Porto Público

N30 - London

2011-12-01T02:13:00.001-08:00

clown bloc

precarious workers brigade

Goldmiths "Capitalism is Crisis"

AMIW@VBKÖ – Ou Antes, o que Podem as Palavras? / Or Rather, What Can Words Do? / Oder vielmehr, was können Wörter tun?

2011-11-10T01:41:00.001-08:00

Mónica Faria, a photo by litcha sparletta on Flickr.

AMIW was initiated in 2005 by the artist Carla Cruz to expound the question of gender and to question power relations in the arts. It wants to affirm itself as a political platform; to let go of the desire of belonging to a discriminatory art world in an attempt to figure out new ways of giving account of hu’wo’man art production.

At the VBKÖ AMIW asks together with the ‘3 Marias’ (Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho da Costa): “Sisters. What can [art] do? Rather, what can words do?” AMIW thus refers to the conscious "New Portuguese Letters" that addressed the age-old oppression of Portuguese woman and provoked, in 1972, during the Salazar/Caetano dictatorship, the biggest literary scandal of Portugal.

The exhibition shows works by the artists André Alves, Catarina Carneiro de Sousa and Sameiro Oliveira Martins, Laura García and Said Dokins, Alice Geirinhas, Risk Hazekamp, Roberta Lima, Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Suzanne van Rossenberg, Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa, Yan María Yaoyólotl, and performances by André Alves, Stefanie Seibold and the duo Projecto Gentileza.

Moreover, visitors will have access to a documentary presentation of AMIW – 2005/10. In addition at the VBKÖ there will be a video lounge, with: Miguel Bonneville, Mónica Faria, Risk Hazekamp, Anna Jonsson, Cristina Mateus, Rita Rainho, Flávio Rodrigues, Evelin Stermitz and Lenka Vráblíková.

The exhibitors take passion as excuse for engaging the world. At the core of their works they intends to question how the desire for visibility can be transmuted into a different experience one of equality and accountability as to evoke a feminist practices that functions as a ‘counter-hegemonic intervention’ in the arts in particular and in society in general?

http://amiw-vbkoe.blogspot.com/

and

http://allmyindependentwomen.blogspot.com/

about London riots

2011-10-21T06:50:00.001-07:00

"A capitalism that is no longer accompanied by an increase in the standard of living, especially of the poorest, loses its credibility." (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005:513)

26th March - London

2011-03-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

2011-03-21T15:57:00.001-07:00

007 by carlacruz

The Ethics of Encounter Research Workshop

2011-03-01T01:45:00.001-08:00

Thursday 3 March & Friday 4 March 2011

As an increasing number of artists site their practice within the social fabric of everyday life, the encounter has been placed at the heart of a newly defined aesthetic experience. Participatory, collaborative, community-based and documentary methodologies which engage directly with interpersonal relations and social realities now proliferate both within and beyond the institution. This move away from traditional forms of representation into the territories of use and action has endowed art’s latest ‘social turn’ with a renewed and expanded ethical significance. In parallel with these developments, it is claimed that ethics has triumphed in the public debate to reign over culture and displace politics.

This research workshop will examine the complex interfaces which have emerged between aesthetics, politics and ethics in the 21st century. Taking into account their historical imbrications in art discourse together with the so-called ‘ethical turn’ of contemporary politics, we aim to develop a critical understanding of their most recent forms and configurations across the diverse terrains of socially-engaged art. The ethical valence of artworks has dominated debates to date – whether interventions into the social fabric can be considered productively ‘good’ or transgressive, ‘bad’ and yet, ultimately, revealing. If the ethical is now a common route for artists seeking to broach the political and provide a site for critique, is it possible to move beyond this dichotomy and map the potential and limits of ethical engagements in art?

The Ethics of Encounter research workshop has been devised as part of a programme of exhibitions, events and residencies of the same name presented at Stills between November 2010 and March 2011. Consecutive exhibitions included lens-based documentary works by The Atlas Group (Lebanon / USA), François Bucher (Columbia / Germany), Renzo Martens (Belgium), Dani Marti (Scotland), Frederick Wiseman (USA) and Artur Żmijewski (Poland). The workshop has been designed to expand the parameters of this curatorial investigation and situate these works in relation to parallel developments within other reality-driven practices. For more information about The Ethics of Encounter programme please visit www.stills.org.

Speakers and interlocutors include Carla Cruz (Goldsmiths University of London), Gail Day (University of Leeds), Angela Dimitrakaki (The University of Edinburgh), Anthony Downey (Sotheby’s Institute of Art), Alana Jelinek (University of Cambridge), Kirsten Lloyd (Stills / The University of Edinburgh), Tracy Mackenna (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design) & Ken Neil (Glasgow School of Art), Mark Miller (Tate Britain) & Victoria Walsh (Tate Britain), Dominic Paterson (University of Glasgow), Michaela Ross (Chelsea College of Art and Design), Harry Weeks (The University of Edinburgh), Stephen Wright (European School of Visual Arts)

‘Mutirão’ or the Importance of a New Extended Solidarity
This paper draws upon empirical research undertaken within a small community in Brazil. It examines the reclaiming of tools from artistic practice for sustainable development projects.

In 1993 the Brazilian government decided to eradicate Chagas disease in Pernambuco’s State, a disease transmitted to humans by an insect that nests in the local rammed earth houses. With the eviction of the insect, began the history of Vila União (Union Village). Though the government provided the materials, the construction of the new buildings was left to the local population. The women organised themselves into mutirão (collectives) and worked together to build 25 family houses. Since then, the community has grown and the mutirão continues to function in terms of agricultural work and in brick making. However, clean water has not yet arrived, subsistence agriculture is still their main resource, the land remains in the hands of a couple of colonels and education is difficult to access. Under these circumstances several local, national and international organisations have coordinated an ambitious project involving a group of local and foreign artists, filmmakers, NGO workers and residents. In the Summer of 2011 they will come together to renovate the now 72 homes in Vila União, painting and plastering the buildings before going on tp collectively create a visual identity for the village which celebrates the community’s singularity.

The Portuguese Intercultural Movement IDENTIDADES has been working with the region of Conceição das Crioulas, where the community is based, since 2003, and on this project since 2009. Despite the fact that the movement is mainly composed of visual artists, art is never directly mentioned. Vila União Project does not have the support of art institutions; it is not an artwork of an individual or collective, it is not even an art project. Nonetheless we claim to be applying knowledge gained through art practice and believe we will harvest new knowledge for our individual practices. Why then is Vila União Project still relevant for artistic discourse? Why is it not mere politics and social practice? Does positioning such activity within contemporary art discourse jeopardize not only its political effects but also its ethical stance? How does the project sit within the intricate relations between politics and aesthetics? What is its potential for instituting and fostering democracy?

Biography

Born - Vila Real – Portugal 1977.

Currently researching for an MPhil/PhD in art practice at Goldsmiths University of London (since 2009). MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2003. Degree in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal 2001.

Member of several national and international art collectives, such as ZOiNA, Caldeira 213, ROOM, CLANITICA, Ateliers Mentol, Switch Metaphors, Identidades, Palindromes and AC.

Manages the blog and exhibition project All My Independent Women on art and gender and the critical blog Porto Público on participation, public space and politics.

“Her work, sometimes strikingly visible, sometimes no more than a rumor, is concerned with the social constructions that we make and reassert every day in the attempt to question and even undermine these constructions, whether these constructions are gender related, about European Identity or even the privatization of the public sphere and the notion of citizenship. The viewer, participant or passer-by is trapped by the anodyne visuals and forms of her work, which usually disguise less innocent content, and pushed to reconsider his values and pre-conceptions with what is presented by her work.”

This statement, written many years ago by my friend Suzanne van Rossenberg, is still the best rendering of my practice.

Parliament Square Protest London 9.12.10 was also about this...

2010-12-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

why did it look more dramatic on the news than it actually was?

merry x-mas!

creativity with minor resources, great impact

a friendly atmosphere prevailed, even after dark when the toughest confronts were taking place,

within a few minutes a group of students started a cafeteria...

Sometimes is difficult not to loose reason

the book bloc

we need to fight

2010-11-15T01:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, we do need new ways of fighting and resisting, but while we/they think about it we might as well unite.

FOX POWER 800

2010-07-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

Limiar

passagem
soleira
princípio
ombreira
entrada
saída

Espaços liminais, entre o interior e o exterior; o já não e o ainda não; ritual de passagem entre a adolescência e a idade adulta, entre a potência e a realização, vida animal e vida política. As ombreiras das portas são um dos lugares seguros em caso de terramoto, segundos que para a vida em suspenso parecerão uma eternidade.

Eu vivo no limiar da periferia. Onde a cidade perde consistência e o subúrbio desponta, nem residencial, nem industrial, nem natural, apenas entroncamentos.

Eu vivo.
A questão de ser e viver conflacionadas, a questão de ser bios e zoē. Bios é a nossa vida política, aquela que diz respeito à polis, enquanto que zoē é a nossa vida enquanto organismos vivos.

- As ostras estão vivas quando as comemos?
- As ervas daninhas contam como vida?

Essa mera vida natural começa a dizer respeito à polis exactamente na vida moderna, ou democrática por assim dizer, quando a política se transforma em biopolítica, e o estado já não está interessado na vida individual de cada cidadão em particular mas na vida colectiva da espécie, este é o “limiar da modernidade biopolítica”. O Soberano já não é entendido como aquele que tem o poder de to kill ou let live; mas soberania é agora a decisão de make live ou let die; de decidir o estado de emergência no qual a lei é suspensa; suspensão tal que lhe dá a sua raison d’être.

A excepção é também liminal, já não... ainda não, já não é zoē ... ainda não é bios.
Esta vida nua é a vida do ser liminal, sujeito ou súbdito do poder político moderno, do soberano que decide esse mesmo estado de excepção. A soberania é ela mesma uma ombreira que está fora e dentro da lei, que aplica e não se faz aplicar. Lei que está fora de si mesma, que se aplica por não se aplicar. A excepção faz a regra, a excepção justifica a regra. A questão é quando a excepção passa a ser a regra.

William Lyttle cavou quilómetros de túneis em torno da sua casa em Hackney durante 40 anos sem propósito à vista.

O limiar é o espaço da soberania e da vida nua. Aqui e agora toda a vida é um só túnel, que como o da toupeira de Hackney tem-se a si mesmo como propósito.

Os túneis são também liminais, já não e ainda não, longas ombreiras subterrâneas, potência nem sempre actualizada... isto é Rotherhite, já não ... ainda não, isto é Wapping; isto é Kent, já não... ainda não, isto é Calais; isto é o México, já não... ainda não, isto é Estados Unidos da América. A tecnologia para teletransportar corpos de um local para o outro já não é o horizonte insuperável da ciência, é actual, porém, uma questão permanece, quando o corpo se divide à partida na sua mais pequena unidade, como reorganizar o todo à chegada?

Somos aquele mesmo que partiu?

Perante a indistinção entre bios e zoē que é a vida nua, o zombie moderno, dedicado já ao mundo dos mortos e portanto sagrado; cuja vida pode ser tomada sem qualquer penalidade, vida cuja distinção entre lei foi apagada para sempre, como reorganizaremos as nossas monadas simultaneamente em singularidade e comunidade?

No quarto episódio da série Americana The Wire, um polícia tenta desencravar uma secretária da ombreira da porta... um segundo polícia junta-se-lhe para ajudar, e mais dois de seguida e finalmente o tenente. Entre grunhidos e praguejamento cinco homens tentam mover a secretária. Exaustos param para avaliar a situação quando primeiro exclama:

- Assim nunca mais a vamos conseguir trazê-la para dentro!

Perante a cara de estupefacção dos colegas ele volta a exclamar:

- O que foi?

Dentro? Exclamam um após o outro. Cristo!

“Este corpo biopolitico que é a vida nua deverá transformar-se no local da constituição e instauração de uma forma de vida que é totalmente esgotada na vida nua e numa bios que é a sua própria zoē.” (Agamben)

Threshold

passage
groundsill
beginning
jamb
entrance
exit

Liminal spaces, between inside and outside; the no longer and the not yet; passage ritual between adolescence and adulthood, between potentiality and actuality, animal life and political life. Door thresholds are one of the safest places in case of an earthquake, seconds that for the suspended life will seem like an enternity.

I live in the threshold of the periphery. Where the city losses its consistency and the suburb rises, neither residential, nor industrial or natural, rather mere junctions.

I live.

The question of being and living conflates, the question of being bios and zoē. Bios is our political life, the one that regards the polis, while zoē is our live as living organisms.

- Are oysters alive when we eat them?
- Does weed count as life?

This mere natural life starts concerning the polis exactly in modern life, or rather democratic life, when the political becomes biopolitical, and the state is no longer interested in the individual life of each particular citizen but in the collective life of the species, this is the “threshold of biopolitical modernity”. Sovereign is no longer understood as the one that holds the power to kill and let live; rather, sovereignty, is now the decision to make live and let die; to decide on the emergency state where law is suspendend; suspension which gives law its raison d’être.

The exception is also liminal, no longer... not yet, no longer zoē... not yet bios.
This bare life is the life of the liminal being, subject, or subject of, the modern political power, of the sovereign that decides that state of exception. The sovereignty is itself a threshold that is outside and inside the law, that applies and is not applied to. Law that is outside itself, that applies by not applying. The rule lives of the exception alone, the exception justifies the rule. The question is when exception is in itself the rule.

William Lyttle dug miles of tunnels around his house in Hackney during 40 years without a purpose in sight.

The threshold is the space of sovereignty and bare life. Here and now every life is one single tunnel, that like those of Hackney’s mole have in itself its purpose.

Tunnels are also liminal, no longer and not yet, long subterranean thresholds, potentiality not always actualized... this is Rotherhithe, no longer... not yet, this is Wapping; this is Kent, no longer... not yet, this is Pas-de-Calais; this is Mexico, no longer... not yet, this is the United States of America. The technology to teletransport bodies from one place to another is no longer the unsurpassable horizon of science, it is present, however one question remains, when the body is divided at the departure in its smallest units, how to reorganize the whole in the arrival?

Are we the same one that departed?

Given the lack of distinction between bios and zoē that bare life is, the modern zombie, already dedicated to the dead and therefore sacred; whose life may be taken without punishment, life whose distinction between law was for ever erased, how to reorganize our monads simultaneously into singularity and community?

In the forth episode of the American series The Wire, a policeman tries to move a desk that is jammed on the threshold of a door... another policeman jumps in to help, and then two other and finally their lieutenent. Between grunts and swearing five men try to move the desk.

Exausted they stop to evaluate the situation when the first exclaims:

- At this rate we’re never gonna get it in!

Before the face of stupefaction of his colleagues he exclaims again:

- what?

In? Exclaims one after the other. Christ!

“This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē.” (Agamben)

Umbral

Pasaje
Solera
Principio
Jamba
Entrada
Salida

Espacios liminales, entre el interior y el exterior; el ya no y el aun no; ritual de pasaje entre la adolescencia y la edad adulta, entre la potencia y la actualización, vida animal y vida política. Los marcos de las puertas son uno de los lugares más seguros en caso de un terremoto, segundos que para una vida en suspenso parecerán una eternidad.

Yo vivo en el umbral, donde la ciudad pierde consistencia y el suburbio se levanta. Ni residencial, ni industrial, ni natural, sólo entroncamientos.

Yo vivo.

