PUB: Dave's Travel Corner - Travel Essay Writing Contest

Dave’s Travel Corner Announces

Annual Travel Essay Contest

(3/28/11) Looking to share your travels with others? Do you enjoy writing? Look no further. Dave's Travel Corner is holding our annual travel essay contest. Entry is free. Please see below for details.

Please include your email address or some form of contact information at the bottom of your essay. This information will not be posted with your essay; it is so we can contact you in case of winning.

Content 
The essay must be written by you and it must be about something that inspired you on one of your travels. It could be about a particular place, a person, a country, a culture or any other number of things that may have touched you on your travels.

Requirements
At least 775 words - no more than 5000 words. Up to two (2) essays may be submitted per person. Essays or blogs already posted on Dave's Travel Corner are not eligible for this contest. Journals published elsewhere that do not violate any copyright by posting them on Dave's Travel Corner are eligible for the contest.

 

Prizes
The grand prize winner will be awarded
     1. Motorola DEFY Smart Phone (courtesy of Motorola Mobility)
     2. $100 sent by PayPal or Check
     3. Two $25 gift cards to be used for Lock-A-Bye products (only one card can be used per purchase) Use Promo Code of
         DTC1291 for an additional 20% discount
     4.
Copy of: Pennsylvania Wilds: Images from the Allegheny National Forest (courtesy of the Allegheny National Forest
         Visitors Bureau)

1st Runner Up will be awarded
   
1. $75 sent by PayPal or Check

    2. Two $25 gift cards to be used for Lock-A-Bye products (only one card can be used per purchase) Use Promo Code of
        DTC1291 for an additional 20% discount
   

    3. Copy of: Pennsylvania Wilds: Images from the Allegheny National Forest (courtesy of the Allegheny National Forest
        Visitors Bureau)

2nd Runner Up will be awarded
     1. $50 sent by PayPal or Check
     2. Two $25 gift cards to be used for Lock-A-Bye products (only one card can be used per purchase) Use Promo Code of
         DTC1291 for an additional 20% discount
   

     3. Copy of: Pennsylvania Wilds: Images from the Allegheny National Forest (courtesy of the Allegheny National Forest
         Visitors Bureau)

---> Also note: a collection of mostly new travel books will be offered to all winners in the form of a list - each winner will choose
      two (2) books starting with the grand prize winner. These books will then be mailed to a provided address.

The prize winners will be listed on the main page of Dave's Travel Corner - with links to their winning essays posted on our main travel journals page.

2010 Travel Essay Contest Winners
  
1st - Blundering in the Balkans | 2nd - Addicted
2009 Travel Essay Contest Winners
   1st - Nghiep | 2nd - Krystal | 3rd - Lorena

Submissions
All essays can be submitted by either dave@pon.net"> Emailing a Word Document or using the GUEST LOGIN link on the lower left hand side of our Journals Page. Any entries that are approved will be posted on our Journals page. Once posted your essay remains your property - it will only be posted on our site. Journals may be submitted to minor grammar and editing before being posted. We encourage photos to be included with your journals but a lack of photos does not factor in the contest decision making. Note that 325 pixels is the maximum width recommended for any uploaded photos.

Deadline
Your essay must be submitted by July 1, 2011. Winners will be announced on August 1, 2011

 

 

 

 

EVENT: New York City—Aesthetic Justice Seminar > Provisions Library » Blog Archive

Aesthetic Justice Seminar

Carlos Motta and Josué Euceda. Resistance and Repression, 2010.

 

Provisions Library and Lambent Foundation are pleased to invite you to attend our upcoming  Aesthetic Justice Seminar, curated by Thomas Keenan and Niels Van Tomme.

SAVE THE DATE:
Saturday, May 14th 10:00 AM – 6 PM
Las Americas Conference Center
Hispanic Federation
55 Exchange Place, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10005

The seminar is organized within the framework of Provisions’s current Aesthetic Justice exhibition at Lambent Foundation, which features the works of Alyse Emdur, Rajkamal Kahlon, Carlos Motta, and Larissa Sansour.

The seminar will stage a number of thought-provoking dialogues between the artists in the exhibition and renowned human rights practitioners, scholars, writers, and journalists. Our aim is to explore the intersections between artistic practices and the field of human rights, and to discuss implications for the notion and practice of justice.

The participants:

Alyse Emdur
Rajkamal Kahlon
Carlos Motta
Larissa Sansour

- Sam Gregory, Witness
- Daniel Karpowitz, Bard Prison Initiative
Amitava Kumar, writer and journalist
- Todd Lester, freeDimensional

- Shannon Brunette, Lambent Foundation
- Thomas Keenan, Human Rights Project, Bard College
- Niels Van Tomme, Provisions Learning Project

RSVP required HERE. Seating is limited.

 

OP-ED: Junot Díaz: Apocalypse (Haiti, Japan, earthquake, tsunami) > Boston Review

Junot Díaz

Apocalypse

What Disasters Reveal 


ONE

Matt Marek

On January 12, 2010 an earthquake struck Haiti. The epicenter of the quake, which registered a moment magnitude of 7.0, was only fifteen miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. By the time the initial shocks subsided, Port-au-Prince and surrounding urbanizations were in ruins. Schools, hospitals, clinics, prisons collapsed. The electrical and communication grids imploded. The Presidential Palace, the Cathedral, and the National Assembly building—historic symbols of the Haitian patrimony—were severely damaged or destroyed. The headquarters of the UN aid mission was reduced to rubble, killing peacekeepers, aid workers, and the mission chief, Hédi Annabi.

The figures vary, but an estimated 220,000 people were killed in the aftermath of the quake, with hundreds of thousands injured and at least a million—one-tenth of Haiti’s population—rendered homeless. According to the Red Cross, three million Haitians were affected. It was the single greatest catastrophe in Haiti’s modern history. It was for all intents and purposes an apocalypse.


TWO

Apocalypse comes to us from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Now, as James Berger reminds us in After the End, apocalypse has three meanings. First, it is the actual imagined end of the world, whether in Revelations or in Hollywood blockbusters. Second, it comprises the catastrophes, personal or historical, that are said to resemble that imagined final ending—the Chernobyl meltdown or the Holocaust or the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed thousands and critically damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Finally, it is a disruptive event that provokes revelation. The apocalyptic event, Berger explains, in order to be truly apocalyptic, must in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate “the true nature of what has been brought to end.” It must be revelatory.

“The apocalypse, then,” per Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.” Apocalypses of the first, second, and third kinds. The Haiti earthquake was certainly an apocalypse of the second kind, and to those who perished it may even have been an apocalypse of the first kind, but what interests me here is how the Haiti earthquake was also an apocalypse of the third kind, a revelation. This in brief is my intent: to peer into the ruins of Haiti in an attempt to describe what for me the earthquake revealed—about Haiti, our world, and even our future.

After all, if these types of apocalyptic catastrophes have any value it is that in the process of causing things to fall apart they also give us a chance to see the aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denials.

Apocalyptic catastrophes don’t just raze cities and drown coastlines; these events, in David Brooks’s words, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” And, equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the catastrophe, whether we are talking about Haiti or Japan. (I do believe the tsunami-earthquake that ravaged Sendai this past March will eventually reveal much about our irresponsible reliance on nuclear power and the sinister collusion between local and international actors that led to the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe.)

 

Becoming a ruin–reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light.

But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance, practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.


THREE

So the earthquake that devastated Haiti: what did it reveal?

Well I think it’s safe to say that first and foremost it revealed Haiti.

This might strike some of you as jejune but considering the colossal denial energies (the veil) that keep most third-world countries (and their problems) out of global sightlines, this is no mean feat. For most people Haiti has never been more than a blip on a map, a faint disturbance in the force so far removed that what happened there might as well have been happening on another planet. The earthquake for a while changed that, tore the veil from before planet’s eyes and put before us what we all saw firsthand or on the TV: a Haiti desperate beyond imagining.

If Katrina revealed America’s third world, then the earthquake revealed the third world’s third world. Haiti is by nearly every metric one of the poorest nations on the planet—a mind-blowing 80 percent of the population live in poverty, and 54 percent live in what is called “abject poverty.” Two-thirds of the workforce have no regular employment, and, for those who do have jobs, wages hover around two dollars a day. We’re talking about a country in which half the population lack access to clean water and 60 percent lack even the most basic health-care services, such as immunizations; where malnutrition is among the leading causes of death in children, and, according to UNICEF, 24 percent of five-year-olds suffer stunted growth. As the Haiti Children Project puts it:

Lack of food, hygienic living conditions, clean water and basic healthcare combine with epidemic diarrhea, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS to give Haiti among the highest infant, under-five and maternal mortality rates in the western hemisphere.

In Haiti life expectancy hovers at around 60 years as compared to, say, 80 years, in Canada.

