“European Green Belt” following the corridor of the former iron curtain.

R-Lab is leading the pack!

From Wiki:

“The European Green Belt initiative is a grassroots movement for nature conservation and sustainable development along the corridor of the former Iron Curtain. The term refers to both an environmental initiative as well as the area it concerns. The initiative is carried out under the patronage of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Mikhail Gorbachev. It is the aim of the initiative to create the backbone of an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black and Adriatic Seas.

The European Green Belt as an area follows the route of the former Iron Curtain and connects National Parks, Nature Parks, Biosphere Reserves and transboundary protected areas as well as non-protected valuable habitats along or across the (former) borders.^[1]“

Miniature version of Aylesbury’s David Bowie statue is revealed

I am afraid this blog will be endless. after having just posted the winning proposal for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Canada, –see post below– i decided it is worth publishing this one here this monument to David Bowie, “Earthly Messenger” by the sculptor Andrew Sinclair  to be erected in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. While not Michelangelo’s David, by a long shot, the sculpture will have a loudspeaker system built in. See the description below. While old fashioned monuments dedicated to dead heroes are not disappearing, its interesting to note when a monument is created to represent some other kind of collectively shared  idolised figure in recent history. In this case David Bowie. Another list to compile, should we begin with Lou Reed?

 

“The bronze sculpture, named Earthly Messenger, will be unveiled later this year in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.

It will be installed under the arches in Market Square, referenced by Bowie in the song Five Years.

The work features a likeness of Bowie in 2002 looking down at Ziggy, alongside of some of his other looks.”

Funds for the statue, designed by sculptor Andrew Sinclair, have been raised through a £100,000 crowdfunding appeal, plus grants.

When completed, speakers mounted above the life size artwork will play one of 2,000 tracks every hour.

Some changes are expected to the design before the finished product is officially unveiled in March.

“Here’s the winning design for the victims of communism memorial in Ottawa Memorial to be built on west side of Garden of Provinces and Territories”

This is an interesting twist in our survey of post-communist, Baltic and Balkan landscapes. Most actions we have witnessed in cities like Mostar and Riga are about isolating opposing monuments, or defacing them, or somehow reinforcing their one-sided messages. More problematic would be to create precisely this kind of monument, where a collective memorial would stand for an abstract and or generic victimisation. Just how this came about in Canada, is worth taking a closer look to discover. By the way, the above image is not the winning image. its just the one I preferred among the set previewed in the article.

“The winning design for a memorial to the victims of communism in downtown Ottawa has been chosen.

Toronto architect and artist Paul Raff created the design with Michael A. Ormston-Holloway, a designer and certified arborist, and landscape architects Brett Hoornaert and Luke Kairys.

“The design is a broad, sweeping, arcing form, moving from east to west, and it’s made up of more than 4,000 individual bronze rods,” Raff said in an interview Wednesday morning following the announcement.

“Each one points at the sun in the sky, one successive hour of the day, every day of the year. So it actually forms a three-dimensional calendar, which memorializes every moment of the vast millions of moments of suffering of victims. But it also expresses resilience and hope.”

The announcement was made by Arif Virani, parliamentary secretary to Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, at the Canadian Museum of History.”

RE-MOVING THE CONFEDERATE PAST, NEW ORLEANS, USA.

 

from the Times Picayune:

Joe Osae-Addo in-formally @ Royal Institute of Art-ARCHITECTURE on Tuesday 16 May 17:30

Please join us for this in-formal meeting with Joe Osae-Addo together with Katarina Tobé to discuss his “architecture of ideas,” and his recent work in Ghana. R-Lab welcomes Joe to our school and we look forward to learning more about future projects with ArchiAfrica and Constructs LLC.

“ABOUT: Joe Osae-Addo is Principal of Constructs with offices in Accra and Tamale, Ghana, and in Washington DC and Los Angeles, USA.

The firm synergizes architecture, urban planning, landscaping, and building technology into a single unit geared towards bringing modern architecture and building techniques to create ‘inno-native’ design solutions to contemporary African architecture. ‘Inno-native’ is the condition where solutions are developed smartly and are indigenous.

