Meet two activists from Mexico. The first is hackarchitect Ehécatl Cabrera who believes that since architecture is not able to answer the many issues that the city has to face, we should raise and ‘make the city ourselves’. The second is Tijuana-based Raúl Cárdenas from Torolab who was in Mexico to present his Institute of Waste
Category Archive: activism
The movie that received most attention from both the public and the members of the File Prix Lux is War of Internet Addiction, a machinima advocacy production that voices the concerns of the mainland Chinese World of Warcraft community. Although the machinima was created with WoW players in mind, the video strikes a chord with the broader public by pointing the finger to the lack of Internet freedom in the country and conveying a general feeling of helplessness
In this series of photos and installations in public space, Mitch Epstein explores and questions the ‘power’ that lays at the core of the United States. ‘Power’ in this case stands for both strength and energy. Over the course of 5 years he traveled through 25 states to photograph nuclear reactors, oil refineries, mines, rigs, abandoned gas pumps, wind parks, pipelines as well as their environs
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Allan Sekula’s portraits of seafarers, dock workers, port cities and their industrial hinterland register the affects of globalisation on people’s lives. With these works, the artist counters the myth that underpins neoliberal ideology of painless flows of goods and capital that constitute international trade
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which will rotate identities every 4 months to highlight another country. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration will be augmented by events, performances, and discussion about the culture, politics, and issues at stake with each county we focus on
Can airspaces be owned and activated by the public? What is the size of the airspace you can own? How can we employ wind farms in a way that disrupts conventional understandings of their use?
social
Artist Sascha Huber symbolically renames “Rentyhorn” a mountain currently named Agassizhorn, after Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz. Renty was a slave from the Congo whose picture Agassiz had taken in the United States in the 1850s as a proof of the inferiority of the black race. The performance is part of a campaign that attempts to make the legacy of colonialism visible
Wafaa Bilal’s latest project addresses the issue of the invisibility of Iraqi civilian deaths during the war. The artist will submit his body to a 24-hour live performance. His back will be tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell
Two artworks i discovered at the Lyon’s 10th Biennale for Contemporary Art. Both by the talented and socially-engaged Pedro Reyes
The exhibition explores the new “updated” textile crafts that are developed by a new generation of serious amateurs, innovative craftsmen, engaged entrepreneurs and political practitioners. Once again the home is the workshop where economic and ecologic innovation happens – not only in the labs of the industrial expertise. After decades of outsourcing, the new modes of production are in the hands of the layperson
A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years
The artists brought together for this show reveal an imagery that has been inspired by the current mutations in our environment. They deal with diverse matters such as Chernobyl, global warming and the rise in oil rates. At times close to science-fiction, these artists imagine new stories which pay witness to the curiosity and fears derived from this changing reality
The audio file of a lecture by Prof. Wendy Brown who explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Bonus! Videos of Shooting Back, the project of an Isreali NGO that gives Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers
Just found out that the utterly brilliant and fascinating thesis that Otto von Busch presented last year at the University of Gothenburg is available as an online PDF. So leave Dan Brown on the shelves and take this one on the beach this Summer, ok?
Knowbotic Research is looking for new zones of intransparency in which people can fully experiment and circulate, where one is neither representable nor identifiable. What would happen if we fight surveillance society with transparency?