Hunger, overpopulation, over-cultivation, and dependence on wood for fuel have strained Haiti’s natural resources to the breaking point. Deforestation has rendered vast stretches of the Haitian landscape almost lunar in their desolation. Haiti is eating itself. Fly over my island—Hispaniola, home to Haiti and my native Dominican Republic—as I do two or three times a year, and what you will see will leave you speechless. Where forests covered 60 percent of Haiti in 1923, only two percent is now covered. This relentless deforestation has led to tremendous hardships; it is both caused by and causes poverty. Without forests, 6,000 hectares of arable land erode every year, and Haiti has grown more vulnerable to hurricane-induced mudslides that wipe out farms, roads, bridges, even entire communities. In 2008 four storms caused nearly a billion dollars in damage—15 percent of the gross domestic product—and killed close to a thousand people. The mudslides were so extensive and the cleanup so underfunded that much of that damage is still visible today.

In addition to resource pressures, Haiti struggles with poor infrastructure. Political and social institutions are almost nonexistent, and a deadly confluence of political instability, pervasive corruption, massive poverty, and predation from elites on down to armed drug gangs has unraveled civic society, leaving the majority of Haitians isolated and at risk. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was reeling—it would not have taken the slightest shove to send it into catastrophe.

All this the earthquake revealed.


FOUR

Nursing school in Port-au-Prince / AIDG

When confronted with a calamity of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake, most of us resort to all manners of evasion—averting our eyes, blaming the victim, claiming the whole thing was an act of god—in order to avoid confronting what geographer Neil Smith calls the axiomatic truth of these events: “There’s no such thing as a natural disaster.” In every phase and aspect of a disaster, Smith reminds us, the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.

In other words disasters don’t just happen. They are always made possible by a series of often-invisible societal choices that implicate more than just those being drowned or buried in rubble.

This is why we call them social disasters.

The Asian tsunami of 2004 was a social disaster. The waves were so lethal because the coral reefs that might have protected the vulnerable coasts had been dynamited to facilitate shipping. And the regions that suffered most were those like Nagapattinam, in India, where hotel construction and industrial shrimp farming had already systematically devastated the natural mangrove forests, which are the world’s best tsunami-protectors.

We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina was a social disaster. Not only in the ruthless economic marginalization of poor African Americans and in the outright abandonment of same during the crisis, but in the Bush administration’s decision to sell hundreds of square miles of wetlands to developers, destroying New Orleans’s natural defenses. The same administration, according to Smith, gutted “the New Orleans Corps of Engineers budget by 80 percent, thus preventing pumping and levee improvements.”

As with the tsunami and Katrina, so too Haiti.

But Haiti is really exemplary in this regard. From the very beginning of its history, right up to the day of the earthquake, Haiti had a lot of help on its long road to ruination. The web of complicity for its engulfment in disaster extends in both time and space.

Whether it was Haiti’s early history as a French colony, which artificially inflated the country’s black population beyond what the natural bounty of the land could support and prevented any kind of material progress; whether it was Haiti’s status as the first and only nation in the world to overthrow Western chattel slavery, for which it was blockaded (read, further impoverished) by Western powers (thank you Thomas Jefferson) and only really allowed to rejoin the world community by paying an indemnity to all whites who had lost their shirts due to the Haitian revolution, an indemnity Haiti had to borrow from French banks in order to pay, which locked the country in a cycle of debt that it never broke free from; whether it was that chronic indebtedness that left Haiti vulnerable to foreign capitalist interventions—first the French, then the Germans, and finally the Americans, who occupied the nation from 1915 until 1934, installing a puppet president and imposing upon poor Haiti a new constitution more favorable to foreign investment; whether it was the 40 percent of Haiti’s income that U.S. officials siphoned away to repay French and U.S. debtors, or the string of diabolical despots who further drove Haiti into ruin and who often ruled with foreign assistance—for example, FranÇois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who received U.S. support for his anti-communist policies; whether it was the 1994 UN embargo that whittled down Haiti’s robust assembly workforce from more than 100,000 workers to 17,000, or the lifting of the embargo, which brought with it a poison-pill gift in the form of an IMF-engineered end to Haiti’s protective tariffs, which conveniently enough made Haiti the least trade-restrictive nation in the Caribbean and opened the doors to a flood of U.S.-subsidized rice that accelerated the collapse of the farming sector and made a previously self-sufficient country overwhelmingly dependent on foreign rice and therefore vulnerable to increases in global food prices; whether it was the tens of thousands who lost their manufacturing jobs during the blockade and the hundreds of thousands who were thrown off the land by the rice invasion, many of whom ended up in the cities, in the marginal buildings and burgeoning slums that were hit hardest by the earthquake—the world has done its part in demolishing Haiti.

This too is important to remember, and this too the earthquake revealed.


FIVE

the earthquake revealed our world in other ways. Look closely into the apocalypse of Haiti and you will see that Haiti’s problem is not that it is poor and vulnerable—Haiti’s problem is that it is poor and vulnerable at a time in our capitalist experiment when the gap between those who got grub and those who don’t is not only vast but also rapidly increasing. Said another way, Haiti’s nightmarish vulnerability has to be understood as part of a larger trend of global inequality.

We are in the age of neoliberal economic integration, of globalization, the magic process that was to deliver the world’s poor out of misery and bring untold prosperity to the rest of us. Globalization, of course, did nothing of the sort. Although the Big G was supposed to lift all boats, even a cursory glance at the stats shows that the swell of globalization has had a bad habit of favoring the yachts over rafts by a whole lot. The World Bank reports that in 1960 the per capita GDP of the twenty richest countries was eighteen times greater than that of the twenty poorest. By 1995 that number had reached 37.

In this current era of neoliberal madness, sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, “The least developed countries lag more and more behind and within countries the number of the poor is growing; on the other side of the split screen is the explosive growth of wealth of the hyper-rich.” It would be one thing if the rich were getting richer because they are just that much more awesome than we are, but the numbers suggest that the rich may be getting richer in part by squeezing the poor and, increasingly, the middle class. This is a worldwide phenomenon. It is happening at the bottom of the market—in Haiti, for example, where per capita GDP dropped from around $2,100 in 1980 to $1,045 in 2009 (2005 U.S. dollars)—and at the top. In the United States, the poorest have gained much less than the wealthy: between 1993 and 2008, the top-1 percent captured 52 percent of total income growth.

Apocalypses are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities: chances for us to see ourselves, to change.

The world’s goodies are basically getting gobbled up by a tiny group of gluttons while the rest of us—by which I mean billions of people—are being deprived of even the crumbs’ crumbs. And yet in spite of these stark disparities, the economic powers-that-be continue to insist that what the world needs more of is—wait for it—economic freedom and market-friendly policies, which is to say more inequality!

Pieterse describes our economic moment best:

Overall discrepancies in income and wealth are now vast to the point of being grotesque. The discrepancies in livelihoods across the world are so large that they are without historical precedent and without conceivable justification—economic, moral, or otherwise.

This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die.

And this too the earthquake revealed.


SIX

I cannot contemplate the apocalypse of Haiti without asking the question: where is this all leading? Where are the patterns and forces that we have set in motion in our world—the patterns and forces that made Haiti’s devastation not only possible but inevitable—delivering us? To what end, to what future, to what fate?

The answer seems to me both obvious and chilling. I suspect that once we have finished ransacking our planet’s resources, once we have pushed a couple thousand more species into extinction and exhausted the water table and poisoned everything in sight and exacerbated the atmospheric warming that will finish off the icecaps and drown out our coastlines, once our market operations have parsed the world into the extremes of ultra-rich and not-quite-dead, once the famished billions that our economic systems left behind have in their insatiable hunger finished stripping the biosphere clean, what we will be left with will be a stricken, forlorn desolation, a future out of a sci-fi fever dream where the super-rich will live in walled-up plantations of impossible privilege and the rest of us will wallow in unimaginable extremity, staggering around the waste and being picked off by the hundreds of thousands by “natural disasters”—by “acts of god.”

Sounds familiar, don’t it?

Isn’t that after all the logical conclusion of what we are wreaking? The transformation of our planet into a Haiti? Haiti, you see, is not only the most visible victim of our civilization—Haiti is also a sign of what is to come.

And this too the earthquake revealed.

 

 

A neighborhood in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake / Logan Abassi, UN Development Programme

 

SEVEN

If I know anything it is this: we need the revelations that come from our apocalypses—and never so much as we do now. Without this knowledge how can we ever hope to take responsibility for the social practices that bring on our disasters? And how can we ever hope to take responsibility for the collective response that will be needed to alleviate the misery?

How can we ever hope to change?

Because we must change, we also must refuse the temptation to look away when confronted with disasters. We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters. We must refuse the familiar scripts of victims and rescuers that focus our energies solely on charity instead of systemic change. We must refuse the recovery measures that seek always to further polarize the people and the places they claim to mend. And we must, in all circumstances and with all our strength, resist the attempts of those who helped bring the disaster to use the chaos to their advantage—to tighten their hold on our futures.

We must stare into the ruins—bravely, resolutely—and we must see.

And then we must act.

Our very lives depend on it.

Will it happen? Will we, despite all our limitations and cruelties, really heed our ruins and pull ourselves out of our descent into apocalypse?

Haiti’s nightmarish vulnerability has to be understood as part of a larger trend of global inequality.

