Resist

spaza-de-move-on

dala
Durban, South Africa
ongoing project: spaza-de-move-on
In the early 60s ‘café-de-move-ons’ could be seen wherever there were substantial numbers of African workers or passers by in need of refreshment. Vendors were frequently arrested in police raids and fined or imprisoned.
Since apartheid, South Africa witnessed the phenomenon of urbanization. Thousands of workers move daily from the township’s into the cities for their livelihood. This has given rise to the re-birth of the trade in refreshments, loose cigarettes, sweets and chips along pedestrian routes. Similarly these vendors too face victimisation by the powers that be.
The spaza-de-move-on is a design response to the need for an efficient, easily transportable solution for these vendors. Its evolution, involved bottom-up collaboration with Moses Gwiba – a street vendor – who Doung has formed a relationship over a number of years of walking in the city of Durban. His hail “when you make something for me?” sparked the inspiration for this South African solution.
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dala is an interdisciplinary creative collective that believes in the transformative role of creativity in building safer and more liveable cities. dala emerged as a response to the growing need for a sustainable space for creative practitioners actively engaging in the production of art / architecture for social change in eThekwini. dala believes that sustainable change can only happen through democratic participation and collaboration. dala therefore facilitates creative initiatives between creative practitioners from a variety of backgrounds (artists, architects, researchers, performers, urban planners, designers), the municipality and most importantly the people and organisations that live and work within and around the city. dala’s initiatives all revolve around re-imagining the use and expression in and of public space.
Founders, Doung Jahangeer, Rike Sitas and Nontobeko Ntombela have been working on similar initiatives individually and collectively for close to ten years. The strength of dala lies in the interdisciplinary skills the founders bring to the organisation – Doung (architect), Rike (social scientist), Nonto (curator). All three are practicing artists and educators who have been involved in a number of local and international projects and exhibitions.
[Text and graphic from dala website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

From: Provisions Library
by jonwinet on 19/12/09 | Read More

stitching a new economics

Those of you who’ve been following this site for a while will know that one of the biggest issues that concerns me is the stifling effects of land speculation on our communities and our creativity.  While many of us crafty types would love to make stuff full time, it’s just not possible when we need to work so many hours a week to pay the rent/mortgage.  It’s bloody frustrating that our economic system rewards those that just buy and sell for a living yet punishes those of us who actually create.
One of big current issues in the craft world has been the ripping off of the ideas and designs of independent crafters/illustrators etc.  It seems like a weekly occurrence that some big company has found the work of a designer online and stolen it for their own products.  And who has the legal budget to fight that kind of crap?
Whilst this might seem like a new phenomenon, the practise of capitalising off the creative talents of artistic communities has been around for a long time.  And the most damaging application of this practise occurs in the land markets.  While we’re out busting our bums creating vibrant awesome and sustainable communities, behind the scenes is a secret, shady bunch of land sharks circling.
It’s called gentrification – and there’s a really good explanation of how it works on the I Want To Live Here film comp site.

From: Radical Cross Stitch
by kakariki on 19/11/09 | Read More

Command-C

Command-C. Did you hear the one about the city as software platform? A group of NYU students has taken a more oppositional approach, posting a series of simple computer commands to address gentrification, development and neighborhood preservation.

From: Social Design Notes
on 01/12/09 | Read More

Index the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation: Goldin+Senneby

April 4th - View from the terrace, my last lunch in the BahamasPhoto: John BarlowIndex the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation
November 4 - December 13, 2009

The artist duo Goldin+Senneby works collaboratively since 2004; staging actions and discussions as a mode of investigating juridical, financial and spatial constructs. In the project Headless, which began in 2007 with the investigation of the offshore company Headless Ltd located in the Bahamas, the artists make use of varying theatrical gestures to expose strategies of withdrawal used by the financial offshore industry.Read Full Article

