Posted: July 14th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events - Pedro Lasch, Exhibitions-Pedro Lasch, Haiti | No Comments »
TELEGETO (PT 1)
Morpeth School, Portman Place (off Globe Road), London E2 OPX
An exhibition of video works by young people from the Grand Rue area of Port-
au-Prince, Haiti and sculptures made by pupils from Morpeth School under the
guidance of artists from Atis Rezistans, Haiti.
Curated by John Cussans
EXHIBITION July 16th - 20th
OPENING (with Pedro Lasch) Thursday, July 16th, 4pm - 8 pm
Opening times Thu. - Fri. 4 - 7 pm, Sat. 1- 6pm
To learn more about Portman Gallery and Morpeth School, visit:
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events - Pedro Lasch, Events-Recommended, Exhibitions-Pedro Lasch | 1 Comment »
Art & Labour Summit: Cultural Workers, Artists, Students, and Interns Meet to Organise, Name Names, and Coordinate Demands
Thursday April 22nd, 6pm-9pm
Cell Projects Space
258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA
Free entry and all welcome
We’d like you to join us for a special event and organisational party open to all who are interested in the better understanding and active transformation of the way art, free labour, and education work. Crises are moments of great opportunity, as we all know, and those defunding and devaluing our labour have been busy applying this knowledge.
We invite your active participation in an evening of events:
1. ‘Show and Tell’ - bring evidence of your current research, campaigns or projects dealing with art and labour to share with the group.
2. ‘Name and Shame’ - collectively create a map of power structures on the wall where we name our exploiters, quantify their exploits, draw the hidden or overt links between them and chart the ideas that legitimise their subsistence.
3. ‘Coordinate Demands’ - engage in small group discussions to identify your demands.
4. ‘Publish and Get Organised’ - we will end the evening by having a look at what we have created to decide where and how we want to publish a map of our most urgent demands and discuss the experimental, pragmatic and sustainable organisational techniques we can use to co-ordinate the next steps.
This event has been developed as a response and dialogue with the newspaper and website “Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor, and Economics” recently published by Temporary Services. Pedro from 16 Beaver has brought forty free copies of the paper from the US to distribute to participants at the event in London, but you can also download the newspaper as pdf or read the articles online here:
http://www.artandwork.us
This summit is co-organised by Carrot Workers Collective, Micropolitics Group, Lottie Child, Ecosophy Group, Temporary Services, Free School, Short Term Solutions, Independent Art School, ARTSCHOOL/UK, Sophie Hope and Pedro Lasch (16 Beaver)…
If you cannot attend the event, but would like to participate in the making of the map long-distance, just send us an email at the addresses below.
For any messages, comments, or questions related to this event, contact Sophie Hope - sophiehope[at]mac.com, or Pedro Lasch - plasch[at]duke.edu
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Haiti, Writing On The Wall | 1 Comment »
Added On March 7, 2010
CNN’s David McKenzie follows a Haitian graffiti artist to see what he’s doing in his country post earthquake.
See video at:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/03/07/mckenzie.haiti.graffiti.champ.cnn?iref=allsearch
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Haiti, Writing On The Wall | No Comments »
See Jerry Rosembert in ‘Voices of Haiti’ (scroll down to Day 10)
http://voicesofhaiti.com/photos
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Haiti, Writing On The Wall | No Comments »
See Jerry Rosembert on ‘Mon JT Quotidien’ web TV episode:
Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Art, Story-Telling & the Five Senses / El Arte, El Cuento y los Cinco Sentidos | 1 Comment »
Ricardo Dominguez performing in the basement of a Church in Jackson Heights, Queens (2002) for the children and families of the experimental immigrant school ‘Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses.’
————–
Dear friends,
I am passing the note below from Casey Alt and Zach Blas, and I ask as many of you who possibly can to help support Ricardo Dominguez. The letter is going out by tomorrow so please answer today. Just send your name and titles, etc to Casey asap. I have collaborated with Ricardo on various occasions, the first one being through 16 Beaver in NY in 2000, and then in 2002 when he came (completely free of charge) to perform an amazing theater piece for the children and families of the immigrant art school I was running in Queens, NY at the time (see images).
Ricardo is a fantastic artist, a brilliant mind, and one of the most courageous people I know. Please support him, and also help us send a clear message that this chain of politically motivated moves against academics across the US has to stop. Ricardo is clearly being targeted for challenging the powers of his institution at a time when this cannot be allowed to remain unquestioned (if they ever can). We cannot let him be punished for doing a service to us all, and we should know that if we let them keep going they will soon come after many more of us, especially in these ‘times of crisis,’ when so many things become magically justified.
