Protest in Montreal against the rise of tuition fees in Quebec and the new law 78.
Every evening at 8pm people meet in the street with their pots and pans and make all the noise they can.
The song (INTUITION #1 – Avec pas d’casque / avecpasdcasque.bandcamp.com/album/astronomietranslated) reads something like this:
You will say, you will say that it is instinct that guided you here, the intuition of a feeling that will never return
You will say, you will say all your senses were betting on the same side, for the same cause, moved by a strange force
And this will be your home base and this will be your home base
You will say, you will say that it is instinct that guided you here, a necessary imprudence from time to time
And this will be your home base and this will be your home base
or how I would call it: Turned by love: the ignorance and fragility of a national socialist mind.
I can´t recall whose phrase this is but it goes something like this: Ignorance can be overcome by reading and racism is overcome by traveling. I agree, it can be as simple as that.
@ Julian Röder, Nick W. Greger with his girlfriend Auntie, Gambia, December 2011
@ Julian Röder, Nick W. Greger’s dog, Nick’s girlfriend Auntie named him “Hitler”
Nick Greger has a Nazi Storm Trooper and the map of the German Empire tattooed on his forearm.
Since he was 12, he has been frequenting right-wing circles. With his buddies, Greger attacks foreigners and leftist flat shares. In the Dresden tram, he tears off a black man’s ear. Twice he sits in jail for aggravated assault.
Shortly before his third arrest, he escapes to Africa. The love for a black Namibian moves him to reconsider. He decides to exit. In 2005 he returnes to Germany and turns himself in. Today he lives with his girlfriend in Gambia, being the only white person in a large settlement in The Gambia.
@ Julie Rebouillat,No Border Calais, manif, 27 June 2009
Refugees in Calais find shelter where they can, in spaces left abandoned or neglected by French citizens. Some sleep in the park or under the canal bridges. Most live in one of two kinds of dwellings: (a) squats in deserted buildings, of which there are many in the post-industrial landscape of the town; and (b) the ‘jungles’ or camps made up of tents and makeshift shelters on disused sites and wasteland, usually around the outskirts of the town.
These settlements are not just shelters, but homes. Here people sleep; eat; sit and drink coffee around the fire; play cards; read and study; listen to and play music; dance; wash their clothes; welcome newcomers and visitors; and share food, water, tobacco, conversation, and each others’ company. But this life is under constant threat. Police raid the squats and jungles every day and night. A particular settlement may be left alone for two or three days, but never for long. Or it may be targeted with repeated visits, and attacked multiple times in one night.
These raids raise a number of questions as to their legality. Under French law, the police normally require permission from the owner and/or occupants in order to enter a property, or, failing this, a warrant from the court. CMS activists have witnessed and documented quite literally hundreds of police raids in Calais. We believe that the vast majority of these may have been carried out without authority.
Besides arresting people, when police officers raid they frequently slash or flatten tents; smash windows; throw away or contaminate water; spray bedding with CS gas; and generally destroy or take peoples’ personal belongings. This is an everyday reality. During bigger raids, council workers accompany the police to demolish buildings; confiscate tents and belongings in trucks; and/or spray disinfectant and other chemicals, on possessions, including on bedding.
In particularly nasty incidents, activists have returned to Africa House following major raids to find that bedding had been damaged and urinated on, and that walls had been daubed with what appears to be Neo-Nazi graffiti. We have also witnessed damage to Muslim prayer spaces and the desecration of holy books, including a Tigrinyan Bible, and the Koran.
Along with beatings, arrests and identity checks in the street, these raids contribute to a constant state of fear for refugees in Calais. This in itself has obvious effects on peoples’ mental health and well-being. Yet raids further undermine bodily and mental health by making it impossible to create stable and hygienic living conditions. For example, since cooking utensils as well as food supplies are regularly stolen or destroyed, it becomes near impossible for migrants to feed themselves adequately.
Finally, to add to the pressure, police employ what can only be described as tactics of psychological warfare, such as repeated nightime visits with sirens, bright torches and loud music.