Truth be told, I’m not very optimistic. I mean, just look at us. No, I’m not optimistic—but that doesn’t mean I don’t have hope. Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I’m from New Jersey: as a writer from out that way once said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Yes, I have hope. We humans are a fractious lot, flawed and often diabolical. But, for all our deficiencies, we are still capable of great deeds. Consider the legendary, divinely inspired endurance of the Haitian people. Consider how they have managed to survive everything the world has thrown at them—from slavery to Sarah Palin, who visited last December. Consider the Haitian people’s superhuman solidarity in the weeks after the quake. Consider the outpouring of support from Haitians across the planet. Consider the impossible sacrifices the Haitian community has made and continues to make to care for those who were shattered on January 12, 2010.

Consider also my people, the Dominicans. In the modern period, few Caribbean populations have been more hostile to Haitians. We are of course neighbors, but what neighbors! In 1937 the dictator Rafael Trujillo launched a genocidal campaign against Haitians and Haitian Dominicans. Tens of thousands were massacred; tens of thousands more were wounded and driven into Haiti, and in the aftermath of that genocide the relationship between the two countries has never thawed. Contemporary Dominican society in many respects strikes me as profoundly anti-Haitian, and Haitian immigrants to my country experience widespread discrimination, abysmal labor conditions, constant harassment, mob violence, and summary deportation without due process.

No one, and I mean no one, expected anything from Dominicans after the quake; yet look at what happened: Dominican rescue workers were the first to enter Haiti. They arrived within hours of the quake, and in the crucial first days of the crisis, while the international community was getting its act together, Dominicans shifted into Haiti vital resources that were the difference between life and death for thousands of victims.

In a shocking reversal of decades of toxic enmity, it seemed as if the entire Dominican society mobilized for the relief effort. Dominican hospitals were emptied to receive the wounded, and all elective surgeries were canceled for months. (Imagine if the United States canceled all elective surgeries for a single month in order to help Haiti, what a different that would have made.) Schools across the political and economic spectrums organized relief drives, and individual citizens delivered caravans of essential materials and personnel in their own vehicles, even as international organizations were claiming that the roads to Port-au-Prince were impassable. The Dominican government transported generators and mobile kitchens and established a field hospital. The Dominican Red Cross was up and running long before anyone else. Dominican communities in New York City, Boston, Providence, and Miami sent supplies and money. This historic shift must have Trujillo rolling in his grave. Sonia Marmolejos, a humble Dominican woman, left her own infant babies at home in order to breastfeed more than twenty Haitian babies whose mothers had either been seriously injured or killed in the earthquake.

Consider Sonia Marmolejos and understand why, despite everything, I still have hope.


EIGHT

“These are dark times, there is no denying.” Thus spake Bill Nighy’s character in the penultimate Harry Potter movie. Sometimes we have to look in our entertainment for truths. And sometimes we have to look in the ruins for hope.

More than a year has passed since the earthquake toppled Haiti, and little on the material front has changed. Port-au-Prince is still in ruins, rubble has not been cleared, and the port is still crippled. More than a million people are still in tent cities, vulnerable to the elements and disease and predatory gangs, and there is no sign that they will be moving out soon. The rebuilding has made many U.S. companies buckets of cash, but so far has done very little for Haitian contractors or laborers. Cholera is spreading through the relief camps, killing more than 4,500 so far, according to the United Nations. In December 2010 Paul Farmer reported that nearly a year after the disaster Haiti had received only 38 percent, or $732.5 million, of promised donations, excluding debt relief. In the Dominican Republic, threats of violence caused thousands of Haitian immigrants to abandon the Santiago area just weeks before the earthquake’s first anniversary.

More than a year later, we can say safely that the world has looked away. It has failed to learn the lesson of the apocalypse of Haiti.

If anything is certain it is this: there will be more Haitis.

Never fear though—if anything is certain it is this: there will be more Haitis. Some new catastrophe will strike our poor planet. And for a short while the Eye of Sauron that is the globe’s fickle attention span will fall upon this novel misery. More hand wringing will ensue, more obfuscatory narratives will be trotted out, more people will die. Those of us who are committed will help all we can, but most people will turn away. There will be a few, however, who, steeling themselves, will peer into the ruins for the news that we will all eventually need.

After all, apocalypses like the Haitian earthquake are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities: chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change. One day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen, and for once we won’t look away. We will reject what Jane Anna and Lewis R. Gordon have described in Of Divine Warning as that strange moment following a catastrophe where “in our aversion to addressing disasters as signs” we refuse “to interpret and take responsibility for the kinds of collective responses that may be needed to alleviate human misery.” One day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen and for once we will heed the ruins. We will begin collectively to take responsibility for the world we’re creating. Call me foolishly utopian, but I sincerely believe this will happen. I do. I just wonder how many millions of people will perish before it does.


POSTSCRIPT

March 15: As I revise this essay, I am watching the harrowing images being beamed in from post-earthquake-post-tsunami Japan. Another apocalypse beyond the imagination—but one that might affect us all. The news is reporting that a third explosion has rocked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and that there might be a fire in the fourth reactor. The worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a nicely combed man is saying. Even if the reactor cores do not melt down, radioactive “releases” into the environment will continue for weeks, perhaps even months. My friends in Tokyo report that the convenience stores that I so love have been emptied and that there are signs that the radiation has already begun to reach that metropolis of 13 million. And finally this, a perfunctory statement from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “NRC’s rigorous safety regulations ensure that U.S. nuclear facilities are designed to withstand tsunamis, earthquakes and other hazards.” When pressed for details, NRC spokesman David McIntyre was reported to have said that the commission is not taking reporters’ questions at this point.

 

CULTURE: Bob Marley: Thirty Years After His Death, The Reggae Legend Lives > Speakeasy - WSJ

Thirty Years After His Death,

Bob Marley Lives

 

Photoshot/Everett Collection / Bob Marley in Amsterdam in 1976.

Bob Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at the age of 36. To mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the reggae legend, the Wall Street Journal asked Jamaican-born novelist Colin Channer to share his thoughts.

The first time I saw Bob Marley perform I was eight years old. It was 1971. A Saturday afternoon. I was sitting in a Danish couch with beige cushions and maple arms in a new development of pre-fab homes in Kingston. He was a glowing presence on a 13-inch black and white Sanyo.

His bandmates Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh were on either side of him, I guess. They must have been; but memory hasn’t saved their bodies, only their sound–their falsettos whinnying as Bob cantered through “Duppy Conqueror,” voice rearing wildly at the end of some lines.

I knew the song. Had heard it in trickling from the doors of rum shops; had heard the postman hum it as he sat on his red bicycle by the wrought-iron gate, half hidden by the crotons, waiting for the helper to come outside for a slack-mouth chat up. I’d also heard it chuffing from the wooden Grundig stereogram owned by my mother’s friends Owen and Alma Dixon, the party couple. They lived in a modest home with a shingled roof and wooden floors on Mountain View Avenue, about two miles away from Harry J’s recording studio, where Bob would go on to record “Natty Dread,” his first album without Peter and Bunny. Island Records released “Natty Dread” in 1974.

So, yes, I knew the song. In fact, I knew it very well. But before this moment in 1971, I’d never thought about who sung it. I wasn’t into music yet. Music was something that washed over me. And in those days in Jamaica one couldn’t depend on the island’s two radio stations for much information about local singers. Like the media in many former colonies, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Jamaica Redifusion Limited rationed how much local music they played. Standards, man. Standards. Standards must be maintained. When the JBC and RJR did play local music, well, they played it down the middle. Girl, I love you. Boy, I love you. Girl, I miss you. Boy, you’re gonna miss me. Off brand Motown. A genre called rock steady. Good kids singing clean music.

In 1971, reggae the fat-bottomed outside child of rock steady and Rastafarianism, was already three years old, It was race music. Bass music. The music of the common people whose feet traced deep lines into the dirt lanes that flowed into the dark heart of the shanty clumps in West Kingston. Reggae was not clean music. It was dutty (dirty) people music. The very essence of funk.

So imagine my surprise then, on this Saturday evening. Life was going along as I’d known it. I was watching Top Ten Tunes on JBC TV. There was a bowl of beef soup in my lap, the enamel warm on my thighs, the broth orange-red from melted pumpkins. I took my eyes off the set to forage for meat under chunks of yam; found mostly bone and gristle; looked up again and saw three dutty people boasting in a song about death and prison, that “their bars could not hold me.”

It was a simple set. Three men in their twenties fronting a cyclorama. No mikes. No band. That the set was unexciting didn’t strike me. I didn’t expect much in the way of excitement from the JBC. What struck me was Bob Marley’s style.

He was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket as if he’d been an extra in “Blackboard Jungle” or “The Wild One.” His hair was worn in a style I found curious … a bit unsettling. I found it unsettling because I was at an age where my sense of what it meant to be intelligent was defining itself in terms of my ability to name things. For didn’t everything have a name?

Marley had an afro. Certainly. But he also did not. His hair was an afro in approximate scale and shape. It was voluminous and round,But the edges were frayed and fringed. Was it an afro, this black halo? Or was it something else?

