thoughtsandtalks

Politics of Change was a gathering in Brussels during a 3-day workshop arranged by so-on and hosted by okno, both cultural organizations composed of several members engaged in different aspects of the artistic creation.
The call, made by the filmmaker and activist Annemie Maes, had different goals. One of them was to reflect on topics as gender and activism in the cultural field, another was the sharing of common technical tools to be used for sharing and spreading the word. One of the main issues we confront today as artists, thinkers and activists, is the fragmentation of our landscapes and the difficulty of access to mainstream media.

The artistic and cultural field remains a field where only a few actors achieve a mega status and become icons. Which strategy should be used to raise the number of multiplicators and create networks to get support and collaboration?
The participants in the workshop came from different fields, writers, students, filmmakers, anthropologists, journalists, visual artists, economists, researchers.
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Left, the smithy of the Barefoot Solar Cooker Engineers in Tilonia, Rajasthan. Right, a solar energy project in the desert of New Mexico.
Under some diagrams on the horizontal and vertical sunlight-tracking for the Scheffler-system, as used for the Barefoot Solar Cookers.

Sheffler-cooker horizontal tracking

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Barefoot College, Tilonia, Rajasthan, India.

Cuisine Interne Keuken started by Constant out of the desire to render visible the internal organisation of the cultural world we work in, with its written and unwritten laws, decision making processes and value systems. In our thinking about interdisciplinary cultural practices, we did not want to leave out.

For Politics of Change, the old project is presented and extended.
Conceptually the questionnaire is updated; a new set of questions is developed by scratching out some of the old questions and introducing new ones relating to the collective interest of Politics of Change. The self(definition) is a central issue, in relation to a wider discoursce on art, activism and technology. (more…)

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skype-interview from Delhi with Lipika Bansal, researcher and educator at Waag Society Amsterdam.
streaming movie — 12:30 // free art license CIK.

I am Lipika Bansal. Born, raised and based in Amsterdam from Indian origin. I studied international communications and science and technology studies. During both studies I looked at the influence of technology on society. My first study focused on ICT in developing countries and my second study looked into technologies such as biometrics and rfid and the acceptance in society of these privacy sensitive tools. (more…)

I am in India, in a small village, where an ashram has been built for women and girls to learn about their right to be educated.
As with all the houses in the village, the ashram is made out of clay. Slogans are painted onto the walls to help boost the revolutionary spirit of the place.
“Lack of knowledge is the cause of fear,” You can kill the body but never the spirit,” Work is worship.”

The ashram also serves as ground zero for a group of poor farmers attempting to seize land from the wealthy, large landowners who live in the cities. The farmers have successfully seized 20,000 acres.
The man in charge of this struggle was educated in Deli, and his philosophy of land ownership is derived not from Marx, but rather from the true democracy established by tribal systems-particularly the Iroquois constitution, which historically is the document on which America’s constitution is based.

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Today I am remembered as ghost, bloodsucker, banshee who fooled the camera because I have no reflection. I could go underground and no one would notice, fool Interpol and travel the globe: Johannesburg, Brussels, New York. I learned from Matsumoto to burn the tips of my fingers in order to rip off my prints. I learned to look into one person’s face and see the world. I saw myself in the world, and traveled through people’s faces. I am a ghost, and they are aliens. We are all aliens in our own home towns. There is no record of me. My passport shows me blurred into the background. I am dream-man, and I have oceans in my mind. I had a dream about a book thick and old, called UFO stories. I pulled it from the shelf and instantly knew aliens were asking me questions. They wanted to know about my home town in the global village but I couldn’t read the words:

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Women from several African and Asian countries in a training/workshop in India learning about photovoltaic solar energy.
streaming movie — 02:30 // free art license CIK.