Full document compiled by Calais Migrant Solidarity of the No Borders network, documenting police violence from June 2009 to June 2011 can be found here
“Indeed, Ledare’s work reveals signs that the relationship between mother and son is also one of professional complicity. In an interview printed on the book’s cover, Peterson defines herself as the ‘model’ who is ‘working her butt off’. At the same time, photo-booth strips of Ledare and his mother mugging for the camera and making out like teenagers provide glimpses of the pair as willing co-conspirators. Such insertions create a layer of artifice that unsettles the raw, confessional mode that Ledare seems to be emulating. His predecessors in the field, like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, have also confronted sexual taboos and flirted with pornography, or, as with Richard Billingham’s documentary images of his family, raised the stakes of familial intimacy and revelation. Despite their explicitness, Ledare’s photographs are neither bluntly documentary nor achingly sincere, but are knowingly mediated through the languages and tropes of contemporary art. His idiom is that of an artist who has already absorbed the romanticization of these previous projects and is looking for way to further complicate the relationship of artist and muse.
In this way, Ledare’s work might signal a shift in this kind of expressionist, confessional tradition of photography. In a culture where candid personal photographs litter the Internet and people willingly use reality TV shows to expose their personal baggage, Ledare is aware that any attempt at authenticity will already be polluted. Maybe the confessional can no longer be confronted head-on, but rather with a sidelong glance, or with a knowing look out the corner of one’s eye. But Ledare’s gazes are no less poignant or penetrating because of it.”
“The city of New Orleans is a topographical/ architectural/material/cultural phenomenon with a diverse population participating in raucously colorful and fascinating pursuits and rituals. Homicide is a cultural fact of the life in the city as well. In her second book, Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, Deborah Luster explores the city in a new way, creating a compelling portrait in the form of a photographic archive of contemporary and historic homicide sites. Following on from her first book, Prisoners of Louisiana, Tooth for an Eye explores the themes of loss and remembrance in a series of tondo photographs that offer an opportunity for the viewer to enter deeper into the idea of the city, a place where life and death coexist, neither free of the other’s infuence.”
As far as the public eye goes, this is our (Portuguese) new emerging photographer. Her images, on the realm of the documentary, have a lot of presence; they reveal intimacy and good awareness of the surroundings. Although not having a strong conductor, I’ll dare to say the thread amidst her work is the stylization of memories, absence, the loss of, the non appropriation of reality and non interference with its time.
Against all odds I can’t resist these images, though I am aware that is the process itself that draws me in.
“Ask Richard Mosse what first fascinated him about the Congo and he’ll give you a long list. “Joseph Conrad. Tin Tin. The Rumble in the Jungle. The Belgian colonial legacy. The beer. The Ebola virus. A country the size of Western Europe with less paved roads than Ireland. The ‘bulletproof’ Mai Mai warriors. A conflict so pathologised that it is well past the point of human comprehension.”
But it’s the latter reason that led the Irish-born photographer to use Kodak’s Aerochrome film. Discontinued last year, the film is particularly sensitive to infra-red light, rather than to the usual visible spectrum of colours registered by traditional film. Since foliage reflects infra-red while buildings don’t, the US Army used it during the Vietnam War to detect and reveal hidden soldiers. “I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we’re allowed to represent this forgotten conflict,” says Mosse. “I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed.”
“In HADES Devin Yalkin is not so much photographing people, but rather the way they move in space, individually and collectively. He records the culmination in blurring faces, constantly changing gestures and melting bodies. The work suggests a series of illusions, the treacherousness of outward appearances. These are apparently images from a dream of an underworld, dark and gritty.”
Are “forced labor camps” being created here, in the middle of the European Union, as the Hungarian daily newspaper Népszava wrote? Are unemployed people from remote villages being housed in worker camps on large construction sites? No one has to work against his will, but everyone who does show up for work is paid the legal minimum wage, says Karoly Papp, the state secretary in the Interior Ministry in charge of the program.
(…)
Orbán’s concept of moral renewal and economic rehabilitation for Hungary has several tenets: Those without work are to be given work; those who are already working should work more in the future, but without being paid more; in the interest of the country’s “stability,” those who hold political power today should be allowed to remain in office for as long as possible; and those who once had power and did not use it for the benefit of the people should now be punished.
(…)
Where is the country headed under this government? “I don’t believe that Hungary is on the path to a dictatorship, although this is perhaps what Orbán would like,” says the professor. “But our people tend to be somewhat relaxed, and our greatest contribution to European culture was probably the operetta. What is now taking shape here is an operetta dictatorship.”
(…)
It isn’t necessary to smell fascism behind every bush, says Heller [Agnes Heller]. “The worst thing is that the checks and balances are being eliminated in this country, and that the rule of the yes-men has begun.” In fact, she adds, now dissidents are even being treated as criminals.