From where I sit today at my desk in a Boston suburb, a 47 year-old novelist, professor and occasional critic, I can describe Bob’s hair as looking like something mysterious had reached from somewhere unseen to grab and twist the ends. I can say that his hair in its raggedness reminded me of what happened to the edges of neat colonial towns when slums appear on their rims, that I was unsettled by what unsettles most of us-being in a present that portends a future of fundamental change, being unsure if that feeling of excitement coupled in our hearts with fear has given fear its full consent.

Yes, I felt afraid that day. Yes, I felt afraid. I felt afraid because I knew I was looking at something I didn’t understand, and wanted to understand, but which I knew by instinct, and rough deduction, would not be considered worthy of consideration by decent people.

And what kind of trouble was going to be caused now, I could hear them thinking, that indecent, dutty hair was on gov’ment TV, getting exposure? Lord, what a calamity and crosses! Since independence, Jamaica gone to the dogs.

In later years, I would come to understand Bob Marley as an artist of substance, however, what made him iconic to me at first sighting was his sense of style.

Icons project. That is what they do. They radiate the capacities we’d like to have inside ourselves. Better yet, they reflect what we radiate in their direction, allowing us to envision the supernatural in ourselves.

There was no sense that Bob had been styled, that someone had chosen that jacket for him, or that he was any kind of copy cat, or in Jamaican parlance a “follow-fashion monkey.” Yes, there was the grammar of American fashion in his look, but he’d disrupted that language, reshaped it, creating a sty-ialect.

Bob was natural. Super natural. Natural to the extreme. Thirty years after his death he lives. It’s as if in singing “Duppy Conqueror” he’d bragged his way into a cosmic truth, had in fact conquered the duppy, that shape-shifter from the afterlife otherwise known as Death, who captured him as he tried to catch his breath in a cancer ward in Florida on May 11, 1981.

The first time I saw Bob Marley perform I was eight years old. But the last time I see him will always be tomorrow.

Jamaican-born novelist Colin Channer is the father of Addis and Makonnen. He’s also a professor of English, the founder and artistic director of a literary trust, and the author of such books as “Waiting in Vain” and “The Girl with the Golden Shoes.”

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Bob Marley:

Rastaman Vibration

 

Thirty years after his death, Bob Marley's legend lives on.

But no other artist has matched his enduring influence

on music and culture. Why? By Ian Burrell

 

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

'A lyrical message of rare power'; Kim Gottlieb-Walker photographed Bob Marley at his home in Kingston at the height of his career. Thirty years after his death, her images are being shown at a new exhibition in London

 

KIM GOTTLIEB-WALKER

'A lyrical message of rare power'; Kim Gottlieb-Walker photographed Bob Marley at his home in Kingston at the height of his career. Thirty years after his death, her images are being shown at a new exhibition in London

 

Neasden, north London. 1971. The man who would become the first musical superstar to emerge from the developing world is cooped up in a freezing house in one of the capital's greyest and least fashionable suburbs. He has no money, no passport and no work permit. This was Bob Marley at 26, standing on the verge of greatness. His drab, monochrome surroundings belied the fact that he would soon be painting the planet red, gold and green, electrifying audiences on all continents with an original sound that carried a lyrical message of rare power. But less than a decade after Marley left that house in Neasden to make the journey to the Island Records office in Basing Street where he would secure a career-defining deal for the Wailers – the band he formed with childhood friends Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh – he would be dead.

It is 30 years since we lost Bob Marley. You can't believe it? Just a moment's consideration of music culture now should be enough to tell you how long he has been gone. The flame that, for most of his international audience, began with the albums Catch A Fire and Burnin', shining a new light on injustices and inequalities that had previously been widely ignored, blazed intensely but only briefly. Now it feels like the candle lit in his memory is all but extinguished.

It's not just that the current charts are almost bereft of serious thought or spiritual feeling. Pop music flourished when Marley was alive – when he was in that house in Neasden the British No 1 was "Ernie", a ditty about a milkman by Benny Hill (and still an all-time favourite track of the current Prime Minister). The sad thing is that, in an era when the tourist stalls have replaced the once ubiquitous T-shirts of Bob or John Lennon with football tops branded with Rooney or Ronaldo, there's almost no one singing about anything of importance. When aspiring artists are encouraged by reality television shows merely to replicate the hits of the past, it's tough being a singer-songwriter, let alone one that wants to change the world.

Marley encouraged musicians to think differently. He was an inspiration to British punk bands in the late 1970s and acknowledged their spirit in his own song "Punky Reggae Party". His success encouraged the explosion of World Music in the 1980s with South Africa's Lucky Dube and Ivory Coast's Alpha Blondy among the artists who sought to emulate his songs of protest.

His influence extended well beyond the parameters of music. The message in songs such as "Get Up, Stand Up", "So Much Trouble in the World" and "War" would surely resonate with demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Libyan rebels in Benghazi. "Bob Marley lives on as an icon – not just in the world of music, but in the social sphere, at the political grassroots, and in the field of human rights," noted the British photographer Dennis Morris, a friend of the musician. Since Morris wrote those words, in 1998, Marley's influence seems to have waned, especially in career-conscious 21st-century Britain.

Even in Jamaica, where Bob led the way in breaking the stigmatisation of Rastafarian culture and making dreadlocks acceptable, there is diminishing evidence of his influence in popular music, with lewd and violent lyrics often holding sway in modern dancehalls. "If Bob Marley was to hear the songs of certain individuals in Jamaica right now he would be horrified," says the reggae DJ David Rodigan.

Perhaps, 30 years after his death, it's a good time to reconsider what Bob Marley left us. His relevance should be particularly strong in Britain, and not just because his father was an English army officer, Captain Norval Marley. He signed that crucial Island Records deal with the label's Anglo-Jamaican founder Chris Blackwell, after coming to Europe with the America singer Johnny Nash and getting stuck in Britain. For a time he lived in London, playing his beloved football with the locals. He made his most famous live recording at the Lyceum Theatre in London in July 1975, filmed the video for "Is This Love" in a north London community centre and helped to inspire the British reggae scene, opening doors for bands such as Steel Pulse and Aswad.

The quality of Marley's work is rooted in the depth of his early life experiences and his long musical education. Separated from his father, he departed the rural parish of St Ann's to live with his mother in the Kingston slums. "After battering around from this dwelling to that one, we finally ended up in a government house in Trench Town," recalled his mother, Cedella Booker, in her biography of her son. He soon began associating with local musicians. "Sometimes Desmond Dekker would come over and the two of them would start jamming together in the bedroom."

In Trench Town he learnt about racial prejudice. "Bob was different from everybody else because he was racially mixed," said Morris in his pictorial biography Bob Marley: A Rebel Life. "He never really saw himself as a black man or a white man: he was Bob Marley. He always said that he had a hard time when he was growing up in Jamaica, coming from a mixed culture. Everybody in Trench Town was very definitely black, so he was an outcast in some ways."

By the time, Bob, Bunny and Peter reached England in 1971, they had been working for eight years. Their earliest recordings for the great Jamaican producer Coxsone Dodd were inspired by the vocal harmonies of American soul groups such as the Impressions and powered by the new rhythms of ska. Songs such as "Simmer Down" and "Jailhouse" reflected the inner city tensions that Marley had experienced and were imbued with the rebel spirit that became his trademark. In 1969, the Wailers joined up with the eccentric Lee Perry, who produced some of the finest compositions of Bob's career, including "Small Axe" and "Duppy Conqueror".

Everyone who met Bob Marley seems to have been touched by his sheer presence, his lion-like visage, majestic air and disarming smile. "He was extremely charismatic and visually, a beautiful man," says Kim Gottlieb-Walker, who photographed Marley at his home in Kingston at the height of his career. She also pictured several of his famously energetic live performances. "He was very dedicated to his music and his message, very serious and conscientious and he demanded the same discipline of his band members. But there was no denying the pure joy and intensity of the performances."

Gottlieb-Walker is exhibiting some of her pictures at a London gallery to mark the 30th anniversary of Bob's death. "He was most comfortable while enjoying the company of friends, family and children, playing football or ping-pong or making music," she says. "At one point I taped some cardboards to the wall of his house at 56 Hope Road in the colours of the Ethiopian flag and asked him to stand in front of them. The first frame was serious and contained...so I stuck my head out from behind the camera and said, 'You know, a lot of people who see these photos will be people who already love you' and that produced the smiles in the next two frames."

According to the reggae author Lloyd Bradley, writers have always struggled to capture the "essential purity" of Marley, which is more easily defined in photographs than in print. "Bob's face was always as expressive as his words, whether he was laughing, thinking, singing, composing or hopping mad." Women found him irresistible. As well as his three children with wife Rita he had up to eight more with other women, including the former Miss World Cindy Breakspeare. Politicians were also drawn by his aura, in spite of his reluctance to get involved, because of his Rastafarian beliefs. At the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, he brought together the leaders of Jamaica's warring political parties and forced them to join hands during a performance of his party anthem "Jammin'".