Pedro
—————————————————
Pedro Lasch
Board Member, N.C. Arts Council (2007-2010)
Visual Artist & Assistant Research Professor
Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
& Latino/a Studies in the Global South, Duke University
======================================
We are writing to gather support for the current academic persecution of Professor Ricardo Dominguez, Visual Arts Department, UCSD. Ricardo is an original co-founder of the art and activist group Critical Art Ensemble, a member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, and a Principal Investigator at CALIT2, where he runs the bang.lab for bits, atoms, neurons, and genes.
Ricardo and his collaborators in the CALIT2 bang.lab, including Duke University Program in Literature PhD alum Amy Sara Carroll (2004), are fighting against criminal charges for the virutal sit-in the group led against the University of California Office of the President in solidarity with the UC-wide March 4 protests.
These actions have led to university and criminal investigations of Ricardo’s research as well as the threat of tenure loss.
In solidarity with Ricardo and his colleagues at the bang.lab, we will submit the attached letter to the President and Senior Vice Chancellor of the University of California to challenge these actions. We invite you to join in our support. To add your name to this letter, please send your name, academic titles, and institutional affiliations to either Casey Alt (
caseyalt@duke.edu) or Zach Blas (
zachblas@gmail.com). Additionally, if you are a graduate of the University of California, we encourage you to identify yourself by further indicating your UC campus and class year in your response.
More information about the recent events can be found here:
Ricardo’s UCSD biography:
On April 6th, our letter will be emailed to the University of California Office of the President and the Senior Vice Chancellor and will be copied to several people at UCSD who are involved in the investigation. All signees will also be blind carbon copied on the letter.
Sincerely,
Casey Alt
Visiting Professor of the Practice
Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Duke University
Zach Blas
Graduate student
Program in Literature
Duke University
——————————————-
email title: Letter of Support for Ricardo Dominguez, bang.lab, and Electronic Disturbance Theater
To the Presidents and Trustees of the University of California:
We are writing as an international group of concerned students and faculty in regard to the series of investigations currently directed against Professor Ricardo Dominguez and his collaborators in the CALIT2 bang.lab. More specifically, we wish to address the following events:
1) On March 21, 2010, a bang.lab colleague at the University of California, Riverside, received notice that he is under investigation in relation to the establishment of the website http://MarkYudof.com, an art protest piece in which the artist expressed an alternate version of the future in which University of California President Mark Yudof publicly resigned his position by acknowledging that his “service as president is detrimental to the future of public education in the state of California.” Despite its obviously unrealistic message on behalf of President Yudof and the multiple links on the site indicating its connection to various student protest groups, both of which clearly identify the site’s political intent and its desire not to defraud its visitors, this artist action has directly resulted in the ensuing investigation.
2) On March 4th, the bang.lab website hosted a virtual sit-in against the website of the University of California Office of the President as part of the system-wide student and faculty protests against the policies of the University of California administration. The virtual sit-in action provided a means for anyone sympathetic to the cause to remotely join the protesters in solidarity. As a direct result of the sit-in action, the University of California, San Diego’s Office of Information Technology Security shut down the bang.lab server’s access to the Internet for eight consecutive days.
3) Following the virtual sit-in, the bang.lab was informed that they were under investigation by the University of California at San Diego Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Paul Drake, who was also attempting to determine the legal grounds necessary to file criminal charges against Professor Dominguez. If successful, these university and criminal charges would directly threaten the revocation of Professor Dominguez’s tenure at UCSD. Despite already established international legal precedents that virtual sit-ins are considered electronic civil disobedience (ECD) and are therefore not illegal denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks (most recently in the First Penal Senate of the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt ruling 1 Ss 319/05 in 2005), these publicly unjustified investigations and charges continue.
As academic colleagues of both Professor Dominguez and his collaborators at the bang.lab, we ask that you cease these seemingly politically motivated investigations. Since initiating his digital protests over ten years ago, Professor Dominguez’s activities with the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the bang.lab have served as unflinchingly courageous examples of intellectual integrity and academic engagement within their wider sociopolitical communities. Professor Dominguez’s tireless efforts to bring awareness to underserved and underrepresented causes through the artful mastery of technologies that so often seek to marginalize such groups has inspired multiple generations of artists, activists, and critical thinkers. His recent bang.lab projects have received numerous international humanitarian awards and funding support in both the U.S. and Mexico. We believe these recent actions against him and the bang.lab threaten the academic freedoms and rights to free speech of all artists and academics everywhere. We recommend that rather than criminalizing legitimate protest activity by members of its own community the University of California would be better served by opening up substantive public dialogues with protesters regarding their concerns. For these reasons, we firmly but respectfully call for increased accountability of this process and an end to the bureaucratic and legal harassment of Professor Dominguez and his colleagues.