The work and interest of the practice has been influenced by various investigations of ‘genus-loci’ and how architecture can/should respond to this in creating pieces that are both site specific and meet the needs of the people who will inhabit or interact with it. This has led to a more public intervention in South Los Angeles, where several projects are under construction aimed at establishing a discourse between what is important to communities and how site, climate, materials and their weathering, with design intent, should shape these interventions

Joe Osae-Addo studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) in London (1980-86).

He has worked for architectural firms in Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

He is Chairman of ArchiAfrika, a platform that initiates and facilitates research and projects on the terrain of African architecture and architecture in Africa.

He was a member of the Awards jury for region Africa Middle East in 2008 and 2011.

Joe Osae-Addo will be a member of the LafargeHolcim Awards jury for Middle East Africa in 2017.”

University of Disaster, Venice Biennale

Radenko Milak & international guests University of Disaster May 12–November 26, 2017 Palazzo Malipiero 3198 San Marco 30124 Venice Italy www.universityofdisaster.org Facebook

Commisioner: Sarita Vujković (Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska) Curators: Christopher Yggdre, Sinziana Ravini, Fredrik Svensk, Anna van der Vliet, in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist Exhibitors: Radenko Milak in collaboration with Roman Uranjek, and guest artists : Lamin Fofana, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena, Loulou Cherinet, Geraldine Juárez in collaboration with Joel Danielsson, Nils Bech in collaboration with Ida Ekblad. What would happen if we rewrote the history of art solely from the perspective of the representation of catastrophe? Original or final, the catastrophe, with its natural cataclysms, epidemics and human activities such as wars, has always had an aesthetic dimension and an impact on our desire, imagination and our relation to the world. This is something that one can hardly ignore encountering the art of Radenko Milak—a work totally in line with what Modern History teaches us, that catastrophes are not independent to us: we are its demiurges. After the Second World War Günther Anders, considered Auschwitz and Hiroshima the two founding events of an era in which humanity has become incapable of representing what it has set up or created. The impossibility of representing catastrophe is, paradoxically enough, not related to the absence of visual documentation. The unrepresentable is primarily defined as the inability to take measure of disaster. At the same time disaster and desire share the same distant etymology. “University of Disaster” can therefore also be read as “University of Desire,” desire as antidote to the crushing feeling of powerlessness in the face of surrounding disaster. What can art do in this new era of unrepresentable disaster? What is the relation between disaster and desire today? It is in light of these questions that the exhibition takes on its meaning, presenting new works by Radenko Milak together with guest artists from different parts of the world. Through his work, Milak questions the imagination of the image in the digital era. His practice involves the real or supposed power of images and their status in our visually-saturated societies. He reveals the aesthetic potential and phantoms of each image that haunt our consciences by creating unfaithful echoes of the continuous flow of images in our global visual archive. For this exhibition, he has created a Wunderkammer of films, paintings, watercolors, collages, some in collaboration with Roman Uranjek, which gives the political, social and environmental disasters an entirely new dimension, inviting us to drift towards the horizons of a world where art becomes the last form of resistance to current and future disasters. The guest artists are engaged in other aspects of the disasters and desires, confronting, contradicting and adding to the proposals by Milak & Uranjek, turning the exhibition into a complex montage, inviting the audience to make up new connections between the tensions in the works. The beauty of unrequited love in the performance work of Nils Bech with Ida Ekblad is played out in the context of the magic of the feminist intervention by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, subverting the power and desire in the sexist matrix of contemporary digital pornography, accompanied by the brutal bliss of Lamin Fofana´s techno music installation reflecting the horrors of forced migration, in contrast to the seductive contradictions of Geraldine Juárez and Joel Danielsson´s frozen installation that stores, layers and fuses geologies and memories against the backdrop of desires and disasters of media history and climate change, and the powerful camouflage of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena´s installation on the expanded potential of the strategy of camouflage in a world of disasters. But, University of Disaster is not only the exhibition at the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is also the starting point for a real university, a shared creative space of knowledge and imagination building. A conference will be held in Venice with writers, researchers, theorists and artists in November during the last week of the 57th Venice Biennale. For this occasion, a new commissioned work by Loulou Cherinet will be presented. Events Opening with a Nils Bech performance May 12, 6pm Loulou Cherinet: Ongoing research performance May 9–14 Release of Paletten Art Journal, with a Nils Bech performance May 9, 6pm Nils Bech performances May 10–11, 3 and 6pm

Tomteboda and some ideas on Gentrification/

Welcome everyone to a panel talk at the entrance of the Royal Institute of Art 26/4 17.00!