Two years later in Harare, at the Zimbabwe Independence Celebrations he performed a set that included the song he had written for that new nation, with its reminder that "Every man got a right to his decide his own destiny" and his advice to Robert Mugabe and colleagues that "Soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionary". Thirty years later, and with the Zimbabwean people suffering under Mugabe's rule, the words are as pertinent as ever.

"The music still resonates today, the people in Libya and Tunisia could be singing the Marley tunes," says Tony Sewell, a former lecturer at Leeds University who is director of Generating Genius, a British and Jamaican charity for boys' education. "You would have to look at the Beatles to see that kind of international currency. It's remarkable that the music has stayed so fresh."

Sewell is another who is depressed by the absence of musicians willing to pick up Marley's baton, particularly in reggae, for which he created a global audience before his death. After an initial explosion of Jamaican talent in the form of singers such as Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Freddie McGregor and Sugar Minott, the well has dried up. The honey-voiced Garnett Silk was seen as a pretender to the Marley throne (before his death in a gas explosion in 1994), as was Buju Banton, whose 1994 tour accompanying the release of the album 'Til Shiloh drew comparisons with Marley. But Banton's appeal was tainted by accusations of homophobia and his recent conviction for firearm and drugs offences leaves him facing up to 20 years in jail. A huge vacuum remains.

In Sewell's view, Marley's contribution was so vast that it intimidates those who have followed in his wake. "I detect that Jamaica needs to get over Bob Marley in some ways and move on," he says. "I'm wondering if his legacy has left a lot of younger Jamaicans, particularly the artists, feeling, 'Where do we take it to the next stage'. What was refreshing about [the Jamaican Olympic athlete] Usain Bolt coming along was at last we had somebody new."

Jason Hall, deputy director of tourism at the Jamaica Tourist Board, which has used Marley's "One Love" to draw visitors to the island for the past 20 years, says that whenever he travelled as a child he was afforded a special status because of the kudos that Bob's music brought to Jamaicans. "There simply hasn't been any musician like that before or since on a global scale," he says. "Nobody else speaks to freedom, positivity, upliftment and of course love."

In Australia, aboriginal people keep a memorial flame for Marley in Sydney. Among the Hopi tribe of Native Americans he is revered as the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy. But Marley's importance is perhaps felt most keenly of all in Africa. In 2005 I travelled to Ethiopia, the spiritual home of Rastafarianism, when 200,000 people thronged Meskel Square for the Africa Unite concert at which Rita Marley and several of Bob's children, including Damian, Ziggy and Julian, performed to celebrate what would have been his 60th birthday. "Bob Marley for me was a teacher, an academic," a member of the vast crowd, Abel Demsew, an 18-year-old student, told me. "He changed the world smoothly and attractively."

That resonates with Jeff Walker, Gottlieb-Walker's husband and a press officer for Island when Marley made the albums Natty Dread, Rastaman Vibration and Exodus (named by Time magazine as the greatest album of the 20th century). "Bob's primary message was peace and love," he says. "Even in the angrier songs they were talking about situations which would really be best addressed by actions of love as opposed to violence."

It's not that we have forgotten the words to those songs. Those who have grown up with iPods probably have a deeper knowledge of the history of popular music than their parents or grandparents. And Bob Marley's work, particularly his greatest hits album Legend, is on a lot of iPods. When Rodigan recently performed for a student audience in Manchester, the crowd sang along to "Is This Love". "Everyone in that house– average age 23, tops – knew every single world of that song and that speaks volumes, does it not, for the power of this man's music," he says.

"He has left such a phenomenal legacy, such an imprint upon our conscience."

A similar enthusiasm is engendered by the militant "Buffalo Soldier" and its battle-cry "Woy-oy-oy-oy", by "Sun Is Shining" the Perry-produced classic that has been remixed as a modern dance record, and the stirring "Iron Lion Zion", a track that was discovered only after Marley's death.

On one occasion at Island Records, Bob played Rodigan a recording of "Could You Be Loved" before its release, anxious to know whether it would have a wide appeal. Obviously, he need not have worried. "Bob's music is universal," says the DJ. "You can cue up and play almost any of his records and you are going to have the audience singing along, clapping hands and smiles beaming back up at you."

It might be that no one will ever again scale the musical heights reached by Bob Marley, with his influence not just on the charts but on politics, international relations and human rights. But it would be nice if more modern artists felt inspired enough to at least give it a try.

Bob Marley & The Golden Age of Reggae is on at Proud Camden and runs from 7 April until 15 May. A book of the same name is published by Titan and priced £24.99. For more information go to www.proud.co.uk

 

>via: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/bob-marley-ras...

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIDEO: Difficult Love by Zanele Muholi


Mapping and Archiving A Visual History of Black Lesbians in post-Apartheid South Africa 

__________________________

Difficult Love

Description: A highly personal take on the challenges facing Black lesbians in South Africa today emerges through the life, work, friends and associates of 'visual activist' and internationally celebrated photographer, Zanele Muholi (who also presents).
Video URL: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3128728089/

__________________________






2010

'I'm just doing my job.'
photo credit: Robert Hamblin 

In October 2010 the Black Empowerment businessman Kenny Kunene spent R700 000 on his 40th birthday party at the ZAR Lounge nightclub in Johannesburg, which he owns. According to reports, his party featured models, who were painted grey, strutting around in lingerie; another model was draped across a table, and party-goers nibbled sushi served on her stomach. Kunene's guests included presidential spokesman Zizi Kodwa, ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, and Malema's spokesman, Floyd Shivambu. A few days later, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi lashed out at "the BEE types who blow up to R700 000 in one night on parties", calling them members of the "predatory elite", which elicited a intense debate around the morality of the celebration. In response to this event, Muholi has photographed herself as one of the models. She has titled the work 'I am just doing my job', which was the answer one of the models offered when questioned after the event. 




In Faces and Phases , I continue to document and explore black lesbian identities through portraiture, where the participants are photographed in their various domiciles. One of our collective painful experiences as a community is the loss of friends and acquaintances through disease or hate crimes. Some of these participated in my visual projects. What is left behind now is the individuals' portraits that works as a site of memory for us, as a trace of 'who and what existed' in a particular space at this particular moment when our black lesbian and South African histories intersect. More... 

Artist statements...



 

In the Being series (2007) I interrogate black lesbian relationships and safer sex. On the surface, the visuals capture couples in intimate positions and moments showing their love for each other. However, deeper within these I wish to highlight how HIV/AIDS prevention programming has failed women who have sex with other women. 
More...



In my latest project "Massa" and Mina(h) ( 2008), I turn my own black body into a subject of art. I allow various photographers to capture my image as directed by me. I use performativity to deal with the still racialized issues of female domesticity-black women doing house work for white families. The project is based on the life and story of my mother. I draw on my own memories, and pay tribute to her domesticated role as a (domestic)worker for the same family for 42 years. The series is also meant to acknowledge all domestic workers around the globe who continue to labour with dignity, while often facing physical, financial, and emotional abuses in their place of work. There continues to be little recognition and little protection from the state for the hard labour these women perform to feed and clothe and house their families. More...

 >via: http://www.zanelemuholi.com/photography.htm

 

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Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi

Martin Machapa1 2006
Lambda print
100 x 76.5 cm

Zanele Muholi

Black Beulah 2006
Lambda print
100 x 76.5 cm

Zanele Muholi

Tri-Beulah 2006
Lambda print
100 x 76.5 cm

Zanele Muholi

Too Beulah
Lambda print
100 x 76.5 cm

Zanele Muholi

Dress Codes series 2006

Zanele Muholi

Dress Codes series 2006

Zanele Muholi

Dress Codes series 2006

Zanele Muholi

Triple III, 2005
Lambda print
500 x 375mm
edition of 8
courtesy of Michael Stevenson

Zanele Muholi

Ordeal, 2003
Lambda print
600 x 535mm
edition of 8
courtesy of Michael Stevenson

Zanele Muholi

Closer to my heart I, 2005
Lambda print
800 x 600mm
edition of 8
courtesy of Michael Stevenson

Zanele Muholi

Closer to my heart II, 2005
Lambda print
600 x 800mm
edition of 8

Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi
Untitled, 2006 
lambda print. 550 X 410mm
edition of 8

Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi
Sex ID Crisis, 2003
silver gelatin print. 325 X 485mm
edition of 8

 


Zanele Muholi
by Gabi Ngcobo (December, 2006)

MODUS OPERANDI

In the past three years or so, Zanele Muholi's photographs have been generating excitement as much as they have been unsettling audiences in South Africa and elsewhere around the world. It seems important that we as South Africans, and indeed all Africans, should ask ourselves if we are ready for Muholi's voice and what she is beckoning us towards. Can we risk hearing, seeing and crossing to this seemingly unfamiliar territory?

Muholi came into public awareness with her solo exhibition 'Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture' held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. The exhibition marked the end of her Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. After that, her work showing black lesbians in intimate moments became a subject of both private and public scrutiny from art historians, feminist and gender scholars.

