Life is sweeter than jewish wine

Ss

The letter Ss from our artist book, an ABbeCedario for newly arrived immigrants to Italy. An alternative educational tool for learning the language through the sale items in supermarket circulars.

ABbeCeDario

The cover of our new artist book, an ABbeCedario for newly arrived immigrants to Italy. An alternative educational tool for learning the language through the sale items in supermarket circulars.

The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO)

“The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), initiated in 1990 in Tartu, Estonia,[1] and formed in February 11, 1991, in the Hague, is a democratic, international organization. It is a roof organisation whose members are political organisations and governments representing indigenous peoples, occupied nations, minorities and independent states or territories which lack representation internationally. The organization educates groups in what channels to use to make their voices heard, and helps defuse tensions so that frustrated groups do not turn to violence to gain attention for their demands. Some former members, like Armenia, East Timor, Estonia, Latvia and Georgia, have gained full independence and joined the United Nations.”

-from Wikipedia

On homelands and promised lands

As part of the project “Making Aliyah” V and I have been researching other homelands and promised lands; people with an ancestral claim to a land or a religious notion that there is a land that is theirs.
I started some drawings that are outlines of the borders of non-existant homelands, or homelands without autonomy, partial autonomy, or separatist movements. Starting at one place I was following the outlines, by the time I was back to where I started, where I started had changed. Seemed like a nice reflection on the shifting nature of claims to land and definitions of borders.
In a separate project, V and I have been working on a Frankfurt school activity book, with coloring and connect the dots and mazes. Seemed interesting to apply these activities to border making as well. We thought about connect the dots for the homeland drawings, and thought about the defining act that drawing takes on in this gesture. Connecting dots with a line, bringing into definition and committing a border. What is the role of the participant then? the drawer who is connecting dots? are they rendering the imagined land real, or are they forcing it into a specificity?

(an early version of Adorno connect the dots, feel free to download and try it!)

how not to get in touch with a community (for chris robbins)

Milan’s Chinatown is concentrated on one main street, Via Paolo Sarpi, and then branching off into a few side streets. The main street is closed off to traffic so a common sight is that of chinese delivery men running up and down the street with hand carts loaded up with boxes.
Nearby there is the non-profit art center Via Farini, that hosts a well known residency as well as other projects. As a result of the proximity there is some casual mixing of artists into the Chinatown area.
At some point last year, the Italian Art collective Alterazioni Video were impressed by all the chinese delivery men and organized a somewhat impromptu hand cart race.
I wasn’t in Milan at this time last year, by all accounts it was a very fun spontaneous event, and so when V and I heard that the 2nd annual hand cart race was taking place this Sunday we went to check it out.
What we found was a hipster art crowd overtaking the predominantly Chinese neighborhood, drinking beers and being an art crowd (as you’d find at any gallery opening) Meanwhile Alterazioni Video, sporting their sharply designed hand cart t-shirts were organizing race teams. They smartly set a rule that for every Italian racer there must be a Chinese racer. The problem was that there weren’t many Chinese to be found… so we witnessed the sad sight of Italian art hipsters running up to curious Chinese on-lookers and pleading them to compete so that they could participate.
The sight was that of artists appropriating a means of survival/commercial activity utilized by an immigrant neighborhood, to have fun with it. In this it was quite ugly, and left me with a bitter taste in the mouth.
It seemed like any opportunity to get in touch with a neighborhood was disregarded. Even having a translator to make announcements in Chinese was not thought of, and on the fly some poor girl was recruited against her wishes to make announcements in Chinese.
If it was not the intention of Alterazioni to get in touch with the community, far enough, no need to force community involvement or dialogue. If it was the intention of Alterazioni to organize something fun and spontaneous and offer to the community, then okay, but make an effort to get the word out to someone other than the art crowd. If it was the intention of Alterazione to appropriate something impressionable to them from the neighborhood and then as artists utilize the language of art to organize an event that somehow offers a reflection on the community, then damn, this was a racist event to witness a bunch of priviliged Italians run around “slumming” like the poor Chinese.
V tells me that these types of silly competitions (like a race with a frog, and the first one to arrive with the frog still alive wins) are quite common during festivals in little villages in Italy, and that perhaps there was a reflection on that. Sounds like an interesting reflection, and they should go to some small Italian villages and enact silly art competitions there.
Christopher Robbins: we need a WPA field officer here in Milan!
Aside from all of the potential problematics that made me squirm while watching laughing drunk artists fall over their hand carts, I also couldn’t help but notice how well and expensively documented the project was. There were probably 5 very expensive still cameras and 3 very professional grade video camera carefully shooting the action and being sure to include a Chinese person in every shot. And of course it was carefully documented in high quality. This is a project that will look incredible in documentation. It will be written up very intelligently about how the action opened a conversation between the nearby art center and the immigrant neighborhood, how as a result an event was organized for the community, and the pictures will prove that there were Chinese and Italian mixing.
Here is the video from last year…

