red Emma's</a>, the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://indyreader.org/">Indypendent Reader</a>, <span style="font-weight: bold;">campbaltimore</span>, and the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Campaign for a Better Baltimore</span> are calling for a conference called <a style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" href="http://cityfrombelow.org/">The City From Below</a>, to take place in Baltimore during the weekend of March 27th-29th, 2009 at <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.redemmas.org/2640/">2640</a>, a grassroots community center and events venue.<br /><br />Our intention to focus on the city first and foremost stems from our own organizing experience, and a recognition that the city is very often the terrain on which we fight, and which we should be fighting for. To take a particularly salient example from Baltimore, it is increasingly the case that labor struggles, especially in the service sector, need to confront not just unfair employers, but structurally disastrous municipal development policies. While the financial crisis plays out in the national news and in the spectacle of legislative action, it is at the level of the urban community where foreclosures can be directly challenged and the right to a non-capitalist relation to housing can be fought for. Our right to an autonomous culture, to our freedom to dissent, to public spaces and to public education all hinge increasingly on our relation to the cities in which we live and to the people and forces in control of them. And our cities offer some truly inspiring and creative examples of resistance - from the community garden to the neighborhood assembly.<br /><br />We are committed in organizing this conference to a horizontal framework of participation, one which allows us to concretely engage with and support ongoing social justice struggles. What we envision is a conference which isn't just about academics and other researchers talking to each other and at a passive audience, but one where some of the most inspiring campaigns and projects on the frontlines of the fight for the right to the city (community anti-gentrification groups, transit rights activists, tenant unions, alternative development advocates, sex worker's rights advocates, prison reform groups) will not just be represented, but will concretely benefit from the alliances they build and the knowledge they gain by attending.<br /><br />At the same time, we also want to productively engage those within the academic system, as well as artists, journalists, and other researchers. It is a mistake to think that people who spend their lives working on urban geography and sociology, in urban planning, or on the history of cities have nothing to offer to our struggles. At the same time, we recognize that too often the way in which academics engage activists, if they do so at all, is to talk at them. We are envisioning something much different, closer to the notion of "accompaniment". We want academics and activists to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and to offer what they each are best able to. Concretely, we're hoping to facilitate this kind of dynamic by planning as much of the conference as possible as panels involving both scholars and organizers.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cityfrombelow.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmUu96hxSwMUVfgbLd91E6m6zgtzic6EVhBkPKw79BD_euMMSnjZ79vSrcoGw6vxYjltd55WIvj5C-Mmtu9vLmxAel4Spsji-CMzonlI_Lkm7fmxra_1rSEf8amxAnpKlCabXrXQ/s400/baltimore03.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5291257668899872258" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">THEMES TO BE CONSIDERED</span><br /><br />* Gentrification/uneven development<br />* Policing and incarceration<br />* Tenants rights/housing as a right<br />* Public transit<br />* Urban worker's rights<br />* Foreclosures/financial crisis<br />* Public education<br />* Slots/casinos/regressive taxation<br />* Cultural gentrification<br />* Underground economies<br />* Reclaiming public space<br />* The right to the city<br />* Squatting/Contesting Property Rights<br />* Urban sustainability<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS</span><br /><br />Please share with us your proposal for workshops or presentations. We hope to host 15-25 sessions with a mixture of formats and welcome proposals from groups and individuals. The conference is geared towards discussion and participation. People are welcome to bring papers and other resources with them, but this conference is not oriented to the presentation of papers. There will be 50 and 110 minute sessions. We welcome self-organized workshops but will also work to incorporate individual proposals into panels with others. In your proposal please indicate how your proposal relates to the themes of the conference, expected participants, organizing partners and session format (training, panel, open discussion, video, etc.) and how long the session will be. We are especially interested in proposals which combine critique of the urban environment with discussions of new strategies for its reclamation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Please get proposals to us no later than the 30th of January</span>, but preferably before January 1st.<br /><br />Please send proposals to: <span style="font-weight: bold;">cityfrombelow -at- redemmas.org</span><br /><br />Email is preferred, but you can also send a proposal to:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">City from Below</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">c/o Red Emma's</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">800 St Paul St.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Baltimore MD 21202</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cityfrombelow.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh92Y1Iwkgxdms3ou-BeqrMTMYzTYRdpEylaSWvxEzz0NmXpRQqr4dNw96t-C3ow_HvwPlK3z9yzKVjC4LFAeRhAB0qTs-Q_uLmkCpHcCSPZoZIF8du0EbC67UZ1uNDg4zOVhRvnQ/s400/baltimore04.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5291257348247536066" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >CONTEXTS</span><br /><br /><a href="http://redemmas.org/">Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse</a><br /><br /><a href="http://indyreader.org/">Baltimore's Indypendent Reader</a> / <a href="http://indyreader.org/issues/list">Past Issues</a><br /><br /><a href="http://baltimore.indymedia.org/index.php">Baltimore Independent Media Center</a><br /><br /><a href="http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/11527/index.php">East Baltimore: A Conversation between David Harvey & Marisela Gomez</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.freestorebaltimore.org/">Baltimore Free Store</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2008/democracy/bal.php">Democracy in America / Town Hall Meetings (Baltimore)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.spa.ucla.edu/critplan/Berzofsky_UCLA_Crit_Plan_v14.pdf">Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity</a> (PDF) / <a href="http://www.sppsr.ucla.edu/critplan/past/volume014/index.htm">Critical Planning</a> / Scott Berzofsky, Christopher Gladora, David Sloan, and Nicholas Wisniewski<br /><br /><a href="http://www.contemporary.org/past_2006_04.html">Investigating the Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison Industrial Complex</a> / Contemporary Museum / May 14-August 27, 2006<br /><br /><a href="http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19900">Reappropriate the Imagination!</a> / Cindy Milstein / <span style="font-style: italic;">Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority</span>, edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland (AK Press, 2007)<br /><br /><a href="http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=14073">Collective Perspective: A Progressive Local Art Exhibition Births A Progressive Local Publication</a> / Baltimore City Paper<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cityfrombelow.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9RpPeYLKGBVSGbM2HrZZVinDS_TE7ftpoG4-y0tmN6RLnHlFOEToHfCo1JSDgfb0bBJ5RCzr-Nm8fIk6AtkgwGlFeXDEeAMfc8GGiqs-SXas25G-HGAYfFb4RbLy2QrQNFiL_7g/s400/baltimore02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5291257853130145410" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-36619587192262031922008-12-02T13:41:00.000-08:002008-12-02T14:16:16.888-08:00Free Land / Ariel Luckey<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/W01YLEd5Kq4&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/W01YLEd5Kq4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.freelandproject.com/">Free Land</a> / <a href="http://www.arielluckey.com/">Ariel Luckey</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.freelandproject.com/">Free Land</a> is a dynamic hip hop theater solo show written and performed by <a href="http://www.arielluckey.com/aboutme.html">Ariel Luckey</a>, directed by <a href="http://www.freelandproject.com/artists.html">Margo Hall</a> and scored by <a href="http://www.freelandproject.com/artists.html">Ryan Luckey</a>. The show follows a young white man’s search for his roots as it takes him from the streets of Oakland to the prairies of Wyoming on an unforgettable journey into the heart of American history. During an interview with his grandfather he learns that their beloved family ranch was actually a Homestead, a free land grant from the government. Haunted by the past, he’s compelled to dig deeper into the history of the land, only to come face to face with the legacy of theft and genocide in the Wild Wild West. Caught between the romantic cowboy tales of his childhood and the devastating reality of what he learns, he grapples with the contradictions in his own life and the possibility for justice and reconciliation. <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.freelandproject.com/script.html">Free Land</a> weaves spoken word poetry, acting, dance and hip hop music into a compelling performance that challenges us to take an unflinching look at the truth buried in the land beneath our feet.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.freelandproject.com/about.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 282px; height: 269px;" src="http://www.freelandproject.com/images/about02.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.utne.com/2008-11-13/50-Visionaries-Who-Are-Changing-Your-World.aspx">"50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World"</a> / <a href="http://www.utne.com/">Utne Reader</a></span><br /><br />In the 19th century, U.S. forces displaced American Indian populations, often violently, before white homesteaders moved in to claim “free” land. “If you look at who owns land in this country, the pattern that’s here today was established in the 1860s,” says Oakland-based hip-hop artist and activist <a href="http://www.arielluckey.com/">Ariel Luckey</a>. To get people seeing the roots of that privilege, he created <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.freelandproject.com/">Free Land</a>, a candid solo show about coming to terms with homesteading in his family’s history. With dance and song, Free Land cuts to the heart of inherited privilege with more resonance than 10,000 self-conscious liberal arts students could ever muster—and in doing so, opens the door for genuine national introspection.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.arielluckey.com/thangstaken.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 345px; height: 259px;" src="http://www.arielluckey.com/photogallery/photogallery-Images/22.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.arielluckey.com/thangstaken.html">Thangs Taken</a> / <a href="http://www.arielluckey.com/">Ariel Luckey</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.arielluckey.com/thangstaken.html">Thangs Taken</a> rethinking thanksgiving is an annual cultural event that brings artists, activists, and communities together to explore the complex history of Thanksgiving and to acknowledge the legacy of US colonialism and genocide against Native Americans. Produced by the Free Land Project, <span style="font-style: italic;">Thangs Taken</span> features live music, dance, film, spoken word poetry, hip hop theater, and visual art installations from Native and non-Native artists. Grounded in grassroots activism, <span style="font-style: italic;">Thangs Taken</span> also features leaders from local social and environmental justice organizations to provide information on current campaigns and concrete ways to take action in the community. With the arts at the center, people from diverse backgrounds gather to engage in a critical dialogue about the impact of Thanksgiving and the history it represents on our communities and to stand in the power of our collective ability to create a world based in peace and justice that we can truly be thankful for.nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-10154074546477900212008-10-23T11:42:00.000-07:002008-10-23T14:45:25.366-07:00Autonomous Geographies<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 451px; height: 203px;" src="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/images/100.