Muholi chose to stay closer to her experiences by capturing her world and 'people' as she would unsurprisingly declare. The closeness Muholi shares with the people she portrays plays itself out in a way in which they appear comfortable in the intimacy of their environments. The pictures are conceptually provocative, playful, and outright confrontational. As photography remains a mode of expression dominated by men, Muholi's images serve to claim a space for black female bodies from centuries of objectification. It is an exercise in ensuring that those rendered voiceless can begin to reclaim the (visual) culture that was historically denied to them.

Muholi's work further evokes moments of women 'living under siege' as so straightforwardly articulated by feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola in a comment published in the Mail and Guardian (May 2004) entitled 'Bleeding on the streets of South Africa'. The current visibility of Muholi's work coincides with major political shifts and events, such as the much debated Same Sex Civil Union bill recently passed by South Africa, the first country in Africa and fifth in the world to allow such unions.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

'This is a time for a visual state of emergence. The preservation and mapping of our herstories is the only way for us black lesbians to be visible. The textualisation of our cultures is not sufficient but historicising is not impassable. It is for this reason that I embark on what I call visual activism. My work is about observing and taking action. I take pictures of myself and other women to heal from my past. ?...It is personal issues that makes me do what I do, for I have been raped more than 50 times by just listening to what women who have confessed and confirmed their love for other women have been through.'

'I have seen people speaking and capturing images of lesbians on our behalf, as if we are incapable and mute. I have witnessed this at Gay Pride events, at academic conferences, in the so-called women's movement forums. Research opened my eyes even wider than the lens, and it made me feel autonomous. I refused to become subject matter for others and to be silenced. Many have exiled our female African bodies: by colonisers, by researchers, by men. Sarah Baartman became a spectacle for Europeans, and she died in a foreign land. She was never given a chance to speak for herself. ?...It is for this reason that I say No, not yet another black body'.

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

'When I see blood (menstrual blood, I'm assuming) crudely manipulated into the form of the female reproductive organ - that is disturbing. The photos of the misshapen, overweight woman - as Venus of Willendorfesque as she may be - it is unhealthy and again disturbing. Seeing the girl with the dildo - disturbing. Maybe I had a weak stomach 'cause I missed lunch, I don't know - I just don't find the photos 'beautiful'. Powerful, yes, beautiful no.' 
http://brownfemipower.com/?p=570

'... Zanele Muholi ushers in a new language to articulate Black lesbian sexuality creatively and politically at the same time. She visualizes it, represents it, captures it, defines it, traces its routes, and imagines its worlds anew. In her pictures, Black lesbian sexualities/identities emerge as a complex myriad with as many experiences and potentialities as exist for any human experience. The documentary and artistic dialects through which she carves such projects themselves reflect her content in their diversity and slipperiness. She is a photographer we cannot neatly classify, and she is one whose vision we would be foolish to ignore.'
Pumla Dineo Gqola 'Re/imagining ways of seeing: making and speaking selves through Zanele Muholi's eyes' in Only Half a Picture, 2006, STE

CURRENTLY

Muholi has recently been awarded the first BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship. The fellowship promotes inspirational practice and teaching in visual arts through an artist-in-residence and teaching programme in the Division of Visual Arts in the Wits School of Arts. As part of the fellowship Muholi is in the final stages of editing her second documentary Being a Ma which looks at lesbian mothers and seeks to challenge confined and narrow definitions of motherhood as witnessed in the heteropatriarchal nuclear family concept that ignores sexual dynamism of many women living in South Africa.

Recently Muholi's work has shifted from her usual focus and ventured into exploring lived realities of the black gay, transsexual and intersex people living around Johannesburg's inner city and townships. She currently features in the group exhibition 'Women: Photography and New Media: Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture' at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and 'South African Art Now' at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

BEFORE THAT

In 2005 Muholi was presented with the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts and subsequently mounted her solo exhibition 'Only half the picture' at Michael Stevenson Gallery. A catalogue was co-published by Michael Stevenson and STE in April 2006. 'Only half the picture' later travelled to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and to the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam. In 2005, as an acknowledgement for her passionate activism within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Intersex (LGBTI) community, Muholi was awarded the first LGBTI Arts and Culture Award.

In 2006 Muholi's work was featured in 'Second to None' curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Virginia MacKenny at Iziko South African National Gallery, and was part of a group show 'Olvida quien soy - Erase me from who I am' curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose with Khwezi Gule, Tracy Murinik and Gabi Ngcobo at the Centro Atlantico de Arte Mordeno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Her photography is included in Vitamin Ph published by Phaidon, London and Women by Women, 50 years of Women's photography in South Africa edited by Robin Comley, George Hallett and Neo Ntsoma.

AND BEFORE THAT

'Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture', Muholi's first solo exhibition held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004 brought her to national attention and opened up invitations to feminist conferences, workshops and exhibitions. One such workshop, 'Gender and Visuality', held at the University of Western Cape, saw Muholi's pictures generating a number of heated comments from the public. Enraged by a Picture(2005), a documentary film by Muholi was a direct response to the feedback generated by the exhibition, it was first shown as part of the 'Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival'and subsequently travelled to 17 international film festivals in places including London, New York, Canada, Brazil, Germany and Korea. Through the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), an organisation that she co-founded, Muholi continues to train young women from Johannesburg townships in visual literacy and photographic skills.

NEXT UP

Muholi is one of 63 artists whose work will be featured in 'TRANS CAPE' a multi venue exhibition of contemporary African art to be held in Cape Town in March next year. Her work will also be included in an exhibition of contemporary South African photography to be held at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK) in Berlin in January 2007. Being a Ma will be shown as part of the 2007 'Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival', South Africa.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Muholi was Born in Umlazi, Durban, 1972. She lives and works in Johannesburg where she completed an Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop, Newtown in 2004. Muholi co-founded and works for the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (www.few.org.za).

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006 Vienna Kunsthalle project space, Vienna
2006 'Only half the picture', Michael Stevenson Contemporary, Cape Town, Market Theatre Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, and Galerie 32-34, Amsterdam
2005 Enraged by a picture, film screenings at the Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, various venues
2004 'Visual Sexuality: Only half the picture' as part of 'Urban Life', Market Photo Workshop exhibition, Johannesburg Art Gallery

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND CONFERENCES

2006 'Women: Photography and New Media: Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture', Johannesburg Art Gallery 
2006 African Feminist Forum, Ghana, Accra
2006 'Olvida Quien Soy - Erase me from who I am', Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderna, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
2006 'Second to None', South African National Gallery, Cape Town
2005 'South African art 1848 to now', Michael Stevenson Contemporary, Cape Town
2005 'Doing Gender', Department of Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape
2005 'Sexual Rights and Moral Panics', International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS) conference, San Francisco State University, California
2005 'A Lesson from History', Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn
2005 'Subject to Change', South African National Gallery, Cape Town
2005 Month of Photography, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town
2005 'Erotic Blenders', Toronto, Canada
2005 World Beyond Words (part of Writing African Women conference at the University of the Western Cape), Centre for?oAfrican Studies, University of Cape Town
2004 'Young Vision 2004', Alliance Française, Johannesburg
2004 'Sex en Kultuur' festival, Cape Town
2004 Pride Week, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg
2004 'Gender and Visuality' conference, University of the Western Cape
2004 'Women Arts Festival: Is Everybody Comfortable?', Market Photo Workshop exhibition, Museum Africa, Johannesburg
2004 'Urban Life', Market Photo Workshop exhibition, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg
2003 'Women Arts Festival: What Makes A Woman?', Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg
2003 'Pride Women Arts Festival', Johannesburg
2003 'Women Arts Festival', Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg
2002 'Women Arts Festival', Pink Loerie Festival, Knysna

AWARDS

2006 BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship
2005 Tollman Award
2005 LGBTI Arts and Culture Award
COLLECTIONS

Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; The Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, USA; UNISA Art Collection, South Africa 

 

 

WOMEN: South Africa ignores 'corrective' attacks > guardian.co.uk + Remembering Zoliswa Nkonyana > Black Looks

Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores 'corrective' attacks

• Women living in fear of brutal assaults by male gangs
• Country's 'macho politics' lead to lack of action

Annie Kelly

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009 17.49 GMT

   
Interviews with South African victims of 'corrective rape' Link to this video

The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs. As well as being one of South Africa's best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in Kwa Thema.

Her brutal murder took place last April, and since then a tide of violence against lesbians in South Africa has continued to rise. Human rights campaigners say it is characterised by what they call "corrective rape" committed by men behind the guise of trying to "cure" lesbians of their sexual orientation.

Now, a report by the international NGO ActionAid, backed by the South African Human Rights Commission, condemns the culture of impunity around these crimes, which it says are going unrecognised by the state and unpunished by the legal system.

The report calls for South Africa's criminal justice system to recognise hate crimes, including corrective rape, as a separate crime category. It argues this will force police to take action over the rising violence and ensure the resources and support is provided to those trying to bring perpetrators to justice.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane's murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter's safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I'm scared of these people that they are going to come and kill me too because I don't know what happened," she said. "Why did they do this horrible thing? Because of who she was? She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

The Guardian talked to lesbians in townships in Johannesburg and Cape Town who said they were being deliberately targeted for rape and that the threat of violence had become an everyday ordeal.