The Iraqi born artist, who gained worldwide fame in 2007 with his performance Domestic Tension (aka. Shoot an Iraqi), explained why media art has the potential to contribute to a discussion about today’s most burning political and social issues
Hans Bernhard on why UBERMORGEN.COM are not activists, but ‘actionists – in the communicative and experimental tradition of viennese actionism – performing in the global media, communication and technology networks’
A day that featured a Deputy Chief of LAPD, traffic Islands, fruit that grow on private soil but fall into the hands of LA citizens, data in Stamen wonderland, Texan oilscape and an audio mirror somewhere in Denmark
Back in July 2007, Russia’s Duma voted to allow the country’s biggest energy monopolies, Gazprom and the state oil pipeline company Transneft, to employ and arm private security units in order to ‘protect themselves from terrorist attack.’ Artists PSJM’s political fiction project explores the possible sequels of the Russian proposal
Couples are geometrically arranged into compositions of up to 110 bodies with two colours. The Acts feature the various possible combinations of penetrator / penetrated: white man-white woman, white man-white man, white man-black woman, white man-black man, black man-black woman, black man-black man, black man-white woman, black man-white man
The work is both intensely dramatic and irresistibly funny. Flooded McDonald’s hints at the consumer-driven power and influence, but also ‘impotence, of large multinationals in the face of climate change.’ Unlike some documentaries on the same subject, the movie doesn’t point an angry finger, it doesn’t give lessons and make you feel guilty as sin, it elegantly and comically allows you to draw your own conclusions
Asking for your help in collecting videos, information, links, online essays, artistic experiences, etc about the role of architecture, urbanism and technologies in the conflict Palestine/Israel
Recognizing that Israeli colonies and military bases are excruciating instruments of domination, the project assumes that a viable approach to the issue of their appropriation is to be found not only in the professional language of architecture and planning but rather in inaugurating an “arena of speculation” that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. How could the architecture of Israel domination be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians?
The Lufttransa bus arrives in Brussels to denounce the practice of deporting refugees and immigrants living illegally in Germany and examine it in the context of the process of European integration
Shoot an Iraqi is equally pertinent reading for those who seek insight into the current conflict in Iraq, and for those fascinated by interactive art technologies and the ever-expanding world of online gaming
The latest issues of two of the best magazines you could get your hands on, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Volume, are out and i beg you not to bypass them
The bold and unescapable installation, inspired by a controversial enterprise of a Gazprom initiative to build a direct gas pipe from Russia to Germany, highlights a series of political issues that impact architecture
Resist is bringing you a live webcast with Gael Garcia Bernal, supported by Amnesty International UK. The debate that will try to bring some answers to the question: How will decentralised communications networks shift the way we understand poverty and our power to resist its causes?
The exhibition ‘Artur Żmijewski: The Social Studio’ reflects the artist’s conviction that in order for art to regain its value in society, it has to expose societal conflict and disclose the conditions in which social antagonisms are cultivated and maintained by the powers that be
Booklets on media art, politically-engaged graphic design and comics zine, essays about cities built from zero, slums and the worst way to deal with them, etc. What a lovely Summer i just had
The work of artists, designers and activists like Lize Mogel, John Emerson and Brooke Singer demonstrate that maps have the potential to bring about social changes
Johannes Gees’ action salat is a very relevant interaction in the xenophobic political climate in Switzerland
A famous architect and a no less renowned group of activists participate to what is probably the best section of the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Art. Hop on the pirate bus!
PSJM acts as an trademark of happening art addressing issues of the artwork in the market, communication with consumers, or function as an artistic quality, using communication resources borrowed from capitalism of the spectacle to underscore the paradoxes produced by its unbridled development.
Or how Karl Marx made me buy a blue Summer dress
Banquete_nodos y redes presents more than 30 Spanish digital and interactive works that critically and creatively explore the notion of Network as a shared matrix, not just from a technological perspective but also from a socio-cultural perspective
The gallery asked Santiago Sierra, Alicia Framis, Elmgreen and Dragset and James Casebere to reflect on the issue and be as caustic as ever
How to export the dynamics of Free Culture and the Copyleft philosophy to general processes of knowledge generation and transmission among citizens. The contents generated are Copyleft, and can be copied, redistributed or modified freely
In a project that addresses the problem of future human food production and the ongoing consequences of the breeding, manipulation and mistreatment of plant and animal species, corn seeds are submitted to a new, broad educational curriculum
A traveling exhibition featuring thirteen recent artworks that use private information as raw material and subject matter
Kumao’s performative technologies generate artistic spectacles in order to visualize the unseen: psychological states, emotions, compulsions, thinking patterns, and dreams