On January 12, 2016, Shanghai's temperature dropped to its lowest of the year. A little girl was seen selling matches in the cold wind on Bund street. The little girl, wearing a classic dress, wrapped in an ocher-red scarf and carrying a small bamboo basket full of matches, gave matches to passers-by.
In 2009, the dissident artist created a work to honour the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. He recalls how the project, Remembering, angered China’s rulers – and changed his career for ever
This is an edited extract from The Start podcast
"Improving
the livability of our towns and cities commonly starts at the street,
block, or building scale. While larger scale efforts do have their
place, incremental, smallscale improvement efforts are increasingly seen
as a way to stage more substantial investments. This approach allows a
host of local actors to test new concepts before making substantial
In France, abstention, vote of protest, lassitude or violent reactions rise from all over the crisis of our "representative democracy ».
What about thinking the other way round ? What if we reappropriate the iconography of the election?
Brooklyn deli re-brands as artisanal emporium to protest rent hike
The owners of an imperiled Boerum Hill deli have staged an “artisanal takeover” of their 25-year-old corner store, re-branding products with yuppified names and jacking up prices to illustrate the kind of shop that could afford the 250-percent rent hike they say the store’s landlord is demanding.
A public art exhibition designed to raise awareness of solutions to climate change. Cool Globes grew out of a commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005, and was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2006. Since that time, Cool Globes premiered in Chicago and went on tour across the country from Washington DC to San Francisco, San Diego, Sundance, Los Angeles, Houston and Cleveland.
Flushing Creek is so hidden by industrial sites and highways, it’s almost invisible to those passing through the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. “I lived in Flushing my whole life and didn’t know that I lived near waterways until I was 20 years old,” Cody Ann Herrmann told Hyperallergic.
In the middle of Berlin, two thousand armed police officers stand guard, with instructions not to let a single person over the fence. They have been brought in from all over Germany on this particular Saturday. Water cannons, tear gas, and guns are at the ready. They stand in a line, a careful five meters behind the chain link and barbed wire fence. Protesters, two for every officer, are standing a few meters back from the other side.
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile — the setting of Patricio Guzmán’s transfixing cinematic essay “Nostalgia for the Light” — is a place where heaven and earth converge. Or some might say heaven and hell.
Renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera surprised a Bogota audience in September when she lined up three people directly involved in the Colombian conflict for a chat. The real performance however, started when a waitress emerged with a tray of neatly organised lines of cocaine, and began offering them to members of the audience.
Just weeks after activists staged an alternative tour of the American Museum of Natural History to call for its removal, among other things, the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt was vandalized early Thursday morning.
Local artist fnnch wants San Francisco to decriminalize certain types of art.
You’re not seeing things: A whopping 450 “honey bears”—variations on the immediately recognizable and widely imitated bear-shaped honey bottles sold in seemingly every store in America--appeared all over SoMa late Sunday night, from the Embarcadero to Fifth Street.
In July and August 2013, O Teatrão, a Coimbra based theatre company, presented the project Arruinados, comprising three theatre performances in three abandoned spaces (‘ruins’), one in each of three cities in the Centre region of Portugal located along the Mondego River:Coimbra, Montemoro Velho, and Figueira da Foz.
This is the image confronting Greeks from an Athenian drain . "Hello, I live in the sewers of Athens," says the cockroach. "Yes, me too," says an Athenian walking past, apparently unfazed by the idea of an insect talking to him from a drain.
Two design students were awarded the Futurapolis prize last Wednesday for their project to adapt the Furan (underground river) , a response to the migration crisis.
Whose job is it to create a city? Our intention is to jumpstart a new profession that can re-invent and negotiate the complex mix that encompasses a city. We have defined a radical new occupation to regenerate, pioneer, and sustain the future urban realm. These innovative multi-disciplinarian advocates are called Urbaneers. Their immense task is to manifest and facilitate the next expression of city across the globe.
Since Christmas Eve, some lights along the streets and in the houses of Bushwick have spelled out a number of messages quite different from the festive wishes one usually finds during the holiday season. “GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM,” “NOT 4 SALE,” and “NO EVICTION ZONE,” some read.
La Casa Negra is a moving artist squat that occupies houses destined for demolition as temporary venues for site specific performance art in Barranco (Lima, Peru). Artists use all of the available rooms (kitchen, bathrooms, stairs, backyard) to enact a series of critical art pieces, while using the space as a demonstration of artist resilience in an increasingly gentrifying neighborhood.
The Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network is a grassroots movement and campaign to prevent the displacement of low-to-middle income people, elders, families and mom-and-pop businesses from Brooklyn. They say, “Not 1 more person displaced! Not 1 more luxury development, until we have affordable housing for all!”
The Protest Banner Lending Library is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests.
A technological feat has emerged amid the Chilean protests. A video of protestors bringing down a police drone has gone viral on social media sites. These protestors didn't use any physical or gun force to bring the drone down. Instead, they used another form of technology: lasers. A lot of bright green laser beams were pointed in unison at the drone, which can be seen moving erratically, before quickly falling down to Earth.
A troupe of approximately thirty women and men of various ages, sizes, ethnicities and performance backgrounds marched through the performance art space of SESC-Vila Mariana in Sao Paulo and then through the streets of downtown Sao Paulo, silent, blind folded, dressed in business attire, and covered completely with a gray mud. The performances walked slowly in unison at turtle's pace.
Imagine affecting the global cultural Landscape through art and technology use. Imagine one-mile long installation in 100 city locations worldwide, each mile-long install is of 250 bronze plaques of different Peacemakers. Then imagine its own App that when any smartphone is pointed at one of the plaques an entire timeline biographical history of that peacemaker becomes available.