FUTURE IMAGEMAKERS
Brazilian Stories and Selfies Through a Pinhole
Great piece in the NYTimes Lens Blog about a pinhole photography workshop in the Mare favela in Rio de Janeiro led by Tatian Altberg. Fantastic photographs.
In my web searching, I found another article about the project.
Just learned of this collaborative team, Antena. I have met them at a bi-lingual conference where they have incorporated translation as an active and integral part of the conference. They make installations, publish books as well as offer translation.
Antena uses writing and multilingual space-building as conduits for a collective creative activist practice that reimagines the power of language. Antena works at the intersection of multiple fields of artistic and political experimentation: writing, literary social practice, interpretation, translation, language justice, performance, installation, book-making, public interventions and radical pedagogy. Each provides us with a context, a vocabulary and a set of principles. We conceptualize our artistic work as social sculpture, a revisioning of the dominant monolingual U.S. way of doing literature, community-building and street-level performance.Some of our core working principles:Language justice is social justice.
Everyone has the basic human right to speak in the language(s) in which they feel most comfortable at a given time. The purpose of creating a dynamic and functional multilingual space is to make it possible for people to express themselves in whichever language they wish, and to be heard and understood by others in the room, regardless of whether they speak the same language.
Inspring piece in today’s Lens Blog:
Wresting the Narrative From the West
… Shahidul Alam’s Pathshala school has produced dozens of world-class photographers and given Bangladesh a reputation for exceptional photography. The Chobi Mela photo festival, which Mr. Alam started in 1999, brings photographers from around the world to the capital, Dhaka, and promotes local image-makers and documentarians. His photo agency, Drik, which he started in 1989, sells stories made by Bangladeshi photographers to media outlets worldwide and encourages its photographers to cover stories the way they want to, and not to try to fit a script imposed by outsiders.
Global Youth Connect is a non-profit human rights activist organization aimed to empower and inspire passion in youth. It has helped to address a wide variety of human rights and social justice issues around the world since 1999. Global Youth Connect provides today’s youth with opportunities to engage in experiential learning in post-conflict countries that have a history of human rights abuses. International youth participants in delegations join local peers in their selected destinations in a combination of workshops, advocacy meetings, volunteer service with NGOS and site visits, through which they obtain vital information on the key human rights issues pertaining to their choice of location. International youth delegations are invited to work collectively in taking action for human rights and social justice.
Over the past decades, GYC has initiated 26 human rights training programs, involving more than 625 young individuals from 15 countries. There are currently twelve locations international participants can select from, such as Rwanda, El Salvador and Bosnia. The GYC programs provide comprehensive tools to inform and empower young people to make educated decisions in the human rights field. Here is a video of an International Delegate talking about her experience in Rawanada. They are currently accepting Bosnia and Rawanda delegation applications. Be sure to also take a look at their blog.
L.E.A.D Uganda is an educational leadership program that transforms traumatized children living on the edges of society into leaders. We locate bright and motivated children – AIDS orphans, former child soldiers, abducted girls, child laborers – who have the raw materials to succeed but lack opportunity. more
Photo of the Day. May 8. « Lead Uganda.
A great article with photos about the Fotokids program in Guatamala on the NYT lens blog.
Nancy McGirr has spent two decades in Guatemala finding value amid castoffs. The symbolism did not escape her when she started teaching photography to a handful of children whose families eked out a living scavenging through the festering, grimy heaps of the capital’s municipal dump.
This is the video exchange in which children from the Amazon make video letters to children in other parts of the world to introduce and show their culture. The videos are made by the children for the children, and the documentary about the project was directed by Kumare Txicao, with video work by Nas Aldeias.
Part of a video letter from the Ikpeng children, introducing their community.
Click here to learn more about/purchase the documentary.
This is part of the larger Video in the Villages project.
Thanks to Laura Buhler of my Art Practice Course for this post.
**New Programs I have learned about while at the Imagining America conference, Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, in Seattle, WA
The Public Square (Chicago) By building bridges between theory and practice, The Public Square encourages the use of ideas as tools to improve people’s lives. These programs promote participatory democracy and create space for public conversations. Knowledge is power, yet much crucial knowledge still circulates only in small, isolated communities.
RW121 Emerson Medellín – a bi-lingual, bi-national project among 100 students working across 5 First-Year Research Writing classes at Emerson College and MIT in Boston and 5 library parks (Parques Bibliotecas) and the Universidad Nacional in Medellín, Colombia.
Make Art / Stop AIDS
part of Art and Global HealthCenter at UCLA
(nod to Douglas Crimp- In 1987 edited a special AIDS-issue of October, entitled AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. In his introduction to the edition Crimp argued for “cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS and its cultural consequences.”)
Through Positive Eyes throughpositiveeyes.org
Through Positive Eyes tells the story of HIV/AIDS at the end of the third decade of the epidemic, when potent antiretroviral medication has been devised, but when treatment access is far from universal. (Los Angeles, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro)t
The Art of Regional Change (UC DAVIS) brings together scholars, students, artists, and community groups to collaborate on media arts projects that strengthen communities, generate engaged scholarship and inform regional decision-making
Marga, Inc – A Firm, Founded by David Maurrasse, Committed to Developing Communication between Communities and Institutes
— Anchor Institutions Task Force – network to promote the role of anchor institutions in community engagement
Children’s Urban Geographies (Univ. of Buffalo)
from the BBC: Born into a brothel in the Indian city of Calcutta, Avijit Halder’s life has undergone a dramatic transformation.
The 20-year-old is currently pursuing a degree at one of the top film schools in the US. It all started with the filming of an Oscar-winning documentary, Born into Brothels, which dealt with the lives of the children of Indian sex workers.
Avijit Halder was one of eight children of sex workers who featured in the 2004 documentary film, co-directed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. read rest of article
Sorry I didn’t post this earlier! The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, in association with Adobe, screened work produced by youth around the world (mostly NYC students though). Topics ranged from youth homelessness to water as a human right. Some of the work was really stunning, and I couldn’t believe how sophisticated some of the films were. This is the Adobe website, and they seem to sponsor other programs as well. The HRWIFF link seems to be broken, but here’s the link to the films that played in New York. (The YPC link is at the bottom.)
Hope your summers are all going well!