and of course the facebook page

Carugate public art project

V and I were invited to develop a project for the first Carugate Public Art initiative in October.
This past weekend we went to visit Carugate with Arianna, the director of the initiative.
Carugate is a small town of approximately 15,000 on the outskirts of Milan. About 20 years ago, the town sold most of its land for the development of mega super stores of the likes of IKEA, Castorama, Carrefour,etc… while it provides employment for over half of its population, it is also a big ugly sight bordering this little town.
The town itself is quite insular, with most of the people having lived there for generations. As it prepares to be integrated more and more into Milan (as it is there is really no break between the city and these small hinterlands, just constant continuous industry and commerce) the population would like to enter with a sense of community. In town there is a strong citizenship with good participation across ages in public life.
Just in the center of town there is a big private villa, owned by the same family for generations, most notably the family of the Lady with an Ermine, the sitter for the DaVinci portrait and mistress of Lodovico Sforza. This villa occupies the center and is surrounded by walls. In this way the town is quite different from other Italian towns where the center is a big public piazza. Instead there is a big walled mansion that is unoccupied for most of the year. As a result, we noticed in our walk through town that apartment buildings are all built with internal courtyards. On the street there is very little life, inside the courtyard children are playing, neighbors are chatting, plants are growing, laundry is drying. It was impressive to think of the psychological impact of the walled mansion on the quotidian life of the people.
The first encounter with participants will be in June, then there will be a week long festival in October in which projects will be realized, along with lectures, exhibits, and visiting critics.
V and I have an idea in the works, still in a premature stage, but details coming soon.

Chinese whispers

Chinese whispers
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
In the game variously known as Chinese whispers,[1] Telephone, Broken Telephone, Whisper Down the Lane, Gossip, Arab Phone (from the French Le téléphone arabe)[citation needed], and Stille Post (Silent Post), the first player whispers a phrase or sentence to the next player. Each player successively whispers what that player believes he or she heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first. The game is often played by children as a party game or in the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread,[2] or, more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection.
In the United States, “Telephone” is the most common name for the game.[2] The name “Chinese whispers” reflects the former stereotype in Europe of the Chinese language as being incomprehensible.[3] It is little-used in the United States and may be considered offensive.[4] It remains the common British name for the game.[5]

The Invention of the Jewish People

Just finished reading Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People as part of my research for the “Making Aliyah” project.
The book was an exciting intellectual provocation as to the roots of the myth of there being a singular, unique Jewish People. Some of the more insightful and inciteful claims that he makes are that: the descendants of the Judeans from Roman rule were not exiled but eventually converted to Islam under Muslim rule and became todays Palestinians; That Eastern European Jews are not descendants of the seed of Abraham, but rather come from the Turkic kingdom of Khazaria that converted to Judaism in the 10th Century; And that the Israeli state’s funding and search for a unique Jewish gene is akin to and a remnant of (with tragically similar consequences) eugenic research of the first half of the 20th century.
Excitingly thrilling, and sadly depressing with a rather pessimistic conclusion to the future.
(some quotations coming soon…)

