During this time rent prices in the Lower East Side/ East Village were rising due to the presence of many community gardens. In response to this, then Mayor Giuliani decided to sell the 198 gardens in question. Streets into Gardens was an effective project that engaged the neighborhood into a collective of change.
Xu Bing, the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist, has brought his “Phoenix” installation to the majestic nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The two phoenixes, both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors of the Cathedral, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night.
São Paulo went through a process of privatization of the public spaces. The local government implemented several rules that beneficiated the real state speculation, the city is expensive, and it's not for the poor.
Besides that, in october the elections were a hard game for the progressive party, PT, since two conservative candidates had big shares.
I Wish This Was began in New Orleans in November 2010. It was inspired by vacant storefronts. There are a lot of them where Candy lives in New Orleans. There are also a lot of people who need and want things. What if we could easily voice what we want, where we want it? How can we influence the businesses and services in our neighborhoods?
Artist Daniel Soares pasted Photoshop toolbar stickers on these H&M posters as a nice little reminder that not all is as it seems. Y'all know how Photoshop messes with our perception of beauty, and I think this is a smart little stunt to snap us back into reality when we start to wonder why we never look like the girls on the posters we walk past every day.
If, like me, you spent the days after Trump’s election in a depressed stupor wondering what – if anything – would change, look no further than Good Trouble. Set up by former Dazed editor Rod Stanley, it’s a new collective arts platform dedicated to celebrating the culture of resistance and grassroots activists promoting positive change.
This project was born a few days after a demonstrator lost an eye after being hit by a rubber bullet shot from police guns in Barcelona. Unfortunately, it was not the first time. "Cop d' ull" means a "a blow to the eye" and also "at a glance”, which is a perfect description of this project.
Kwentong Bayan: Labour of Love is a community based comic book project, created by Toronto-based artists Althea Balmes (Illustrator) and Jo SiMalaya Alcampo (Writer) in close collaboration with caregivers and supporters, about the real life stories of Filipina migrant workers in the Live-in Caregiver Program.
The crisis is here, let the party begin! April 30, 2009. At first the crisis was just a state of being, a kind of social sadness that paralyzed everything. To break this atmosphere we couldn’t think of anything better than to throw a party. The first thing you need for a party is a good location, so we set out to find a place where social sadness and fear were extremely present. It didn’t take us long to find one: an unemployment office.
On the one-year anniversary of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, artist-activists at Liberate Tate staged a guerrilla performance in the Tate Britain galleries to highlight the museum's ties to BP.
Rain of Poems took place over London on Tuesday 26th June 2012 at 9pm. One hundred thousand poems printed on bookmarks by over 300 contemporary poets from 204 countries fell from a helicopter over Jubilee Gardens during Poetry Parnassus as the sun sets.
See below for a link to the performance of the song at the Academy Awards.
From Salon: How Common and John Legend’s performance of “Glory” fired up Oscar night’s idling empathy machine by Sonia Saraiya
On October 2nd 2012, World Farmed Animals Day, three animal rights activists in Israel got branded with a hot steel brand, in the same way that farmed animals are branded in factory farms.
Since summer 2011, FARM’s activists have been paying people $1 each to watch a 4-minute video depicting the inherent cruelties of raising animals for food. This tactic, known as “pay-per-view,” has led 80% of participants to reduce meat consumption, sparing tens of thousands of animals from abuse and slaughter.
Camp Mossandsticks, named after moss and sticks--two of the most rudimentary tools with which one can spark fire--is a site for young women and girls to become resourceful, defiant, and self-sufficient revolutionaries of today. Started on November 6, 2012, the camp hosts workshops to spark the attendees’ inner political flames, challenging them to confront disenfranchisement created by the status quo and to take matters into their own hands.
A television report written, directed and produced by Enmedio members Leónidas Martín and Xavier Artigas. Collective projects that see art as a kind of social relationship. Artistic interventions that target consumption, media guerrilla tactics, creative mobilisations and protest, critical projects brimming with humour and disobedience, new narratives capable of changing the existing symbols and codes.
V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money, and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), and sex slavery.
"Surround Congress”: as soon as we’d heard this, in our minds we were there. To make the Government resign and demand they start a new constituent process seemed like a great idea. We immediately got to work.
The Guerrilla Girls tactic was well thought-out and was effective in creating a spectacle to draw attention to the issue at hand, which is the lack of female representation in the museum. Where I think the campaign has some drawbacks is in the actual message on the billboard. The rhetorical and ironic message is subtle and really only reaches those who are privy to the art world and/ or the museum.
“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Mahatma Gandhi
#FUEELESTADO is a project about the lack of social justice and the gross human rights violations in Mexico. It examines the conflict between state power and personal autonomy and responsibility, a conflict that, in Mexico, involves missing persons and unidentified bodies and that can’t be silenced anymore.
On April 23rd, in commemoration of the International Day for Animals in Laboratories, Animal Equality's activists in Rome, Madrid, Barcelona and many other cities across Europe carried out demonstrations against animal testing.
On November 7, 2010 Pope Benedict XVI visited our city. He would have been better off staying at home. Even before he touched land we had rendered him impotent for life. Yes: im-po-tent.
"The traveling mini-exhibition aims to gather a snap-shot of contemporary cultural production.
Editors collect items and contributions are ongoing." (From site.)
The development of the Nights from the oriental oral and literary traditions of the Middle Ages into a classical work for Western readers is a fascinating one. The notebook of a Jewish book dealer from Cairo around the year 1150 contains the first documentary evidence for the Arabic title. The oldest preserved manuscripts, comprising a core corpus of about 270 nights, appear to date from the 15th century.