show &

intersections of creative + radical

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Every so often I dream of my brother's face on fire, his brown eyes--eyes very much like my own--staring at me through a terrible mask of flames. I wake to the scent of burning flesh, his fiery face looming before me as an afterimage, and in that darkness I am eleven again. I have not yet learned to trespass. I have not yet learned to grieve. Nor have I learned to pity us--my brother, my mother, and me...

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, “At the Cafe Lovely”, Sightseeing, 2005.

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Wichu wears the outfit she bought specifically for the occasion: a neatly pressed white button-down; crisp, black polyester slacks; a new pair of brown Bata loafers, buffed bright with Kiwi shoe polish. She's even borrowed a gold watch from a friend who hawks them to farangs on Soi Cowboy; it hangs loosely from Wichu's wrist like a bangle, glinting in the weak morning light. She believes that the less Wichu looks like a day-laborer's son--something he'd in fact been until the day-laborer died before Wichu could commit him to memory--the less the draft board will be inclined to put a red ticket in his hand when he reaches the lottery run. A red ticket means losing her youngest son to two years of duty, just as she lost her eldest, Khamron, who'd been drafted though he drank a whole bottle of fish sauce, who arrived at the lottery violently ill, and who came home eighteen months later from the Burmese border with a vacant look in his eyes, a letter of commendation and honorable discharge, and a flower of shrapnel buried in his right leg slowly poisoning his bloodstream.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, "Draft Day", Sightseeing, 2005.

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Friends! Reject the suffocating solitude of the social and sexual networks. Challenge the media platforms' efforts to channel our passions. Resist oppression through classification. Reject the tyranny of the electronic devices that bring us together only to satisfy carnal desires. Don't message, massage. Don't like, love. Recover the almost forgotten memories of our human intimacy. Bring back the old toys. Let's play!

Retrofetishist Manifesto. Baron Magazine No. 3. Contributing editor Michael Alig.

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An anti-gentrification campaign mobilizing, uniting, and celebrating residents of color in Brooklyn, from an amazing community organizer and social worker Imani Henry: 

BEFORE IT'S GONE // TAKE IT BACK is a web-based response to the crisis of gentrification of Brooklyn, NY.

We define ‘gentrification’ as the deliberate pricing out of low-to-middle income residents from neighborhoods by corporations, real estate developers, and landlords in favor of renting, selling, and catering to people of higher or more flexible incomes.  At the same time, we know from first-hand experience that the same unscrupulous property owners who use tactics to force long-time older tenants of color out of their rent-stabilized apartments will turn around and illegally overcharge incoming younger white tenants for the same apartment. For this very reason, we believe that ALL of us- long-time and new residents, communities of color and white communities, low-income and middle-class people - have a stake in the urgent struggle to save affordable housing in Brooklyn.

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“This conference is a form of globalization The conference itself could not take place If globalization did not exist Globalization is the interaction of people of action I am co-founder with Ama Ata Aidoo of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. Ama Ata is from Ghana, she speaks Twi or Fante But because of globalization or colonialism She speaks English And because of the Transatlantic slave trade in the form of globalization I speak English We have writers here from Senegal who speak and write mostly in French There are writers from Mozambique and Angola that write and publish mostly in Portuguese.”

Jayne Cortez, Globalization, Yari Yari Ntoaso, 2013 (via chimurengalibrary)

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Al Fatah Palestine Poster show at the 1st Pan African festival in Algiers, Guy Le Querrec, 1969.

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“My arrival in Algeria was met with great emotion, in large part because our political consciousness… was cultivated as a result of our knowledge of the Algerian war for independence. And so, for us, it was the country that had obtained genuine independence, more so than most African countries, and to arrive there, it was like going to a Rome or a Mecca…”

Henri Lopes, Liberation At The End Of A Pen, 2009 (via chimurengalibrary)

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Kara Walker: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby 

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"It is cold inside the Domino factory, and dark, and it smells sweet and old. It feels a certain type of way, full of ghosts, maybe. The use of sugar in art might be novel and evoke a history too often ignored, but I heard some of my favorite writers whispering in my ear the entire time I was in the factory. Diaz and Dandicat; Glissant and Chamoiseau: they lived in and reckoned with the history of our sweet tooth, with lives and deaths on islands and in fields. Sugar has been and is still violent, it has been and is still colonial, and the building literally bleeds sugar from its walls. The Domino factory connected slavery in the Caribbean to industrial work in the north to domestic work across the world. The factory was a site of labor, life and death, and of struggle for workers’ rights. And all that (colonialism excepted) is going away and the walls of the condos will certainly not bleed molasses or anything else."

