Tag: activism

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Dancing with the Zapatistas

Dancing with the Zapatistas

Dancing with the Zapatistas is a collection of scholarly and artistic responses to the continuing work and lives of the Zapatistas twenty years after their emergence from the Lacondon Jungle.  The digital book illustrates the many ways the Zapatistas have inspired other movements and artistic responses. Written by scholars, artists, journalists, activists and graduate students, each response is informed and enriched by the others yet also comprehensible in its own right.

Besides co-editing the book, I also contributed a photo-essay of the murals of Oventik. 

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Positive Visions – December 1 Day With(out) Art

DayWithoutArt_Logo_500_500Day Without Art began on December 1st 1989 as a national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis… In 1998, Visual AIDS suggested Day With(out) Art become a day WITH art, and change the name to Day With(out) Art, to recognize and promote increased programming of cultural events that draw attention to the continuing pandemic. [read more at Visual Aids]

In 1996, I launched Positive Visions, a special section of my Collected Visions web project for Day Without Art 1996 with photographs and stories by and about people living with HIV/AIDS, who have died of AIDS, or who are caretakers of people with HIV/AIDS. The Web was young but was already a site of activism. I remember contacting Creative Time who used to coordinate the online DWA activities. It was very exciting to be able to connect online with people I did not know and be part of something bigger.

poslogo2

In 1997, I collaborated with young people at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, not-for-profit agency serving gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth in New York City, to create an online gallery. Each year I would try to collect more stories, but it became increasingly hard to get the word out and there were increasing number of projects dealing with stories around the AIDS pandemic, so I stopped collecting stories for Positive Visions in 2001.

Today I search  #DayWithoutArt #WorldAidsDay

activists warn policies causing same fear from early

More history and perspective at Art 21 in conjunction with Visual Aids: 1989-What We Lost by Jim Hubbard.

 

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Woman in Blue Bra – Egypt

women-protest-bluebra

Today I was looking through images that I had posted to this blog to add to Random Interference, and I came across the image above which I posted on February 29, 2012 . It was linked to an article in Buzzfeed, and that link is now dead. So I did some searching. A google ‘search by image’ came up with “best guess for this image: blue bra girl,” which I quickly realized refers to woman in the newspaper image who is being dragged. The image was taken December 17, 2011. US feminist me resents that this image and the women becomes know as the ‘blue bar girl’. I didn’t do follow up at the time so I did not realize until today the extent of the anger that the event (and image) caused. It became a symbol of outrage against abuse of power by the military. The following screen grab from my image searching sums it up.

image search: blue bra girlLinks to more information:
Tahrir Square, December 17, 2011

Egyptian women march against military rule – War in Context (with attention to the unseen)

The ‘Girl In The Blue Bra’ – NPR

‘Blue bra girl’ rallies Egypt’s women vs. oppression – CNN

The “Blue bra girl” comes back as a masked avenger – EastWestWestEast

It’s International Women’s Day – Will the Blue Bra Girl Be Forgotten? Between the Lines

Mass March by Cairo Women in Protest Over Abuse by Soldiers

 

 

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Taksim Square Book Club

In Pictures: The Taksim Square Book Club – In Pictures – Al Jazeera English.

Standing silently, and initially alone, Turkish performance artist Erdem Gunduz stood, with his hands in his pockets, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre in Taksim Square, Istanbul, for eight hours.

With extraordinary speed, Gunduz become the latest symbol of the resistance movement. In days that followed, thousands of people would emulate his solitary act, standing silently, for minutes or hours, in places across Turkey.

…Public reading and informal education has been notable since the earliest days of the protest, but has since merged with the Standing Man to form “The Taksim Square Book Club”. more

 

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Journalism vs Activism

great piece by David Carr

Journalism, Even When It’s Tilted – NYTimes.com.

In a refracted media world where information comes from everywhere, the line between two “isms” — journalism and activism — is becoming difficult to discern. As American news media have pulled back from international coverage, nongovernmental organizations have filled in the gaps with on-the-scene reports and Web sites. State houses have lost reporters who used to provide accountability, so citizens have turned to digital enterprises, some of which have partisan agendas. more

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Curating the Traces of Illegal Immigration

Reblogging this from Hyperallergic.

Curating the Traces of Illegal Immigration.

Curating the Traces of Illegal Immigration

In the summer of 2012, University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León and a group of his students were doing fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona when they came across the body of a 41-year-old woman. Her name was Marisol, and she was dead. She had been for four days. more

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De León started the Undocumented Migration Project four years ago as a way of studying illegal immigration from an anthropological and an ethnographic perspective

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1-1-13

I love that Yoko continues to gives us this gift in the New York Times. It also rewards those of us who still read the paper version since it does not appear on nytimes.com. In the past, she has offered  downloads on the imagine peace website.

Another view out the window with a nod of course to Robert Heinecken: