At Carnival, Where Challenging Normal Is the Norm
By NADIA SUSSMAN and TAYLOR BARNES
New York Times MARCH 2, 2014
RIO DE JANEIRO — Standing high atop a truck rigged with speakers, André da Silva Lisboa cried out to hundreds of drummers, dancers and costumed revelers gathering in the sun-drenched avenue below.
“Carnival has arrived,” shouted Mr. da Silva Lisboa, 38, a samba singer. “Come to the streets! We’re freaking out!”
Directed by Fernando Sariñana, Todo el poder centers around the politics and corruption that shroud the Mexican police system. Featuring Demián Bichir as Gabriel, a filmmaker whose career has left him assaulted and robbed in broad daylight more times than he cares to remember, the film itself was inspired by Sariñana's personal experience with urban crime oftentimes perpetrated by the police themselves. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi
Brief History is part of a series produced by Carlos Motta between 2005 and 2009 that presents two chronologies of events in Latin America: one of U.S. interventions in the region since 1946, and one of the area’s leftist guerrilla movements. One side of the print outlines the interventions’ interconnected narratives in text; the other depicts two bloody handprints and the symbol of the Mano Blanco death squads from 1980s El Salvador.
Fashion designer and social scientist, Lucia Cuba, has taken up the task of using fashion as a vehicle to bring attention and awareness around Articulo 6, an article in the Peruvian constitution that declared a law of forced sterilization of women in the country. Cuba has taken the testimonies of the victims of this article and integrated them into the very fabric of her designs.
Parió Paula is an all women’s percussion group based in Lima, Peru. These women are truly artistic renegades defying the social norms of Lima’s predominantly male music scene. With a bold message on emphasizing female expression, these ladies have transformed their countless styles of drumming into something effective for their city.
(see full article and short documentary at link below)
In 2017, the political party Ahora Buenos Aires (Now Buenos Aires) was running in the legislative election for the first time. It is not easy being a small left-wing party in the City of Buenos Aires, therefore imagination is an essential part of a campaign if you want to get the attention of the media and voters.
Ahead of Monday’s planned protest, police set up a barricade around the presidential palace, which a spokesperson described as a “peace wall” to prevent vandalism, the Guardian reported. But protesters said the barrier was symbolic of the president’s refusal to take on the issue, noting that he frequently makes a show of traveling in drug cartel-controlled parts of Mexico but felt unsafe ahead of their protest.
Thousands of students have protested in the Colombian capital, Bogota, and other cities against government plans to reform higher education.
The demonstrations were mainly peaceful but Bogota police fired tear gas and used water cannon after some people threw stones, officials said.
Students say the proposed reforms will lead to partial privatisation of the public universities.
From a Universe of Trash, Recycling Art and Hope
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
“We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials,” Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker’s inspiring documentary “Waste Land.”
The work of a radical theater and puppetry collective, known as Papel Machete, produces and performs throughout Puerto Rico and the United States. Papel Machete was established on May 1, 2006 during protests responding to the government shutdown and political and economic crisis prompted by Puerto Rico’s status as a United States colony.
El Antimuseo es un proyecto curatorial que questiona los mecanismos de legitimación del arte. El grupo considera su trabajo " el proceso social donde se produce el valor simbólico y económico de la obra de arte, así como en el análisis de la estructura y límites de la institución."
En las palabras de ANTIMUSEO:
Jorge Rodríguez-Gerarda is a cuban Artist that was born in 1966. One of his projects was naed Expectations in which he did with sand and grave a massive image of Barack Obama, as a way to reflect all what this presidential candidate representated in terms of change.
The Canadian artist collective General Idea found its drive in the AIDS epidemic, becoming aesthetically and conceptually refined in the in the 1970s and ’80s, after long forays into absurdity and performances evocative of Dada and Fluxus.
Thousands of Indigenous activists and environmentalists have converged in one of the Amazon’s biggest cities to voice their hopes and fears about the future of the world’s biggest rainforest.
The Brazilian city of Belém will this week host a two-day conclave bringing together the presidents of eight Amazon nations including Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.
To mark the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx, PL Henderson offers an appreciation of one of Frida Kahlo’s greatest paintings, which was heavily influenced by Marx's creative thinking.
At Rio+20 we present a bread tank with a garden inside to underline the realistic possibility of eradicating hunger and extreme poverty by redirecting military spending.
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.
Bit Rosie showcases female music producers in high quality performance videos and short documentaries. Our videos and digital archive project with the New York University library document the work of women using music technology to make sounds across genres and locales.
Bit Rosie is directed and produced by Adele Fournet.
http://www.adelefournet.com/
"Mimes gesture as they stand in a crosswalk in Caracas, Venezuela, Friday Oct. 7, 2011. The mayor of the city's eastern district of Sucre has launched a unique program aimed to encourage civility among reckless drivers and careless pedestrians, putting 120 mimes at intersections to politely and silently scold violators"
Contra-Tiempo’s first Miami dance performance will bring Ana Maria Alvarez back to her roots. Her father’s family settled in Miami after leaving Cuba in the early ’60s. Most of them, including his four siblings and their spouses and children, still live here, and Alvarez expects much of the clan to attend her show.
This is the sixth piece of the series Tatlin’s Whisper which examines the relationship between apathy and anaesthetization of the images in the mass media. This series intends to activate images, well-known because of having been repeatedly seen in the press, but are here decontextualized from the original event that gave way to the news and staged as realistically as possible in an art institution.
From this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27632527
A campaign by one of Brazil's biggest football clubs to encourage fans to become organ donors has led to a massive rise in the number of life-changing transplants and reduced waiting lists for organs in the area almost to zero.