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/">Autonomous Geographies</a> is a two year action research project run jointly by geographers at the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.<br /><br />We use the term <span style="font-style: italic;">autonomous geographies</span> to define those spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship, which are created through a combination of resistance and creation, and the questioning and challenging of dominant laws and social norms.<br /><br />The <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/ourproject/">project</a> looks at how activists make and remake these types of spaces in their everyday lives by exploring their core ideas, beliefs and visions, how they are translated into action, what kinds of spaces for participation and identity are created and what it means to live in-between the overlapping spaces. We are currently participating in three UK-based <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/casestudies/">case studies</a> and are guided by an <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/advisorygroup/">advisory group</a>. By engaging in such research, our aim is to critically explore and support autonomous spaces in the UK and the ideas, struggles and practices that bring them to life, as well as help to introduce them to new audiences.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/images/112.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/whorunsleeds">Who Runs Leeds?</a></span><br /><br />An Action Research Project run by the School of Geography and <a href="http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/">Corporate Watch</a> with financial and research support from local trade unions.<br /><br />The emergence of Leeds as an economic powerhouse in Britain in the past decade has been nothing short of spectacular. The second largest metropolitan district in England, Leeds is now the leading financial and law centre outside London. In the last 20 years, more jobs have been created in Leeds than in any other UK city outside London, and it is expected to provide 45% of employment growth in the region over the next 10 years. But beneath this comprehensive transformation of Leeds from industrial town to thriving metropolis, a dramatic restructuring of power, ownership and wealth is taking place prompting citizens to ask: who is really running Leeds?<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.thecommonplace.org.uk/">The Common Place - Leeds' autonomous, radical social centre</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.handbookforchange.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.plutobooks.com/titleimages/9780745326375_f.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://www.handbookforchange.org/">DO IT YOURSELF: A Handbook for Changing Our World</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Edited by </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://trapese.clearerchannel.org/index.php">The Trapese Collective</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A Radical Guide to Ethical and Sustainable Living</span><br /><br />Climate change, resource wars, privatisation, the growing gap between rich and poor, politicians that don't listen. Massive issues, but how can we make any difference?<br /><br />This <a href="http://www.handbookforchange.org/">book</a> shows how. It's not a book about what's wrong with the world, but a collection of dynamic ideas which explore how we can build radical and meaningful social change, ourselves, here and now. Covering nine themes, the book weaves together analysis, stories and experiences. It combines in-depth analytical chapters followed by easy to follow "How to Guides" with practical ideas for organising collectively for change.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://hbfc.clearerchannel.org/sample_chapter.pdf">Download a Sample Chapter (PDF)</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/images/68.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://trapese.clearerchannel.org/">Trapese Collective</a></span><br /><br />Trapese is a Popular Education Collective who offers workshops and training aimed at inspiring and promoting action for changing our world.<br /><br />TRAPESE stands for ‘Taking Radical Action through Popular Education and Sustainable Everything!’ Our work involves interactive workshops, games, films, trainings, and action/campaign planning sessions. We aim to provide opportunities for children, young people and adults to explore the big issues of our time. Our work focuses on practical steps to inspire, inform and enable action, and how to develop workable alternatives. We are a not for profit collective motivated by a passionate belief in the power of learning together.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://sparror.cubecinema.com/stuffit/trapese/">The Rocky Road to Transition: The Transition Towns movement and what it means for social change</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sparror.cubecinema.com/stuffit/trapese/rocky-road-a5-web.pdf">Download Book (PDF)</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/images/118.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/publications">Misc. Essays</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/p.chatterton/">Paul Chatterton</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.jennypickerill.info/">Jenny Pickerill</a><br /><br />Chatterton, P (2008) <a href="http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/p.chatterton/PublicScholar.pdf">"Demand the Possible: Journeys in Changing ourWorld as a Public Activist-Scholar"</a>.<br /><br />Chatterton, P (2006) <a href="http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/p.chatterton/antipode.pdf">"'Give up Activism' and Change the World in Unknown Ways: Or, Learning to Walk with Others on Uncommon Ground"</a>, Antipode. Vol.38, No.2.<br /><br />Pickerill, J & Chatterton, P (2006) <a href="http://www.autonomousgeographies.org/files/notes_towards_ag.pdf">"Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics"</a>, Progress in Human Geography. Vol.30, No.6.<br /><br />Pickerill, J (2008) <a href="http://www.jennypickerill.info/Pickerill%202008%20Public%20Scholar%20Antipode.pdf">"A surprising sense of hope"</a>, Antipode. Vol.40, No.3.nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-72409766644833349512008-10-22T09:20:00.000-07:002008-10-23T11:39:59.463-07:00Beehive Design Collective's Coal Campaign<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://beehivecollective.blogspot.com/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.beehivecollective.org/images/coal_poster.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/">Beehive Design Collective</a> / <a href="http://beehivecollective.blogspot.com/">Coal Campaign</a></span><br /><br />Understanding the devastation of Mountaintop Removal is perhaps primarily a visual undertaking - the vastness of the altered landscape cannot be conveyed with words alone. And while the <a href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/">Beehive Collective</a> is known for graphics that speak in pictures across the cultural and language barriers of North and South Americas, it is our hope through this campaign to use our image-based storytelling methods to cross domestic class, geographical, and literacy barriers very close to home. We intend to produce a learning tool that artfully captures the human and ecological scale of totalitarian resource extraction while reinforcing and participating in the rich storytelling tradition of Appalachia.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=237">Coal Graphic Campaign / In Process Gallery</a><br /><br />Halfway through our drawing process, the Beehive is beginning to share the Story of Coal with diverse audiences through two banners: one <a href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/special/COALbanner2.pdf">explaining our research trip</a> and one <a href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/special/COALbanner1.pdf">outlining the upcoming graphic</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=237"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.beehivecollective.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=1193&g2_serialNumber=2" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.beehivecollective.org/">Beehive Design Collective</a> is a 100% volunteer driven non-profit political organization that uses graphical media as educational tools to communicate stories of resistance to corporate globalization. The group, based in Machias, Maine, has a mission objective to "Cross-pollinate the grassroots by using imagery as an effective organizing tool". The Beehive Collective is most renowned for its large format pen and ink posters which seek to provide a visual alternative to deconstruction of complicated social and political issues ranging from globalization, free trade, militarism, resource extraction, and biotechnology.nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-72720857942013902842008-10-21T21:01:00.000-07:002008-10-23T16:33:56.974-07:00Eating in Public & Historic Waikiki<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/index.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.nomoola.com/">EATING IN PUBLIC</a> / <a href="http://www.gayechan.com/">Gaye Chan</a> + <a href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/sharma/index.html">Nandita Sharma</a></span><br /><br />In November of 2003 we planted twenty papaya seedlings on public land near our house in Kailua, Hawai'i. In doing so, we broke the existing laws of the state that delineate this space as 'public' and thereby set the terms for its use. Our act has two major purposes: one is to grow and share food; the other is to problematize the concept of 'public' within public space....<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/pages/diggers_p1.html">{ Part 1 : Autumn }</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/pages/diggers_p7.html">{ Part 2 : Winter }</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/pages/diggers_p9.html">{ Part 3 : Spring }</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/pages/diggers_p10.html">{ Part 4 : Summer }</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/pages/diggers_p12.html">{ Part 5 : Spring/Summer/Autumn }</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/pages/diggers_p13.html">{ Part 6 : Winter }</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/pages/diggers_p8.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/pages/diggers_p8front_lg.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.tinfishpress.com/free_stuff.html">Eating in Public</a> is an anti-capitalism project in Hawai'i nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Unlike Santa and the State, they give equally to the naughty and the nice. They do not exploit anyone's labor. And they do not offer tax-deductions. They are, in all the word's various definitions, free. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people's homes and <a href="http://www.nomoola.com/">plant food on public land</a>. They currently have two ongoing free_stores and a <a href="http://www.nomoola.com/">website</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/pages/diggers_p13.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/pages/diggers_p13.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/star_bulletin/story01.html">"Sowing the seeds of awareness"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Honolulu Star Bulletin</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.nomoola.com/diggers/honolulu_advertiser/index.html">"Store's open — and free"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Honolulu Advertiser</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Eating in Public" in </span><a style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.constituentimagination.net/">Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization</a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/">Historic Waikiki</a></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/aloha_or.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.downwindproductions.com/aloha_or.