The Hungarian authorities are investigating Heller and some of her philosopher friends, known as the “Heller gang,” for alleged embezzlement of research funds. But Heller, sitting in her apartment high above Guttenberg Square, laughs off the accusation.
What is most troubling to Heller, who survived both the horrific regime of the Hungarian version of the Nazi Party and the communists, is the disquieting feeling that the clique now running Hungary does so without “responsibility” — and without a sense of the “danger that violence could erupt.” “Orbán is extremely sure of himself,” says Heller. “It’s a typical characteristic of dictators.”
Full article “The Goulash Archipelago: EU Remains Silent as Hungary Veers Off Course” can be found in Spiegel
“Ivan is the elder, he is 16. Andrey, nicknamed Moon, is the younger, 14 by now. The two brothers live in a distant village in the northern part of Russia. They are not like regular teenagers, and live in a fairy tale world, yet deeply connected to nature: they go hunting and fishing, can use a joiner’s chisel, play with ghosts at abandoned places, do not want to move to a city, and love nature. Mature and childish. Naive and enigmatic. In this ongoing project I want to show the mysteriousness of the world of these brothers.
The narrative in ‘Ivan and the Moon’ is neither chronological nor event related. It does not have a strict and one-way-to-read plot. All the images are connected to each other on the level of correlated motives and on the level of hypothetical story interpretations. Each picture is supposed to provoke some inquiry about ‘What is going on?’
Moreover, the two brothers are reflections of each other. Many people might even think that they are twins. The main corpus of works contains their individual portraits, so that it is no longer clear who is who. It was also important to show that the world around the boys is itself magical and their games and fantasies are consequences of being a part of this world.
My aim is to follow the brothers through their life (I met them at a folklore expedition) and ‘document’ things that are impossible to document: the world of a boy’s fantasies, ghosts, gods, spirits of specific places, magic itself. Such things usually can not be literally depicted. As J. Szarkowski stated in his famous work ‘Mirrors and Windows’: ‘most issues of importance cannot be photographed’. My goal is to try to photograph the ‘unphotographable’ side of the matter and challenge some formal criteria of ‘classical’ documentary.”
The Cariou family Live an autonomous life in Provence. Faced with the huge cost of property in their area they were fortunate to buy a small olive grove in which they have designed and built their home. Their goal is to move as far as possible from the use of non-renewable fuel. They get enough electricity from a 140-watt solar panel to provide them with light and music throughout the year. A pump draws water from the river to a tank. In winter they use solar energy to heat the water, as the river is too cold and the current too strong for bathing.
“The state puts everything into ones hands but one must always work to sustain that materialistic way of life. Money serves to make the system function and people become slaves to it.”
They want to have as little to do with this system as possible. Yanick sustains the family with his earnings from olive, apricot and lavender farming. They do not have neighbours.
“It is our choice to live unseen. It is not easy to live in a different way with others watching. No neighbours, no worries. Maybe one day we will have problems but we will find ways. To take the decision to live in this way is a form of combat against modern materialistic life. And we will fight for that decision.”
“The economic crisis in Greece has sparked riots and violent reactions. Massive protests broke out against severe government spending cuts aimed at saving the country from economic collapse. Thousands of people march through central Athens protesting government plans to impose new spending cuts to save the country from bankruptcy. The protesters chanted in the streets as squads of riot police with stun grenades, tear gas and arrests attempt to enforce discipline.”
As modern society has been burdened with social, political and environmental challenges, people have become disenchanted with our current way of living. Consequently, a movement of radical communities breaking step with the status quo has come about. The primary aims of these groups are; to be sustainable, resilient and follow a way of life that has a minimal impact on the environment.”
The community of Grow Heathrow follows these principles with a desire to live in a way that is sensitive towards nature and each other. The project was founded as a direct action protest against the threat of a third runway being built at Heathrow Airport. Had BAA succeeded in their bid, Sipson and other surrounding villages would have been completely demolished. This would have destroyed homes, schools, churches and cemeteries, devastating the local community.
Since taking the land on 1st March 2010, activists and local residents have set about reviving the blighted community. At the same time they have returned the site to its historic function as a communal market garden. This act of reclaiming what was once common land has allowed a new relationship to flourish between the people and their surrounding natural environment.
Excerpt from Jessica’s text about “Grow Heathrow” here
Echoing statements by Roland Barthes, Shahbazi commented recently, “Photography is a simple, stupid medium.”2 In fact, photography is dumbfounding; it communicates in a purely visual language. Yet, without a frame to contextualize these visions, photography fails to speak.