Sincerely,
lots of people
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events, Events-Recommended, Haiti | 1 Comment »
————————
Thursday 03.18.10
A Haiti Screening & Conversation w/ Port-Au-Prince artist André Eugene & Others / Screening of ‘Atis Rezistans, The Sculptors of the Grand Rue’
CONTENTS:
1. About this Thursday
2. About our guests: Port-Au-Prince based artist André Eugene, Laura Heyman, and Richard Fleming
3. About Leah Gordon’s film ‘Atis Rezistans, The Sculptors of the Grand Rue’
4. About the Ghetto Biennale: A Salon des Refusés for the 21st century (November-December 2009)
___________________________________________________
1. About this Thursday
What: Haiti Screening & Conversation w/ Port-Au-Prince artist André Eugene & Others
When: Thursday 03.18.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:30 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This Thursday we will have a very special event with Port-Au-Prince based artist André Eugene, who is in New York for a few days during an exceptional visit. After screening oLeah Gordon’s
‘Atis-Rezistans: The Sculptors of Grand Rue’ (34mins), André Eugene, and our other guests Laura Heyman, and Richard Fleming, will answer questions or comments in a general conversation about art and politics in Port-Au-Prince, the recent Ghetto Biennale that happened there, and the aftermath of the tragic earthquake, and the prospects for the future.
We are keeping to 16 Beaver’s tradition of not charging anything for this event (our events are always free), a hat will be circulated for those who want to help with contributions for the Grand Rue community, as André Eugene will be flying back directly to Haiti, and is specifically in New York to buy tents for people who have no shelter for the coming rain season.
The evening is an opportunity to have a group conversation with everyone in New York who knows and cares about Haiti, or art, politics, and international resistance struggles. Please forward and post to your lists.
___________________________________________________
2. About Port-Au-Prince based artist André Eugene, Laura Heyman, and Richard Fleming
André Eugene Andre Eugène is the progenitor of the Grand Rue artist movement in downtown Port au Prince. He fuses the fetish effigy with an apocalyptic futuristic vision. Much of his work is figurative using human skulls for heads and imbued with a bold sense of irony, sexuality and humor. To learn more on him and the Grand Rue artists, see below text and link (3).
British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon first visited Haiti in 1991 and has built an extraordinary body of work over nineteen years. Her work does not merely articulate nostalgia for an authentic popular culture but positively celebrates the vivid potential of contemporary communal creativity in Haiti.
Richard Fleming is a writer and journalist with experience in Haiti. He is the author of ‘Walking to Guantánamo’: ( http://www.walkingtoguantanamo.com/Front.html ). You can learn more about his work at his blog:
http://antarcticiana.blogspot.com/
Laura Heyman is an educator, photographer, artist and curator. She was a participant in last December’s ‘Ghetto Biennale’ in Port-Au-Prince and will speak of her work and experience there.
___________________________________________________
3. About Leah Gordon’s film ‘Atis Rezistans, The Sculptors of the Grand Rue’
The Grand Rue Sculptors are a community of artists living in a downtown slum neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This is the newest art community to have emerged in the last ten years. They have produced art that reflects a heightened, Gibsonesque, Lo-Sci-Fi, dystopian view of their society, culture and religion, and have dragged Haitian art into the 21st century. Jean Herard Celeur, Andre Eugene and Guyodo are at the core of the movement, which contains seven or eight other younger artists, all producing powerful sculptural works. Their work has opened entirely new vistas into the creative possibilities of the Vodou-inspired arts of Haiti. Their muscular sculptural collages of engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber transforms the detritus of a failing economy into deranged, post-apocalyptic totems.
To read texts, and see images of works about the Grand Rue, and its artists, visit:
___________________________________________________
4. About the Ghetto Biennale: A Salon des Refusés for the 21st century (November-December 2009)
Please visit the Ghetto Biennale website for full information on participants, history, ideas, etc. The following text is just an introduction.
http://www.ghettobiennale.com/
(below already happened, but written in present//future tense)
What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?