La cuestión de ser y vivir combina la cuestión del ser bios y zoē. Bios es nuestra vida política, en lo que se refiere a polis, mientras que zoē es nuestra vida en tanto organismos vivos.

¿Están vivas las otras cuando las comemos?

¿Cuentan las malas hierbas como vida?

Esta mera vida natural comienza, en lo que respecta a la polis, exactamente en la vida moderna, o democrática por decirlo así, cuando la política se transforma en biopolítica, y el estado ya no esta interesado en la vida individual de cada ciudadano en particular sino en la vida colectiva de la especie, este es el “umbral de la modernidad biopolítica”. El soberano ya no es entendido como aquel que tiene el poder de to kill o let live, sino que la soberanía es ahora una decisión de make live and let die; de decidir el estado de emergencia en el cual la ley es suspendida; suspensión que da a la ley su raison d’être.

La excepción tambien es liminal, ya no… aun no, ya no es zoē… aun no es bios.

Esta nuda vida es la vida del ser liminal, sujeto o subdito del poder politico moderno, del soberano que decide ese mismo estado de excepción. La soberanía es en si misma un umbral que esta fuera y dentro de la ley, que aplica y no se hace aplicar. La excepción hace a la regla, la excepción justifica la regla. La cuestión es cuándo la excepción pasa a ser la regla.

William Lyttle cavó kilómetros de tuneles alrededor de su casa en Hackney durante 40 años, sin proposito aparente.

El umbral es el espacio de la soberanía y de la nuda vida. Aquí y ahora toda vida es un solo túnel que como aquellos del topo de Hackney se tienen a si mismos como propósito.

Los túneles son también liminales, ya no y aun no, largos umbrales subterraneos, potencia no siempre actualizada… esto es Rotherhithe, ya no… aun no, esto es Wapping; esto es Kent, ya no… aun no, esto es Pas-de Calais; esto es México, ya no… aun no, esto es los Estados Unidos de América. La tecnología para teletransportar cuerpos de un lugar a otro ya no es el horizonte insuperáble de la ciencia, es actual, pero una cuestión permanece, cuando el cuerpo se divide en sus unidades más pequeñas, cómo reorganizar todo a la llegada?

Somos aquel mismo que partió?

Dada la falta de distinción entre bios y zoē que es la nuda vida, el zombie moderno, dedicado ya al mundo de ls muertos y por lo tanto sagrado; cuya vida puede ser tomada sin ninguna penalidad, vida cuya distionción entre la ley fue apagada para siempre, cómo reorganizaremos nuestras mónadas simultáneamente en singularidad y comunidad?

En el cuarto capítulo de la serie Americana The Wire, un policía tenía que destrabar un escritorio del umbral de una puerta… un segundo policía se une para ayudar, y luego dos más, y finalmente el teniente. Entre gruñidos e insultos cinco hombres tratan de mover el escritorio. Exhaustos paran para evaluar la situación cuando el primero exclama:

- Así nunca vamos a conseguir meterlo!

Ante la cara de estupefacción de sus colegas, exclama de nuevo:
- ¿Qué?

¿Adentro? Exclaman uno tras otro. ¡Cristo!

“Este cuerpo biopolítico que es la nuda vida deberá transformarse en el lugar de la constitución ye instauración de una forma de vida que esta totalmente agotada en la vida nuda y una bios que es su propia zoē.” (Agamben)

Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa, Carla Cruz e/and Jose Araud-Bello

the fox

2010-07-20T07:24:00.001-07:00

the fox
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

Fox power 800, at the Mews, London
with Carla Cruz, Jose Arnaud-Bello and Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa

Onde comprar //Where to buy: AMIW

2010-06-27T03:04:00.000-07:00

A publicação AMIW - Novas Cartas Portuguesas está já à venda (10,5€) nos seguintes locais:
The Publication AMIW - New Portuguese Letters (9£) is now on sale at:

Porto:
INC
Inc. livros e edições de autor
Rua da Boa Nova, 168
4050-101 Porto
(+351) 22 609 55 37

GESTO
Gesto Cooperativa Cultural
Rua Cândido dos Reis, 64
4050-153 Porto
Portugal
(+351) 22 332 09 86

DAMA AFLITA
Galeria Dama Aflita
Rua da Picaria n84
4000 PORTO

Coimbra:
Casa da Esquina
Rua Aires de Campos nº6,
3000-014 Coimbra
(ao lado do Convento das Carmelitas)
(+351) 23 904 13 97

Lisboa:
ZDB
Zé dos Bois
Rua da Barroca
Nº59 1200-047 LISBOA
(+351) 21 343 02 05

UK: London:
MEWS
the Mews Project Space
Osborn Street,
Alley behind the Whitechapel art gallery
London, E1

demoCRACIA

2010-05-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

THE UNSURPASSABLE HORIZON
A project by Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado
No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents at Tate Modern, London

No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents
May 14 – 16, 2010
10 AM – 12 PM (May 16: 6 PM)

www.nosoulforsale.com

Lisbon, May 10 – The Lisbon-based curatorial collective Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado is presenting “The Unsurpassable Horizon”, a project organized for NO SOUL FOR SALE – A Festival of Independents at Tate Modern, London. This project brings together works by Carla Cruz, Ruth Ewan, Runo Lagomarsino, and Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner. The works on view respond to, comment, and speculate on the potential of the communitarian ideal in contemporary society. This project thus addresses the social fabric in which both artists and non-profit organizations/curatorial collectives operate, considering consider the public sphere as an arena of individual participation in the collective future.

In one of the most acknowledged books by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperable Community (1982), he sets himself the task of redefining community beyond a cultural, economic and political dimension. To be operative, the community needs a substance, a sense of communion, and this is the intellectual framework that shapes “The Unsurpassable Horizon”. These artists deal with community as something that either has been disintegrated or that is in a process of rebuilding. Their practice thus reflects the entropic current state of affairs that Nancy encapsulates with his reference to the contemporary “unsurpassable horizon” of political, economic, and cultural regimes.

Cruz’s demoCRACY (2010) consists of a typical voting scene: a ballot box and two piles of ballots on each side of it. The ballots have a question addressed to the potential voter: “Would You Like To Participate?” Three possible answers are given: “Yes”; “No”; and “None of The Above”. What is not made clear is on what the viewer would be voting on. In addition, there are no pens available and the ballot box doesn’t even have a slot where one could insert the ballot. Alluding to the mixed feelings of hopelessness expectation of change through the electoral process, the artist examines issues of civic participation and citizenship in liberal democracies.

Ewan presents a series of drawings created between 2006 and 2009 that are available as stickers sold at cost price. These works are informed by a range of sources referencing several British socially radical groups. Among these organizations is The Plebs League, a political association inspired by Marxist ideals founded in 1908 at Ruskin College, Oxford, which attempted to create a brand new educational system, free from capitalist ideology. The drawings were made by young people, aged 12 to 14, as a result of a series of one-to-one workshops done by the artist. In this learning context, she examined how ideas are disseminated and systems of belief are created, thus addressing the ideological dimension of any educational process.

Lagomarsino’s Notion of Conflict, Dance of the Piñata (2004) explores the dynamics of oppression and resistance by alluding to an ancient, popular Latin American game – the Piñata – that was used by European colonizers to “Christianize” indigenous populations. In this video, a blindfolded male character attempts to hit a piñata figure shaped as a human body dressed in a military uniform. After finally succeeding it with extreme violence, the image slowly fades to black, leaving the viewer to ponder what happens after. The work reflects the era of colonization as the institutionalization of state violence and the subsequent means of collective opposition and cultural hybridization that accompanied the de-colonization of Latin America.

Lindner & Steinbrenner’s Start Spreading the News (2010) consists of a printer connected to the Internet continuously printing on A4 sheets of paper everything that is worth being reported by Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading press agency. This device is located on top of a ladder, so every minute 2/3 sheets of paper will tumble into the ground, each containing absolutely unfiltered news from somewhere in the world. These are words that have no feedback from the audience, allegorically replicating the way most information is circulated on a global scale. Through the poetic image of “falling news” that they created, the artists question the power of the media in the shaping of the current visions of the world.

NOTES TO THE EDITORS

NO SOUL FOR SALE is a festival of independents that brings together the most exciting not-for-profit centers, alternative institutions, artists’ collectives and underground enterprises from around the world. Neither a fair nor an exhibition, NO SOUL FOR SALE is a spontaneous celebration of the individuals and groups that live outside the market and that animate contemporary art. To celebrate Tate Modern's 10th anniversary, the second edition of NO SOUL FOR SALE, organized by Cecilia Alemani, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, and produced by Tate Modern, is bringing together 70 of the world's most innovative independent art spaces and teams to take over the Turbine Hall. The festival will fill the iconic space with an eclectic mix of cutting-edge shows and events on 14-16 May 2010.

Participants in the second edition of NO SOUL FOR SALE include: 2nd Cannons Publications (Los Angeles), 98weeks research project (Beirut), Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul), Arrow Factory (Beijing), ArtHub Asia (Shanghai/Bangkok/Beijing), Artis - Contemporary Israeli Art Fund (New York/Tel Aviv), Artists Space (New York), Artspeak (Vancouver), Auto Italia South East (London), Ballroom (Marfa), Barbur (Jerusalem), Black Dogs (Leeds), Capacete Entertainment (Rio de Janeiro), casa tres patios (Medellín), Cinématèque de Tanger (Tanger), cneai= (Paris-Chatou), Collective Parasol (Kyoto), Dispatch (New York), e-flux (Berlin), Elodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel - 220 jours (Paris), Embassy (Edinburgh), Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado (Lisbon), FLUXspace (Philadelphia), FormContent (London), Galerie im Regierungsviertel / Forgotten Bar Project (Berlin), Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila), Hell Gallery (Melbourne), Hermes und der Pfau (Stuttgart), i-cabin (London), Intoart (London), K48 Kontinuum (New York), Kling & Bang (Reykjavík), L'appartement 22 (Rabat), Latitudes (Barcelona), Le commissariat (Paris), Le Dictateur (Milan), Light Industry (New York), Lucie Fontaine (Milan), lugar a dudas (Cali), Mousse (Milan), Next Visit (Berlin), New Jerseyy (Basel), Not An Alternative (New York), no.w.here (London), Or Gallery (Vancouver), Oregon Painting Society (Portland), Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Peep-Hole (Milan), PiST/// (Istanbul), Post-Museum (Singapore), PSL [Project Space Leeds] (Leeds), Rhizome (New York), Sala-Manca & Mamuta (Jerusalem), Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Scrawl Collective (London), studio1.1 (London), Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art (New York), The Mountain School of Arts (Los Angeles), The Museum of Everything (London), The Royal Standard (Liverpool), The Suburban (Chicago), The Western Front Society (Vancouver), Thisisnotashop (Dublin), Torpedo - supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Tranzit.cz (Prague), Viafarini DOCVA (Milan), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Western Bridge (Seattle), White Columns (New York) and Y3K (Melbourne).

Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado is a Lisbon-based curatorial team that started out in 2004 with the programming of different alternative spaces in Lisbon. They have organized series of solo shows by Portuguese emerging artists that have stirred up the city’s traditional art scene. They have been working internationally since 2009, having shifted their focus from conventional exhibition formats to critically engaging, participatory projects informed by the relationships of aesthetics and ethics within artistic practice.

/////////////MAKING A LIVING \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

AN OPEN LETTER TO TATE

TATE: NO SOUL FOR SALE // ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM // FAIR PAY FOR ARTISTS

"We don't really cherish our artists to the degree we should."
Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, quoted in the Evening Standard 23.04.10

As a grouping of national and international artists, we publicly challenge No Soul For Sale (NSFS) at Tate Modern over the weekend of 14th-16th May 2010.

The title No Soul For Sale re-enforces deeply reductive stereotypes about the artist and art production. With its romantic connotations of the soulful artist, who makes art from inner necessity without thought of recompense, No Soul For Sale implies that as artists we should expect to work for free and that it is acceptable to forego the right to be paid for our labour.

It has come to our attention that many participants are not being paid by Tate Modern for their efforts. In fact, most are self-funding their activities throughout the weekend. Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?

Reciprocal generosity is the lifeblood of independent art communities throughout the world. This spirit is not however the property of any one institution, artist or curator and it is complacent for Tate to believe that their position is comparable to ground level arts activity. It therefore seems disingenuous for Tate to claim that their hosting of NSFS is somehow altruistic or philanthropic. Tate publicly has the most to gain, yet we have discovered that Tate’s reciprocity does not even extend to the provision of basic resources, such as the use of chairs and tables for some of the participants in NSFS. Tate will commercially benefit from NSFS through increased audiences and the inevitable increase in the sale of books, magazines, merchandise, refreshments, donations and exhibition entry fees. Is the nature of this exchange really occurring on a level playing field? Is the relationship as reciprocal as it could be?

As many of us in Making A Living have worked with Tate and other major art galleries, we understand that the expectation of free labour and self -funding is not exclusive to NSFS. During our discussions it has come to light that Tate has not paid artists for some exhibitions, workshops and events, including last year’s Tate Triennial, and that this policy has existed over a considerable period of time, long before the current economic crisis became an issue for arts institutions.

We call for an end to this poor practice and manipulation of generosity as Tate Modern celebrates its 10th birthday. We call on Tate to make public its policy in regard to artists’ fees.

If artists continue to work for free, or are expected to pay for their efforts when working with our major art institutions, then we deny opportunities to the great majority of artists who simply cannot afford to take such financial risks. Tate and other major publicly funded galleries risk spoiling their good work by unwittingly limiting their pool of future exhibiting artists to individuals who can afford to pay for the privilege, or who are content or able to work for little or no pay. If NSFS manages to start a productive conversation about this 'elephant in the room' then we think it may yet be described as a success.

M.A.L
(Making A Living: A discussion group of Arts professionals currently active across the UK)
makingaliving@live.co.uk

/////////////PORTUGUES\\\\\\\\

O colectivo curatorial Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado apresenta “O Horizonte Insuperável”, um projecto desenvolvido para o evento No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents. Este evento reúne cerca de 70 dos mais inovadores espaços alternativos e colectivos curatoriais do mundo e realiza-se na Tate Modern, em Londres, no âmbito da comemoração do 10º aniversário desta instituição.

Lisboa, 3 de Maio – O colectivo curatorial Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado apresenta “O Horizonte Insuperável”, um projecto desenvolvido para o evento No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents. Este evento reúne cerca de 70 dos mais inovadores espaços alternativos e colectivos curatoriais do mundo e realiza-se na Tate Modern, em Londres, no âmbito da comemoração do 10º aniversário desta instituição. Após participações na primeira edição de No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents (Nova Iorque, 2009), na Frieze Projects da Frieze Art Fair (Londres, 2009) e na Curators’ Desk da Just Madrid (Madrid, 2010), “O Horizonte Insuperável” é o quarto projecto recentemente organizado por Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado em contextos de excelência internacionais.

O Horizonte Insuperável” inspira-se no pensamento do filósofo francês Jean-Luc Nancy. No livro La communauté désoeuvrée (1982), este definiu comunidade para além da sua dimensão cultural, económica e política. O projecto compreende obras de Carla Cruz, Ruth Ewan, Runo Lagomarsino e Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner que exploram o potencial do ideal comunitário na contemporaneidade. À natureza ontológica de colectivos curatoriais subjaz a relação com o tecido social em que operam, assim considerando o espaço público como uma arena para a participação individual no devir colectivo. Sob esta premissa, reuniram-se artistas que abordam a comunidade como uma realidade tanto em desintegração como em construção. Assim, as suas propostas enquadram as palavras de Nancy, para quem “o testemunho mais doloroso do mundo moderno (...) é o da dissolução, deslocação ou conflagração da comunidade.”