Most recently for Shahbazi, that context has been the normalized cultural forms of photography, those genre images of landscape, portrait, and still life whose history lies less with photography than with painting. Yet her photographs draw our attention to the limits of those genres. With the still lifes, Shahbazi takes her cue from seventeenth-century Dutch painting, capturing natural curiosities: orchids, minerals, fruits, vegetables, and so on. Unlike her Dutch predecessors, however, she presents these vignettes floating on a monochromatic background, excised from their origins as Protestant images of exoticism. The portraits and landscapes are haunted by similar displacements. In Shahbazi’s hands, portraits of certain individuals are repeated throughout a larger sequence. Each portrait is taken from a slightly different angle. Across these movements, the viewer becomes uncertain if the artist or the sitter has changed position; identities become confused, and the photographic portrait’s sense for capturing individuality is exiled across a series of photographic events. The landscapes from Meanwhile, in contrast, are less subjective than placeless. To borrow a term used by German photographer Michael Schmidt to describe the places that he has photographed, the landscapes in Shahbazi’s photographs are irgendwo (somewhere), thus lacking particularity.3 While we cannot deny the indexical nature of her landscape photographs, we are also struck by how their sense of place escapes specificity. Despite engaging a history of representational imagery that spans many media, Shahbazi, in her use of these genre images, displaces painting’s subjectivity and historicity for photography’s immediacy.
excerpt from Chris Balaschak’s text. Full version at hammer.ucla.edu
“This series is a metaphor for the relationship between Man and the animals he hunts or frequents every day. The former predators, companions and meat supply are transformed, not into trophies but objects of estime and amazement. The former wild animals go from their natural habitats to homes and cafés, while pets keep themselves in their owners’ houses, in shop windows, on shelves and televisions…”
More of Valter’s work here This series in particular here
“Time is in fact the secret protagonist in these photographs. Every picture shows its effects and relativity: It eats away at aged houses soon to be replaced by modern construction sites already looming in the background; it presents its manifestations in TV-sets and refrigerators alongside traditional furniture and cooking accessories; it is even directly captured in the clocks that Huang likes to place prominently in his staged arrangements. The images demonstrate that progress takes as much as it gives. To Huang’s mind, the positive effects should not be overlooked. He points out that life has become safer and easier in the last 30 years. The expressions of the families portrayed are indeed mostly content, they are proud of what they have gained, little as it may seem from a Western point of view. But troubled smiles can be noted too, as in the faces of the family in the resettlement programme in Beijing, waiting to be moved to their new home so their old one can be demolished.”
“Living in a Western society where virtually all taboos have fallen. Everything has been done, seen, admired, abhorred, nothing remains that can shock.
But are we really that free?
“I’ll be your mirror” became a social depiction of a taboo conflict that is considered as nonexistent in the artistic community. It reflects on how characters in my life experience their own bodies. Every person is linked to a cultural history, and his or her body is scarred by that. Their story carrying bodies voice the answer to my ever returning question:
Will you pose nude for me on photograph?
Come, please undress …
Let me see you,
Through your eyes.”
Edgar Peixoto [49 years old] – HOUSEHOLD SERVANT | Sluha
My dream is to see my children graduated. I started to work when I was 8 years old. Lily Marinho [86 years old]
Total protection for children and the elderly. The discovery of medicines to cure illnesses that kill thousands of people, and the disappearance of hunger which causes so much grievousness to humanity. I don‘t consider what I do as tiring work. On the contrary, it gives me the pleasure of being with people who show solidarity with the work of helping forsaken infants and with cultural activities
“The portraits of Brazilian domestic servants confront both, master and servant, two environments and two characters, the world of reality and dreams. In many of the photographs it’s as if a dividing line has emerged, separating the two very different lives. A sensitive and deep portrayal of the relations with respect to those being photographed emerged, even though Balco’s sense of humor, exaggeration, and even sarcasm are on display. The portraits impress with their dignity and are at the same time monumental. The selected photographs are connected to stories, acquainting us with two different worlds: the luxury of the middle class and the common Latin-American standard, many times interwoven with compositions from life on the street. The detailed severely posed en face portraits are compiled into triptychs where selected “work“ surroundings supplement the confrontation of the master and the servant.” Lucia Benická, June 2008
A pdf with the complete project can be found here
And Andrej’s website here