From: e-flux shows :: rss
on 08/11/09 | Read More

Political Football

Flash Points contributor and University of Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle is currently spending 2 weeks in India, traveling with the Indian artist Riyas Komu. Following is the third in a series of dispatches from the road. — Ed.
Riyas Komu, "Stadium I," oil on canvas, 2007
Iraq’s victory over Saudi Arabia in the 2007 Asia Cup final is likely to hold up as one the decade’s most significant wins. The team’s victory represented a complex distillation of resistance and anger. The torture and murder of Iraqi athletes is frequently cited in the litany of horrors suffered by the Iraqi people at the hands of Saddam Hussein (see this 2003 Sports Illustrated story). Responding to allegations of torture in the country’s soccer program, in 1997, FIFA investigated the architect of Iraq’s athletics program, Uday Hussein, but spoke only with his people and wrote a report exonerating the sadist. Interest in the plight of the country’s people has long been guided by questions of political expediency. These athletes know intimately what it is to have one’s body enlisted in the service of the state, and are wary at best about having their experiences drafted into discourse defending the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. On winning the cup, while a frantic official stood next to him shouting, “No Politics! No Politics,” captain Younis Mahmoud said, simply: “I want America out of Iraq now!”
Riyas Komu, "A portrait of Younis Mahmoud" from   "Occupation Stories I-IV" 2007
Drawn to the team by the Asia Cup victory and the captain’s powerful statement, in 2007, Indian artist Riyas Komu went to watch one of Iraq’s World Cup qualifying matches. At the time, these matches were played in Dubai; this was the period during which the team had been forced into exile (they’ve only recently returned to play in Iraq, with an inaugural match played against another dislocated team, Palestine). Inspired by this experience, Komu made a series of works that elliptically but powerfully tap into the contradictions that swirl around the team, and around the body as an instrument of nationalism more broadly.

Riyas Komu, "Flags"
Komu’s Iraq Project is a serial work which encompasses photographs of the team and its spectators, paintings and prints based on those images, and a series of sculptures of left legs — strange amputated and distressed objects, intricately carved in surreal anatomical detail from salvaged teak by migrant artisans from Kerala (the region from which Komu himself hails). The legs are skinned, tendons, muscle and ligament spiral down to the foot clad in football boots.
Riyas Komu, "Left Legs VI and VII," wood, concrete, iron stone sculpture, 2008
These legs have since been integrated into the mythic alphabet from which Komu assembles his works — they are in conversation with five-pointed stars, intricate patternwork, the head and brain, coffins, crutches, and miniaturized temples.  Everything looks familiar but dislocated, like folkloric and national symbols that have been hijacked and repurposed. In Last Pass, for example, four legs become pall bearers, carrying a cage, a temple, a coffin — a space waiting for a body. Laced throughout much of Komu’s work is the sentimental texture of mourning. Komu explains, “the present is carrying the burden of the dead, and the future is nowhere in sight.”
Riyas Komu, "Last Pass," installation with wood and metal, 2008
In scheduling our work in India, Komu and I had hoped to attend a friendly match between India and Iraq. FIFA suspended Iraq for “governmental interference” in its football program, and so the match was canceled. The punishment is directed at Iraq’s Olympics Committee, which took over the Football Association; basically, the latter had declared the country too unstable for them to hold their local elections. (Athletes and sports officials are vulnerable to insurgent attacks as well as kidnapping for ransom, etc.) As Rod Nordland and Sa’ad Al Izzi point out in their New York Times article on the subject:
It is hard to persuade investors to spend their money here, if even the country’s football association declares it too dangerous to hold its elections here. (“Soccer in Iraq: Another Field for Argument“)
And so we play another round of political football.
Komu stages his work in these overdetermined spaces — spaces in which it seems impossible to move, and yet people do. Iraq Project pushes up against “war and carnage tourism.” It asks (and answers) how one makes art from a subject like the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The works collectively bridge the dynamic of hope and uplift of Mark Him with the violent past and present that surrounds this team and the region. It is an ambivalent collection of works: photographic images of exhilaration alternate with sculptures which seem to memorialize the athlete’s body, to embody loss and pain. It seems to me as though Komu approaches the body from the outside, and from the inside, capturing not only what it feels like to be in the stands as spectators to that body’s struggle and its glory, but also what it feels like to be in that athlete’s body — pinned by so many contradictory investments in the athlete’s gesture, in the meaning of each victory and each defeat.

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  addthis_title = ‘Political+Football’;
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From: Art21 Blog
by Jennifer Doyle on 22/12/09 | Read More

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