"Every day I am told that they are going to kill me, that they are going to rape me and after they rape me I'll become a girl," said Zakhe Sowello from Soweto, Johannesburg. "When you are raped you have a lot of evidence on your body. But when we try and report these crimes nothing happens, and then you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street."

Research released last year by Triangle, a leading South African gay rights organisation, revealed that a staggering 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape said they lived in fear of sexual assault. The group says it is dealing with up to 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week.

"What we're seeing is a spike in the numbers of women coming to us having been raped and who have been told throughout the attack that being a lesbian was to blame for what was happening to them," said Vanessa Ludwig, the chief executive at Triangle.

Support groups claim an increasingly aggressive and macho political environment is contributing to the inaction of the police over attacks on lesbians and is part of a growing cultural lethargy towards the high levels of gender-based violence in South Africa.

"When asking why lesbian women are being targeted you have to look at why all women are being raped and murdered in such high numbers in South Africa," said Carrie Shelver, of women's rights group Powa, a South African NGO. "So you have to look at the increasingly macho culture, which seeks to oppress women and sees them as merely sexual beings. So when there is a lesbian woman she is an absolute affront to this kind of masculinity."

A statement released by South Africa's national prosecuting authority said: "While hate crimes – especially of a sexual nature – are rife, it is not something that the South African government has prioritised as a specific project."

The failure of police to follow up eyewitness statements and continue their investigation into another brutal double rape and murder of lesbian couple Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massooa in July 2007 has led to the formation of the 07-07-07 campaign, a coalition of human rights and equality groups calling for justice for women targeted in these attacks.

Sigasa and Massooa were tortured, gang raped and shot near their homes in Meadowland, Soweto in July 2007, shortly after being verbally abused outside a bar.

Human rights and equality campaigners are hoping that the public outrage and disgust at Simelane's death and the July trial of the three men accused of her rape and murder will help put an end to the spiralling violence increasingly faced by lesbians across South Africa.

Despite more than 30 reported murders of lesbians in the last decade, Simelane's trial has produced the first conviction, when one man who pleaded guilty to her rape and murder was jailed last month.

On sentencing, the judge said that Simelane's sexual orientation had "no significance" in her killing. The trial of a further three men pleading not guilty to rape, burglary and murder will start in July.

In Soweto and Kwa Thema, women seem unconvinced that Simelane's case will change anything for the better.

Phumla talks of her experience of being taught a "classic lesson" by a group of men who abducted and raped her when she was returning from football training in 2003. She says that "practically every" lesbian in her community has suffered some form of violence in the past year and that it will take more than one trial to stop this happening.

"Every day you feel like its a time bomb waiting to go off," she said. "You don't have freedom of movement, you don't have space to do as you please. You are always scared and your life always feels restricted. As women and as lesbians we need to be very aware that it is a fact of life that we are always in danger."

__________________________

Remembering

Zoliswa Nkonyana,

South African lesbian

who was murdered

on 4th of Feb 2006.

 Zoliswa Nkonyana, was murdered on the 4th February 2006 by a mob of 20 men.  5 years later her case has been postponed 25 times and still has not been resolved.   

So many lesbians have been raped and murdered but their stories barely become news worthy.   It’s ironic that in South Africa where LGBTI people have constitutional protection therefore can be regarded as being in a different space from for example Uganda. But the still the violence against Black lesbians and trans women continues to happen and to go unreported.   

Zoliswa will be remembered today in Khayelitsha, Cape Town by her family, friends and colleagues. 

 

WOMEN: South Africa ignores 'corrective' attacks > guardian.co.uk + Remembering Zoliswa Nkonyana > Black Looks

Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores 'corrective' attacks

• Women living in fear of brutal assaults by male gangs
• Country's 'macho politics' lead to lack of action

Interviews with South African victims of 'corrective rape' Link to this video

The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs. As well as being one of South Africa's best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in Kwa Thema.

Her brutal murder took place last April, and since then a tide of violence against lesbians in South Africa has continued to rise. Human rights campaigners say it is characterised by what they call "corrective rape" committed by men behind the guise of trying to "cure" lesbians of their sexual orientation.

Now, a report by the international NGO ActionAid, backed by the South African Human Rights Commission, condemns the culture of impunity around these crimes, which it says are going unrecognised by the state and unpunished by the legal system.

The report calls for South Africa's criminal justice system to recognise hate crimes, including corrective rape, as a separate crime category. It argues this will force police to take action over the rising violence and ensure the resources and support is provided to those trying to bring perpetrators to justice.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane's murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter's safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I'm scared of these people that they are going to come and kill me too because I don't know what happened," she said. "Why did they do this horrible thing? Because of who she was? She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

The Guardian talked to lesbians in townships in Johannesburg and Cape Town who said they were being deliberately targeted for rape and that the threat of violence had become an everyday ordeal.

"Every day I am told that they are going to kill me, that they are going to rape me and after they rape me I'll become a girl," said Zakhe Sowello from Soweto, Johannesburg. "When you are raped you have a lot of evidence on your body. But when we try and report these crimes nothing happens, and then you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street."

Research released last year by Triangle, a leading South African gay rights organisation, revealed that a staggering 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape said they lived in fear of sexual assault. The group says it is dealing with up to 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week.

"What we're seeing is a spike in the numbers of women coming to us having been raped and who have been told throughout the attack that being a lesbian was to blame for what was happening to them," said Vanessa Ludwig, the chief executive at Triangle.

Support groups claim an increasingly aggressive and macho political environment is contributing to the inaction of the police over attacks on lesbians and is part of a growing cultural lethargy towards the high levels of gender-based violence in South Africa.

"When asking why lesbian women are being targeted you have to look at why all women are being raped and murdered in such high numbers in South Africa," said Carrie Shelver, of women's rights group Powa, a South African NGO. "So you have to look at the increasingly macho culture, which seeks to oppress women and sees them as merely sexual beings. So when there is a lesbian woman she is an absolute affront to this kind of masculinity."

A statement released by South Africa's national prosecuting authority said: "While hate crimes – especially of a sexual nature – are rife, it is not something that the South African government has prioritised as a specific project."

The failure of police to follow up eyewitness statements and continue their investigation into another brutal double rape and murder of lesbian couple Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massooa in July 2007 has led to the formation of the 07-07-07 campaign, a coalition of human rights and equality groups calling for justice for women targeted in these attacks.

Sigasa and Massooa were tortured, gang raped and shot near their homes in Meadowland, Soweto in July 2007, shortly after being verbally abused outside a bar.

Human rights and equality campaigners are hoping that the public outrage and disgust at Simelane's death and the July trial of the three men accused of her rape and murder will help put an end to the spiralling violence increasingly faced by lesbians across South Africa.

Despite more than 30 reported murders of lesbians in the last decade, Simelane's trial has produced the first conviction, when one man who pleaded guilty to her rape and murder was jailed last month.

On sentencing, the judge said that Simelane's sexual orientation had "no significance" in her killing. The trial of a further three men pleading not guilty to rape, burglary and murder will start in July.

In Soweto and Kwa Thema, women seem unconvinced that Simelane's case will change anything for the better.

Phumla talks of her experience of being taught a "classic lesson" by a group of men who abducted and raped her when she was returning from football training in 2003. She says that "practically every" lesbian in her community has suffered some form of violence in the past year and that it will take more than one trial to stop this happening.

"Every day you feel like its a time bomb waiting to go off," she said. "You don't have freedom of movement, you don't have space to do as you please. You are always scared and your life always feels restricted. As women and as lesbians we need to be very aware that it is a fact of life that we are always in danger."

VIDEO: Simone, Lizz Wright, & Dianne Reeves - Four Women (NSJ '09)

FOUR WOMEN

Uploaded by  on Aug 9, 2009

 

Simone (1st & 3rd woman), Lizz Wright (2nd woman), & Dianne Reeves (4th woman) - Four Women (NSJ '09)


Lyrics:

My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is wooly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
That's been inflicted again and again
What do they call me
My name is Aunt Sarah

My skin is yellow
My hair is long
Between two worlds
I do belong
My father was rich and white
He forced my mother late one night
What do they call me
My name is Saffronia (2x)

My skin is tanned
My hair's alright, its fine
My hips invite you
And my lips are like wine
Whose little girl am i?
Well yours if you have some money to buy
What do they call me
My name is Sweet Thing

My skin is brown
And my manner is tough
I'll kill the first mother I see
Cos' my life has been too rough
I'm awfully bitter these days
Because my parents were slaves
What do they call me
My
Name
Is
Peaches

 

PUB: Artist in Residency Programme > Africa Centre

Artist in Residency Programme (AIR)

Connecting Africa’s artists to residencies around the world.

 

The Africa Centre, together with artist in residency programmes in Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Finland, Netherlands, Turkey and the United States of America have partnered to launch a new Artist in Residency Programme (AIR).  The programme has been conceived to support artists from Africa who are provocative, innovative, relevant and highly engaged with both social issues and their art forms. 