In 2009 the ‘Sculptors of Grand Rue’ plan to hold their first ‘Ghetto Biennale’. They are inviting fine artists, filmmakers, academics, photographers, musicians, architects and writers, to come to the Grand Rue area of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, to make or witness work that will be shown or happen, in their neighbourhood. In the words of the writer John Keiffer it will hopefully be a “’third space’…an event or moment created through a collaboration between artists from radically different backgrounds”. ’
‘The artists use all the detritus of a post-industrial global economy which uses Haiti as a dumping ground. They return the compliment, creating astounding bricolages and assemblages which express both the despair and the seemingly endless creativity of Haiti and Vodou. I have visited their ateliers on Haiti’s Grand Rue on several occasions over the last four years. I have had a chance to see their sculptures as they were being wrought from their desperate materials in a scrap yard on this wreck of a street, in this wreck of a city, in this wreck of a country. Saying all that, I would also have to add that, like Haiti, their sculptures seem to express the boundless creative energy of a people who are simultaneously the economically poorest, and artistically richest culture in the New World.’Professor Donald Cosentino, World Arts and Cultures, University of California-Los Angeles.
Forging a successful arts career is difficult for a downtown Haitian. Refused US entry visas, the Grand Rue sculptors were excluded from a private view of their work in a major museum in Miami. A lack of government support makes them economically excluded from all major biennales. The artists have responded by hosting the ‘Ghetto Biennale’, the first arts festival located in a shantytown in the developing world. The event will explore what happens when artists from radically different backgrounds come together. When first world art objectives encounter third world artistic reality, and when Western artists try to make art in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haitian artist, Andre Eugene says, ‘the Ghetto Biennale represents positive change in my area and gives us the chance to show another face of life in the ghettos of Port-au-Prince. I think we have much to offer and much to learn.’
Malaysian artist, Simryn Gill, has said of her potential involvement in the ‘Ghetto Biennale’.'The making of things, in the way that you describe Haitian artists doing, is very energising and attracting for me. Sometime it feels like we have left so behind us the acts of actually making, forming, transforming materials with passion and courage, and art has become a kind of domain of cleverness, even timidity, in case we somehow show ourselves up in too much eagerness or insufficient wit or skill by making forms.’
Kathy Acker, Andre Breton, Maya Deren, Katherine Dunham, Graham Greene, Jerzy Grotowski, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, & Genesis P.Orridge have all visited Haiti and made work inspired by their visit.
__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th / 5th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry
Posted: March 3rd, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events-Recommended | No Comments »
Haiti Disaster Appeal
6.30-9pm, Thursday 4 March 2010
In support of the ongoing disaster appeal for Haiti, Four Corners
Gallery is pleased to feature a screening of:
‘Atis-Rezistans: The Sculptors of Grand Rue, 34mins’.
A drinks reception will follow in the company of artists Andre
Eugène and Leah Gordon.
Andre Eugène is the progenitor of the Grand Rue artist
movement in downtown Port au Prince. He fuses the fetish effigy
with an apocalyptic MTV futuristic vision. Much of his work is
figurative using human skulls for heads and imbued with a bold
sense of irony, sexuality and humour.
British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon first visited
Haiti in 1991 and has built an extraordinary body of work over
nineteen years. Her work does not merely articulate nostalgia for
an authentic popular culture but positively celebrates the vivid
potential of contemporary communal creativity in Haiti.
Posted: February 25th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Events-Recommended, Haiti | No Comments »
Thursday February 25th Feb The Haiti Earthquake Fundraiser 19:30PM - 02:30AM
£10 tickets , start at 19:30, over 18s
http://www.proudcamden.com/events.aspx?ear=2010&month=02&eventid=4075#4075
The aim of this event is to raise awareness of a culture in trouble and generate desperately needed funds for the people of Haiti.
The sole beneficiaries will be ActionAid & Medecins Sans Frontieres with 100% of all ticket sales going to the charities.
Live:Charlotte O’Conner, The Hoosiers, Strangeways, Adam Ficek
DJs:Smash DJs - Sally SexFace, DJ Cooks, Stereo MCs, Maxi Jazz, Tara Rocks and Richard Biedul, Hextatic, Mista Jam,Fred Deakin
Venue: The Horse Hospital, Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, Camden Town
NW1 8AH.Email:info@proud.co.uk. Telephone:0207 482 3867