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/">Historic Waikiki</a> is a project by <a href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/">DownWind Productions</a>, a collaborative of artists, writers, teachers and activists who examine the impact of colonialism, capitalism, and tourism in Hawai'i. We distribute information and agitprop commodities through the marketplace and e-commerce to help tourists and locals alike understand our complicity in the decimation of Hawaii's land and people, and to imagine different relationships with each other and with our own desires and longings.<br /><br />DownWind is subjected to everything that happens and happened upwind. When hunting, it is recommended that you position yourself downwind of the hunted.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/shopping/book/about_book.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.downwindproductions.com/shopping/book/waikiki_cover.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/shopping/book/about_book.html">Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and Remembering</a> is a work of art, critical history, and investigative journalism that assumes the unlikely form of a coffee table book. Written in an accessible style, the book creatively draws from historical text and images to tell the story of Waikîkî’s transformation from a self-sustaining community to one of the world’s most popular and overdeveloped vacation destinations.<br /><br />The result is an innovative collaboration between an art historian and an artist. Written by Andrea Feeser, the text is carefully researched and masterfully woven, using literary metaphors alongside documentary evidence and historical narrative. Artist Gaye Chan contributes lush and haunting imagery that at once serves to illustrate the text and questions the veracity of photographic evidence.<br /><br />Equally satisfying for a Hawaiiana enthusiast or a cultural studies scholar, a visitor or a long-time Hawai‘i resident, the book offers little-known facts about Waikîkî as well as theoretical and poetic reflections on the very process of memory and history making.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/shopping/book/table_of_content.pdf">Download Table of Contents (PDF)</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/shopping/book/chapter3-ALAWAI.pdf">Download an excerpt from the book, Chapter 3 - Ala Wai (PDF)</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://channel.creative-capital.org/grantee_108.html">Gaye Chan @ Creative Capital</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/story-continued/2006/11/where-spouting-waters-ebb/">"Where Spouting Waters Ebb"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Honolulu Weekly</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hawaii.edu/malamalama/2007/05/f7-waikiki.html">"Room for a View: Projects influence how we see Waikiki"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Malamalama</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/feeser.htm">"Real-time and Digital Communication in and about Contested Hawai'i: The Public Art Project Historic Waikiki"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Andrea Feeser</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.gayechan.com/there_there/">THERE THERE</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.gayechan.com/">Gaye Chan</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> + </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://socialsciences.people.hawaii.edu/faculty/?dept=es&faculty=nsharma@hawaii.edu">Nandita Sharma</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.downwindproductions.com/hawaiitimeline/hawaiitimeline11.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 420px; height: 600px;" src="http://www.downwindproductions.com/hawaiitimeline/hawaii_timeline11.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-20239396055387628672008-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:002008-10-23T09:55:08.356-07:00The Right to the City<span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCgpRV9ROQE">Battle of the Bailout: The Fight For The City 2008</a></span><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bCgpRV9ROQE&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bCgpRV9ROQE&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2740">The Right to the City</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://davidharvey.org/">David Harvey</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://newleftreview.org/">New Left Review</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://newleftreview.org/?issue=287">September-October 2008</a><br /><br />Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://abahlali.org/files/Harvery_right_to_the_city.pdf">Download PDF</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sustainablecities.dk/actions/interviews/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city">David Harvey: The Right to the City</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sustainablecities.dk/">Sustainable Cities</a><br /><br />The question of what kind of city we want cannot be separated from what kind of people we want to be. David Harvey invites all manner of social movements to assert their 'right to the city' - the right to re-make the city in a different image.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.theory-talks.org/2008/10/theory-talk-20-david-harvey.html">Theory Talk #20: David Harvey</a><br /><br />David Harvey on the Geography of Capitalism, Understanding Cities as Polities and Shifting Imperialisms<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.righttothecity.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 183px; height: 185px;" src="http://www.righttothecity.org/images/RTTC_FINAL_LOGO_sm-1.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.righttothecity.org/">Right to the City Alliance</a></span><br /><br />Right to the City (RTTC) is a newly formed alliance of base building organizations from cities across the country as well as researchers, academics, lawyers, and other allies. We came together in January of 2007 to build a united response to gentrification and the drastic changes imposed on our cities. We stand together under the notion of a Right to the City for all.<br /><br />Right to the City offers a framework for resistance and a vision for a city that meets the needs of working class people. It connects our fights against gentrification and displacement to other local and international struggles for human rights, land, and democracy.<br /><br />We are coming together under a common framework to increase the strength of our community organizations and our collective power. Our goal is to build a national urban movement for housing, education, health, racial justice and democracy.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.righttothecity.org/">Principles of Unity for the Right to the City Alliance</a><br /><br />1. Land for People vs. Land for Speculation<br />2. Land Ownership<br />3. Economic Justice<br />4. Indigenous Justice<br />5. Environmental Justice<br />6. Freedom from Police & State Harassment<br />7. Immigrant Justice<br />8. Services and Community Institutions<br />9. Democracy and Participation<br />10. Reparations<br />11. Internationalism<br />12. Rural Justice<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/building-power-in-the-city/">Building Power in the City: Reflections on the Emergence of the Right to the City Alliance and the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Harmony Goldberg / </span><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://www.joaap.org/contents.html">In the Middle of a Whirlwind</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.soc.iastate.edu/Soc535a/Readings%20PDF/Purcell.pdf">Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order (PDF)</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Mark Purcell</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/geojournal.pdf">Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant (PDF)</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Mark Purcell </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.righttothecity.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px; height: 450px;" src="http://www.justspaces.org/graphics/saje02.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-32451374440683689592008-10-01T09:50:00.000-07:002008-10-23T10:25:20.664-07:00In the Middle of a Whirlwind<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.joaap.org/projects/whirlwind.htm"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 354px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqbNfL808v0dAvqp1-TL3eTUTVOhvFBBhjbk3USfhNwfi42lPse_S5C8YZc9kzjp2_iSkf4TCpXxJP26FiK3ytEXTujqNRQNtEa-I44q6zF5zEwx3lAYl0hp80Tq_xXtZBo0_ADA/s400/whirlwind02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5260398715397196722" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/will-you-join-us-in-the-middle-of-a-whirlwind/">Will you join us in the middle of a whirlwind?</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info">In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement and Movements</a></span><br /><br />A one-off online journal of theory, art, activism and organizing out now!<br /><br />Coordinated by: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.warmachines.info/">Team Colors Collective</a><br /><br />Published by: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/">The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press</a><br /><br />In the Middle of a Whirlwind (Whirlwinds) inquires into current organizing efforts in the United States, and through that process, assembles a strategic analysis of current political composition as a tool for building political power. <br /><br />Whirlwinds' strategic context is this summer's RNC and DNC protests; through these documents and the discussions that erupt from them we hope to directly impact the anti-Convention organizing. In a larger sense, and in the long-term, Whirlwinds is intended to provide a set of useful documents for contemporary radical organizing. Each essay and interview addresses the issues of movement, working class power and composition, and/or gives strategic insight into organizing, and the strengths and weaknesses of current movement/s in the U.S.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/will-you-join-us-in-the-middle-of-a-whirlwind/">A Letter Among Friends: A Whirlwinds Introduction</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Conor Cash, Craig Hughes & Kevin Van Meter/ Team Colors Collective</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://teamcolors.wordpress.com/">Team Colors News & Events</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=29847746">Team Colors @ MySpace</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.joaap.org/projects/whirlwind.htm"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2hKSMTSW76UH_m0acORvDiKBMZWLfP0AECaC3tJJNzxIDpRZACuwt7LhMl5lv2Hacfyy-V0UvH8NtrpWixipglE47y9yxKn_k9V_Krk0xtTFs_s2Faat3G_EozfgX-3jSIZDqUg/s400/whirlwind01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5260398363356372690" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-15284670024382433782008-09-25T20:52:00.000-07:002008-10-23T08:29:58.246-07:00Making Policy Public<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/projects/54"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/images/image.php?resource=/resources/mpp%20for%20site.jpg&w=505&h=387?" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/">Making Policy Public</a> / <a href="http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/">The Center for Urban Pedagogy</a></span><br /><br />CUP's new series of fold-out posters uses innovative graphic design to explore and explain public policy. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/">Making Policy Public</a> is published twice a year, and each poster is the product of a commissioned collaboration between a designer and an advocate.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=how-it-works">How It Works</a><br /><br />While the effects of public policy are widespread, the discussions around these policies are anything but. This series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared. By calling on designers to work with advocates to find new ways to make policy public, CUP aims to add vitality to crucial debates about our future. Making Policy Public facilitates new collaborations across the fields of design, education, and public policy by creating opportunities for designers to engage social issues without sacrificing experimentation and for organizations to better reach their constituencies through design.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=2008-policy-briefs">Download 2008 Policy Briefs</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=the-cargo-chain">The Cargo Chain</a></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=the-cargo-chain"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/uploads/images/contents/pg3.1_poster2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The Cargo Chain is an organizing tool for longshore workers that shows the players and pressure points in today’s globalized shipping network. How do commodities get from factory to shopping mall? Who really has the power to move today’s global economy? This pamphlet was produced through a collaboration between the <a href="http://lwcjustice.com/?p=147">Longshore Workers Coalition</a>, <a href="http://www.labornotes.org/">Labor Notes</a> (a quarterly journal of labor journalism and research), cartographer <a href="http://www.radicalcartography.net/">Bill Rankin</a>, and the graphic design office <a href="http://www.thumbprojects.com/index.php?/recent/cup-center-for-urban-pedagogy/">Thumb</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=social-security-risk-machine">Social Security Risk Machine</a></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=social-security-risk-machine"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/uploads/images/contents/pg3.2_poster3.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Social Security Risk Machine explains the mechanics of this “social machine”: how it works, why it was created, where the money comes from and where it goes. Most importantly, the poster shows the many adjustments that can be made to keep the machine running. This poster was written by Sam Stark and designed by David Reinfurt and Damon Rich.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >SEE ALSO:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.agobservatory.org/issue_farmbill.cfm">Understanding the Farm Bill</a> / <a href="http://www.iatp.org/">Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)</a></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.agobservatory.org/issue_farmbill.cfm"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdqDPp-TEccQwPptdrLpoP1YBd2eYfNl_2NMTlxF0SnXMduGy3Wb6hLkMSYg5cAjkIcmwC6YsxTOxVPifOhXa3ZeB-8xBb2rxiQx4XCvquhApXsjYXOHAaZOiN54cQNZAvmEUR8g/s400/iatp01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259029612735752770" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.iatp.org/"></a><br />The U.S. Farm Bill leaves a huge footprint on the U.S. and the world. As Washington gears up for the debate, IATP analyzes what's at stake.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><br />Via <a href="http://www.backspace.com/notes/2007/06/understanding-the-farm-bill.php">Social Design Notes</a> and <a href="http://www.agobservatory.org/">IATP's Ag Observatory</a></span>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-90977950226394578302008-09-03T13:38:00.000-07:002008-09-03T23:08:53.081-07:00A Call To Farms / Midwest Radical Culture Corridor<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/library"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 420px;" src="http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/library/images/farmscover" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/library">A CALL TO FARMS: Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor</a></span><br /><br />Featuring the words of Claire Pentecost, Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross, Lisa Bralts-Kelly, Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune, Ryan Griffis, Mike Wolf, Martha Boyd and Naomi Davis, Rebecca Zorach, Nicolas Lampert, The Langby Family, Eric Haas, Sarah Holm, Brian Holmes, Dan S. Wang, mIEKAL aND, and Sarah Kanouse<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/farms_pdf">FREE Download (PDF)</a><br /><br />Designed by <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.heavydutypress.com/">The Heavy Duty Press</a>, offset printed at <a href="http://www.bookmobile.com/">Bookmobile</a><br />8.5 x 6.75", 60 pages plus cover, first printing: 500 copies, $10<br />Available soon at the <a href="http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5825633">Heavy Duty Etsy Store</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >MRCC & Continental Drift Resources</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://radicalmidwest.blogspot.com/">MRCC Blog</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/809322@N22/pool/">MRCC Drift @ Flickr</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/further/">"The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor in the Recent Past and the Distant Futures" / Brian Holmes</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://prop-press.vox.com/library/post/finding-being-the-radical-midwest.html">"Finding, Being the Radical Midwest" / Dan S. Wang</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://tempserv.livejournal.com/83415.html">The MRCC Schedule</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/">Continental Drift & 16Beaver</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.stopgostop.com/nca/ds3.html">"Songs of Returning, Both Silent and Aloud" (The Domestic Struggle Part Threee)</a> @ <a href="http://www.artofthis.net/">Art of This</a><br />Minneapolis, Minnesota<br />August 23 - September 7, 2008<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://desperationexhibition.blogspot.com/">"The Audacity Of Desperation"</a><br />Urbana, Illinois<br />May 7 - June 15, 2008<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://radicalmidwest.blogspot.com/"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifkwrCLqLEm9_4VRhD5qcqy-x8WWM9CiTA18U1GHBU5cSS0D9gdvT-5x-Bwb5-JnUfkioHBY9uN2_sb6t3EeGeFOeXddcMXsdyO0of36JiN4Iunsu5yBOyZG0A4BY1zEg5uWrHMA/s400/mrcc01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241903519131244690" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-9780634678652678592008-07-29T13:00:00.000-07:002008-07-30T13:35:46.880-07:00The Missing Plaque Project<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/posters.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/revenuerez.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />History can be a tool for social change. It is often said that the victors of history write the history books in their favor. Some stories are promoted, and others are left to dwindle in obscurity. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/">The Missing Plaque Project</a> tries to stand as a force to stop this from happening, by shedding light on the hidden histories.<br /><br />The project is based in Toronto, and has dedicated itself to changing the way we think about Toronto's history. The city's history is often portrayed as being conservative, British and boring. However, that is only part of the truth. People have lived in the area for thousands of years, but most people think of it as a young city with very little history. It is not that nothing is known of life here before the British set up shop, in 1793; rather those stories are not given the attention they deserve.<br /><br />Another element to how Toronto's history is portrayed is that anything bad that happened in the city took place long in the past and that since multiculturalism was "invented" in the 1970's everything has been "honky dory". To cast this image many stories have been ignored, including the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/Bathhouse-raids.jpg">Bathhouse Raids (1981)</a>, the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/yonge-street-riot.jpg">Yonge Street Riot (1992)</a>, and the treatment of homeless people.<br /><br />But why are some histories overlooked? Racism and other biases are partly to blame. Another part of it is the result of efforts to always portray Toronto in a good light, or efforts to use history as a tool to promote tourism or to increase property values. Another part is that many of the people who do work around the city's history come from a narrow background and happy to focus on the history of the British and the rich. Many of them are interested in what most people find banal. Often are happy to look at the history of buildings in the city rather than the people who lived here, and the social turmoil of the past.<br /><br />Most Torontonians don't find the history of their city relevant to their lives. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://missingplaque.blogspot.com/">The Missing Plaque Project</a> attempts to show how our history is relevant to us today. The project does all it can to get people interested and thinking about our cities history. Although the project has began to use a variety of mediums, it started as a project to put up posters about little-known histories.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/posters.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/riel.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The project started on a freezing cold December night in 2002. After spending the evening at Kinko's, the founder of the project, Tim Groves, set out for Christie Pits with a steaming bucket of wheat paste and a roll of posters on the Christie Pits Riot. The idea of putting up posters had come to him as soon as he had learned the story of this riot. Before long, ideas for other posters sprang to mind. Slowly new posters were made.<br /><br />One of the ideas behind putting up the posters is that they can be up right on the street in the areas where people live. Instead of having to go out of your way to learn about the history it can be stumbled on by anyone in the neighbourhood that the history took place.<br /><br />One dilemma of using posters is that people have to stand in order to read them. They can not take it with them to sit down somewhere comfortable. This would suggest that the posters need to be as short and as easy to read as possible. However, we have been resistant to this, because so many historic plaques mark only that an event happened, but not why it is relevant. The content of our posters is a constant struggle between these two extremes.<br /><br />In 2006, it was decided to move the project in more ambitious directions. Not only is the number of posters being expanded, but plans are underway to incorporate a variety of other mediums, to seek funding, and to find collaborators to work on various projects.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://missingplaque.blogspot.com/">The Missing Plaque Project Blog</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/wish%20list.html">List of posters that may be released in the future</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/tours.html">Guided Tours</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" href="http://spacing.ca/postering/poster-potenial.htm">The poster's potential</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / Tim Groves</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/posters.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.missingplaque.tao.ca/wonscotanach-1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Via <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2008/07/the_missing_plaque_project.html">Just Seeds</a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-48669021053625890922008-07-22T17:00:00.000-07:002008-07-30T14:19:25.675-07:00Critical Geographies<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.praxis-epress.org/CGR/contents.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://www.praxis-epress.org/availablebooks/CG_cover.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.praxis-epress.org/CGR/contents.html">Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings</a><br />Edited by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.praxis-epress.org/rtcp/contents.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://www.praxis-epress.org/availablebooks/boa_cover2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.praxis-epress.org/rtcp/contents.html">Radical Theory/Critical Praxis: Making a Difference Beyond the Academy?</a><br />Edited by Duncan Fuller and Rob Kitchin</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Misc. Resources:</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.praxis-epress.org/">Praxis (e)Press</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.acme-journal.org/">ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies</a> / <a href="http://www.acme-journal.org/contents.html">Contents</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.antipode-online.net/classic.asp">Antipode Classic Articles (Free PDFs)</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.antipode-online.net/themed.asp">Antipode Themed Articles (Free PDFs)</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://activistgeographers.blogspot.com/">Activist Geographers Grouping</a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-64508958062267834392008-06-23T17:44:00.000-07:002008-10-23T08:49:13.556-07:00David Harvey<span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://davidharvey.org/">Reading Marx’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> with David Harvey</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/new_faculty/harvey.htm">David Harvey</a>, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been teaching <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://davidharvey.org/help-finding-the-text/">Karl Marx’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital, Volume I</span></a> for nearly 40 years, and his lectures are now available online for the first time. This open course consists of <a href="http://davidharvey.org/">13 two-hour video lectures</a> of Professor Harvey’s close chapter by chapter reading of <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital, Volume I</span>.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-01/">Reading Marx’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> - Class 1, Introduction</a><br /><br /><embed src="http://blip.tv/play/Acv1Y46MUA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="270" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> <br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-02/">Reading Marx’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Capital</span> - Class 2, Chapters 1-2</a><br /><br /><embed src="http://blip.tv/play/Acv2CI6MUA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="270" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=36080595">The Right to the City (Part I)</a></span><br />Lecture by Professor David Harvey<br /><a href="http://www.keg.lu.se/eng/index.aspx">Department of Geograhy</a> / <a href="http://www.lu.se/">Lund University</a><br />May 28, 2008<br /><br /><object height="360" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=36080595,t=1,mt=video"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=36080595,t=1,mt=video" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="360" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=36080957">The Right to the City (Part II)</a></span><br /><br /><object height="360" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=36080957,t=1,mt=video"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=36080957,t=1,mt=video" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="360" width="425"></embed></object><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.aap.cornell.edu/crp/resources/colloquia/event.cfm?customel_datapageid_47712=80945">Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development</a></span><br />Lecture by Professor David Harvey<br /><a href="http://www.aap.cornell.edu/crp/index.cfm">Department of City & Regional Planning</a> / <a href="http://www.cornell.edu/">Cornell University</a><br />March 13, 2008<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr1Cj1QzdCY&hl=en">(Part 1/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr3INtOSxUk">(Part 2/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W_czejj6iI">(Part 3/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbEiKVU3RgE">(Part 4/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjsWbuhw_xg">(Part 5/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAO9ndzi1Wc">(Part 6/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvaKOZrWagk">(Part 7/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dh6JXWMR0g">(Part 8/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw3Mt516IZ4">(Part 9/10)</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z-WoSz5yZ0">(Part 10/10)</a><br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tr1Cj1QzdCY&hl=en&rel=0"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tr1Cj1QzdCY&hl=en&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/">Introduction to Continental Drift</a></span><br /><a href="http://www.16beavergroup.org/">16beaver</a> / <a href="http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/intro2005ny.htm">New York, Fall 2005</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">David Harvey on Neoliberalism</span> (Quicktime)/ <a href="http://71.18.85.184/drift/091605_harvey.mov">(Part 1/2)</a> / <a href="http://71.18.85.184/drift/091605_harvey2.mov">(Part 2/2)</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/videos2005ny.htm"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihmMTW0Ex7zs2nw0E168QbrjpnkTB8erUdOC33lfPwCxdt_ZNULbziHHi2D_UGcMXUI0Pe9RPCZM_UVvO_hZgF1B_GmOrozQpc60gdhU4XkMIWHL1BeH5a-0YiPVMEPlW7D9RiQ/s400/harvey_drift.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5215549261841446546" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ></span>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-40407566989125389722008-06-17T15:28:00.000-07:002008-06-18T08:42:55.595-07:00Spectres of Liberty<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/spectresofliberty/TheEventChrisHarveyPhotos/photo#5212600212181391378"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/spectresofliberty/SFbgRoMymBI/AAAAAAAAA3I/jtolu8I8Cjo/CH_0548.JPG" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" ><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/spectresofliberty/TheEventChrisHarveyPhotos">Photo: Chris Harvey</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://spectresofliberty.com/">Spectres of Liberty</a> is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.<br /><br />The <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://spectresofliberty.com/site/golhistory">Liberty Street Church</a> is not only significant as a vanished part of Troy's architectural history, but also for its value as a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery. From old photos of the site provided by the Rensselaer Historical Society, we created an inflatable 1:1 scale reproduction of the church and will install it at the former site of the church, which is now a parking lot. We will be animating this ghost church through video projections that call forth the history of the site, as well as through the social context of a cultural event that will bring community members to the site to think more deeply about the space and its history.<br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fspectresofliberty%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F981851%3Freferrer%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fspectresofliberty%2Ecom%2Fsite%2Fgoldocumentation%26source%3D3&brandlink=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dbrandlink&brandname=blip%2Etv&showguidebutton=false&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf" allowfullscreen="true" id="showplayer" height="255" width="400"><param name="movie" value="http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fspectresofliberty%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F981851%3Freferrer%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fspectresofliberty%2Ecom%2Fsite%2Fgoldocumentation%26source%3D3&brandlink=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dbrandlink&brandname=blip%2Etv&showguidebutton=false&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf"><param name="quality" value="best"><embed src="http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fspectresofliberty%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F981851%3Freferrer%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fspectresofliberty%2Ecom%2Fsite%2Fgoldocumentation%26source%3D3&brandlink=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dbrandlink&brandname=blip%2Etv&showguidebutton=false&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf" quality="best" name="showplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="255" width="400"></embed></object><br /><br />Through our research we learned more about <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://spectresofliberty.com/site/golhistory">Henry Highland Garnet</a>, the pastor of Liberty Street Church from 1843-1848. He was known around the world for his militant orations and publications calling on people to actively participate in the fight to end slavery. When we read Henry Highland Garnet's words from the 1840's: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance," we do not think they are dead words from a forgotten time - but a call, an urging, to participate in transforming our world now.<br /><br />Spectres of Liberty is a project by <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://oliviarobinson.com/web/">Olivia Robinson</a>, <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.justseeds.org/">Josh MacPhee</a>, and <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.daragreenwald.com/">Dara Greenwald</a>.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://spectresofliberty.com/site/golhistory">History</a> / <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://spectresofliberty.com/site/pamphlet">Pamphlet</a> / <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/spectresofliberty">Photos</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/spectresofliberty/TheEventOliviaPhotos/photo#5208539679793837794"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/spectresofliberty/SEhzPiSjduI/AAAAAAAAApQ/GXrUPE1VkmY/IMG_5669.JPG" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" ><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/spectresofliberty/TheEventOliviaPhotos">Photo: Olivia Robinson</a></span>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-61889043617277569952008-04-24T12:14:00.000-07:002008-06-24T14:52:22.200-07:00La geografia esborrada de la Barceloneta<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 414px;" src="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/images/BGEpage1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/barceloneta.html">La Geografía esborrada de la Barceloneta</a></span><br /><br />MAP > <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/PDF/geografiaEsborradaMapa.pdf">PDF</a><br /><br />AUDIO > <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/barceloneta.html#audio">MP3</a><br /><br />Passeja’t pel barri amb els teus auriculars, i deixa’t portar per les històries, imbueixe’t…<br /><br />L’audio tour, és una saborosa barreja de veus, peces d’antigues cançons… el mar, les gavines… I explicacions obtingudes a través de la història oral del barri, acompanyades de deliciosos ar-pegis flamencs especialment composats per a l’ocasió. Tots els sons s’han obtingut, cuidadosament a la Barceloneta<br /><br />VIDEO > <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.lavanguardia.es/premium/publica/publica?COMPID=53448938913&ID_PAGINA=1810084&ID_FORMATO=9&turbourl=false">Ruta por la Barceloneta desaparecida</a><br /><br />La geografia esborrada, és un tour a través dels espais desapareguts del barri de la Barceloneta. Aquells que han estat emblemàtics, que han creat xarxes de solidaritat veïnals. És 1 projecte melancòlic, és un estat de turbulència i rebel.lió transitori, però no és 1 projecte purament regressiu i estancat en el passat. Vol saber sobre les seves arrels, vol llegir-les i sentir-les, vol explorar per reinventar, no pretèn idealitzar, vol obrir camins, portes….vol recordar, reimaginar…. Llegeix la història en diagonal, de principi a final, de final a principi, d’enmig cap amunt o cap avall. Cada espai que descobreix, és 1 nova font de circulació d’idees, formes i estructures que van connectant-se amb el reste de nuclis descoberts.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/barceloneta.html#mapa"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://greenpeppermagazine.org/geografiaesborrada/images/mapa.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-61443235905514156452008-02-28T15:55:00.000-08:002008-02-28T17:07:20.719-08:00Public Space & Experimental Geography<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/publicspace/bromberg.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/publicspace/bromberg_images/MHfree_bin_lg.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://creativetime.org/">Creative Time</a> Presents: <a href="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/publicspace/index.html">Interrogating Public Space</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/publicspace/index.html">Interrogating Public Space</a> is an ongoing series of interviews by Creative Time Curator <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://creativetime.org/about/staff.html">Nato Thompson</a> with artists, theorists, policy makers, and community organizers about the issues surrounding public space. These questions serve to complicate and broaden the notion of what constitutes a public practice and what mechanisms are available to increase social justice. As the study of space has grown to include multiple discourses, this investigation anticipates finding connecting issues that bring together disparate forms of analysis—from public housing to theme parks to public art to community organizing to interventions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/publicspace/bromberg.html">Ava Bromberg, February 2008</a></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/publicspace/haeg.html">Fritz Haeg, July 2007</a></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/473"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/blog/2008/02/eg_halperin3501.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/473">Experimental Geography: Interview with Nato Thompson (Lauren Cornell)</a></span><br /><br />The term "Experimental Geography" was coined by artist <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.paglen.com/">Trevor Paglen</a> in 2002 and has become an umbrella term for a diverse and quickly multiplying range of art practices. Fittingly, Experimental Geography was selected as the title for a <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/exhibitions/experimental/experimental.htm">new exhibition</a>, curated by <a href="http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/exhibitions/experimental/nato_thompson.html">Nato Thompson</a>, that explores "the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether)." The traveling show, supported by the organization <a href="http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/">Independent Curators International</a>, features an international group of artists, all of whom have made important strides in this new field.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.node.net/youarehere/Arrival.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://www.node.net/youarehere/Arrival_files/Houston%20Flood%20Map2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.node.net/youarehere/You_Are_Here.html">You Are Here</a></span><br /><br />A two-day conference featuring contemporary artists and researchers working with mapping and tactical media<br /><br />November 30 - December 1, 2007, Houston, Texas<br /><br />Performances and lectures by <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vimeo.com/473168">Center for Land Use Interpretation</a>, <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vimeo.com/470601">Matt McCormick</a>, <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vimeo.com/473148">Institute for Applied Autonomy</a> and <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vimeo.com/479616">Nato Thompson</a>.<br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=479616&server=www.vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF" height="300" width="400"> <param name="quality" value="best"> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"> <param name="scale" value="showAll"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=479616&server=www.vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF"></object><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" ><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/479616/l:embed_479616">You Are Here- Nato Thompson</a> from <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/user284808/l:embed_479616">bree edwards</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/l:embed_479616">Vimeo</a>.</span>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-70596041882924124672007-12-19T15:41:00.000-08:002007-12-19T14:32:33.596-08:00Lesbian National Parks and Services<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.geist.com/node/3491"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.geist.com/files/images/imce/43LesbianNationalpostcard.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/performance_art.html">Lesbian National Parks and Services</a> / <a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/bio.html">Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan</a></span><br /><br /><a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/performance_art.html">Lesbian National Parks and Services</a> was founded in 1997 to insert a lesbian presence into the landscape. In full uniform as Lesbian Rangers, <a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/bio.html">Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan</a> patrol parklands, challenging the general public's ideas of tourism, recreation, and the "natural" environment. Equipped with informative brochures and well-researched knowledge, they are a visible homosexual presence in spaces where concepts of history and biology exclude all but a very few.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.mawa.ca/membergallery/dempsey_millan/index.php#img1"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.mawa.ca/membergallery/dempsey_millan/images/Dempsey_Millan1.JPG" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/rangers_mov.html">Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature (Video Clip 7.2 MB)</a></span><br /><br />This <a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/rangers_mov.html">mock-u-mentary</a> follows the intrepid Lesbian Rangers through Jr. Lesbian Ranger training camp, research missions, deep-sea rescue, and field work around the globe. Premiered at the Sydney (Australia) Gay/Lesbian Film Festival.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/current/artgallery/lesbianrangers/video/rangers_promo_mpg.mov">Watch another LNPS promotional video here</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/finger_store.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 216px;" src="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/images/rangers_book.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/finger_store.html">Lesbian National Parks and Services: Field Guide to North America</a></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">By Ranger Shawna Dempsey and Ranger Lorri Millan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Illustrated by Daniel Barrow</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Pedlar Press (2002)</span><br /><br />Whether you are a veteran outdoors-woman or a novice bushwacker, this is the comprehensive lesbiancraft manual you have been waiting for! After extensive tours-of-duty around the globe and in the field, the world-famous Lesbian Rangers have compiled their exhaustive findings in this richly illustrated book. A practical field guide, the Lesbian Rangers describe Flora, Fauna, and Lesbian Survival Skills in intimate detail. Discover how to start a fire and keep it going, what and whom to eat, and the secrets of lesbian psychology.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.rabble.ca/modest_proposal.shtml?sh_itm=815133c6f86383d55825104adb781f66&r=1">Read excerpts from the Field Guide here</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/nonfiction/field_guide.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">Lesbian National Parks and Services: Field Guide to North America</span> / Reviewed by Anne Borden / The Danforth Review</a></span><br /><br />Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan's <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/finger_store.html">Field Guide</a> is a witty, indelibly Canadian exploration of a variety of species, including, of course, our own. It is designed to mimic the field guides of the 1950s and 1960s, with rounded corners, pen-and-ink illustrations and a lilting, Audubon parlance. Through their double-voiced narration, the authors urge readers to protect not only the Atlantic Ridley Sea Turtle and other rare creatures, but the endangered beauty and diversity of queer culture, which is constantly under threat due to "unnatural disasters such as religious fundamentalism and assimilation."<br /><br />The Lesbian Rangers were conceived by Dempsey and Millan as part of a <a href="http://www.banffcentre.ca/press/publications/private_investigators.asp">residency </a> through the <a href="http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibitions/pre2001/">Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Center</a>, in which they donned uniforms and established an onsite information centre for the preservation of "lesbian wildlife." The reaction from guests at the provincial park was overwhelmingly positive, in part because of Dempsey and Millan's adept humour, steeped in double-entendre that manages to fall far short of mockery, and never stoops to mean-spiritedness. "Busy Hands, Happy Heart" goes the Rangers' motto, but this work ethic expands beyond the work of preserving North American wildlife to advocating for LGBT visibility and establishing the important role that queers play in society, in a voice that alternates between authoritative fact and radical cheek.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/nonfiction/field_guide.htm">Read the full review here</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.danforthreview.com/features/interviews/dempsey_millan.htm">Interview with Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan / The Danforth Review</a></span><br /><br />As collaborators since 1989, <a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/bio.html">Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan</a> have created a prolific body of performance art, print publications, video and film. Their most recent text, the <a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/finger_store.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America</span> (2002, Pedlar Press)</a> is a thought-provoking, uproarious send-up of the field guide genre. It looks and feels like a field guide from the 1950's, from the light sheen of its pages and the cover lamination, to its rounded corners and romantic illustrations. But within its pages lies an examination of the diversity of sexual practices among animals and plants, and a radical critique of sexism in science and sexual conservatism in the broader culture.<br /><br />Shawna and Lorri spoke with Anne Borden (The Danforth Review) via telephone in early February 2003. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.danforthreview.com/features/interviews/dempsey_millan.htm">Read the full interview here</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/finger_store.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 216px;" src="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/images/handbook_patch.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/finger_store.html">Junior Lesbian Ranger Handbook</a></span><br /><br />Everything you need to get started on life's bushpath. This handy guide covers knot-tying, how to move an insensible lesbian and more! Also includes a full-colour embroidered Junior Lesbian Ranger patch.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.rabble.ca/modest_proposal.shtml?sh_itm=815133c6f86383d55825104adb781f66&r=1"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 212px;" src="http://www.rabble.ca/images/slices/body/beaver.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br />Recent Projects</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/current/artgallery/lesbianrangers/index.shtml">Lesbian Rangers / Reorientation 2005 / University of Winnipeg</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.considerationliberationarmy.ca/">Consideration Liberation Army / The Revolution Begins June 21, 2007</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/images/aus_jr_rangers.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-39477964878808486122007-12-12T20:00:00.000-08:002007-12-12T19:41:15.805-08:00Labor Histories<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://howlingmobsociety.org/images/redindex.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/">The Howling Mob Society</a></span><br /><br /><a href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmsabout.html">The Howling Mob Society (HMS)</a> is a collaboration of artists, activists and historians committed to unearthing stories neglected by mainstream history. HMS brings increased visibility to the radical history of Pittsburgh, PA through grassroots artistic practice. Our current focus is <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmsstrike.html">The Great Railroad Strike of 1877</a>, a national uprising that saw some of its most dramatic moments in Pittsburgh.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmssigns.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://howlingmobsociety.org/images/sign%20images/grant&liberty.