Graffiti artist Blu strikes a chord in his home country with a new giant mural in Grottaglie, Italy, famous for its olive trees, ancient ceramic tradition and new, ever-expanding waste dumps. As the artist’s contribution to FAME Fest, a yearly event inviting top urban artists to create street and gallery works, Blu chose to highlight the town’s growing problem with his work É Pronta la Torta (The Cake is Ready).
“Southern Italy is in real deep shit with the trash business. Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warning before it was already being built. Guess how come? Now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from Northern Europe to deliver more shit.
This piece comes at the very right moment, considering that there are workers digging another huge hole in the ground near the dump. There are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town councilors are not telling anything to their own people. How morbid is this?” – FAME Fest founder Angelo Milano
Visit this site for additional images and info about Blu’s mural, and check out the award winning film Gomorrah to get a glimpse of the severity and situation surrounding Southern Italy’s toxic dumping problem.
It’s hard to be in Canada and blog about something other than the G20 riots and the gross treatment of citizens on the streets of Toronto this past Sunday, which Ezra addressed so fabulously in his post “The G20 summer blockbuster”. But here I am, talking instead about something affiliated with North America’s other contentious issue of the day – the oil spill.
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/secretagentarthur
Monday night saw a party of protesters outside Tate Britain, calling on the gallery to cut its ties to one of its large funding partners: BP.
As reported by the Guardian, “A group of artists under the name The Good Crude Britannia voiced concerns about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” and demonstrated outside of a launch party meant to display new art by Fiona Banner and to celebrate 20 years of BP support. Click to continue »
What do you get when you mix a postindustrial urban mess with a group of artists who want to make it better? In Windsor, the answer is Broken City Lab, a post-avant-garde art project whose object is the city itself and the social relations necessary to transform urban blight into community and prosperity.
Broken City Lab (BCL) is the brainchild of artists Justin Langlois and Danielle Sabelli that quickly attracted the interests of a handful of other artists – Josh Babcock, Michelle Soulliere, Cristina Naccarato, and Rosina Riccardo. The idea was to find a new way – other than protest, that is – to use art for social change. What they came up with is a fascinating series of public interventions rooted in art practices intended to energize and mobilize local interest in reimagining Windsor’s future.
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Take an art show comprised entirely of works found in the trash, a soapbox derby, countless bands, guerilla theatre interventions, conceptual art pieces, picnics in strange places, video screenings and parades and you get a pretty interesting festival. Remove participation fees, unethical sponsorships, a heavy corporate presence and any form of censorship and replace those negatives with an inclusive community-based approach to the arts and you get the International Infringement Festival.
Created in Montreal in the summer of 2004 and thrown together in just a few months, the festival has managed to survive long enough to enter its seventh year and spread to various communities around the world as varied as Bordeaux, France and Ottawa, sometimes planting roots and continuing. This year, there are four stops on the Infringement circuit: Brooklyn, which already happened in May; Montreal, which gets underway in late June; Hamilton (for the first time) in early July; and Buffalo in the end of July and early August.
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Jerm IX and Vegas just want to see more public street art in Vancouver. In the tradition of the world’s greatest graffiti artists, these two prolific tricksters have one big goal — to fill up sad, blank spaces in our city with thoughtful (and sometimes controversial) words and art. True to their word, Jerm and Vegas have spent a great deal of their free time pasting, hammering and spraying various eye-catching statements and graphics on every neglected space they can find.
Most recently, the artists have collaborated to bring their art-based dialogues to one of the most public spaces of all — the Skytrain — in a campaign aptly entitled V-TARP (Vancouver Transit Adspace Re-Appropriation Project). With over 35 installations already applied on Skytrain ads across the city, you may have noticed something a little different during your daily subconscious ad-scanning routines. Imagine this: next to one of those endless, ingratiating McDonald’s ads, a smaller ad-sized block of text that declares “I’M NOT LOVIN’ IT.” If this makes you pause and think, it has done its job.
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A new biography of the great 20th century journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski is causing a stir. His biographer Artur Domoslawski accuses Kapuscinski of making it up — of making some of it up, anyways. And his accusations have reignited the controversy over truth’s inviolability in the work of professional journalists.
Kapuscinski is like Canada’s Farley Mowat who some years ago was the target of a similar complaint — in fact, a rather savage attack that also accused him of making it up (Mowat’s face appeared on the cover of a widely circulated national magazine with an enlarged Pinocchio nose). And there is the recent reputational crucifixion of James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and memoir-writer-cum-reluctant-novelist who made too much of it up for America’s apparently (and selectively, one might add) fact-hungry public, not to mention Oprah and her fans.
The idea of the ‘lie’ in journalism can still provoke a certain kind of righteous outrage. But what gets lost in the excitement is the conversation about truth itself. More specifically, outraged critics hardly ever suggest just what the unimpeachable approach to the truth might be.
Growing skepticism about journalism runs deeper than doubts about a few erroneous facts. An increasingly media savvy public has begun to suspect that the truth always arrives in the mouth of a speaker — that is, always from within language, culture, experience. The more serious problem isn’t the inviolable truth of this detail or that, but what will happen to a profession that hangs all of its hats on the peg of truth when the possibility of truth itself is up for grabs.
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Is Anne Coulter a pundit, a performance artist or a baffoon? Une question tres important.
Coulter’s talk at the University of Ottawa on Tuesday this week was canceled. Students who disagree with her particular brand of over-the-top conservative histrionics marched and shouted (I think someone pulled the fire alarm) and, apparently on the advice of her security staff, she withdrew from the show.
So now Coulter is filing a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. She alleges that an e-mail from Ottawa U that asked her to use “restraint, respect and consideration” when speaking, and explained that freedom of speech in Canada is defined differently than in the U.S., makes her the victim of a “hate crime.” Her point is that the email targeted her as a member of an identifiable group and thus was hate speech and a hate crime.
A quick look at the Criminal Code of Canada suggests that hate crime is committed with the intention to intimidate, harm or terrify a group of people who are targeted for who they are and not for anything they have done. Hate crimes involve physical force or threat of physical force against a person, a family or a property; intimidation, harassment.
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