The liberating voices are not the soothing nor reassuring kind . They do not just invite us to wait for the future as we await for a train. The future is something we overcome. We are not subjected to it, we make it.
- Georges Bernanos
Monthly Archive for May, 2011
“Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”
- Excerpt from: Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky – 2002
A short animation from the book Drawings from the Gulag. The book consists of over 130 drawings and texts by Danzig Baldaev — author of the acclaimed Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volumes I, II, III — describing the history, horror and peculiarities of the Gulag system from its inception in 1918.
His work as a prison guard allowed Baldaev to travel across the former USSR and witness scenes of everyday life in the Gulag first-hand, chronicling this previously closed world from both sides of the wire. The drawings, made during the Communist period, form a devastating document, a haunting echo of the works of Varlam Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
With every vignette, Baldaev brings his characters to vivid life: from the lowest zek (inmate) to the most violent tattooed vor (thief), the practices and inhabitants of the Gulag system are revealed in incredible and shocking detail. He documents the contempt shown by the authorities to those imprisoned, and the transformation of these citizens into survivors or victims. This graphic depiction exposes the systematic methods of torture and mass murder of millions undertaken by the administration, as well as the atrocities committed by criminals on their fellow inmates.
The biggest European writers/street art challenge will take place in the post-nuclear location of Rome, at the back of the terrible Bomarzus, in the heart of Area 19.
If it is art when Banksy does it and degradation when you do it, if you’re tired of the street diktat, if you want to have a voice and some means of expression, take the next step and join us on the 14th of May for the biggest event in history: the International Street Art Competition.
Aesthetics at the service of politics, politics at the service of Aesthetics.
The notions of citizenship, liberty, and equality of political rights, as well as popular sovereignty, were closely interrelated. The most essential feature of citizenship was one’s origin and heritage: Pericles was the ‘son of Xanthippus from the deme of Cholargus’. From 451 BCE, one had to be born of an Athenian mother and father in order to become a citizen. Defined by his belonging, the citizen (polites) was opposed to the idiotes, or non-citizen—a designation that quickly took on a pejorative meaning (from the notion of the isolated individual with no belonging came the idea of the ‘idiot’). Citizenship as a function thus derived from the notion of citizenship a status which was the exclusive prerogative of birth. To be a citizen meant, in the fullest sense of the word, to belong to a homeland – that is, to a homeland and a past.
- Excerpt from: The Problem of Democracy, by Alain de Benoist