AIR manifests through existing artist-in-residency partnerships around the world that are prepared to select an artist from a short list provided by the Africa Centre, created from a Continental search, for one of their 2011 or 2012 residencies. The costs of the residency and roundtrip airfare are included in each residency award made as part of this programme.

Each of the eight residencies on offer have different durations, structures and requirements. We are taking applications between 1 April and 1 June 2011.  To apply or to find out more about the eight residency programmes, please Click here. If you have any queries please email robinj@africacentre.net

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Artist in Residency Application Methods

  1. Online Application Form: Click here to apply online
  2. E-mail Application: If you would rather use e-mail, download the application formand then send your application directly to our project manager Robin atrobinj@africacentre.net. Please do not send attachments larger than 5MB. Please be sure to add your full name and contact details in the email message field.

    If your attachment is larger than 5MB, you can upload it using www.yousendit.com. This is a free service that will allow you to upload your file directly to us. To upload a file, fill in the fields under the green text, "Send a File". Please be sure to add your full name and contact details in the YouSendIt message field. The email address for delivery is: robinj@africacentre.net
  3. Submitting via Post: If you cannot use any of the above methods, you are always welcome to post your application directly to us. Click here to download the application form. Be sure to include an e-mail address and phone number where we can contact you.

    Postal Address:
    THE PROJECT MANAGER:ARTIST IN RESIDENCY PROGRAMME 
    C/O THE AFRICA CENTRE, 1ST FLOOR, 44 LONG STREET
    CAPE TOWN, 8000, SOUTH AFRICA

    AIR APPLICATION DEADLINE:  1 June 2011

Shortlist and Award Process

The Africa Centre will select three candidates for each of the 8 residency awards on offer from the applications received. These shortlisted candidates will be forwarded to our various Residency Partners; it is from these lists that they will select the 7 artists to be granted the Artist in Residency Awards. 
  
The Africa Centre will announce the recipients of the Artist in Residency programme on the 1 July 2011. If you have any questions, please direct them to Robin Jutzen at the email address above or on +27 21 422 0468.

 

Participating Residency Programmes

Bundanon Trust

The Bundanon property is located on 1,100 hectares of pristine bush land overlooking the Shoalhaven River, near Nowra in New South Wales, two and a half hours south of Sydney. Bundanon Trust supports arts practice and understanding of the arts through its residency, education, exhibition and performance programs.  In preserving the natural and cultural heritage of its site Bundanon promotes the value of landscape in all our lives. 

The Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence program is open to professional artists and groups, from all disciplines. The program supports artists’ new work, research and collaborations.

For more information go to www.bundanon.com.au

 
Instituto Sacatar

The INSTITUTO SACATAR operates a residency program for creative individuals in all disciplines at its estate on the Island of Itaparica in the Bay of All Saints, across from the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

The purpose of the Instituto Sacatar is to:
  • Provide artists a place to live and create;
  • Generate opportunities for artists to interact and collaborate with the local and regional community;
  • Enhance the visibility and cultural impact of the host city and nation; and  
  • Encourage art that returns us to where art began — to a wordless silence before all of creation.

The culture of Bahia, Brazil (its dance, music, religion and food) is strongly influenced by the cultures brought to Brazil from Africa by the slaves who worked the sugar cane plantations from the 17th through the 19th centuries. We encourage artists to engage in the powerful local culture in whatever way suits the artist's interests and working methods.  We assist artists in making appropriate contacts, locating collaborators and/or students for workshops.

For more information go to www.sacatar.org

 
Zoma Contemporary Art Centre

ZCAC (Zoma Contemporary Art Center) is an eco-sensitive and educational artist-in-residence village. Named after Zoma Shifferaw, a young Ethiopian contemporary artist who died of cancer in 1979, ZCAC is located in two major cities in Ethiopia. ZCAC Addis is in a house made by Elias Sime in Addis Ababa, and ZCAC Harla is in Harla, a small historic village east of Dire Dawa. ZCAC is run like a family where the surrounding community is an extension of the center.

ZCAC residence programs includes an Architectural Residency, a Landscape Residency, a Village Art Residency and a Documentation Residency. At the end of each residency, the artists' work will be exhibited in two different venues, one in Dire Dawa and the other in Addis Abeba. The exhibition can include photographs, sketches, video installations, actual art pieces made in ZCAC or anything else the artist wishes to show.

For more information go to www.zcac.net | Download the PDF containing the residency information.

 
Instituto Sacatar

KulttuuriKauppila is the manifestation of the dreams of three artists.  It offers artists’ studios, an international Artist-in-Residence programme, exhibitions, art education programmes, children's cultural activities and community art. KulttuuriKauppila also organizes the ART Ii Biennale of Northern Environmental and Sculpture Art.  Located in Finland, on the Iijoki riverbank in a town of Ii with 9000 inhabitants, close to the Arctic Circle, it offers its guest artists a tailored residency program with a private studio and living premises.

The residency is offered for 2 months during May-June 2012 during the Midsummer, when the sun does not set. The residency program includes participating in the ART Ii Biennale of Northern Environmental and Sculpture Art. Assistants, equipment, material, machines and compensation for the work are offered.

For more information go to www.kulttuurikauppila.fi/sivu/fi/en/

 
Caravansarai

Caravansarai is an independent art production space and meeting point for creators in Istanbul, Turkey. Just as the historical caravansarais hosted camel caravans along the Silk Road, we invite creative people - with or without camels - from around the globe for collaboration, experimentation, research and exchange. Our building is home to workshops, investigation, public and private events, collaborations and an artist-in-residence program. As experienced producers of cultural and artistic projects, we are able to present a myriad of services; project and event management, art production and artist management. 

For more information go to www.caravansarai.info

 
Thamgidi

Thamgidi is a private foundation that gives grants for artists in residency exchange and collects contemporary art from Africa. It was initiated in 2003 as an educational program and was registered as a non for profit organization in 2006. The office is situated in the eastern region of the Netherlands. The focus is on promoting diverse and mutual artists exchange in order to create a continuous flow of new influences and at the same time contribute to fruitful exchange based on sharing of knowledge and exchanging of ideas. The selected artists can be in residence for a period of one to three months, depending on the proposed project. The artist in residency is a time out period that artists can use the space to reflect and focus on their creative process. During the residency guest artists' work individually or in an artist community depending on the proposed project and duration of residency. Depending on the length and purpose of stay, the residency can end with an exhibition, or debate.

The Thamdigi Foundation Residency provides a fully furnished apartment in Arnhem, guest studio, bicycle, health insurance, cash for some material costs, and exhibition (optional)/guest artist presentation or debate. The duration of the residency is for one month and will take in 2012.

For more information visit http://thamgidi.org/ |http://www.resartis.org/en/residencies/list_of_residencies/?id_content=4963

 
18th Street

18th Street is a community, which values art and creativity as an essential component of a vibrant, just and healthy society. Its mission is to provoke public dialogue through contemporary art making.

In its curatorial decision-making process, 18th Street seeks artists who demonstrate social consciousness and spiritual awareness in a well-developed art making practice.  They emphasize artists who are emerging to mid-career in their development, and who manifest a wide spectrum of approaches to contemporary ideas. They seek to select artists who represent culturally diverse populations.

Now in its 15th year, the  program has hosted over 200 residencies in partnership with the countries of Australia, Cameroon, China, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Serbia, South Korea, Sudan, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom and South Africa.

The 18th Street Artist in Residency program is based in Los Angeles, USA and provides living and studio space to artists; access to office and audio/visual equipment, and meeting space, event posting service to the internet, full representation on the website, and fiscal receiver services. The residency will be held in 2012.

For more information visit, www.18thstreet.org

 
THe WITS School of Arts

The Substation Residency: Dislocating the Studio is a pilot project set up by the Witwatersrand University Division of Fine Arts in Johannesburg, South Africa, that is structured as a challenge to the space of the studio.

The artist’s studio or Atelier in its modernist incarnation is a pseudo sacred place where rarefied art objects are produced. Implicit in this configuration is a hierarchical, elitist and commodity driven view of the fine arts. Objects within the studio are open to manipulation, they are transitory and in process of becoming. Once the object leaves the studio however, it becomes fixed as Artwork. This standard operation of the studio and artwork is one that has increasingly been challenged and rearranged as artistic practice becomes less tied to object production and more orientated to processes of temporality and relational encounters. The studio is not simply an atelier but can look more like a library, a playground, a meeting point, a laboratory or even a research facility.

This pilot residency project aims to push against ideas of the studio. Artists, theorists, curators, filmmakers, activists or performers are invited to rethink, to re-imagine the studio in a real time engagement with the Substation Project Space and the audiences that visit it.

The Substation Residency opportunity on offer will run for a month between the 1 August 2010 to the 7 November 2010. The exact dates will be formalised with the artist chosen to participate in the residency. 
The following items will be provided to the artist participating in the residency: Accommodation; an artist fee; and a per diem. Budget for the production of the work will be drawn up in discussion with the art practitioner.

Photographs of the Substation Residency Studio Space: