Radical media, politics and culture.

Culture

June 11, 2007 - 5:54am -- autonomedia
News
Culture

African Cinema Giant Ousmane Sembene, 84, Dies
Led Cinema's Advance in
Africa

Agence France-Presse

The Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembene, a
pioneer of African cinema, died at his home in Dakar,
Senegal, his friends and family said Sunday. He was 84.


He had been ill since December.


Born into a fisherman's family in 1923, he worked as a
mechanic, carpenter and builder in Africa and Europe
before being drafted by the French Army in World War
II. Those experiences gave Mr. Sembene, a self-educated
writer, material for films as well as books like The
Black Docker, God's Bits of Wood and The Money
Order.

He said that he decided to go to film school, in
Moscow, after realizing that "pictures are more
accessible than words." That led him to what he called
"fairground cinema."


"I can go to a village and show the film," he explained
in 2005, "because everything can be filmed and
transported to the most remote village in Africa."


His career began in the 1960s with black-and-white
shorts like "Borom Sarret," about a poor cart-driver.
His "Black Girl From ..." (1966), about a Senegalese
girl who becomes a servant in France, is considered the
first full-length feature by an African filmmaker.


One of his last films, "Moolaadé" (2004), was a
denunciation of female genital cutting and won a jury
prize at the Cannes Film Festival.


He also won two prizes at the Venice Film Festival, in
1968 and in 1988. The first was for "The Money Order,"
the second for "The Camp of Thiaroye," which recounts
the violent repression by French troops of protests by
Senegalese soldiers demanding their pay. He was among
the first African artists to warn of the danger of
excesses in the post-colonial era and to call for "a
radical change in African policies."


The former Senegalese president Abdlu Diouf said Africa
had lost one its greatest filmmakers and a "fervent
defender of liberty and social justice."


A tribute from Mali's culture minister, Cheick Oumar
Sissoko, himself a filmmaker and a friend of Mr.
Sembene, said that "African cinema has lost one of its
lighthouses."


"The man only worked fully in Africa and for Africa,"
he said. Mr. Sembene "led Africa to understand its
identity and build its cultural horizon."

June 5, 2007 - 3:41pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

PERFORMANCE: COPIES & CONTEXTS IN THE AGE OF CULTURAL ABUNDANCE

Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer

We are both co-founders of Piratbyrån, a Swedish group that has been
around for four years. Piratbyrån explores how file-sharing and other
copying technologies interact with creativity and change how people
relate to everyday culture. We analyze tendencies and cases and
discuss possible future scenarios and opportunities.

Internationally we are mostly known for starting up the The Pirate
Bay, which we no longer run but are in close contact with. By this
and many other projects, campaigns, performances, talks and media
appearances, we have intervened in the discussion known as "the file-
sharing debate".

Almost exactly a year ago, at the time of the last Reboot conference,
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a controversial raid that involved
about 180 confiscated servers and pressure on the Swedish government
from US officials and lobby groups. Still today, over 100 servers
remain in custody and the prosecution is just about to be delayed for
several months more.

The raid was followed by demonstrations just three days after co-
hosted by Piratbyrån and other piracy organisations as well as
political parties from different sides of the Swedish political
spectrum. At the very same day, The Pirate Bay came back online.

Since then, a lot of light has been put on the alleged Swedish
"pirate safe haven" and we have had an extensive public debate in
Sweden on file-sharing issues. Although it's great that we have this
debate, it is often stuck in pre-internet frameworks, copyright
abstractions and outdated perspectives.

Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and
we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living
if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say
for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at
least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has
somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be
nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.

What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and
complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in
contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is
already going on.

June 3, 2007 - 11:28am -- stevphen
News
Culture

Desert Autonomous Zone

Jesse Walker

From Reason

Somewhere in the northern New Mexico desert, a grizzled gardener called Robbie is praising the prickliness of his home. "The cops don't like to come out here," he says proudly, "and this place is built on being left alone by the authorities. People say to the government, 'Fuck you. Chinga tu madre. We don't want your government, and you can get out of here.'"

Robbie is a folksinger, a self-described "middle-aged hippie," and one of the rich cast of characters who populate Off the Grid, a film now playing the festival circuit that will make its New York debut at Lincoln Center on August 16. Jeremy and Randy Stulberg, a brother and sister team, originally set out to make a documentary about U.S. citizens living abroad. Then they discovered a tribe of expatriates here at home, fleeing the American mainstream in a way that only deepened their American identity. The Stulbergs filmed them instead, with riveting results.

In 15 square miles of abandoned land, about 400 misfits—aging hippies, disillusioned veterans, teenage runaways—have built a community where no one cares if you smoke pot, fire your rifle all day, let your kids drive your car, or walk around naked in the desert heat. It's a landscape of beat-up old trailers, shacks jerry-rigged from recycled materials, solar panels, little farms, greenhouses, and at least one tipi. "Where I live is the last remaining land of America that is left," says Dreadie Jeff, another Mesa resident. "You can do what you fucking want there."

The local culture defies easy stereotypes. "Going into this community with this traditional mainstream liberal ideology," Jeremy says, "we realized all our preconceived notions were bullshit. These people were extremely into their Second Amendment rights, and they were also into marijuana legalization. They don't fit into these molds." There's a touch of madness to the place as well. Mama Phyllis, a Mesa woman who used to be a psychiatric nurse ("I couldn't do that anymore," she says, and leaves it at that), calls it "the largest outdoor insane asylum." The governing philosophy is a mix of anarchism, patriotism, New Age stoner wisdom, and a militia-style distrust of the state. Early in the film Dreadie Jeff, a veteran of the first Gulf War, exclaims that his military oath was not "to defend this land, it's not to defend the people, it's not to defend the motherfucking asshole president of the United States. My military oath goes, 'I solemnly swear to defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.'" The Constitution's "biggest enemy," he adds, is "this fucking government that is in place right now."`

June 1, 2007 - 4:12pm -- stevphen
Events
Culture

Radical Politics & Publishing in Eastern Europe Discussion

Tuesday June 5th @ 7pm

ABC No Rio, Gallery Space

156 Rivington Street (between Clinton & Suffolk)

Come join us for an informal discussion about radical politics and publishing in Eastern Europe with Gediminas Baranauskas from the Lithuanian publisher Kito Knygos. Kito Knygos is the publisher of a variety of books on radical politics and arts in Lithuanian by authors such as Noam Chomsky, Guy Debord, Valerie Solanas, Hakim Bey, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Henry Miller.

May 31, 2007 - 11:10am -- autonomedia
Culture

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Geography of Disaster

Reg Johanson, Rain


Reviewing Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

(London: Verso, 2006)

In Planet of Slums geographer of disaster Mike Davis turns his attention to the human disaster of slums in order to understand the scope and the meaning of the economic disaster of neoliberalism. Arguing from research that includes UN, World Bank, IMF, CIA, and Pentagon reports as well as literature on urbanism and housing, Davis observes that cities will account for all future population growth, and that “ninety five percent of this final build-out of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries” (2).


This massive transfer of population from the country to the city, Davis argues, was generated by the equally massive transfer of wealth from the Third World to the First orchestrated by North American and European states “with the IMF as bad cop and World Bank as good cop” (70), a transfer that has produced what will probably be a widely quoted statistic from Planet of Slums: “Global inequality, as measured by World Bank economists across the entire world population, reached an incredible GINI coefficient level of 0.67 by the end of the century—this is mathematically equivalent to a situation where the poorest two thirds of the world receive zero income, and the top third receives everything” (165).


But while rural populations fled for the cities because they were no longer permitted to practice the subsistence economies that had previously sustained them, Davis shows that in most of the developing world, urban growth is exploding without economic growth. In fact, just the opposite is occurring: with few exceptions, there has been a de-industrialization of the big cities of the global south. As Davis says, “the size of a city’s economy […] often bears surprisingly little relationship to its population” (13). Cities are growing with a decreasing capacity to support residents, creating a widely varying “informal economy” of subsistence, housing, and infrastructure.

May 11, 2007 - 11:18am -- stevphen
Culture

In Praise of Pageantry

By Jen Angel

From In These Times

This past January I spent a week in a chilly warehouse in Tacoma, Wash.,
making puppets with 20 other activists to support Army First Lt. Ehren
Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to
Iraq. We were creating a play to perform on Feb. 5 at the vigil outside
the gates of Fort Lewis, Wash., where his court-martial—which would end
in a mistrial—was being held.