Due to the investigation of moving the Royal institute of Art to Tomteboda we would like to bring up the questions of public vs. private and art/artists role in society.

We have investigated the ownership of Tomteboda and sent out that information in an email a few weeks ago.

There has also been information about this in the entrance of the school until a few days ago.

With this talk we hope to not only discuss the current situation for the school but also try to discuss it in a broader sense connected to gentrification, renovictions and privatizations.

We would also like this to be a discussion about how artists can relate to these questions, within their practice but also in the situations around their practice.

If you have any questions or points you would like to be discussed, send an e-mail or just show up on Wednesday!

There will be time for an open discussion.

The talk will be held in English and the duration of the event will be one hour.

Invited guests:

Maryam Fanni

Maryam Fanni is a graphic designer based in Stockholm. 

Dominika Polanska

Dominika is associate professor of sociology at Uppsala University. She has since her doctoral thesis in 2011 about gated communities in Poland focused on social movements in Eastern Europe (especially Poland) but also Sweden, working with living and housing issues. Her research interests include: urban social movements, extra-parliamentary activism, squatting, informal organization, non-traditional forms of civil engagement and tenant organizing around renoviction.

Peter Lang

Peter Lang is professor of architectural theory and history at the Royal Institute of art in Stockholm.

Frida Sandström

(b. 1990) is an artist and a writer, whose practice takes place in the intersection of the curatorial and the pedagogical, with performance as its core. She is one of the editors of Paletten Art Journal, and is a frequent writer in Swedish cultural journals and magazines such as Kunstkritikk, Feministiskt Perspektiv, Konstnären and ETC. She is currently enrolled with a two-year research project on the notion of the event at the Royal Academy of the Arts, together with artist Cara Tolmie and curator Aleksei Borisionok and studies a masters program in aesthetics at Södertörn University.

Moderator: Elof Hellström

All the best,

Tove and Astrid

There is no such thing as Western Civilisation-the Guardian.

While this article doesn’t’ bring to the table anything that shockingly new, Kwame Appiah makes a good argument about how this term, a relatively recent fabrication, is so misleading.

Mordåtal för vansinnesfärd

Mordåtal för vansinnesfärd

Föraren av den bil som mejade ned ett stort antal människor på Västerlånggatan i Stockholm åtalades på fredagen för att avsiktligt ha dödat två människor och försökt döda femton andra.

below a quick google translation:

The driver of the car that mowed down a large number of people on Western Street in Stockholm was indicted on Friday for intentionally killing two people and attempted to kill fifteen others.

 

“Battling to Save James Baldwin’s Home in the South of France” NYTs

By RACHEL DONADIOAPRIL 4, 2017

James Baldwin houses in France link

“But those who arrive today to pay homage to Baldwin won’t find anything commemorating that American novelist, playwright and essayist. No house museum greets them, or even a plaque with his name. The wing where Baldwin lived was torn down a few years ago. The remaining two houses on the property are in disrepair, the once-verdant garden unkempt. And the local real estate developer who now owns the property, after the Baldwin family lost control of it more than a decade ago, plans to build three apartment buildings and a swimming pool.”

“Trevor Baldwin, one of Baldwin’s nephews, who helped get a street in Harlem named for the author, said in an email that he would like something more tangible in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. “I hope there will be a commemorative vestige to honor his dedication to elevating humanity through enlightenment with appreciation for his love of the country that saved his life,” Mr. Baldwin wrote. Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where his uncle “chose to die,” Mr. Baldwin said, was deeply meaningful to the writer.

Baldwin left behind an unfinished play, “The Welcome Table,” about an African-American living in the South of France. Its title refers to the table in his garden here, where friends would talk late into the night. In the developer’s plans, that patch of lawn will become the entrance to an underground garage.”