Carla Cruz recria uma mesa de voto; porém, os boletins contém uma pergunta – “Gostaria de participar” – com respostas múltiplas e a urna encontra-se selada, impedindo o gesto democrático. De Ruth Ewans vende-se, a preço de custo, um conjunto de autocolantes com desenhos alusivos a diversos grupos radicais britânicos, incluindo a The Plebs League, inspirada pelo ideário marxista. Aludindo ao popular jogo “pinãta”, o vídeo de Runo Lagomarsino analisa as dinâmicas de opressão e resistência resultantes do colonialismo na América Latina. Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner compõem um dispositivo tecnológico através do qual se imprimem continuamente, em folhas de papel A4, as notícias geradas pela agência noticiosa Thomson Reuters.

CHANTAL MOUFFE’s Democratic Paradox seen through TERRE THAEMLITZ’s Rosary Novena for gender Transitioning – Soulnessless Project.

2010-05-03T08:00:00.001-07:00

http://www.comatonse.com/releases/soulnessless/

Assuming, as the Oxford Dictionary states, that a Paradox is a “proposition that, despite sound reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems logically unacceptable or self contradictory” and democracy is a system of government by the whole population, what is contradictory about the rule of the many? This is the starting point of Mouffe’s analyses, that the Modern Democratic project poses a threat to democracy itself.
By criticizing the supposed essence, i.e. permanent nature, of liberal democracy Mouffe builds an argument for a radical pluralist democracy.

Pluralism as the dissolution of the markers of certainty (a notion that Mouffe takes from Lefort) legitimates conflict and division and proposes equality. The modern liberal democracy accepts pluralism, but this is taken as irrelevant and relegated to the private sphere as differences being mere facts, but Mouffe argues that pluralism is a not a fact but a valuable principle that should be enhanced and not hidden. Nonetheless if pluralism is to be celebrated it is also presented with limits, Mouffe does not defend heterogeneity to an incommensurable point, she proposes a continuous challenging of the relations of subordination but not their extinction, for this relations help us building the “we” which is the construction she claims as holding the political dimension.

Then in order to understand the importance of conflict she shows the eradicable nature of power. Objectivity, i.e. identity, is perceived always in opposition to something outside itself, and that outside is what makes it perceptible, so is part of its nature, power is identity’s “constitutive outside”. Identity is consequently contingent and therefore no one can claim to represent the totality. Power relations will always be there, so democracy can not be about abolishing power and antagonism, therefore the question is how to transform antagonism and Power according to democratic values?

Liberal democracy by concealing pluralism instead of building institutions that could present antagonism (rivalry) in an agonistic (contestant) way creates a problem, this being the transformation of political adversaries into enemies; and by presenting its institutions solid as real buildings unlegitimates and irrationalizes any possible challenge. Since homogeneity is an illusion and consensus an impossibility, what Mouffe proposes is a continuous and permanent agonistic conflict that instead of trying to erase power, brings it to the fore so it can be challenged.

Terre Thaemlitz is not looking for consensus, he is not looking for political correctness. He affirms boldly in his performance: I hate all religions.
For he is not an atheist that tolerates others belief, he re-asserts:

- I hate all religions. Without exception. Yours too.

Here, in the first part of his project Soulessness: ROSARY NOVENA FOR GENDER TRANSITIONING, Thaemlitz is deconstructing is own religious upbringing, his catholic upbringing.
So when I speak against religion and spirituality, I do so not as a person with the rare luxury of a secular upbringing, but as a person who has struggled to overcome one's own spiritual programming, and who sees others struggling to do the same. I assure you, any harshness to my words rests in defensive panic, not arbitrary aggression. I do not stand proudly before you. I am laying prostrate, an anti-Holy Roller speaking in tongues, trying to catch my breath for one more kick and "Fuck you!" against the endless trample of faiths and superstitions framing my existence in this world from birth to death. I concede the inescapability of religious and spiritual dogma to one degree or another in all corners of life - from extremist religious militarism to the seemingly harmless transcendental pretenses of "soul music," ambient, new age, classical, pop, rock, folk, house... No matter how much I wish for the eradication of spiritual thinking, I have no faith in the possibility of an atheist society or godless world. I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.

Thaemlitz presents this project as lecture performances, directing the narrative in the first person, where theory and facts are interwoven, to a point where it does not really matter the veracity of the facts, they serve to grip the public to his narrative. He stands before the audience in drag, dressed as an old fashion schoolteacher, reading from his notes (which are transcribed in his website). Subsequently he projects a video, where the audio is of equal importance, we should not forget that he is mainly an audio artists. The performance started with this anecdote:

I lived in Oakland, California. Although I did not own a radio receiver, the wires in my studio acted as an antenna, filling the line noise with religious broadcasts from a local public-access radio station.
Some might call them messages from God.
I called them fucking annoying.

The grainy video tells the story of an encounter, or an heritage. A little figurine owned by his grandmother led him to a whole new reading of catholic dogmas, the sinless conception of christ, his death and ressurection. Through the wax figurine of the Virgin Mary displaying a large erected penis to the stained glass representation of the Piéta; Thaemlitz takes us on a journey of individual transubstantiation, not of blood into wine, but of female into male and back again.
The woman that engenders from her own body her sexual opposite, and dies to return to the female form. ROSARY NOVENA is transgender tale.

I use the concept of agonistic pluralism to present a new way to think about democracy which is different from the traditional liberal conception of democracy as a negotiation among interests and is also different from the model which is currently being developed by people like Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls. While they have many differences, Rawls and Habermas have in common the idea that the aim of the democratic society is the creation of a consensus, and that consensus is possible if people are only able to leave aside their particular interests and think as rational beings. However, while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted. The democratic process should supply that arena. (MOUFFE, 2000)

I believe Thaemlitz is performing that arena. Presenting us with the affects of such liberal pluralist project that diverts conflict into an underground space, erupting violently on specific subjects, on him.

A limited inquiry into the influences of Catholicism in my own life would be a safer topic to discuss here, since anything less subjective could be labeled culturally insensitive, bad karma, anti-Semitic, demanding fatwah, or any number of other curses bestowed upon outsiders. I wish to limit the potential for such curses because I have already endured acts of verbal and physical violence at the hands of Christians, and suspect that fanatical followers of the other great religions of the world are no less capable of the same.

Thaemlitz voices dissent, he does not play the general tolerant model, that “forces the participants to leave aside all their particularities and interests.” (Mouffe, 2000, 87), the democratic tension is ineradicable and Thaemlitz performs it. Critic of spiritualism and the patriarchy society, he uses the symbol of the Virgin Mary, but has he states, not only as a possible feminist icon, but beyond that, as a gender trouble. Extremely critic, as well, of sexual transition through surgery, because in the end what happens is that we all conform to the old same binary of male female. The same old roles, the same old play. Thaemlitz ends the video with a hymn, sung to medical footage of vaginoplasty operation.

On that resurrection morning
When all dead in Christ shall rise
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life
Won't it be so bright and fair
When we meet our loved ones there
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

I'll have a new home of love eternal
Where the redeemed of God will stand
There'll be no more sorrow (No more pain)
There'll be no more strife
Raised in the likeness of my savior
Ready to live in paradise
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

When ol' Gabriel blows his trumpet
And we walk the streets of gold
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life
No more pain, worry, sorrow
In this wicked world of sin
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

I'll have a new home of love eternal
Where the redeemed of God will stand
There'll be no more sorrow (No more pain)
There'll be no more strife
Raised in the likeness of my savior
Ready to live in paradise
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

Oh dear brother are you livin'
For that day when Christ shall come
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life
Graves all burstin'
Saints a' shoutin'
Heavenly beauty all around
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

This sex change, for her, levels down the necessary complexity of gender identities, and the tale of desire to embody the idealized shape is counter posed with the compulsory sex change that homosexuals have to go through in Iran when stating their homosexual preference openly.

Thaemlitz finishes her video presentation and opens the performance to questions from the audience. Again we can sense the opening up of that space for articulation of antagonism, but is society prepared to voice differences and still be able to break some bread afterwards? For Mouffe the goal is to transform antagonisms into agonism. “This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but an adversary.” (MOUFFE, 2000, p.103)

How can we construct society on this model, against the liberal notion of being a mere collection of individuals and interests groups? For Mouffe “the prime task is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.” (MOUFFE, 2000, p.104) We can hint the open up of that place of encounter, of dissent in Thamelitz work, but how will the democratic institutions that could embody society agonistic play, in large scale, look like? Thaemlitz is very pessimistic; she does not believe that there will be any substantial change, even though we can witness this change in her performance; so while not believing in change she is already performing that very same change. And even though we cannot envision the agonistic institutions that Mouffe argues for, where ‘conflictual consensus’ can be achieved, Thaemlitz is voicing out loud all that remains hidden, all that can be only uttered as private (here I mean as non public therefore almost as non political). Hers, as many other projects, is maintaining this possible agonistic pluralism, and therefore keeping “the democratic contestation alive” (MOUFFE, 2000, p.105). Thaemlitz performs democracy, but could it really be institutionalized, as Mouffe believes, in order to save democracy as a form of government and society, or is democracy something else, or better, lying somewhere else, ‘below and beyond’ state policy.

Mouffe argues that the common good is always something unreachable, is “a vanishing point, something to which we constantly refer when we are acting as citizens, but that can never be reached.” (MOUFFE, 1992, p.379) While for Rancière democracy is not a form of government nor a type of society, but egalitarian relations “that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts,” is there is where we can spot democracy. (RANCIÈRE, 2006, p.96) Somehow their positions do not seem very different, but while Mouffe believes that change, even if precarious, can be achieved through governance, Rancière alert us to look at all that we consider today as democratic achievements, and how they were actually achieved outside the state framework, through people’s struggles and isolated acts.

My queries are these; what could an agonist democratic institution look like, and is it really necessary, or could democracy maintain itself on these temporary agonistic platforms, such as those provided by the arts? Moreover if democracy will never be a form of government but precarious single acts between equals, what is the role of organized social struggle and how can we envision different forms of community? What it seesm to happen in Thaemlitz work, for example is the possibility of different forms of community and empowerment within our oligarchic societies, done with the belief that nothing susbtancial will change, but it must be done anyhow. Although, I might accept that potential for change can be found in that articulation, I am still puzzled with the possibility of a truly democratic governance. But maybe I am down in the belief trap that Thaemelitz so violently urges us not to fall into.

NOVENA PRAYER (FOR NINE DAYS)
Hail, O Lady of Gender Transitioning, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, my hope!
To Thee do I send up my sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
O Holy Mother, in this age when feminine napkins are sold by South Korean transgendered celebrity Harisu, as Your imitators we beseech Thee for humility.
Forgive her envy of menstruation as that which she is "jealous of and wishes to do as a woman," and forgive my envy of sexual reassignment surgery as that which I am jealous of and wish to do as a "man."
Bless me, as You have blessed her, in granting faithful imitation and homage to Thine sacred womb, to give birth to my gender opposite.
Bless me with Thine beauty and grace.
Bless me with the heavenly riches necessary to complete such a transformation.
May the financial success of this audio project serve as the sacred seed of my own menstruation, an idillic flow like that seen in tampon commercials, a holy blue flow reflecting the plasticity of gender transitioning, draping my legs like Your blessed blue robe, that I may follow in Thine image.
O Lady of Gender Transitioning, pray for this sinner now and at the hour of my death, and receive me in my resurrection. This I humbly pray in Your name. Amen.

CHANTAL MOUFFE is a Belgium political theorist, knowned exactly for this notion of the pluralist agonistic democracy. From her vast work she is better known for have writen Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics with the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau in 1985.

TERRE THAEMLITZ is “a multi-media producer, writer, educator, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. His work combines a critical look at identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production. This diversity of themes is matched by Thaemlitz' wide range of production styles, which include electroacoustic computer music, club oriented deep house, digital jazz, ambient, and computer composed neo-expressionist piano solos.”

http://www.comatonse.com/thaemlitz/gigs.html

Thaemlitz is both addressed as male and female throughout this paper both because his own appearance in drag in the performances and her self address in her website are always in between male / female binary, therefore I used the hymn of gender transition to do the linguistic change on Thaemlitz, in lack of a better tool to convey her own gender troubling in a society where one can still not be gender neutral.

MOUFFE, C (1992) Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics. In BUTLER, J. and SCOTT, J. W. 1992. Feminist Theorize the Political. Routledge.

MOUFFE, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox. London, New York. Verso.
RANCIÈRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.
THAEMLITZ, T. (2009) http://www.comatonse.com/writings/becoming-minor.html (01.05.2010)

ON SPINOZA’S POLITICAL TREATISE

2010-04-25T04:30:00.000-07:00

Emanuel de Witte 1675

The world cannot have been created for any purpose other than which it fulfils by being that it is. To say that it has been created for the good of man, or for any similar end, is to indulge in grotesque anthropomorphism. (XXV)

Spinoza (1632–1677) was a contemporary of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and pretty much influenced by the latter. Hobbes thought of humanity as self-interested and always struggling for power and, in his 1615 Leviathan, set out to understand why and how can men actually cooperate and trust each other despite their nature. Hobbes idea, as pointed out by David Held in Models of Democracy, is that to be able to escape a lonely, hard and most certainly short life men have to come together. So society is better than natural state, and as Spinoza would argue, in choosing between two goods or two evils one goes for the greatest of the goods and lesser of the evils, and this could almost be an universal truth, and the reason why men are willing to “surrender their rights of self-government to a powerful single authority” (Held 1996), for the sake of security and self preservation. Hobbes theories were the beginning of the need to establish “both the liberty of individuals and sufficient power for the state to guarantee social and political order.” (Ibid) Hence he thought that the perfect state was absolute but with the consent of the people. “A multitude of men, are One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented” (ibid – Leviathan p. 220). A sovereign, therefore, is someone or a group of people who has been given the right of governing through the social contract.

But before engaging in his own definition of the perfect government Spinoza will spend a considerable time convincing his readers, in his Theological-political Treatise, that the Bible “leaves reason absolutely free; that it has nothing in common with philosophy, in fact, that Revelation and Philosophy stand on totally different footing” (p. 9); demonstrating that there is no contradiction between being religious, i.e. obedient, and scientific experimenting and thinking. If we are looking for empiric knowledge we won’t find it in the bible. He always sought to “separate philosophy from theology, and to show the freedom of thought which such separation insures both” (p. 200) and having done that he could concentrate on the pursuit of the ideal state.

The concern of philosophers have been to understand what is the aim of the state, and how can a state secure that aim, but even before focusing on what is the goal and goodness of a state, the question might be how can men live together?

According to Spinoza “every individual has sovereign right to do all that he can; (p. 200) so the individual who does not “yet know reason” will act “solely according to the laws of his desire” as the wise man will live according to the laws of reason … “the natural right of the individual man is thus determined, not by sound reason, but by desire and power.” (p. 201) But men, he continues, that do not live in community and by reason “live most miserably”, as argued also by Hobbes, therefore “men must necessarily come to an argument to live together as securely and well as possible if they are to enjoy as a whole the rights which naturally belong to them as individuals, and their life should be no more conditioned by the force and desire of individuals, but by the power and will of the whole body” (p. 202) deciding by doing so to be guided by reason. The question is, how to keep men under human law? If everyone was led by reason, they will keep the social pact for the sake of the good of the state, but according to both Hobbes and Spinoza this is not true. Spinoza believed that mankind is drawn away by pleasure so we are only restrained by the hope of some greater good, or the fear of a greater evil.

Balibar, in Spinoza and Politics, explains how Hobbes argues that in order to establish security, “natural right must be replaced by civil right” (Balibar 1998) which can only be imposed by a higher force, the state, and through the acceptance of the social contract, the natural state is replaced by the “body politic”. But Spinoza rejects this distinction between “natural right” and “civil right”, for him freedom of thought lies beyond the reach of the state.

Having come together in society men are giving away part of their rights and power, but this, argues Spinoza, would not enslave them, because the individual might be less free but the state is the freest; the subject “obeys the orders of the sovereign power, given for the common interest, wherein he is included.” (p. 215) Here we can see how he differs from Hobbes, for men remain as they were in the state of nature, equals, because no one transfers his rights absolutely, one still has a voice. Furthermore even in acting out of fear for the state, men act according to their own thought, “obedience does not consist so much in the outward act as in the mental state of a person obeying.” (Ibid)

Security or common good have been seen as the aim of governance but for Spinoza the true aim is liberty. The best government allows “freedom of philosophical speculation no less that of religious belief” (p. 263) and this is why we went to such a length defending freedom of thought in the Theological Political Treatise. Freedom of speech was of extreme importance to Spinoza, which saw no contradiction between the liberty of saying what one thinks and the authority of the sovereign power.

Spinoza, as Hobbes, desired an absolute state, but, unlike the latter, he believed that it could be in the hands of the multitude, i.e. it could be a democracy. In a democracy “everyone submits to the control of authority over his actions, but not over his judgment and reason (ibid)

As Balibar exposes, all of Spinoza’s arguments, in the Political Treatise, are to prove that the closer a state is to democracy the stronger it will be. “The basis and aim of a democracy is to avoid the desires as irrational, and to bring men as far as possible under control of reason, so that they may live in peace and harmony: if this basis be removed the whole fabric falls to ruin.” (Balibar 1998) Moreover that his democratic propositions are strongly connected to his belief in equality and freedom, freedom of thought as mentioned above and equality between all citizens, which can “exist by the joint result of institutions combined with collective praxis” (ibid)

But Spinoza’s argument, weaved in the Political Treatise thought the analyses of different political regimes, was left unfinished in the middle of the democratic regime, for he died before being able to conclude it, but as Balibar points out, in all regimes’ analyses we see the tendency to democracy “the less sovereignty is physically identified with one fraction of society… the more it will tend to coincide with the people as a whole, and the stronger and more stable it will be. But at the same time, the more difficult it will be to imagine its unity (its unanimity) and its indivisibility (its capacity for decision), and the more complicated it will be to organise them in practice. (Balibar 1998) The question left unanswered then, and still threatening contemporary democracy is, how can the multitude govern its own passions?

“[E]very individual wishes the rest to live after his own mind, and to approve what he approves ... reason can ... do much to restrain and moderate the passions, but ... the road, which reason herself points out, is very steep...” (p. 289) Reason will then refrain the passions, but it does not mean that it destroys them; and passions, Balibar argues, create forms of dependency to others.

To better understand Spinoza’s preference for the democratic rule we follow his own path: what is the best Dominion?

“Where men have general rights, and all guided, as it were, by one mind, it is certain that every individual has the less right the more the rest collectively exceed him in power; that is, he has, in fact, no right over nature but that which the common law allows him. But whatever he is ordered by the general consent he his bound to execute, or may rightfully be compelled thereto. This right, which is determined by the power of a multitude, is generally called Dominion.” (p. 297)

He continues by saying that if the rule, which is decided by the multitude, is entrusted to a “council composed of certain chosen persons” we are facing an aristocracy; if to a sole man, then it will be a monarchy, if “to a council, composed of the general multitude” (ibid) then the dominion is a democracy. But what is the best, i.e., which one can ensure individual’s liberty? Spinoza thought that the best and most independent would be the one “founded and guided by reason” (p. 313) and he added... “a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear” (p. 314). Hope is then the bond between individuals and of those with the state. Hope in Liberty?

How can a Monarchy ensure a good governance and freedom? According to Spinoza, a monarchy is always, in fact, an aristocracy; for no man can “by himself hold the supreme right of a commonwealth.” (p. 317) Moreover, because normally aristocrats are more interested in securing their lineage and plotting against each other, than governing for the people, their subjects will be under worst conditions. Nevertheless, and because from his perspective politics is the science of preserving the state, Spinoza will articulate how could a monarchy persist. First a monarch should be careful of is own inconstancies. “Every law be an explicit will of the king, but not every will of the king a law.” (p. 328) And he thought that the multitude would be willing to hand to a king that “which it cannot itself have absolutely within its authority, namely, ending controversies” (p. 330) and regarding that the king is surrounded by many counsellors that can express the multitude’s interests, “the multitude may preserve under a king’s an ample enough liberty, if it contrive that the king’s power be determined by the sole power, and pursued by the defence of the multitude itself.” (p. 344)

What about aristocracy?
“A king needs counsellors, but a council like this” as we said before, composed of chosen people, “doesn’t. Kings are mortal, but councils are everlasting” (p. 346) Here the multitude is under no consultation and the only reason why aristocracy is not absolute is because the council fears the multitude, therefore the multitude retain some liberty, even if only by a tacit agreement. Spinoza’s conviction was that “aristocracies were formerly democracies… that augmented with foreigners…” (p. 351) and since those could not become citizens of full rights a class of patricians was formed. Spinoza states that if “the nature of patricians was that they were free from all passions (in choosing who his or not a citizen) and guided by mere zeal for the public welfare in choosing their patrician colleagues, no dominion could be compared with aristocracy.”(p. 387) but has said before, reason can refrain passions but never extinguish them.

Therefore we arrive at the third dominion; democracy, which differs from aristocracy mainly because the latter “depends on the supreme council’s will and franchise only, that this or that man is made a patrician, so that no one has the right to vote or fill public offices by inheritance, and that no one can by right demand this right as is the case in the dominion whereof we are now treating.”(Ibid) Thus, a man can claim the right to vote and fill public offices, and even if the supreme council might have fewer citizens this shall still be called a democracy, “because in them the citizens who are destined to manage affairs of the state, are not chosen as the best by the supreme council, but are destined by law.”(Ibid)

That the rule is chosen by lot is the main characteristic of democracy, how it can be, as Spinoza wished, an absolute government is what he did not succeed to explain. Therefore the only clue given has to why he thought this would be the best dominion is what Balibar points out when we says that in the analyses of the former dominions, they are best as they approach a more democratic governance.

But then, how can the multitude govern its passions when one knows that every man thinks the other should live as he does? Can state institutions distil the multiple opinions into a common opinion? Although true equality does not exist and can only be achieve through the action of the state, as true independence does not exist, and citizens have to establish relations of dependence between each other and between them and the state; it is this state and their institutions who should “distil a single opinion, and thus a choice, out of the fluctuation of minds” and to produce a union around a common purpose. Then, as Balibar states, it is imaginable that the multitude might rule itself “on the basis of the dialectic between these two forms of rationalisation of the State, one of which begins by privileging equality, and the other, freedom”. (BALIBAR 1998)

BALIBAR, E. 1998. Spinoza and Politics, Verso.

HELD, D. 1996. Models of Democracy. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.

SPINOZA, B. 1951. A Theological-Political Treatise. Dover Publications.

ANGEL SQUARE #3 // PRAÇA DO ANJO #3

2010-04-18T10:03:00.001-07:00

354kg, 118€

“The Porto’s Court of São João Novo ordered yesterday, X, to a prison sentence of four months on charges of receiving stolen goods, the only unlawful act proved in trial”; wrote, in november 2009, M. Claudia Monteiro in the Newspaper Notícias. As an urban tale remains the story that the alleged thieves withdrew energy – to power the equipment needed to shred the bronze sculpture – directly from one of the Clérigos Shopping abandoned stores. The female angel, created by the sculpture José Rodrigues, valued at 200 thousand euros, is the thread to the history of this square. Initially called Angel Square, as the legend tells that the wife of D. Afonso have fallen there from her donkey, and the king ordered that a chapel should be erected on the place. It was after an outdoor market and later, when Porto wanted to appear as a truly European city, that it became Lisbon Square and Clérigos Shopping.
In 2006, none of the refined stores remained open, the space being used only as access to the underground parking. And more specifically, in December 22nd, thieves, who were neither members of an international art trafficking network, nor bearing Zorro’s masks, decided to strike the final blow to a space death at birth.
How many more similar spaces will arise in the city to fall, not under the thick cover of a great cataclysm such as Pompeii, but due to the rapid erosion of the negligent planning of our leaders?
Association of Friends of the Angel Square, Porto 2010.

354kg, 118€

“O Tribunal de São João Novo, no Porto, condenou, ontem, __ a uma pena de prisão efectiva de quatro meses, pelo crime de receptação negligente, o único acto ilícito provado durante o julgamento.” Escrevia M. Cláudia Monteiro em Novembro de 2009 no Jornal de Notícias. Como mito urbano ficará a estória de que os presumíveis assaltantes retiraram a energia – necessária ao equipamento para retalhar a escultura em bronze – directamente duma das lojas abandonadas do Clérigos Shopping. A anja, de autoria do mestre José Rodrigues, avaliada em 200 mil euros, é o fio condutor à história desta praça. Inicialmente denominada Praça do Anjo, pois conta a lenda que a mulher de D. Afonso aí terá caído do burrico, terá então o rei mandado erguer uma capela. Foi depois mercado ao ar livre, e mais tarde quando o Porto se quis dar ares de cidade europeia, transformou-se em Praça de Lisboa e Clérigos Shopping.
Em 2006, nenhuma das lojas de mercadorias finas restava aberta, sendo o espaço apenas usado como acesso ao parque de estacionamento subterrâneo. E mais precisamente a 22 de Dezembro, uns ladrões, que não seriam membros de uma rede de tráfico internacional de arte, nem possuidores de mascarilha, resolveram dar o golpe final a um espaço moribundo à nascença.
Quantos mais espaços semelhantes se erguerão na cidade, para caírem, não sob o manto espesso de um fantástico cataclismo como o de Pompeia, mas, devido à rápida erosão de um planeamento negligente dos nossos líderes?
Associação de Amigos da Praça do Anjo, Porto 2010.

Carla Cruz and Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa at Sousa Ribeiro shop for the Troca-se por Arte event, Porto.

TROCAM-SE VITRINES POR ARTE

2010-04-11T16:04:00.000-07:00

at Brno - czech republic

2010-03-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

Trying out some arguments on public space, participation and collaboration of the audiences at Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts.

The worst question I can ever be asked is: “You’re an artist! What type of art do you do?”, I can’t answer straight and I always seem to stutter.

...

And if public sphere, or public space was always connected to politics, or, lets say, it was a way of measuring the pulse of our democratic society, to attest its health, it seems to be less and less part of the political and philosophical discourse, as if of a cadavre we are talking about, and there is nothing much we can do about its situation, than just to forget.

“Participatory practices presumes that there is a difference between the producer and receiver, but the focus is on the latter, to whom a significant part of the development of the work is transferred”(Maria Lind, 2007)

Notes#022

2010-02-19T13:30:00.001-08:00

"POWER2010 has entered the final few days of its public vote - where anyone can go online and vote for the changes they'd make to British democracy. Of the 29 ideas in the vote, themselves submitted by members of the public and then endorsed by a Deliberative Poll of a random selection of the population, only the top five come midnight on Monday will make the cut as a set of people's proposals for democratic renewal." quoted from opendemocracy.net
POWER2010 enter site to vote

Notes#021

2010-02-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

"Michael Landy transforms the South London Gallery into 'Art Bin', a container for the disposal of works of art. As people discard their art works the enormous 600m³ bin becomes, in Michael Landy’s words, “a monument to creative failure”.
where to apply to discard your work

Notes#020

2010-02-19T05:29:00.000-08:00

...thinking of CRISTIANA ROCHA's work when reading Agamben's comming community, specially the idea of the inessential character of the whatever singularity ... not that I fully understand why.

In 2007 at the massive participatory even "Serralves em Festa", at Porto's contemporary art museum, Rocha invited the audience, according to some specific characteristic, to come together at a particular hour of the day at a particular time, and only them the commonality appeared...

see more here

Louder than BOMBS

2010-02-18T01:42:00.001-08:00

BOLHÃO

2010-02-18T01:41:00.001-08:00

Notes#019

2010-02-11T05:25:00.000-08:00

@http://www.edinburghsculpture.org/magazine.html

Democracy according to Aristotle and the Revolutionary Workers in Venezuela.

A society is called a State when it has a collective aim, and according to Aristotle it aims at the highest good, this good is of the State itself and not of each citizen’s as individual.

Naturally, thought Aristotle, this State shall have rulers and subjects and is to be governed in a way ‘where everyman can act best and live happily’. This happiness is bond to wisdom and not to material possessions, but to be wise one has to have leisure time and not be engaged in everyday life survival, therefore wise man must be provided with property. Here comes a vicious circle, those who are wise must be entrusted with property, those with property and free time will certainly be wiser. So property is again a condition to rule and in the end of the day Aristotle polity is an oligarchy.

Nowhere in his treatise Aristotle considers a State without rich and poor; even though he affirms that the best States are those where the middle class is the larger class; as a matter of fact it could be accepted – there have been always rich and poor, but is troubling when it is never questioned why are always the same getting the best gifts from Fortune, for it seems that there is not much class interchange in his treatise.

Education is paramount to Aristotle’s constitution, and it is a matter of the State; this reveals which instrument is used to maintain each player in its own position, for education is the same among equals but some are equals as possible rulers and others equal as permanent subjects. Aristotle will use a similar argument to Plato’s to differentiate natural rulers and natural subjects making an analogy with the anatomy of the soul where one part – rational – naturally rules and the other – irrational – is ruled. Again why some are soul and others body is difficult to accept as natural.

Now, let the citizens rule! But what is a citizen? A citizen is not an individual who lives in a certain State, he is the one who takes part of the government of the State; and the constitution will be different if this government is in the hand of one, or of few, or of many; and of course governing to the common interest otherwise they are perversions. The best constitutions are then, according to Aristotle, kingship, aristocracy and polity or simply constitution, which is a ‘fusion between oligarchy and democracy, inclining towards democracy in an attempt to unite the freedom of the poor and the wealth of the rich.’

In practice there are only two types of government: oligarchies and democracies, both perversions, or imperfect constitutions. A form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority govern, and an oligarchy when the rich, being few, rule. Focusing only on Aristotle notion of democracy, we find that it arises out of a revolution based on ‘the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.’ With which he disagrees, because men are rarely absolutely equal, the simple fact of being young or old, he would argue, differentiate men. And because a democracy governs towards the interests of the majority and not of the common is, therefore, a perversion.

Nonetheless the main characteristics of democracy, for Aristotle, are: ‘the election of officers by all out of all; and that all should rule over each, and each in his turn over all’; the appointment to every office is made by lot; the possession of property should not be required for offices; no one should hold an office twice, and this tenure should be brief; all men should judge, in all matters, or in the most important; the assembly should be supreme over all causes, or the most important. This highest type of democracy is based strictly on equality, rich and poor have the same right to hold office and the multitude has supreme power. But because it is the highest it is also the worst type.

As a counterbalance I propose a look at 5 Factories, the 2006 documentary by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler about five self-managed factories in Venezuela, which seems to show that a democratic rule is possible. After the Bolivarian Revolution (term coined by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to refer to the social movement, or twenty first century socialism in South-America) many workers in Venezuela took charge of factories that they had worked on and had been closed down by their former administrators as ruined and led them to full operational plants. Organized in cooperatives, the five examples given in this documentary portray a different way of managing a company, a social administration way. Taking the example of the presented CAIGUA tomato sauce factory, which won a government subsidy - already during Chavez legislation – to invest in modern equipment and enlarge the range of products, but which subsidy was diverted for personal expenses, I will demonstrate how a democratic management is done. The workers, realizing, that the factory was working only at 10% of its maximum capability, due to lack of raw material but specially due to ill administration, saw in the misuse of the government’s subsidy and the lack of payment the excuse they were looking for to take the management of the plant in their hands. Occupying the factory day and night over three months, they prevented the former administration to enter the facilities. Encouraged by Chavez government they constituted a cooperative, that gives shape to their social struggles. Part of this different way of managing a company, which is directed towards the benefits of the whole community and not only of the company itself, CAIGUA helped the local producers with machinery in order to augment the producing of their raw material, tomatoes. The company is managed by a temporary board of directors, selected from the body of workers, which works closely with the assembly all, 58, workers. All the projects and decisions pass by this assembly where all the opinions count. It seems only possible because there is such a small body of workers, critics of democracy would argue; but in another example presented in this documentary, an aluminium plant, the same management is being done with 3200 workers. Part of the success of these co-managed companies is due to the fact that all workers are informed of all the procedures necessary for the company’s production and management; that all workers are involved in all decisions and also because part of this type of cooperative administration involves a social-political engagement and education. At CAIGUA all workers earn the same salary, being administrators, technicians, or operators; and the surplus is distributed between the community by supporting education centres, medical care or opening their canteen tho the most needed. The aim of a democratic state, Aristotle would say, is liberty. Listening to these workers one can understand this idea of liberty, of not being constrained to express one’s opinion and ideas regarding the management of the common, but they are also aware that it does not mean simply licence - as described by many democratic critics.

The danger for Aristotle is that in democracy ‘the people becomes a monarch’, which grows into despotism. The best democracy, for him, would then be that which is subject to the law. The multitude is not call to decide upon every matter, specially the most important, for those would be in the hands of the magistrates; and the best citizens are in charge, so the more qualified represent the uninformed.

Yet, we realize in this documentary that when a worker feels that his opinion counts; that the company also belongs to him and that the result of his labour will benefit not the company and its few owners but himself and his community; he will be engaged in aiming at that Aristotelian highestgood, which is not the good only of himself but of the community, and ultimately he is HAPPY.

Aristotle, 1921, The Works of Aristotle, Oxford, Clarendon Press
Azzellini, D. and Ressler, O. 2006. 5 Factories. [DVD].

@http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ressler.html

(An Ideal Society Creates Itself: Venezuela and the Bolivarian Process) Oliver Ressler

see also the text "Can the Bolivarian Process Achieve Socialism? 5 Worker-controlled Factories in Venezuela" by Sharat G. Lin

Notes#018

2010-02-06T03:26:00.000-08:00

Different types of constitutions

Notes#017

2010-01-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

Abraham Bosse (attr.)
Frontespiece to Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, And Power
of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil.
1651

Notes#016

2010-01-21T06:22:00.000-08:00

Twitted by GRAVANA:
"Camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars will soon be taking photo suggestions from the public http://ow.ly/YU4x"

It reminds me of an overheard comment on how fashionable participation is nowadays, from televote to educational services in museums ... to NASA. With no sarcasm I say, when not mandatory there is something really powerfull about participation ...

"Since arriving at Mars in 2006, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has recorded nearly 13,000 observations of the Red Planet's terrain. Each image covers dozens of square miles and reveals details as small as a desk. Now, anyone can nominate sites for pictures.
...
The idea to take suggestions from the public follows through on the original concept of the HiRISE instrument, when its planners nicknamed it "the people's camera." The team anticipates that more people will become interested in exploring the Red Planet, while their suggestions for imaging targets will increase the camera's already bountiful science return. Despite the thousands of pictures already taken, less than 1 percent of the Martian surface has been imaged." see the rest of the article here http://ow.ly/YU4x

Participants will not be just anyone, for the suggestions are sellected 'based on science rationale', it is, therefore, targeted to science students and professionals. I have created my account but since I could not provide any further rationale then curiosity I won't be able to suggest any target for NASA's camera nor receive my own picture of Mars terrain, oh well, "public" is only universal in theory anyway!

Notes#015

2010-01-21T03:40:00.000-08:00

Is it the question of maintaining a public sphere the question of the possibility of democracy?

ORWELL: Political purpose - using the word "political" in the widest possible sense - the desire to push the world in a direction, to change other people's ideas about the type of society for which they should fight. (2008, 17)

I have always defended artistic intervention in public space, for the defense of a participated public sphere, therefore democratic and this is my political purpose. But what is public sphere or even democracy and its relationship with art it is still to be understand, and what I share here is just the beginning of a search. Neither the fabric is woven, or the loom ridden, but only the warp preparation is being done.

The bourgeois public sphere, which Habermans gives account of its disintegration in the The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was a the late eighteenth century sphere of private individuals gathered as a public and thus controlling public authority. This enlightened public use of reason was not only the courage to think for ourselves, but to do it aloud, and is seen as the paradise lost, but with the mixture of state and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a 'public sphere has lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had made public to the control of a critical public.’

Salons disappeared, in the course of twentieth century, the leisure activities of culture-consuming public replace them, but these new activities do not require any critical discussion. The diagnosis was that the discussion has become a mere exchange of tastes and preferences among consumers since the occupation of the public sphere by the dispossessed masses, which led to an interlocking of state and society that has demolished the old foundation of that sphere without supplying a new one.

The importance of a critical public sphere in connecting society with the state seems still paramount to democratic theory, therefore many defend its rehabilitation, but is there only one public sphere, or are they multiple?

HANNULA: The idea of an open public sphere, where so the story goes, all interested parties can collaborate and exchange ideas equally is a beautiful dream, but not much more that that. Public space is a tool of control, and a tool for achieving certain ends. (2006, 74)

Let’s admit the plurality of public spheres – but Habermas considers only a democratic public sphere, which does not coincide with the public spheres of mass culture, is one and only one in which citizens could communicate about the regulation of public affairs.’

Unlike Habermas the Viennese philosopher Marchart opposes to this idea that the democratic public sphere 'is naturally privileged over others’. He asks, ‘what makes all the various "partial" public spheres such as the everyday public spheres of advertising, backstairs gossip, sports events, youth cultures, etc. any less public, less autonomous or less universal than a public sphere created through rational discussion.’

LACLAU: For me, a radically democratic society is one in which a plurality of public spaces constituted around specific issues and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instils in its members a civic sense which is a central ingredient of their identity as individuals. Despite the plurality of these spaces, or, rather, as a consequence of it, a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific identity. Within this community, the liberal institutions - parliament, elections, divisions of power - are maintained, but these are one public space, not the public space.

Mouffe would follow saying that despite this plurality democracy does not consist of a colorful harlequin suit of public spheres, ‘rather the conflict of the question as to which public spheres are tolerated as politically legitimate and which are not’. This is the notion of an agonist democracy where different groups will be in permanent conflict, not as enemies but as competitors. Public sphere emerges where is dissent since homogeneity is an illusion and consent an impossibility. What Mouffe proposes, therefore, is a continuous and permanent agonist conflict, that instead of trying to eliminate power relations brings them to the fore to be disputed. The possibility of democracy lies also there where a constant articulation and re-articulation of alliances, or temporary consensus is made.

HANNULA: We are part of the game, part of the mess. What we ought to strive for is the perspective of a critical reflective participant... (2006, 76)

In what sense can art – and we shall say public, including performance which is the reason for this ‘warping’ – be a part of this ever-present attempt ceaseless attempt to build a public sphere and hence society?

BEGGAR: you have nothing to do with it. Now you have your chest hollow, like a hole in the sewer, because you made a stupid question. They are all stupid questions. What stupidity, questions! *

So lets untangle the skein from another end. Democracy for Plato was not only a form of government, but the third degree of the good government’s decay. The democrat, son of the oligarch, blind due to excessive freedom: for him everything is the same, good and bad, everyone is entitled to equal civic participation, liberty and equality is his motto. Jusque ici tout va bien. But it is not the fall but the landing that is matters, and according to Plato all that is excessive comes back as its opposite. The destruction of democracy, he announces, will be by the metamorphosis of its highest good - freedom - into its opposite: excessive slavery, and with it tyranny.

By this diapason the contemporary critics of democracy tune their repertoire, portraying democracy as the destroyer of the social body due to its excessive individualism – the search for personal pleasures and material prosperity - which in turn is seen as the antidote since time Aristotle’s time of that which is fatal to democracy and which reveals the known democratic paradox: the excess of democratic activity is the ruin of democracy and therefore should be repressed. In turn this repression leaves citizens indifferent to the common good and undermine the state’s authority. Good government, as Rancière affirms, shall be that which is capable of balancing this excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent to democratic life.

RANCIÈRE: democracy is the worst of governments with the exception of all the others. (2006, 4)

Being able to rule or be ruled is an aphorism dear to the good government of Plato - where the most stronger and wise were the guardians of the city - but it is also exactly where democracy turns out to be problematic. The real scandal, Rancière would say, is not in the excessive demand for individual pleasure but in the superiority to rule be based on nothing more than the absence of superiority, i.e., the guardians would be chosen by drawing of lots.

Politics begins exactly there, where the power of birth is undermined and declared for what it is, the power of the property-owners. Democracy is precisely this dissociation and not a kind of constitution, or a type of society. The power of the people is not the union nor the power of the majority but the very particular power of those who have no more right to govern than to be submit, which is then the power of anyone, and everyone.

The public sphere, as stated above, shall be in constant conflict, just as democracy must fight continuously against the distribution of public and private under the control of oligarchs, and also, as Rancière says, ‘struggle for the enlarging of the recognition, as equals and as political subjects, of those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings, and to assert the public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private.' It will then be in the small gestures of emancipated political subjects that democracy operates.

* In The Begger or the Dead Dog. 1919. Bertolt Brecht

HABERMAS, J. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Polity Press.
HANNULA, M. 2006. The Politics of Small Gestures: Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art, art-ist.
MARCHART, O. 1999 . Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s). [Online] disponível em http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en [Acedido a 14 Novembro 2009]
MOUFFE, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London, New York: Verso.
ORWELL, G. 2008. Por Que Escrevo e Outros Ensaios. Antígona.
PLATO. 1997. Republic. Wordsworth.
RANCIÈRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

Notes#014

2010-01-11T03:20:00.000-08:00

HARUN FAROCKI
Against what?
Against whom?

image source

4. Transmission, 2007. Video, 1 screen, 43 minutes.
"Transmission was a public art commission in Zurich, designed originally as a loop for projection outside a bus station. Its subject is the memorial stone, a site where memory seems permanently fixed"

Transmission. Why do people want to connect to something, touch and be touched? Have I touched St. Peter’s foot in Rome? I don’t recall doing so, but I do remember perfectly realizing the power of a single touch. There is a saying in Portuguese that the continuing dripping of soft water in hard stone will eventually open a hole. Maybe that was what went through my mind, and if I touched the saint’s foot was not so much with the desire to connect with the divine but with that mass of people who repeated a gesture over and over until the metal foot became soft, polished and shapeless. That would be for me the morbid allure, being part of an endless chain. The power of the repetition of an act. But this is not the metaphor for the power of the people, the one that destroys social constructions, rather is the repetition leading to meaninglessness. Rancière knew that already when we saw in the power of the people not the power of the population or of the majority, ‘but the power of anyone at all’.

The power of subjectification, of becoming a subject of politics, which is always something ‘defined in an interval between identities.’ (Rancière, 2006, 59) between different names of subjects. That’s when politics occurs, and like the women that in 1955 refuse to leave the white people’s seat in an Alabama bus, politics implies: ‘the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular,’ that are fixed by models of government and practices of authority i.e., by police.

These repetitions in Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, and Munich are full of hope and so are our votes in each and every election, which lead to a change of flavor but do not a new aliment. Rancière will call it an oligarchic invention to look for consent, and the representative democracy portrayed as only representing the interest of an elite. Universal suffrage is not a natural consequence of democracy, he will further, it is its struggle, the democractic struggle against the privatization of the process of enlarging the sphere of State intervention. Pursuing ‘the recognition, as equals and as political subjects those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings – wage workers and women;’ and ‘the recognition of the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth;’ (Rancière, 2005, 55) and finally the enlargement of the struggles to ‘assert the public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private.’ (Rancière, 2006, 56)

This redistribution of spheres and the subjectification inherent to it is paramount to Rancière’s maintenance of democracy, or is where democracy actually operates, and understanding what democracy is means renouncing to a vision of a world governed by the multitude and trust it to those singular and precarious acts on political subjects.

at Raven Row
56 Artillery Ln.
London

Notes#013

2009-12-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

'We are accustomed to hearing that democracy is the worst of governments with the exception of all the others.' (Ranciére, 2006, 4)

Democracy has been hated since ancient times as a perversion of the good government due to the excess of license which with intensive participation ruins the state; this has been re-directed to the search of material prosperity and private pleasures which results on citizen’s indifference towards the common good and the weakening of public authority. So if not by the illness death comes by the cure.

The diagnosis is identical today, people are disengaged from politics, and if politics is, as in ancient times, the search for the common good, and today’s citizen is the individual consumer pursuing his private affairs we can see how democracy was reduced to a mere form of society emptied from politics, and seen as a corruption of it’s people and not of its government.

Who is entitled to govern has always been the question in search of the good government and it is where democracy, states Rancière, reveals the trouble. Plato lists seven titles to govern; four related to birth: being older, or the father, highborn, free; and two associated to relations in nature: stronger over the weaker, wiser over the ignorant. The first four, base government of kinship; the latter two on excellence, and according to Rancière it is where politics commences, when the title to govern is separated from kinship, and also when the seventh title appears – the drawing of lots – the title of chance, the democratic title which is no title. And that is what is so outrageous for some people: that age, birth or even wisdom has to ‘bow before the law of chance.’

Then, if politics begins when the power of birth is undermined and its true nature disclosed – property-owning power – democracy creates a rupture relegating to different places the principle of government and the principle of society, and this dissociation is its ultimate meaning: ‘the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.’ (45) And for Rancière ‘if politics means anything it means something that is added to the possible governments’, that naturally are oligarchic, ‘and put themselves forward as models for the construction of larger an more complex human communities.’ (45) This something is democracy, the government of chance. So in his view democracy is neither a type of constitution nor a form of society, ‘but is this ungovernable on which every government must ultimately find out it is based.’ (49) The condition to have a political government, thus, is to be founded on the absence of title to govern, and politics exists only if there is a supplementary title, and again the scandal of democracy, is that this title is the absence of title; the power of anyone at all. So at the bottom of every government is equality, for inequality cannot exist without a ‘multitude of egalitarian relations’.