http://thefeministwire.com/2014/05/kara-walker-sweet-taste-gentrification/

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From OpenSpace: Your Day is My Night

The project began when Lynne Sachs, curious about the Chinatown shift bed, entered the bustling, open sociality of a Chinese cultural center and asked the people there for stories. She filmed them cooking together, eating together, passing time, and retelling the stories in a small apartment which approximates the spaces where many live. Everything here is aesthetically interesting: the music, the color, the camera variation, the mishmash of things, the pacing, the intimacy between the economically constituted family of the small apartment. She shot in mirrors often to increase light and space among the warren of bunk beds.

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The NannyVan is in SF today at the International Womens Day Festival! 

When: Friday, March 7th, 12 - 2pm & Saturday, March 8th, 12-3pm

Where: Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

The NannyVan is a creative awareness and organizing campaign for domestic workers that's been on a tour of the US. It came out of a collaboration between social-change design org Rev- and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Rev- is the org behind the El Bibliobandido youth literacy program in Honduras that I've posted about previously. 

More info: 

http://theintersection.org/2014/01/nanny-van/ 

http://vimeo.com/74250301 

Rev- has been working with domestic-worker orgs to design resources and organizing support for domestic workers who are often vulnerable, informal-sector, and largely women of color and immigrants. One of Rev-'s earlier designs was a talk-show-style nanny hotline, New Day Standard, that nannies could call into to hear information about their rights in a humorous and entertaining format. Hear a sample here. 

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A Tiger by the Tail

Open City Fellow Thomas Mariadason kicked off the first in a series on stop and frisk, a police-harassment practice that targets people of color and immigrants, focusing on Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City:  

In 2012, over half a million stop and frisks took place citywide. Half of these involved persons of color—”young men like Nilesh, who are constantly on the lookout for patrolling officers.

we're launching our three-part series on policing in Jackson Heights. Each article examines the relationship between residents and the police in this culturally diverse  Queens neighborhood--one in which the NYPD logs high rates of stop and frisk, even as street crime remains relatively low

Published by Asian American Writer's Workshop's great Open City newsmagazine that features local voices of color documenting experiences, histories, and political issues within their communities. 

For more information on stop and frisk—and the amazing coalition organizing campaign that is fighting it—check out Communities United for Police Reform's issue page. 

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Inhwan Oh, a Seoul-based artist, professor, and an old friend from our Iban-QKNY community-building days in NYC, now has a website showing his far-ranging body of contemporary art work.

In a 2010 trip in Japan with Dave and Mike, we stopped by Nagoya for an hour and sprinted to the Aichi Trienniale, so I could finally see "Where He Meets Him" after hearing about it for so long. I wished I could visit it again and again to see the progression of the piece and slow combustion of text incense. Great. 

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It's just stuff—until you don't have it.

Interactive awareness + fundraiser microsite to raise funds for everyday "unsexy" but necessary items for homeless services provided by UMD in North Carolina. Slick design, great writing, and a smart twist on general-operating/unrestricted fundraising. 

Urban Ministries of Durham is selling the naming rights to all of the items that connect our clients to food, shelter and a future.

Designed by ad firm McKinney, the same folks that collaborated with UMD to produce the interactive online game that raises awareness about homelessness and unemployment: Play Spent. 

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Yes.

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Finally, an Accurate Look Back at AIDS Activism in ‘Why We Fight’

It’s no easy task, but ‘Why We Fight,’ now at the New York Public Library, perfectly recalls the fevered early years of activism—a signal flare fired from the library’s own archives.

In recent years, there has been a rush to remember AIDS, to capture its specifics on film and in galleries, to memorialize those we lost and honor those who survived. Given the ongoing nature of the AIDS crisis, this is no easy task. We live in a culture where the past is seen as a dead thing, a set of names and dates to be memorized—and then forgotten.

So no wonder AIDS activists are wary of our present memorializing impulse, when more than 35 million people around the world now live with AIDS.

At best, the study of history is a close examination of the forces that created a particular moment in time, which helps us better understand the workings of the world. At worst, it is a petting zoo, putting on display sanitized versions of real life that conform to our preexisting biases and beliefs. Instead of a window, we use history as a mirror, and like toddlers, we clap joyfully at our own reflections, naively believing we have engaged with something real.