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmssigns.html">Ten New Historical Markers Commemorate The Great Railroad Strike of 1877</a><br /><br />The Howling Mob Society has created ten historical markers, detailing events and significant locations from The Great Strike, and mounted them throughout the Strip District, Downtown, Polish Hill and Lawrenceville. Visit the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmsmap.html">map link</a> to find out where the signs are located.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmssigns.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://howlingmobsociety.org/images/sign%20images/fudgywudgy.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The events that unfolded in July of 1877 marked a unique moment in the history of the United States. Exceptional as it was, however, what has come to be known as the Great Railroad Strike goes largely unmentioned in mainstream accounts of Pittsburgh history. Common people were pushed to the breaking point and struck out in resistance, however they did not have the opportunity to preserve their stories for posterity. Those who had the means to record the strike quickly revealed their sympathetic relationship to the business leaders of the day and set the tone for how 1877 would be remembered. Their bias can be seen in published accounts of the riots, which use racist and xenophobic language to blame immigrants and transient laborers for the property damage and looting that took place. Considerably less attention is paid to the conditions that incited the riot in the first place; the fact that one quarter of the cities entire population participated in the uprising; or the lives lost at the hands of the state militia and National Guard.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://howlingmobsociety.org/howling%20mob%20site/hmssigns.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://howlingmobsociety.org/images/sign%20images/bridge.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In a culture that tells its history through the stories of great men and war heroes, a movement without iconic leaders quietly falls to the wayside. Telling the story of a decentralized social insurrection requires a different approach to history making. It requires that individuals outside the traditional power structure stand up and take responsibility for setting the record straight. The Howling Mob Society seeks to do just that.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Thanks <a href="http://www.daragreenwald.com/">Dara Greenwald</a> and <a href="http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2007/12/howling_mob_society_strikes_pi.html">Just Seeds</a>!!!</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzFWcdPgtm1YHy65j2gruH_wfRW6pT3pZqtp5yFCf4KpC6LJrKbBMWX2lV6U6tmwX5yDKNKjGqF8u5JMupjE3zfyFPCyWp5fhaYz4Wj8d8U9zkwT00PFS2dhmpzvmIPF8P0s0W5Q/s400/sk02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143214556545613714" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html">Don't Mourn</a> / <a href="http://www.readysubjects.org/">Sarah Kanouse</a> / <a href="http://liminalities.net/">Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies</a> <a href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/">(Volume 3, Number 3)</a></span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html">Introduction</a><br /><br />Dust rises in sheets from the hard-pounded ground, hesitates for a moment, and disperses on the dry wind. Hulking steel and concrete structures, their functions lost to Free Trade, rust ominously. A few second-generation industries — mostly recycling and storage concerns — have set up shop in some of the scattered outbuildings, and a trickle of dirty pick-ups checks in and out at the guard post, though the automatic gate seems permanently open. They take little notice of the car, my videographer, or me, a young woman with a battered, vinyl-sided suitcase and a HAM antenna cut to a commercial FM frequency.<br /><br />I’ve been making pilgrimages to sites like this for a few years now to bear witness to the unmarked relics of old and not-so-old labor struggles in my home state, a place known for a solid union backbone that’s been much bent in recent years. Maybe it was always bent: the struggles I commemorate were not always the heroic or victorious ones but also the shameful episodes: armed conflicts between white strikers and black workers brought from faraway and tricked into taking their places, big unions selling out their struggling locals with a wink and a nod. Sometimes struggles that were victorious and heroic on one level were shameful and disquieting at another. I come to mourn but I don’t want it to stop at that.<br /><br />The premise is simple: I make radio monuments, monuments composed of radio waves. I squat in the dust for two minutes to broadcast a mournful, distorted version of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale">Internationale</a> over a commercial radio station to the usually empty immediate vicinity. Without a radio to listen in, it looks like a moment of silence, with luggage. In the name of the events that took place here, I bathe the site in radio waves in a slight, invisible, ephemeral memorial that doesn’t make heroes of the fallen, doesn’t fix the narrative, doesn’t pretend that the story — of the strike, the massacre, the battle, the labor movement, or capitalism — ended any differently or better.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoX0cfVcjgwQ8Hnhv6nPBEXQOmeRpV33OPBDvGVF0pTgcebMSqdnGdQe7O9ZUPunDYbPRY889uUWp653elutIWokuU4sJSddn8DrZ5KlqVNzEepOqD1FiUccPbGZN90g8Nk07S7w/s400/sk04.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143215149251100594" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html">Pana, Illinois</a><br /><br />I do not make the bronze plaques, stone monuments or epic murals often sought by labor groups for their permanence and aura of legitimacy. I am not inspiring or instructing but remembering these events and their sometimes ambivalent outcomes. “Public memory” is more often performed than it is read, a difference that Diana Taylor has identified between the “archival” knowledge of history and the “repertoire” of embodied understanding. “Performed, embodied practices make the “past” available as a political resource in the present.... [A] performance may be about something that helps us understand the past, and it may reactivate issues or scenarios from the past by staging them in the present.” Uttering, singing, dancing, visiting, eating or drinking in a ritual fashion, imbued with symbolic meaning, is how individuals access the accumulated experience of a culture such that what has happened in times past to others feels as real, as palpable, as understandable as what has happened in their own lives.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDZmLiKSDRgxjfhRfkzdVXynaDfPH9nEMegI4_ZAMp2tmMi9p4cEoI77Ye05ts-pSY9fqCJM3g0yfXTUluH6cG_6-fl7JJIU5QpdIcbQ7I-21POXmf5vu-5X4cCKGvUArC-H_Mrw/s400/sk03.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143215011812147106" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://liminalities.net/3-3/dontmourn.html">Battle of the Viaduct</a><br /><br />To my ears memorial is silent, and I have two minutes of silence in which to think — think about what I am doing, think about what happened here and about what is still happening here and in other places like it. The metal box, its whirring fan faintly audible even in the wind, is reorganizing a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, encoding it to carry my Internationale, more dirge-like than martial, to the unsuspecting receivers of passing cars. The disturbance to the commercial frequency I am jamming is so localized that car radios may flicker with only a few notes of a strange, sad march before resolving again to a steady, static-free mix of Top-40 and commercials. I have no way of knowing for sure how far my signal travels or if anyone is listening, yet the temporary and quixotic interruption of frequency-modulation-as-usual resonates in satisfying ways with the battles I am marking. The symbolic value of reclaiming the electromagnetic commons collides with the fact that the transmissions are local, dissipate, and are drowned out, just as the battles won or lost have been made mute by the onward march of capital and time.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.labortrail.org/lt-00-labortrailmap.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://www.labortrail.org/ele/labortrail-map-1.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" ><br /><a href="http://www.labortrail.org/">The Labor Trail</a></span><br /><br /><a href="http://www.labortrail.org/">The Labor Trail</a> is the product of a joint effort to showcase the many generations of dramatic struggles and working-class life in the Chicago area's rich and turbulent past. The Trail's <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.labortrail.org/lt-00-labortrailmap.html">neighborhood tours</a> invite you to get acquainted with the events, places, and people - often unsung - who have made the city what it is today. In addition, the statewide map is just a starting point for further exploration of Illinois' labor heritage. We invite you to report new themes for research and investigation on both the city and state level.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.labortrail.org/lt-00-labortrailmap.html">Labor Trail Map</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.labortrail.org/lt-00-main.html">Interactive Labor Trail</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.labortrail.org/lt-00-main.html"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7_gXbcWvJkkFipRt0YZgmoa0KuRDCQ7jconPZHaJdzCoRk6zLPZs0JzwJj2xGcI9id83XM6lK5oIkNlTcRpahgtjWoKOP9wxSx5IyN3t_TAE7fbmHcz-jOlg_1ik1lD8RFIaWTw/s400/labor_trail01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143214071214309250" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-12960100522287177452007-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:002007-11-26T11:17:09.107-08:00Frente 3 de Fevereiro<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/11.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/">Frente 3 de Fevereiro</a> is a research and artistic intervention group concerned with racism in Brazilian society. The group’s goal is to create a new understanding and contextualize the fragmented information the general population receives via mass media. The group’s artistic interventions create new forms of protest pertaining to racial issues. <br /><br />New strategies are required to think and to act in a constantly changing reality permeated by cultural transformations on a diverse scale. Frente 3 de Fevereiro connects with the artistic legacy of generations that thought out new ways to interact with urban space in light of the history of the Afro-Brazilian struggle and resistance.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/7.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://publicotransitorio.com/WeAreZumbi.pdf">We Are Zumbi: A Cartography of Racism to the Urban Youth - Chapters 1 & 2 (English - PDF)</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">About Cartography</span><br /><br />Frente 3 de Fevereiro was founded by artists, a filmmaker, a graphic designer, musicians, a historian, a sociologist, a dancer, a lawyer, a set designer and actors. It was born out of this group’s mobilization after a real occurrence: on February 3rd, 2004 when a young black man, Flávio Sant’Ana, was mistaken by a thief and murdered by the São Paulo military police. <br /><br />To us, the murder of Flávio, a young, recently graduated dentist, was more than a mere fact: it was an exemplary case, a denunciation of social contradiction. The idea of idealized racial democracy in Brazil is perpetuated, affirming a discourse that this is a mixed-race country, which is therefore automatically “free” of racism. On the other hand, Flávio’s death brings forth the daily racial profiling of a young black man as a “suspect”, as a “threat.” Therefore, Flávio Sant’Ana’s murder reveals racial democracy as a deliberate attempt to deny perverse social practices punctuated by legacy of slavery. <br /><br />Following this event, the group began to observe how the media narrated the story, and we noticed that most of the time, the racial factor easily disappeared in the news, describing the murder as “yet another case of violence.” That was our catch: how to racialize this occurrence? How to expose the racism behind the police’s violent action legitimized by a society that is equally racist and violent? <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/5.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> <br /><br />We performed several actions: we built a horizontal monument in the exact spot where Flávio was murdered—a plate on the floor observing the occurrence in remembrance; we pasted posters throughout the city claiming: “Who polices the police? Police racism.”