Democracy has been confused with representative democracy, but lets not be fooled says Rancière, ‘representation was never a system invented to compensate for the growth of population’ it represents the property owning minorities ‘who are entitled to take charge of public affairs.’ But again democracy is not a type of constitution; it can never be identified with a juridico-political form. It is the power of the people – not of the majority but of anyone and everyone – and this power works beneath the state, because of its egalitarian foundation; and beyond the state, because its public activity frustrate the ‘State’s tendency to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere’. The State’s tendency is to shrink this public sphere , by relegating the interventions of the citizen’s to the private domain; democracy fights this tendency in the endless effort to enlarge this sphere. This struggle is then about distribution, a key concept in Rancière’s thought, the ‘distribution of the public and the private that shores up the twofold domination of the oligarchy in the State and in society’. This re-distribution is a struggle to: defend the ‘public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private’ (56); recognize ‘the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth;’ (55) by doing so it enlarges the ‘recognition, as equals and as political subjects those who have been relegated by the State law to the private life of inferior beings.’

The idea of becoming a political subject is also paramount to Rancière’s thought; are man and citizen the same subject? Rancière unpacks this question through Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx notion of Human Rights. To the first these are the rights of bare life, of those who do not belong to any constitutional national community, therefore without rights, so the Human Rights are an illusion; to the latter these are the rights of citizens, property owners who belong to a national community, therefore the rights of those who have rights. But to Rancière they both miss that the one of politics exists only through that supplement which is democracy. Neither bare life, nor citizenship of constitutional texts are political subjects, these are always defined by an interval between identities, when the distribution of terms and places are overturned.

Rancière uses the statement of Olympe Gouges to further this idea: 'Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum', i.e., if she can be sentenced to death then she does not belong solely to the domestic life. ‘Women can therefore claim rights as women and as citizens, an identical right that, however, can only be asserted in the form of the supplement.’ (60) Gouges, maintains Rancière, proved wrong both Arendt’s and Marx’s views. She ‘inserted a third possibility: women's and citizen's rights are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.’ (61) They are deprived of the rights but at the same time they exercise them. Politics is that operation of splitting into two – which he illustrates with the example of the women that in 1955 refused to leave the white people’s seat in an Alabama bus. ‘That is what the democratic process implies: the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular.’ Democracy must constantly bring into ‘play, inventions of forms of subjectivation and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life, in a ‘political movement that blurs both the given distribution of the individuals and the collective, and the accepted boundary of the political and the social.’

Ranciére call us to renounce to the faith in the vision of democracy by the multitude, which is such a dreadful task; but if we understand democracy’s true meaning, that an ‘egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts,’ (96) and that ‘it is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts,’ then, as he finishes ‘to those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence,’ democracy can ‘inspire courage, and hence joy.’ (97)

Participation in, and the construction of, democracy, according to Rancière, is then to act in the intervals of our own identity split and therefore fight the state’s privatization of our private life with single and precarious gestures of equality.

RANCIÉRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

Notes#012

2009-12-28T06:22:00.000-08:00

Which kind of participation is possible in Plato's aristocracy?

In his book Republic, Plato supposedly transcribes a conversation between Socrates and some young Athenians that starts by analysing what is justice leading to the creation of a just city. This ideal city follows – what was identified by Leon Battista Alberti during the Renaissance as – concinnitas universarum partium, or the harmony and concord in all the parts in relation to one another, where each and every organ mind its own performance and to remove one part compromises the whole. Being on one’s place is here proved to be the required participation in this city. Divided in four elements: wisdom, bravery, temperance and justice; Socrates will analyse the city’s first three elements believing that the remainder would be justice, the gathering’s inquire. As the appetite is the largest element in an individual, followed by courage and both governed by his reason, the smallest element; so is the city ruled by a few wise men and women or by a king with a true love for philosophy, helped by soldiers and a larger amount of auxiliaries. Each element does it occupation, that should be a single one if to be done with excellence, and respect the rule of the few and this harmony and respect to the wise element is what makes a man or a city just. To be sure, in such a city to be a just man means performing the assign task, be it to be a shoemaker or a philosopher, according to one’s gifts and training; and this is the required participation, to be just.

Why then, have I been dreaming about the reasons to escape Plato's perfect city and fall into the extravagant excesses of a democracy? For I truly have.

Until the city is ruled by philosophers there shall be no constitution worth being called a city, under this oath Socrates debates on the reasons why philosophers are considered useless by the multitude and nevertheless are the right ones for the job. The reason being that philosophers are the ones with access to the essential forms lighten by good and revealed by pure reason. To achieve this level of knowledge requires years of training in several subjects and to be considered as guardians requires a just city. Democracy for him is not a just constitution but the third level of decay from the desired one, aristocracy. An oligarch’s son, the democrat is blinded by license; all appetites are alike for him, good and evil; everyone has equal participation in civic right, liberty and equality is his motto. Jusque ici tout va bien. However it is not the fall but the landing that matters, and as is noticed in their conversation to do anything in excess seldom fails to provoke a violent reaction to the opposite extreme. Democracy destruction shall be by the metamorphosis of the object of its supreme good – freedom, into its worse shape: excessive slavery, and with this tiranny arises.

This hate of democracy is as old as its very origin, ancient Greece. And today’s hate formula is not against democracy itself, conversely to Plato’s idea, democracy is not a corrupt form of government, the problem is about the people, democratic civilization. What provokes the crisis of democracy is nothing other that the intensity of democratic life (Ranciére, 2006, 7).

PLATO. 1997. Republic. Wordsworth.
RANCIÉRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

continued on note #13 with the reading of Ranciére's Hatred of Democracy…

Notes#011

2009-12-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

A performance done in October 2009 at Avenida dos Aliados, Praça da Liberdade and Largo dos Lóios - Porto by the name Coreto. An ephemeral piece made out of cardboard that echos those structures of Porto's Romantic gardens, once filled with the music of local brass bands are nowadays quite abandoned. This intervention was made in the context of an educational project - Artistic Interventions in Public Spaces and Site Specific work - by André Silva, Cláudia Lopes, Dalila Gonçalves and Inês Gama.

you can see the original news in portuguese here

It seems that the bandstand had a programme with music and that interaction was the goal. Unfortunately I could not see if there was any, and of what kind. The truth is that this Avenue after being requalified three years ago have been the target of several artistic interventions that try a posteriori to inquire what has not been examined before the urban intervention: what was it used for and what can it be used for on an everyday basis.

you find in this blog my own investigation after the works were finished on how it was being used.

After Party C213

2009-12-26T10:57:00.001-08:00

Todos à festa!
Caldeira 213 no Senhorio
R. Duque de Loulé 239, 2º
Porto.
3.Jan.2010
17:00

streetmoney003

2009-12-07T05:29:00.001-08:00

streetmoney003
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

money found on the streets of London since the 24th of September.

I would Prefer To!

2009-12-03T06:13:00.000-08:00

(5th attempt, and certaintly not the last, to clarify my research)

Art, as politics, pose questions of responsibility about our role in society (1) and a politicized art can be part of the toolkit of the radical and plural democratic project (Mouffe, 2009). Democracy should be under constant revision, and the role of one and each citizen is paramount to the maintenance of its project, or it is not. Notions of participation and resistance are then an important aspect for this maintenance. My affiliation would be to art that call to arms and inspire people to take action but the contemporary discourse seems to be much more directed towards passive resistance. This led me to think of the political gesture of Michael Angelo’s David and Agamben notion of passive resistance seen through Melville’s character Bartleby who “would prefer not to” (2) , as different examples of resistance. On the one hand a call for an active participation on the other a call for inaction as strategies of defeating hegemonic systems. Being the first utopian, ideological and outdated and the latter conforming to the Zeitgeist and offering potential effect. This poses a problem to my own position as a possible conservative one (in the sense of maintaining old left-wing pro active strategies), and how to understand this idea of participation through non-participation, which I visceral refuse. But why? is it because I want to hold on to outdated ideals? Or is there really something counter-productive leading to global inaction on theorising around refusal as a positivist resistance position?

So what is at stake is active/passive resistance, participative participation and non-participative participation. Is one excluding the other? Believing that the latter does really have a potential for change, and is the strategy to follow, what would happen if we would just ALL disengage? We should not forget that Melville’s Bartleby dies in the end. Does this mean that the opposite it true, that the participation of ALL is ultimately ineffective? If active participation might help the formation of collectives is refusal individualistic? Is this a matter of which has stronger agency? I was before holding on to the idea of the small gesture , as a dear one, but is the small gesture (3) actually a refusal of participating in grand visible projects?

Kris Cohen gave –in the lecture “atmospheres of participation”– the Tutti Bianchi squad as an example of refusal. The Tutti Bianchi operates on the G8 summits as a heavily padded group of people under white overalls that conduct a kind of Gandhi resistance. Staying in front of the mass of demonstrators they take the blows of the riot police without being hurt. I argue that this is not exactly a sit in protest, they prepare themselves in advance and do attempt to progress in the confront field to win territory and by doing so affirming the eligibility of demonstrating and how the local governments have been pushing this protests further and further from the actual location of the meetings (4). But if this extraordinary form of resistance is truly a Bartlebian one, what does this make of my argument of these being different types of participation? But is it really, or are theorists just pushing it a bit to far?

1 ( Bernadette Buckley lectures in art and politics helped to articulation this idea)
2 ( A month of lectures and reading led me to this feeling of a contemporary celebration of inaction, failure, non reciprocity, indifference, doing wrong as active modes of expressing dissactisfaction and therefore sites of resistance.)
3 (Hannula, M. (2006) the Politics of Small Gestures – Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art, Art-ist)
4 ( I owe this notion to Oliver Ressler)

Notes#010

2009-11-20T02:58:00.000-08:00

Signs of Revolt Bricklane 91 - Shop 14 / truman Brewery - London

Brian Holmes write on the catalogue that "all of the activists-artists in this exhibition, and probably most of the visitors as weel, took part somehow in the inspiring and dramatic events created by the movement of movements - events that started well before Seatle, for example at the Carnival against Capital in the city of London on June 18th 1999, or at any one of the surprising and often hilarious Reclaim the Streets parties... some of us will meet again and again beneath the teargas and water canons ... only to learn that the leader of our supposedly democratic countries cared nothing for the votes that were cast in the streets." meaning that new forms of protest have to be experimented?

View of the exhibition

Holmes also wrote about the role of art as offering a "foretaste of a better life" but also an incompleteness, which means "an invitation to participate ... the art of the protest movements mingles dream and reality, beauty and terror, and expresses a symbolic violence of a necessary break with society as it is, while never forgetting that the real violence continues."

Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army /CIRCA

"the decade to come will see the most passionate struggle of them all: the one that finally takes apart the neoliberal system, to invent a future that no one claims to own and that no one trades away for profit, a future that everybody can live with." and I would argue that this struggle has to be fought on everyday life and maybe it is through this scope that the 3 years art project of Sarah Cole in a primary school takes its most radical democractic patine

NEST LIFE

Notes#009

2009-11-20T01:46:00.001-08:00

Serena Korda

The Library of Secrets

The Library of Secrets is a mobile library conceived from the love of keeping and finding things amongst the pages of books. The Library of Secrets invites you to leave your thoughts, wisdoms and secrets amongst the pages of one or more of the 400 books in its collection. Peruse the shelves for your favourite 19th or 20th century classic or maybe just rummage through the books to find other peoples secrets.

Between 2007-2008 The Library took up residence in different venues across Whitstable as part of Whitstable Biennale 2008. For a whole year the The Library of Secrets hosted a series of events including the Book Club Debate, which met every 6 weeks. The Book Club focused on discussing books that inspired the films Peter Cushing starred in, including; Dracula, Lolita, The Hound of the Baskerville’s, Frankenstein, Nineteen Eighty Four and The End of the Affair. These classics are often imbedded in our knowledge through their film adaptation rather than the original novel. The Book Club Debates were chaired by myself and a host of visiting experts, lively debate was followed by a screening of the film each book inspired. The Book Club Debate was documented through a series of book reviews written by myself and members of the Book Club.

The Library of Secrets also became a mini publishing house producing a series of artist’s books that chart the development of the library and its relationship with its members. The books and multiples that have been produced include, ‘The Book Club Debate Whitstable’, ‘The Writing Challenge’ and ‘Things Found Inside Books’.

I attended the Real Wold Seminar at the Whitechapel, and this was how I got to know Serena's work. A work that according to Serena's own words seeks to intervene in everyday life, to disrupt everyday. One of the things that interest her the most is story telling, other people's stories, things you don't find in books, but in this piece the audience does find those bits and pieces of people's life inside books, for she invited the audience to leave secrets in between the pages of the many books on tour. Working with people is the other big interest in her work, to ask for collaboration on the very creative process, as for example in the answers lies at the end of the line for the Tube, local crossword puzzle fanatics were invited to help her create puzzles to be distributed across the Jubilee line.

Notes#008

2009-11-02T13:33:00.000-08:00

ANDRÉ ALVES

A sort of portable story telling device. this structure exemplifies in perfection the kind of aesthetics I am interested in my own work, a sort of DIY and bricoleur tactic, grabbing whatever is lying around and still with attractive materialization.

André is currently studying Fine Art at the University of Cincinnati -US
see more here

Notes#007

2009-10-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Carey Young -Donor Card
Frieze 2009

Impossible Exchange (curated by Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado) Frieze Projects

“Carey Young once wrote that she explores ‘how the artist’s role, agency and identity could or might need to change in response to the collapsing categories between business, politics and culture’. She has been appropriating corporate ideology and manipulating it in order to examine the era of global capitalism. Recently, she has focused on the law apparatus and its realtionship to civil government. For example, with the assistance of a legal team, she once created a United-States-Constitution-free zone within a New York-based gallery. Contractual agreements with the visitor have been one fo Young’s major strategies, and Donorcard (2005 –ongoing) is one of the works that better represents this aspect of her practice. Wallet-size human organ donor cards in general, and the design of such a document issued by the British NHS in particular, inspired Young in the making of this work. Each time it is on view, Young previously signs a limited edition of Donorcards copies, which are free to take and also have to be signed by the viewer in order to become art, a status that will last only while both of them are alive. In a new instalment of its preservation, for Frieze Projects Young is signing the work at the booth during the VIP preview of FAF. bringing together the language of jurisdiction, authorship, and rituals of collecting, Young comments on the forms of power ruling the art world.

Donorcard was created with the assistance of a legal team comprising Robert Lands of Finers Stephens Innocent LLP and Dr. Jaime Stapleton of Birkbeck College.”

"Mining institutional critique, community-based movements, self-organization traditions, and activism, their proposals address the production of symbolic value in the “age of questioned capitalism” – an expression suggested by the global financial crises. Through their socially engaged practice “impossible exchange” establishes a counter-public sphere that radically envisions change on the economic, political, and cultural levels."

Carey Young Donor Card

By principle in Portugal everyone is an organ donor unless one manifests the will against it to the health ministry (RENNDA) in a system of contracting/out, thus taking advantage of people's natural inertia the country has an enormous potential donors list . In the UK we have a completely different approach, one has to join organ donation. Hence the former has a non donors card, while the latter a donor card.

uk donor card

Politically, we can say in the Portuguese case that the state (even though one has the possibility to sign out) is taking the decision for the citizens by presuming that everyone would want to be an organ donor, whilst in the UK the citizens are accounted for the decision, but then the state has to campaign for people to meet that responsibility. Uk's example seems the most democratic to me, in an horizon of a social responsible society were our relation to others - human beings and not - is constantly being activated and reevaluated, but I also know that most of the time we function in automatic pilot, and that's why the Portuguese example might be more effective for the case presented, but then what does that tell us about a more general political engagement?

