thoughtsandtalks

Summary of an interview I conducted with Vandana Shiva during the workshop and seminar ‘The Future of Food’ on the Navdanya-farm in Dehradun, India - early october 2008.

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You can view this info also on PADMA (public access digital media archive).
click here for the excerpt :Vandana Shiva on Diverse Women for Diversity
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click here for the transcript of this section.

Beekeeping goes back throughout history and was an art that was closely related to goddess worship in the ancient world. Bees are a matriarchal society, closely related to the feminine.

MELISSA - “bee” was the title given to Aphrodite’s high priestess at the honeycomb-shrine of Mount Eryx, where the Goddess’s fetish was a golden honeycomb. Pythagoreans perceived the hexagon as an expression of the spirit of Aphrodite whose sacred number was six. She worshipped bees as her sacred creatures because they understood how to create perfect hexagons in their honeycomb. In Her temple at Eryx, the priestesses were melissae, “bees” and the Goddess herself was entitled Melissa, the Queen Bee.
Seeking to understand nature’s secrets through geometry, the Pythagoreans meditated on the endless triangular lattice, all sixty-degree angles, that results from extending the sides of all hexagons in the honey comb diagram until their lines meet in the centers of adjacent hexagons. It seemed to them a revelation of the underlying symmetry of the cosmos.

The bee was usually looked upon as a symbol of the feminine potency of nature, because while creating a magical elixir, known for its preservation properties, they were also pollinating flowers, increasing plant fertility, and abundance.

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In MAHILA (women), the filmmaker steps between different worlds, going from West to East, from urban to rural surroundings. Her encounters with the experiences and observations of rural Rajasthani women provoke reflection on the process of empowerment. In an artistic ethnography we see and hear how they are using education, technology and politics to redefine their destinies. As we trace the film-maker’s memories we are taken into questions about story-telling. How are the women fighting to get their stories heard? Can the filmmaker tell other women’s stories?

screenings:
Brigittines Brussels, 5 december 19u
Lazareti Dubrovnik (croatia), 10 december 19u
Netwerk Aalst, 17 december 19u

Annemie Maes is invited by Ana Valdés (Maraya.org) to present the Politics of Change project in Damascus, Syria. Presentations (lectures and screenings) are scheduled at the Finnish Cultural Institute in Damascus.
The Finnish Institute in Damascus, maintained by the Foundation of the Finnish Institute in the Middle East, is an academic institute, which promotes, in particular, the research and teaching of the languages, cultures and religions of the Middle East. The institute focuses its operation on the Arab world and its fringe areas with high cultural and historical significance. It has permanent representatives in Syria and Egypt.

The institute’s main function is to organise academic courses, lectures and seminars for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers. The aim is to promote widespread cooperation in the fields of education and research, and to improve intercultural dialogue.
The headquarters of the institute are located in a building in the Old Town of Damascus, a Unesco World Heritage site. The building has a seminar room, an exhibition hall, a reference library, and lodging facilities for visiting researchers and students.

Screenings at HUMlab, the Conference room
Annemie Maes and Goedele Verleysen

Starting with the screening of the movie ‘MAHILA’ (about the women solar engineers of Barefoot College India) followed by the screening of the film of Goedele Verleysen (on the role of the women in the political situation in Bolivia). A more detailed presentation on the projects will follow the screenings.

This will be followed by a more detailed presentation on the projects, and a discussion starting from a list of questions. These questions will be modified collectively, during the workshop. New list will serve as a starting point to do audio interviews with the participants, and will be added to a collective (open source) audio database.

May 1st, Labour Day, my computer and me made this short experimental movie: ‘pw:betelgeuse, portrait of a young moroccan woman at okno’.
Big HardDisk didn’t like the footage too much, and I had to call Little HardDisk for help to bring it to a displayable result.

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I tried to apply a respectfull approach towards the portraying of people in Islamic culture, and at the same time take the digital culture of Okno into account.
Big HD made the selection of the images and gave them their specific rythm and rendering, little HD and myself gave a little help to finalise the experiment.