<br /><br />Thus we began our cartography trying to decompose the historical thread that has been rendered “natural” through new social practices. But how are these practices structured? What are the limits of the slave legacy in our quotidian experience? How can we break free from this logic by inscribing other forms of sociability? <br /><br />Cartography is to us more than a map. It is writing understood in a larger sense, a stance before the world. We are cartographers when we recognize and organize that which instigates us to act, giving us hearing, a voice and form to our anxieties and desires, poetically expressing and inscribing onto reality that which moves us. <br /><br />It is not enough to unveil the past in the present. It is necessary to invent new ways of reading and writing our desires, therefore inventing new forms of sociability. Once we own our daily practices, believing in what we feel, we abandon a place of constant reactions to what is socially reproduced. That way, we recognize our historical legacy and move to an active place where we produce new practices, a new logic, and new maxims, always yet to be invented. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/6.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />“Everything that voices the movements of desire, everything that serves to coin expressive material, is welcomed. All entry points are good, so long as there are multiple exits. That way the cartographer uses a variety of sources, not only written or theoretical [...]. The cartographer is a true cultural cannibal: always expropriating, appropriating devouring and giving birth, trans-valuing. The cartographer is always seeking elements/nourishment to compose his/her cartographies.”<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />Zumbi Somos Nós: Cartografia do Racismo para o Jovem Urbano</span> (We are Zumbi: A Cartography of Racism for Urban Youth) is not a treatise about racism in Brazil. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a device for dialogue through our paths, doubts and desires. <span style="font-style: italic;">We are Zumbi</span> presents a sketch of our itinerary, the organization of a gaze attentive to quotidian experience, constructed through diverse layers of understanding: our actions, poetic manifestos, text fragments, interviews with scholars, research, newspaper articles, etc. <br /><br />The group’s artistic actions synthesize different “areas” from this cartography. Our focus on urban space re-signifies quotidian elements through a symbolic “detour.” The power of direct action without institutional mediation, and the creation of poetic situations open to the subjectivity of possibilities to build a different future.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://publicotransitorio.com/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://publicotransitorio.com/frontpage.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://publicotransitorio.com/">TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO | PUBLIC TRANSITorio<br />NOVEMBER 13 - 20 : 2007<br />LOS ANGELES</a><br /><br />Political art that is refreshingly amoral<br /><br />A migratory installation of artists, activists, and militant researchers: in art spaces, parks, and a museum; around a university, under a bridge, and on the train.<br /><br />These events will bring together artists and activists from throughout Latin America and Los Angeles to create public discussions and performances in Santa Monica, Westwood, Hollywood, Downtown, and on the way to Tijuana.<br /><br />Participants include: the Internacional Errorista (founders of the errorist movement); Argentine militant performance group Etcétera; Brazilian antiracist art group <a href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/">Frente 3 de Fevereiro</a>; activist sound art collective <a href="http://www.ultrared.org/">Ultra-red</a>; <a href="http://www.bijari.com.br/">BijaRi</a>, an interventionist design+performance+VJ collective from São Paulo; Argentine art and environmental organization <a href="http://www.alaplastica.org.ar/">Ala Plástica</a>; <a href="http://www.lalleca.net/">La Lleca</a>, an artist social intervention based in the prison system in Mexico City; Guatemalan performance artists <a href="http://www.karaandrade.com/">Regina José Galindo</a> and <a href="http://www.mariadeladiaz.com/">María Adela Díaz</a>; Ecuadorian performance artist Jenny Jaramillo; and Los Angeles performance ensemble Butchlalis de Panochtitlan. Participants also include leading feminist artists Mónica Mayer, from Mexico City; Kirsten Dufour, from Copenhagen, and <a href="http://www.suzannelacy.com/">Suzanne Lacy</a>, from L.A.; the Mothers of East Los Angeles; the former Eastside Artistas; anthropologist <a href="http://www.swfs.ubc.ca/index.php?id=3028">Pilar Riaño-Alcalá</a>; Boyle Heights community garden <a href="http://proyectojardin.org/">Proyecto Jardín</a>; editors of the magazines <a href="http://www.makeshiftmag.com/">Make/shift</a> and <a href="http://www.calstatela.edu/usu/loudmouth/">LOUDmouth</a>; Xicana/Indigenous filmmakers collective Womyn Image Makers; the creators of <a href="http://www.justspaces.org/">just space(s)</a>; <a href="http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/">The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest</a>; and architect Teddy Cruz.<br /><br />TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO is presented in collaboration with the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://politicalequator.org/">Political Equator II</a>.<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.justspaces.org/pdf/tp_poster.pdf">Download Tránsito(ry) Público / Public(o) Transit(orio) Poster (PDF)</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.justspaces.org/pdf/pe_poster.pdf">Download The Political Equator II Poster (PDF)</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.frente3defevereiro.com.br/10.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21235222.post-1738707824626421672007-11-04T19:29:00.000-08:002007-11-04T17:37:33.860-08:00The Pocho Research Society<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://theoctobersurprise.org/eng/catalog/projects/pocho.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://theoctobersurprise.org/eng/catalog/projects/Pocho%20Research/prsfoto.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prs1.html">The Pocho Research Society</a> is a collective of artists, activists and rasquache historians who reside in Los Angeles.<br /><br />Dedicated to the systematic investigation of space, memory and displacement, the PRS understands history as a battleground of the present, a location where hidden and forgotten selves hijack and disrupt the oppression of our moment.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/new3/prs.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/new3/chaka.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >PROJECTS</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invmon.html">Operation Invisible Monument</a><br /><br />Public monuments are undeniably important sites in the projection and erection of hegemonic constructs. They often monumentalize heroic, romantic and militaristic versions of history and thereby deny density and complexity. Los Angeles is a rich and fertile terrain for the investigation of bulldozed and forgotten stories<br /><br />In <a href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invmon.html">Operation Invisible Monument</a>, the <a href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prs1.html">Pocho Research Society (PRS)</a> confronts the construction of history through the public monument. Anonymous members installed mock historic plaques at four locations. These monuments entitled <a href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/tropical.html">Tropical America</a>, <a href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/ellis.html">El Otro Ellis</a>, <a href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/chavez.html">The Displacement of the Displaced</a> and <a href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/chaca.html">The Triumph of the Tagger</a>, commemorate moments in Los Angeles history that have not been officially recognized. In the first of several actions, the PRS identified strategic sites in an effort to pay homage to historic erasure. By inserting plaques, the PRS hopes to interrupt historical amnesia, trigger memory and interrogate the present in order to see the world with fresh eyes rather than the diesel haze of a media-blurred present. The result, ideally, is a reconstruction or destruction of the hegemonic world view responsible for the erection of the site's original monuments.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">SITES: </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/tropical.html">Tropical America</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/chavez.html">Displacement of the Displaced</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/ellis.html">El Otro Ellis</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/invismonum/chaca.html">Triumph of the Tagger</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?m=2007&w=26"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/plaq.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/images/echopressfin.htm">Echoes in the Echo: A Series of Public Interventions About Gentrification In and Around Echo Park</a><br /><br />Echoes in the Echo is a series of public interventions that will explore History and memory in and around Echo Park. This phase of the project commemorates a few of many queer Latina/o spaces that were a "home" to many for periods of up to a couple of decades and have since changed ownership and now cater to a new, straighter, younger and whiter clientele. This project takes place while the city, itself, is at a crossroads in its own history. Dramatic increases in real estate prices coupled with commercially driven development projects facilitated by elected officials are two of a multitude of forces that push many working class communities out of the city "core." Waves of new 'immigrants' (albeit from the Midwest) have in the process displaced longstanding cultural spaces created over several decades. Within this massive “land grab” questions like ‘where do drag queens, closeted quebradita dancers and gay cholos go once they been pushed out?’ arise. How and who defines a space? Is a space defined by its present incarnations or does its past ruthlessly resurface like dust in unswept corners?<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.scpr.org/news/stories/2007/06/28/00_latino_gay_bars_0628.html">Artist Leaves Mark on Former Latino Gay Bars (89.3 KPCC)</a><br /><br />There's no shortage of opinion in the Southland about what constitutes a landmark. Earlier this week, in the dead of night, one Los Angeles artist cemented her own historical plaques to commemorate the Latino gay bars she says have been gentrified out of the Silver Lake area. KPCC's Adolfo Guzman-Lopez went along and filed <a href="http://www.scpr.org/news/stories/2007/06/28/00_latino_gay_bars_0628.html">this report</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prsoctsup/octsurp.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 232px;" src="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prsoctsup/images/time.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prsoctsup/octsurp.html">Operation Invisible Monument @ The October Surprise</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">SITES: </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prsoctsup/decenter.html">The DeCenter</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prsoctsup/prc.html">The Popular Resource Center</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> / </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/projects/prs/prsoctsup/vex.html">The Vex</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.soccas.org/html/rpintro.html"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 450px;" src="http://www.soccas.org/images/rpwebimages/pochoresearch.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >MISC.</span><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/new3/prs.html">Operation Invisible Monument</a> / <a href="http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/new3/index.html">The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Issue#3</a><br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.hijadela.com/Info/info2.html">Sandra de la Loza Statement & Biography</a>nicholas_sennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522347557167095291noreply@blogger.com