We spent hours painting, taping, cutting, gluing, eating and talking.
For the characters in our play, we created a 15-foot-tall judge with a
sculpted cardboard head and paper mâché hands, jurors and witnesses,
and, for our finale, doves and suns to end with a vision of a beautiful
future.

But art and activism aren't just about pageantry. Skilled activists use
culture as an entry point into larger discussions of politics and
theory, and use art and culture to celebrate victories and mourn losses.
Art becomes a way to engage the public, reinspire activists who are
tired of the same old marches and chants, and at its best, model a
future world where our lives are both productive and enjoyable.

But connections between art and activism are often tenuous. Individuals
who straddle the two communities face artists who don't care about
politics and activists who don't take art seriously. Realizing the
Impossible: Art Against Authority, a new and beautifully illustrated
anthology edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, explores these
intersections and contradictions while linking art, culture and
anarchist politics.

May 5, 2007 - 4:14pm -- stevphen
Events
Culture

Revolutionary creativity

Isa Tousignant

From Hour

May is the month of anarchy, did you know that? To me, it's a supremely ludicrous idea: that anarchy, by very nature disobedient, could fit itself neatly into a 31-day period of celebration. Shouldn't it be breaking the barriers of May to spread into June, July, August?

Nevertheless, the Festival of Anarchy is on, and celebrations are taking place. For one, the end of the month sees the eighth instalment of the yearly Anarchist Book Fair (May 18-20, mark it on your calendar), and for two, today marks the start of Canada's largest political art show ever: the Art + Anarchy Montreal 2007 exhibition, featuring the work of over 230 politically engaged visual artists from around the world.

Until May 13 at the freshly transformed, hitherto abandoned space that is the Esplanade Loft Project - a 5,000-square-foot temporary gallery in Mile End - the exciting exhibition will display dozens of photos, installations, paintings, sculptures, sketches, etchings, art videos and comic art by established and emerging artists from Montreal, across Canada, the USA and abroad. Among the artists included are Norman Nawrocki, Linda Dawn Hammond, Danielle Sara Frank, Freda Guttman, Stefan Christoff, Alden Penner, Rebecca Bain, Catherine Herrmann, ZIBZ Black Current and Jason Milan Ghikadis. The exhibition integrates and complements an existing, celebrated travelling show, Paper Politics, curated by New York anarchist artist Josh MacPhee, which features 195 international politically and socially engaged prints.

April 30, 2007 - 7:41pm -- autonomedia
Announcements
Culture

The Situational Drive

Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement

New York City, May 12-13, 2007

Free Weekend Conference

May 12 and 13, 2007

May 12, 10am – 7pm

May 13, 10:45am – 6:15pm

Cooper Union, The Great Hall

7th Street, btw 3rd and 4th Ave, NYC

Organized by Joshua Decter

A partnership between
inSite/ San Diego-Tijuana and Creative Time, New York
in collaboration with
The Cooper Union School of Art

In the network society everyone puts together their own city. Naturally
this touches on the essence of the concept of public domain…Public domain
experiences occur at the boundary between friction and freedom.
— Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain

inSite/ San Diego-Tijuana and Creative Time, New York are pleased to
present The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement, a
two-day multidisciplinary sequence of panel discussions, conversations,
and art projects rethinking the challenges of artistic, curatorial,
architectural and theoretical engagement in urban and other public
spheres.

April 18, 2007 - 9:54pm -- stevphen
Events
Culture

Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Hermetics, Art Criticism and Philosophy"

Thursday, April 19, 7pm

Amphitheater

School of Visual Arts

209 East 23 Street, 3rd floor

Free and open to the public.

The MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department presents a talk by Peter Lamborn Wilson, a political writer, essayist, and poet. His books include TAZ, Leaving the 19th Century, Orgies of the Hempeaters, Immediatism, Pirate Utopias and Gothick Institutions.

March 29, 2007 - 1:24pm -- autonomedia
Announcements
Culture

Campaign for Nawal El Saadawi
Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA)— Belgium

International campaign for freedom of thought and creativity and for solidarity with the Egyptian novelist and writer Nawal El Saadawi


Arab Women's Solidarity Association — Belgium invites you to sign this petition for freedom of thought and creativity, and thanks you in advance for diffusing it as widely as possible.