A LAND WITHOUT A PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITHOUT A LAND

“A LAND WITHOUT A PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITHOUT A LAND” The expression often attributed to the early Zionist movement in relation to Palestine. Recent scholarship argues that it actually came into being from christian restorationists
“A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITHOUT A LAND” The interpretation of the phrase by Palestinian academic Edward Said. In the leaving out of the indefinite article A, the sentence is no longer an abstract reflexive statement about the state of the Jews, but rather a powerful argument against the early Zionist ideologies. Said writes about it in The Question of Palestine, which I don’t have a link to, but here is another relevant essay by him.
“A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT A LAND”When Stalin created the Jewish Autonomous Region, he chose a part of Russia that apparently really was devoid of people (Though of course these things are always subjectively stated… ). This served two purposes: the active population of the entire Soviet empire, especially in a strategic area bordering China, and moving the Jews away from the areas of the Pale where the local populations were resentful.
“LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT LAND” Now this sounds like a rallying cry for the Landless movement in Brazil!

Giovanni’s bookstore, part 2

We spent a busy week in Pesaro working on relocating Giovanni’s bookstore (see earlier post). What was meant to be a big creative collaborative fun project turned a bit (originally Giovanni presented the idea as a joining of his creative friends to re-imagine his bookstore in new space). There was a point in the process a couple of months ago when Giovanni became very anxious about surviving as a business, and redirected his original plan to re-conceive his bookstore, into focusing on a functional bookstore. He did this by entrusting the bulk of the work to a local store designer. Once the store designer went from being a helpful advisor to a hired worker, he assumed the control and began to relegate our ideas to mere conceptual fantasy. We had one very frustrating meeting where he suggested that all of our ideas should be concentrated on the children’s book section. This was about a month ago, and at that point we returned to Milan and decided to focus on autonomous contributions and interventions into the bookstore without inserting ourselves into the overall layout and design. An unfortunate decision, since we were very keen on an involvement in that part of the work.
Then we arrived for a week in Pesaro to work on our contribution and to help Giovanni and Ale with the relocation. We arrived to find the two of them very sad and bitter with the work of the store designer. They felt that he did not make any consideration for their desires, wants, or even needs in a bookstore and instead proceeded to design a space as he wanted it. Many essential elements to a bookstore and to the personality of Giovanni were discarded.
The space however is very beautiful, and the shelves from the old bookstore found a home in the space very nicely with the addition of just a few new shelving units built by drug-rehabilitating carpenters.

For our contribution we focused on creating a new system of signage for the bookstore. We decided to make small colorful flags with symbolic representation on them to signify the categories and to counteract some of the omnipresent wood of the shelving. Together with Giovanni we came up with a list of image representations for the sections and then V drew and cut the images while I was sewing them on the flags. I was using the sewing machine to applique the shapes, since I am just learning how to use it, and have never made an applique before I had a bit of a learning curve. The first four days in Pesaro we had a production line on the machine running late into the night.
When we did enter the bookstore, V was finishing up painting the section names while I was stretching fishing lines across the ceiling beams to suspend the flags from.


Giovanni and Ale and some helpers were running books in a wheelbarrow from the old store down the street and busily shelving them in the new store.

The store designer stayed true to his commitment and didn’t touch the children’s book section. So V and I decided to have some fun with it. Giovanni’s clientele has always been an older intellectual crowd and not so many families and kids shopping in the store, so children’s books have always been an afterthought for him. We hoped that we could give a new direction to this neglected part of the store. V went through the catalog and made a nice list of recommendations for books that he should stock up on. For the space, we painted two of the walls a bright green and salvaged some old crooked misshaped shelves from the old store. We hung them in odd arrangements, working with the limited space and materials and trying to give the sense of being inside a tree in the crookedness of the branches.


When we left on Sunday everything was almost complete and ready for the opening. Next weekend we’ll go back down to Pesaro for the opening celebration.