Notes#006

2009-10-26T15:30:00.001-07:00

photo taken from here

in Germany it is not allowed to have a stall on the street to sell, but if you actually don't have anything on the ground you can make your own business, as this Grill Walkers do. I find interesting the ways people bend the laws :-) and reclaim the public space for their benefit.

see also

Notes#005

2009-10-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

Royal Observatory - Greenwich

TIME STTOD STILL FOR ME WHEN...
card from the time and society gallery to stick on the board.

this post is under construction

Notes#004

2009-10-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Sancho Silva

His work for the 2007 exhibition Depósito. Anotações sobre Densidade e Conhecimento at Reitoria da Universidade do Porto, curated by Paulo Cunha e Silva, was a Street Museum (I am searching the web for information, but it is difficult to find, text or images on the specific piece). I remember calling it a generous piece of art. Basically it was a shelf made of wood, that stood on four legs. On the one side a transparent acrylic surface, on the other a wooden plate, that could be lifted up. Passers-by were suppose to place on the self compartiments whatever they might find interesting, or just happen to have in their pockets, and this would be there on exhibition. The piece was outside the University building, in the public space. It mimicked the academy selves, but had a democratic use.This street furniture or invitation was also close to the famous student Cafe Piolho, so it had plenty use, and also vandalism, it did not last until the end of the exhibition. Still it was a similiar proposition to those I have been doing in my own practice. Invited for an exhibition that dealt with the depot of the Science University, and questions of displaying, preserving and educating, Sancho Silva takes the question to the streets, what is worth to present, protect and discuss?

image of the inside - by MSM

Arte Capital - text (pt)

the photos of the piece are a courtesy of Sancho Silva (see more here)

this post is under construction

Notes#003

2009-10-22T02:00:00.000-07:00

Heath Bunting orchard project

Orchard of Avon

I met Heath last summer in Bristol and went on one of his triming tours. He keeps track of the apple trees (which are mainly along the Avon Gorge) and cleans them from parasitical plants. At some point a map of these trees is made public so people can harvest them. I guess this is part of his commitment to nature but also reclaiming this common space - natural ground in the interstices of private and state property. By taking the fruit of the "blind" farmers planting, people are picking the fruit of their own doing :-) for this trees are most probably there because people throw away the apple cores after eating them. There are several phases in this project: the unintentional planting; the identification, listing and nurture of the apple trees and finally the publication of their location and invitation for a public harvest. The public enters first in this last bit, harvesting the fruits of heaths labour, but clearly is invited as well to 'adopt' his own orchard.

Heath Bunting - Avon Orchard map

see also
Irational website

Notes#002

2009-10-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

Felix Gonzales-Torres 1993

The Art of Participation from 1950 to now

"this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process"

Abramović/Ulay, Vito Acconci, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Blank & Jeron and Gerrit Gohlke, George Brecht, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett, John Cage, c a l c and Johannes Gees, Janet Cardiff, Lygia Clark, Minerva Cuevas, Maria Eichhorn, VALIE EXPORT, Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin, Fluxus Collective, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Jochen Gerz, Matthias Gommel, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Allan Kaprow, Henning Lohner and Van Carlson, Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, and Bruce Tomb, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ,Tom Marioni, MTAA (M.River and T.Whid Art Associates), Antoni Muntadas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, Raqs Media Collective, Robert Rauschenberg, Warren Sack, Mieko Shiomi, Torolab, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Stephen Willats, Erwin Wurm.

under construction --- will be looking at this SFMOMA exhibition closely ... more soon

http://blog.sfmoma.org/tag/art-of-participation/

Felix Gonzales-Torres (at the SFMOMA show)
Photo: Brita d'Agostino/Wired.com

Notes#001

2009-10-21T09:31:00.001-07:00

Erwin Wurm One Minute Sculptures

I remember striking a pose for a polaroid camera at Museu do Chiado, while pressuring a chair sideways to my body with my right upper warm. I stuck that polaroid photograph inside a dictionary, not to lose it, and maybe as a way to revisite the action. Together with that chair I was a sculpture, the polaroid photo attest to that, with no need of being signed by the author, as 1961 Manzioni's Living Sculptures did. But did I really felt like a scupture? I just remember the desire of wanting to take part of Wurm's work, much out of a fan feeling more than wanting to experience being a sculpture. The museum surroundings, a low broad white plinth - if I remember correctly, a chair, a bucket, and maybe some other object. Those objects are there to trigger our action, to potentiate our becoming, they were not themselves the sculpture - or ready-mades, neither would we be it alone. The combination of both, body and object, were the sculpture, the action itself. Still I recall this experience just as a curious episode. Mere participation is not what is at stake for me, but its relation to politics.

Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with Richard Wiseman

2009-10-11T02:53:00.001-07:00

(in the corridor)

"In After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions, major artists and writers exhibit newly-commissioned and existing work, inspired by Charles Darwin's book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Their pieces explore Darwin's theory that expressing emotion is not unique to humans, but is shared with animals." See NHM website

"The exhibition itself starts outside the gallery with an installation involving mirrors by Jeremy Deller and Matthew Killip in collaboration with psychologist Richard Wiseman. Not only does the reflection employ the viewer as part of the installation, but the instructions – through image and word – to display certain behaviours make this a compelling installation. The installation includes a twist that gestures to practices of surveillance and observation of the chimp and human world alike."

(inside)

Gustav Metzger

2009-10-11T02:39:00.000-07:00

"The exhibition draws together the themes and methodologies that have informed the London-based artist’s practice from 1959 until the present day. The broad cross-section of works on view include Metzger’s auto-destructive and auto-creative works of the 1960s, such as his pioneering liquid crystal projections; the ongoing Historic Photographs series, which responds to major events and catastrophes; and later works exploring ecological issues, globalisation and commercialisation. Film footage of seminal performances and actions are exhibited, as well as a new, participative
installation using the archive of newspapers Metzger has been collecting since 1995."
see serpentine gallery website

(Media)

I was particularly interested in the following piece, Historic Photographs: To Crawl Into - Anschluss Vienna March 1938 1996 (here above), where one had to crawl under a big piece of fabric to be able to see a photograph on the floor and on how that changes our relation/interpretation to its content. A grainy photograph of people kneeled down, the association with the horrors of the second world war is immediate, even before reading the title, Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. I looked for the image on google images today, and realized the importance it had to involve my whole body in the experience of this art work, how fragile and pathetic I felt and how strange it was to realise that those portrayed on the image were looking much more confused and anxious... the privacy of my gaze and the impossibility of seeing the whole image...

Forth Plinth

2009-10-11T02:22:00.000-07:00

see Antony Gormley's Forth Plinth

"We saw sea monsters, Nazis, and – inevitably – plenty of nudity. But was Antony Gormley's One and Other actually any good?" see guardian

yes, it is not exactly the speakers corner.

Pato Donald

2009-10-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

As necessidades quotidianas são de extrema importância, apesar de quase sempre eliminadas das expressões maiores :-) das artes. Tornam-se rotineiras e servem de fundo, pedestal as nossas actividades, aquelas dignas de nota. A importância de que sejam quase mecânicas permitem realmente produzir outras coisas que não sobreviver. É isso mesmo que tenho feito nas últimas duas semanas sobreviver, aprender quase tudo de novo, como se compra um bilhete de autocarro, faz uma cópia na biblioteca, abre a porta do estúdio A; onde se toma um café razoável, compra boa fruta ou um vaso; estar à espera da nova conta bancária, como pagar as propinas ou perceber a forma mais barata e rápida de ir ao centro de Londres. Enfim, mas em breve, passada a instrução, posso voltar a por a cabeça no lugar :-)

parada do orgulho gay - Porto

2009-07-20T11:56:00.001-07:00

Eu amo quem quiser, seja homem ou mulher
ou outra pessoa qualquer !!!

Gay Pride

Utopias, Ciborgues e Outras Casas nas Árvores

2009-07-16T05:52:00.001-07:00

Oficina de Criação Artística com Carla Cruz

Datas: 22, 23 e 24 de Julho, das 19:00 às 22:00
25 de Julho das 14:00 às 18:00
Local: Centro de Memória (google maps), Vila do Conde
Público-alvo: todos os interessados

Nunca foi tempo de sermos pessimistas, mudar o mundo disse Marx, mudar a vida disse Rimbaud, mudar de vida disse Variações. Sim o mundo é composto de mudança, e hoje como sempre precisamos de novas projecções para o futuro, imaginar o impossível, criar gestos que reflictam a pluralidade da existência, ou seja novas Utopias. A proposta desta oficina é exactamente a de imaginarmos criticamente uma nova cidade*, mas também uma nova mulher e homem para essa cidade, daí a noção de ciborgue, que de acordo com Donna Haraway é um híbrido entre máquina e organismo, uma criatura de realidade social bem como ficcional, uma possibilidade de novas construções de relacionamento social.

Ficha de Inscrição (Microsoft Office - Word)

Do resultado da oficina sairá a obra a apresentar na 5ª edição do Circular Festival de Artes Performativas, que decorrerá de 19 a 26 de Setembro de 2009.

*cidade/polis - civilização

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991).

2009-06-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

Tsurus - e a lenda de quem fizer 1000

Eu Pisei as Flores

2009-06-15T03:34:00.000-07:00

Rua das Flores - 12 de Junho - Porto
"É favor Pisar as Flores". Esta “interferência” é um dos projectos dos participantes no 1º Curso de Especialização em Intervenções Artísticas em Espaços Públicos da Universidade Lusófona do Porto. A equipa do Projecto Flores Adriana Oliveira . Irene Loureiro . João Medeiros

2009-06-06T05:16:00.001-07:00

Vila do Conde

2009-06-05T03:02:00.001-07:00

Vila do Conde

2009-06-03T11:52:00.001-07:00

Vila do Conde

MAYDAY - Porto

2009-05-02T06:29:00.001-07:00

1º de Maio no Porto

MAYDAY

2009-04-30T02:19:00.001-07:00

Tecktonik

2009-04-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

Não fazia ideia do que era tecktonik, até este passado Domingo à tarde na Praça D. João I no Porto, é uma dança, e foi também um campeonato informal....

Objecto Urbano não Identificado

2009-04-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

encontrei estas intervenções na minha rua e na rua Fernandes Tomás - gosto :-)

inútil

2009-04-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

junto ao mercado do bolhão - a tapar a sinalização do Metro do Porto.

2009-03-17T05:13:00.000-07:00

há rádio e música na Avenida dos Aliados :-)
estes senhores, muito bem equipados, oferecem.

2009-03-13T06:48:00.001-07:00

Parece que vai haver uma luta de almofadas nos aliados :-)

2008-10-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

22///Porto /// FNAC Santa Catarina /// 18:30
23///Viseu/// FNAC Palácio do Gelo // 18:30

2008-10-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

2008-09-29T03:45:00.000-07:00

Em Outubro a Circolando passa filmes no Cine-L.
Entrada livre.

"Porto Comunidade"

2008-09-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

Projecto organizado por Tobias Hering, Emre Koyuncuoglu e José Roseira.

"Porto Comunidade" pretende iniciar e animar um debate público sobre conceitos e expectativas que implicamos a comunidade, modos de comunicação política, e experiências pessoais do espaço público no Porto. Este projecto baseia-se numa oficina onde será desenvolvida uma performance coreografada para um espaço público, que irá relacionar narrativas particulares do Porto e dos seus habitantes, a sua presença física na paisagem urbana, com os temas políticos inerentes.

A oficina terá início na Segunda-Feira, 29 de Setembro, e será dirigida pela coreógrafa Emre Koyuncuoglu, de Istanbul. Tanto a oficina como a performance serão inspirados por excertos do filme La Commune- Paris 1871 de Peter Watkins, mas esperam-se do processo e do resultado final que sejam o resultado de um esforço colectivo de todos os participantes.

De forma a apresentar o projecto e a convidar mais pessoas à participação vamos organizar três eventos entre 25 e 28 de Setembro. Em cada um destes eventos vamos mostrar cerca de uma hora do filme La Commune, e a projecção será seguida por uma discussão sobre o projecto e suas possibilidades no Porto.

"Porto Comunidade" integra a programação de REDline, um projecto produzido pela Ideias Emergentes; as apresentações públicas serão a 12 e 14 de Outubro.

Sessões Programadas:

Quinta-Feira, 25 de Setembro, 21h no Terraviva, Rua dos Caldeireiros 213

Sexta-Feira, 26 de Setembro, 21h no Uma Certa Falta de Coerência, Rua dos Caldeireiros 77

Domingo, 28 de Setembro em Local a Definir

aplauso na praça

2008-09-20T07:47:00.001-07:00

aplauso na praça
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

everyday at exactly 13:14 we applauded in the D. João I square.

audiencia

2008-09-18T11:50:00.001-07:00

audiencia
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

participante_domingo_004

2008-09-15T12:27:00.001-07:00

participante_domingo_004
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

O plastisfério cresce a cada dia!

begining of the world

2008-09-13T06:57:00.001-07:00

participante_convocatorias_13_09_08_fimp010
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

convocatorias

2008-09-13T06:48:00.001-07:00

convocatorias
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

participante

2008-09-13T06:27:00.001-07:00

participante_convocatorias_13_09_08_fimp007
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

convocatorias

2008-09-13T06:25:00.001-07:00

participante_convocatorias_13_09_08_fimp002
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

os sacos de papel para serem trocados pelos sacos de plástico que os transeuntes carregam...

2008-09-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

O Núcleo de Experimentação Coreográfica
Em co-produção com o Festival Internacional de Marionetas 2008 Residencial na praça
apresentam

Convocatórias
O projecto Convocatórias pretende criar interferências a partir da dinâmica gerada pelo Festival Internacional de Marionetas do Porto e pelas suas apresentações, propondo tanto momentos de pausa e suspensão, como momentos de intervenção e acção relacionados com o evento, o local e os seus públicos. O projecto irá ser configurado a partir de uma residência aberta, assegurando uma presença contínua durante todo o festival, alternando momentos de observação com intervenções esporádicas e oportunamente convocadas, de forma a atingir diferentes fluxos de potenciais espectadores/participantes. As formas de intervenção serão preparadas de acordo com a especificidade de cada encontro, podendo variar em termos de suporte, permitindo o recurso à performance, à locução, ao jogo, à escrita ou às mais diversas formas de construção. Convocatórias comportar-se-á como uma espécie de programa paralelo acoplado ao programa principal, por vezes parasitando-o, por vezes criando acontecimentos tangenciais.

Setembro de 2008, Praça D. João I, Porto

De 13 a 19
(das 11h00 às 13h00 e das 17h00 às 18h00)
Troca de sacos plásticos dos transeuntes

(Traga o seu saco plástico e seja um dos nossos 1.000 participantes)

De 15 a 19
(exactamente às 13h14)
Aplauso na praça

(Venha também aplaudir connosco)

Dia 17
(das 17h00 às 20h00)
Rádio FIMP com o NEC

(Com destaque para a estreia da peça radiofónica Episódios)

Dia 20
(às 23h30)
Plastisfério

(Apresentação do Plastisfério)

Uma co-criação de: Carla Cruz, Cristiana Rocha, Gabriela Vaz Pinheiro, Joclécio Azevedo e José Alberto Gomes
Colaboração: Michelle Ferreira, Sofia Santos, Luís Sezões, Brunna Anchieta, Óscar Lopes
Participação especial na peça radiofónica Episódios: Catarina Costa e Silva, Maria João dos Reis e Luís Teixeira

+ Info
FIM - Festival Internacional de Marionetas
Rua de Camões, 404 - 4000-140 Porto
t. 22 332 00 53 | f. 22 208 55 99
fim@fim.com.pt

NEC - Núcleo de Experimentação Coreográfica
Rua Miguel Bombarda, 124, r/c sala A, 4050-377 Porto
T. 22 518 85 22 | Telm. 96 142 46 68 / 91 432 14 28
nec@nec.co.pt
www.nec.co.pt

2008-09-04T09:19:00.001-07:00

Podem me encontrar na Praça D. João I em Residência com o Nec. Eu a Cristiana, a Gabriela, o Joclécio e o José, estamos lá por volta das 14h e até as 16h até dia 12 de Setembro, depois logo se vê :-)

FIMP

toxindujour_tour

2008-07-26T10:30:00.001-07:00

toxindujour_tour
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

a tour on the talking cctv camerasin Bristol City centre

global warning

2008-07-26T10:15:00.001-07:00

global warning
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

surveillance pamphlet, for Bristol Series, front.

toxindujour_on surveillance

2008-07-25T08:51:00.001-07:00

toxindujour_on surveillance
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

hoot for privacy

2008-07-25T07:42:00.001-07:00

hoot for privacy
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

bristol city Centre

toxindujour_snooping

2008-07-24T02:42:00.001-07:00

toxindujour_snooping
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

toxin du jour giving stickers to passers-by in Bristol.

toxindujour_caught

2008-07-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

toxindujour_caught
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

begging pardon from a talking cctv in bristol.

CCTV que fala

2008-07-17T06:42:00.001-07:00

CCTV que fala
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

Bristol city centre's CCTV with a loud speaker attached

toxindujour

2008-07-08T14:02:00.001-07:00

toxindujour
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

Pamphlet being distributed at the Piazza in Eindhoven --- photo by Alicia Herrero

panfleto_frente_verso

2008-07-02T15:20:00.001-07:00

panfleto_frente_verso
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

teste9

2008-06-29T05:34:00.001-07:00

teste9
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

frente do Panfleto para "State of Translocality" - a ser distribuído em Eindhoven no dia 5 de Julho - 15:00.

FESTIVAL SINCERO

2008-06-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.myspace.com/festivalsincero

23h dia 27.06.08 – Rua Duque de Vizela, 95, Porto

FESTIVAL SINCERO || TERCEIRA EDIÇÃO

23h ^ A CARCAÇA Colóquio-concerto

23.30h ^ THE MAMAS BAPTISTA Mamodrama hipersensivero de Marta e Filipa Baptista.

24h ^ MARÇAL DOS CAMPOS http://www.myspace.com/marcaldoscampos Três anos de pop sintético ultra melódico.

24.30h ^ FEIA MEDRONHO http://www.myspace.com/feiamedronho Duo techno metal chunga. Nascidos e criados na Ponte de Braga, estes dois engenheiros da Chungaria (a Engenheira Feia e o Engenheiro Medronho) inspiram-se nos sinos da Igreja da Nossa Senhora do Carmo para fazerem música. São difíceis de capturar e manter em concerto durante muito tempo, porque passam a vida a festejar, de forma rápida e alucinante. Rezam as lendas que os seus concertos são o seu confessionário onde se redimem dos pecados do festejo. De dia nunca ninguém os viu... apesar de haver 2 energúmenos que de vez em quando se fazem passar por eles.

1h ^ FOX TROT SIERRA Transmissão pirata.

1.30h ^ SOLO COMBO BASS BOOSTS http://www.jammusica.blogspot.com/ Este é um dos projecto de produção a que João Alves Marrucho tem dedicado mais tempo nos último anos. É o projecto herdeiro de Ana e leva a Nova Emoção 2.0 até ao Ultra Estilo 1.0. Trinta minutos de música para quem estiver interessado em assistir à primeira apresentação ao vivo de Solo Combo. Vai haver Cds à venda.

ANDALUCIA RACION (Vídeo) BAR LUIZA O bar do Festival Sincero, com as suas decorações interactivas, é um biscate da Luizinha, que usa os seus múltiplos talentos de forma criativa para pagar a renda. O bar terá as mais exuberantes combinações de frutos e cores, a combinar com o estilo do festival, em forma de bebidas com álcool e sumos naturais feitos em casa.

O Festival Sincero começou por ser uma festa de Natal e desenvolveu-se mais tarde num projecto maior de ocupação temporária de um espaço onde um conjunto de demonstrações de talento aconteceram.

Ao ritmo da cidade e ao vento quente do verão, terá lugar a terceira edição deste festival numa cave/loja do centro do Porto entre os Clérigos e a Avenida. O espaço a ser ocupado será o recinto fechado e a própria rua – o único limite será o palco e o tempo que pertencerá ao participante. Participações espontâneas, por entusiasmo do público, poderão acontecer após o tempo dedicado a cada participante agendado. Participações discretas e sinceras serão bem vindas e integradas no Festival, basta fazer uma inscrição no Bar. Não há lugares sentados e a "entrada" custa 0.50 cêntimos que deverão ser oferecidos generosamente ao festival. Pode-se fumar, serão vendidas bebidas e material promocional de cada participante.

Se o metal das moedas pesar e não der jeito ter 0.50 cêntimos na mão ou uns trocos a mais, levar bebidas para o bar.

http://espacogesto.blogspot.com

2008-06-21T05:11:00.001-07:00

(my room full of virus, for the Toxin du jour Pamphlet - The State of Translocality - Van Abbe Museum - Eindhoven)

PLEASE READ!
This is absolutely true.
A dangerous TOXIN is among us.
This pamphlet is being given to you by a friend, and is most definitely not a joke.
Every single day we are confronted with a new virus.
This is not a scam or something out of a science fiction novel.
This new threat to our existence and lives is called surveillance.
It is real. It is documented and confirmable.
We have been invisibly watched since 1984.
It is extremely important that as many people as possible read this pamphlet.
Surveillance, like a Trojan Horse, opens a door. Explores our frailties.
You can confirm this to the e-mail address below.
Fear then infects our brains, sending cryptic waves all around.
This is Categorical. Please bounce this pamphlet to whomever you can.
Fright contaminates the ones around us by making copies of itself.
The e-mail address at the end of this text is real and used to denounce this outrage.
The fearful waves transmit the serious incapacity of critical thought.
So keep this pamphlet, copy it, and pass it on.
Together with this powerlessness comes self-control.
There is no luck associated with this pamphlet, but the capacity of reinventing our lives.
If you fail to give out copies of this pamphlet to others, then absolutely nothing extraordinary will happen to you.
A certainty is, that in order to survive this toxin, we must mutate.
If on the other hand you do propagate this pamphlet, then something absolutely extraordinary might happen to the world.

PLEASE BEWARE.
A friend
toxindujour(at)yahoo(dot)com

fly

2008-06-14T07:13:00.001-07:00

fly
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

sketch for a pamphlet

virus1

2008-06-14T07:12:00.001-07:00

virus1
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

sketch for a pamphlet

Festival sincero

2008-06-12T02:46:00.000-07:00

Ainda estão abertas as inscrições em
pony (ponto) cab (arroba) gmail (ponto) com

2008-05-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

Ana Lu e Ricardo leite para o leilão 30X30 --- apareçam

LEILÃO 30X30

2008-05-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

CONVIDO para um acontecimento artístico e cultural invulgar:
Um leilão não como os outros!
Cerca de uma centena de artistas, expressamente para este evento, fizeram a sua marca artística numa tela 30 cm x 30cm. Todas as telas serão apresentadas a leilão com uma base de licitação de 100 euros.A receita reverte a favor do projecto de intercâmbio cultural IDENTIDADES.

R. Cândido dos Reis n. 64 - Porto

2008-05-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

AMAZÓNIA

2008-05-06T15:00:00.001-07:00

Recebido por mail ...
"*Discurso do Ministro Brasileiro da Educação nos EUA...

Este discurso merece ser lido, afinal não é todos os dias que um brasileiro dá um 'baile' educadíssimo aos Americanos...

Durante um debate numa universidade dos Estados Unidos o actual Ministro da Educação CRISTOVAM BUARQUE foi
questionado sobre o que pensava da internacionalização da Amazónia (ideia que surge com alguma insistência nalguns
sectores da sociedade americana e que muito incomoda os brasileiros). Um jovem americano fez a pergunta dizendo que
esperava a resposta de um Humanista e não de um Brasileiro.
Esta foi a resposta de Cristovam Buarque :

*'De fato, como brasileiro eu simplesmente falaria contra a internacionalização da Amazónia. Por mais que nossos governos não tenham o devido cuidado com esse património, ele é nosso.

Como humanista, sentindo o risco da degradação ambiental que sofre a Amazónia, posso imaginar a sua internacionalização, como também a de tudo o mais que tem importância para a humanidade.

Se a Amazónia, sob uma ética humanista, deve ser internacionalizada, internacionalizemos também as reservas
de petróleo do mundo inteiro... O petróleo é tão importante para o bem-estar da humanidade quanto a Amazónia para
o nosso futuro. Apesar disso, os donos das reservas sentem-se no direito de aumentar ou diminuir a extracção
de petróleo e subir ou não seu preço.

Da mesma forma, o capital financeiro dos países ricos deveria ser internacionalizado. Se a Amazónia é uma reserva para todos os seres humanos, ela não pode ser queimada pela vontade de um dono ou de um país.

Queimar a Amazónia é tão grave quanto o desemprego provocado pelas decisões arbitrárias dos especuladores globais.
Não podemos deixar que as reservas financeiras sirvam para queimar países inteiros na volúpia da especulação.

Antes mesmo da Amazónia, eu gostaria de ver a internacionalização de todos os grandes museus do mundo.
***

*O Louvre não deve pertencer apenas à França. Cada museu do mundo é guardião das mais belas peças produzidas pelo
génio humano. Não se pode deixar esse património cultural, como o património natural Amazónico, seja manipulado e
destruído pelo** **gosto de um proprietário ou de um país.

Não faz muito tempo, um milionário japonês, decidiu enterrar com ele, um quadro de um grande mestre. ***

*Antes disso, aquele quadro deveria ter sido** internacionalizado. Durante este encontro, as Nações Unidas estão realizando o Fórum do Milénio, mas alguns presidentes de países tiveram dificuldades em comparecer por constrangimentos na fronteira dos EUA.

Por isso, eu acho que Nova York, como sede das Nações Unidas, deve ser internacionalizada. Pelo menos Manhattan deveria
pertencer a toda a humanidade. Assim como Paris, Veneza, Roma, Londres, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília,Recife, cada cidade,
com sua beleza específica, sua história do mundo, deveria pertencer ao mundo inteiro.

Se os EUA querem internacionalizar a Amazónia, pelo risco de deixá-la nas mãosm de brasileiros, internacionalizemos também todos os arsenais nucleares dos EUA. Até porque eles já demonstraram que são capazes de usar essas armas, provocando uma destruição milhares de vezes maior do que as lamentáveis queimadas feitas nas florestas do Brasil. Nos seus debates, os actuais candidatos à presidência dos EUA têm defendido a ideia de internacionalizar as reservas florestais do mundo em troca da dívida.

Comecemos usando essa dívida para garantir que cada criança do Mundo tenha possibilidade de COMER e de ir à escola.

Internacionalizemos as crianças tratando-as, todas elas, não importando o país onde nasceram, como património que merece cuidados do mundo inteiro.

Ainda mais do que merece a Amazónia. Quando os dirigentes tratarem as criança pobres do mundo como um património
da Humanidade, eles não deixarão que elas trabalhem quando deveriam estudar, que morram quando deveriam viver.

Como humanista, aceito defender a internacionalização do mundo. Mas, enquanto o mundo me tratar como brasileiro,
lutarei para que a Amazónia seja nossa.

Só nossa!'
*
ESTE DISCURSO NÃO FOI PUBLICADO. AJUDE-NOS A DIVULGÁ-LO
porque é muito importante... e porque foi CENSURADO"

AVENIDA com nova folhagem

2008-05-03T04:11:00.000-07:00

Já repararam que a Avenida dos Aliados tem colecção Verão e Inverno!
Ora vejam lá bem se estas árvores são as mesmas do verão passado, e quem diz isso diz, de há um mês atrás!!!
ver aqui

Novo Blog ... para reflectirmos sobre o espaço público

2008-05-03T03:36:00.000-07:00

Mercado do Bolhão: Ideias a considerar para o futuro da cidade

Recentemente e pelas piores razões, a discussão sobre o futuro do Mercado do Bolhão ganhou um novo impulso. De um lado, o projecto de reconversão promovido por um grupo holandês e apoiado pelo actual executivo municipal; do outro, um activo grupo de cidadãos que desejam preservar o património arquitectónico e cultural que o Bolhão representa. Esta dualidade tem-se concentrado no edificado e nos usos inerentes ao espaço comercial que o mercado representa, deixando frequentemente de lado algumas das principais questões que integram o futuro deste espaço. (ver a totalidade do texto aqui!) por Lígia Paz Oliveira

Os Calhau no Senhorio

2008-04-29T09:17:00.001-07:00

von Calhau
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

concertos públicos em espaços pri(vados)viligiados

uniform / public squares

2008-04-29T09:16:00.001-07:00

uniform
Originally uploaded by litcha sparletta

da suspensão das regras

2008-04-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

O FC Porto ganha o campeonato e a baixa vira um imenso carnaval. Mas no verdadeiro sentido do termo, é um bacanal azul. Rapidamente os passeios foram invadidos por vendedores de bifanas e farturas, nas suas rulotes; penduraram-se cordas entre postes com toda a panóplia de versões do "antes morto que vermelho", campeões deste e doutros anos, superQueens, etc, etc. Todas as novidades em chinesises, pulseiras, aneis e afins que piscam azul.

Usam-se as camisolas do clube, e até o cão trás um cachecol.

As pessoas concentram-se nas bermas da estrada a ver passar o corso. E estes sim, os carros, são muitos e variados, e apesar de estarem dois polícias de 5 em 5 metros, é o vale tudo: passar vermelhos, ir sentado meio de fora, em cima do capot, no tejadilho, aos montes em carrinhas, de mala aberta, eu sei lá... sem capacete, a cavalo, de bicicleta, a sacar cavalos, acelerar o tunning, e dar estouros realemente assustadores com os escapes das motas.

Famílias inteiras, passeavam-se pela avenida, serenas. Entoavam-se cânticos de um lado para o outro dos passeios, e como quem bate palmas é tripeiro e quem não salta é lampião, lá andava tudo aos saltos.

Não eram muitos, é verdade, a massa estava no estádio, mas foi o verdadeiro reclaim the streets versão azul,

2008-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Pequenos gestos na Cidade _ Oficina do NEC // a partir de textos de Mika Hannula // the politics of small gestures...

Praça Moinho de Vento no Porto
16 de MArço

Victor, Sofia, Joana, Joana, Filipe, Carla e Flávio!!!

s