جمعية تضامن المرأة العربية- بلجيكا تدعوكم لتوقيع هذه العريضة من أجل حرية الفكر و الابداع و تشكركم سلفا لنشرها على أوسع نطاق ممكن.


Pour signer / to sign /للتوقيع :

here.

The Egyptian writer and novelist Nawal El Saadawi, well known both in the Arab world and internationally, is facing a political and religious campaign mounted against her by the authorities of Al-Azhar. Basing themselves on a play written by her entitled "God Resigns at the Summit Meeting," published during the month of January 2007 in Cairo, they are accusing her of apostasy and disrespect for the principles of Islam.


The theater play is a work of fiction and should be judged by the men and women who read works destined for the theater and not by religious dignitaries whose areas of concern are totally different. To bring a writer to trial before a court relying on dangerous accusations of this kind can be a license for her assassination.


Accusations such as this which should not hold sway in the twenty-first century are being leveled against a woman of letters, a woman from the medical profession who has given to the Arab world forty-five works ranging from novels, plays, short stories, autobiography to scientific and intellectual studies which have served the cause of women's liberation and that of men and have been translated into thirty languages covering different regions of our globe.


This is not the first time that Nawal El Saadawi has had to face campaigns of this kind. The accusation here also was that of apostasy.


We the signatories of this petition demand that this repressive campaign come to an end immediately. We call upon all the men and women of conscience all over the world, in the Arab countries and in Egypt to take the action they see fit in order to defend freedom of thought and creativity. We call upon all the associations and organizations of civil society, the unions of workers, on journalists, on all free women and men in the different countries, on the associations and organizations of women and on democratic progressive political parties to join us in our efforts to defend freedom.
Arab Women's Solidarity Association – Belgium

ألحملة الدولية من أجل حرية الفكر و الابداع تضامناً مع قضية الدكتورة نوال.


تتعرض الكاتبة المصرية نوال السعداوي، ألمعروفة عالمياً و عربياً، لحملة سياسية دينية يقودها الأزهر في مصر لتقديمها للمحاكمة و ادانتها بتهمة الكفر و ازدراء الأديان بسبب مسرحية لها نشرت في القاهرة باللغة العربية في يناير ألماضي
.


تندرج هذه المسرحية تحت أعمال الخيال و الابداع و المفروض أن يحكم عليها القراء و القارئات و نقاد المسرح و الأدب و ليس رجال الدين. ولهذا يعتبر تحويل كاتبة مبدعة الى المحاكمة بهذه التهم الخطيرة طريقا يؤدي الى اهدار دمها. هذه التهم لا تليق بالقرن الواحد والعشرين وتنال من كاتبة، أديبة و طبيبة، قدمت للمكتبة العربية خمسة و أربعين مؤلفا ما بين الرواية و المسرحية والقصص القصيرة و السيرة الذاتية و الأعمال العلمية و الفكرية التي تربط بين قضايا تحرير الانسان و قضايا تحرير النساء، ترجمت الى أكثر من ثلاثين لغة في العالم. وقد سبق لنوال السعداوي أن تعرضت لحملات من هذا النوع و منها محاولة تفريقها بالقوة من زوجها بتهمة الكفر أيضاً ووضع اسمها على قوائم الموتى لعدد من السنوات.


ولهذا فاننا نطالب بايقاف هذا القهر فوراً وندعو كل أصحاب و صاحبات الضمائر في العالم وفي البلاد العربية و في مصر أن يهبوا للدفاع عن حرية الفكر و الابداع و لرفع أيدي السلطة الدينية السياسية في مصر عن نوال السعداوي و أن تتبنى هذه الحملة المنظمات الشعبية واتحادات الكتاب و الأدباء و الصحافيين والأحرار من الرجال و النساء في كل بلد و كذلك المنظمات النسائية و الأحزاب السياسية المتنورة.


جمعية تضامن المرأة العربية - بلجيكا


Arab Women's Solidarity Association — Belgique ASBL


Avenue de l'Eternité, 6

1070 Bruxelles

0881.718.815

363-0002517-35

0486/ 61 80 82

Email: awsabe@gmail.com

Web: AWSA Belgique

AWSA

Pages

Subscribe to Culture