American Reece Humphrey and Iranian Masoud Esmailpour Joubari go head to head on the mat. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

There is no quality implicit in citizens of the United States, Russia and Iran dictating that we can’t get along. In fact, it is the actions of policy makers that perpetuate conflict and war.

So it is strange that a campaign to keep wrestling in the 2020 Olympic Games—after the International Olympic Committee announced it would drop the sport—should promote the message, “wrestling makes friends of foes.” This hackneyed ideology presumes that the wrestlers identify with their countries’ aggressive stances and consider each other foes.

But when I went to watch a wrestling competition at New York’s Grand Central Terminal on May 15 between the United States, Russia and Iran, I witnessed as much tenderness as aggression among the athletes. Wrestling is a savagely beautiful sport.

Here are five reasons that explain why I believe wrestling should remain in the 2020 Olympics:

1. Wrestling promotes the notion that one can compete and exhibit simultaneous empathy for their competitor.

2. The Olympic Games are the goal that all athletes focus on as they commit to rigorous training regiments. Beneficiaries of this dream include at-risk youth.

3. Wrestling creates a community where cultural exchange is actually possible.

4. International wrestling provides the opportunity for competitors to travel, see the world for themselves, formulate their own opinions about other nations and dispel myths perpetuated by nationalist agendas and ignorance.

5. Wrestling provides an arena for intergenerational mentoring and communication.

Iranian freestyle wrestler Hassan Rahimi takes a breather between bouts. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

Iranian two time world champion Mehdi Taghavi Kermani stretches American Kellen Russell in the 66 kg. weight class. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

American Logan Stieber lock limbs with Russian Artas Sanaa. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

American World and Olympic Champion Jordan Borroughs takes down Russia’s Saba Khubetzhty. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

American Helen Maroulis throws and pins Russian Irina Kisel. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

Russian Asker Orshokdugov awaits the wrath of American Kendrick Sanders in Greco-Roman style wrestling. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

American Jordan Holm dominates Russian Evgeni Saleev. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

Russian Ambako Vachadze is patted down by referee as American Ben Provisor looks on. Photo by Lisi Raskin, May 15, 2013.

The post Rumble on the Rails: USA, Russia, and Iran Embrace Each Other appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Pedro Reyes, Imagine (Double Psaltery), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

In the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed twenty children and six adults, gun sales soared across the United States. It is a sadly familiar response in a country where nearly half the population keeps a gun at home (as of 2011). After each massacre, whether a mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater or the attempted assassination of an Arizona congresswoman that killed several bystanders, Americans have bought guns at a higher pace than they did before the rampage.

Lax gun laws in the United States also have devastating effects south of the border: over 250,000 guns are smuggled into Mexico each year, contributing to the country’s warlike conditions. As an urgent debate about gun control continues after regulations aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals were defeated in Congress, we turned to Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who in two major projects spanning the last several years, has responded to gun violence by transforming weapons into art.

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In 2007, I was invited to Culiacán, a major drug trafficking center that is also one of Mexico’s most violent cities, to launch a campaign where residents were asked to donate weapons that were then melted and made into shovels to plant trees. We received 1,527 guns, steamrolled them and transformed the metal into 1,527 shovels we used to plant the same number of trees.

Pedro Reyes, Palas por Pistolas, 2007–present. Courtesy of the artist.

Pedro Reyes, Palas por Pistolas, 2007–present. Courtesy of the artist.

Pedro Reyes, Palas por Pistolas, 2007–present. Courtesy of the artist.

This project, Palas por Pistolas, developed in response to a situation that has only gotten worse. Over the last six years, more than 70,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence. There are now voluntary gun donation campaigns throughout the country. People are eager to clean out the huge number of weapons that Calderón’s presidential term brought. But we can’t stop the flow of guns on our own: we need change within the United States.

As it stands now, the United States is an extremely dangerous neighbor. It’s impossible to buy a weapon in Mexico; there are no armories here. But with such lax gun laws across the border, drug traffickers only need to take a short drive to Walmart or any other of the nearly 7,000 gun retail shops along the U.S.-Mexico border.

To get to the root of the cartel wars, the United States will need to end its War on Drugs.

For my latest project, Disarm, I have taken guns seized by police in Ciudad Juárez and turned them into musical instruments: guitars, drums, marimbas and so on. I think about Disarm as a form of exorcism, expelling a demon that has overtaken the body. In the United States, demons of war and violence possess the social body. There are 89 guns for every 100 citizens in the United States. The country spends more than the next 13 nations combined on its military. You have to defeat and tame the demon before you can expel it. In the instruments I’ve built from guns, the weaponry appears intact—though, of course, it is no longer functional—so that people still have to deal with this demon.

To get to the root of the cartel wars, the United States will need to end its War on Drugs, which has, in my opinion, spawned the violence in Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Marijuana has never killed anyone, while a single weapon can kill people for generations, because there’s no planned obsolescence in these objects. A gun manufactured 50 years ago may function as well as it did the day it was made.

Pedro Reyes, Imagine (Psaltery), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

The two big cultural shifts that we have to undertake in this century, I believe, are a new policy toward drugs and a new policy toward guns, which are intrinsically related projects. First, in terms of health, prescription drug abuse causes many more deaths than the use of illegal drugs. Then there are the “side effects” of the War on Drugs, whether mass incarceration or the gun violence that an illicit drug market fuels. For gun companies to thrive, you need conflict. You need fear, you need wars and you need crime. This doesn’t mean that all drugs should be legalized at once, or that all weapons should immediately be banned. But we obviously need a major readjustment. We are living in mayhem.

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With both Palas Por Pistolas and Disarm, I think about the tradition of alchemy, where, simultaneous with the physical conversion of a substance, a psychological transformation is supposed to occur. As children use former weapons to plant trees, or musicians play instruments that are visibly composed of guns, they engage in a concrete activity that is positive, but also in a ritual that builds trust.

I want to live in a world that is moving toward common trust rather than universal fear.

A cultural rejection of weapons as an industry must come about if we want to see real change in the prevalence of guns. Investing money in a company that makes weapons should be regarded as dirty—a sin. If you are investing in weapons, you are fueling death and suffering around the world. It should be a responsibility for everyone on earth to go on a crusade against guns.
 

Pedro Reyes, Imagine (Bass Guitar Bass), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

Change will be difficult; even setting aside the economic interests maintaining the status quo, I believe there is a certain amount of violence in our nature that we can’t eliminate. We have to find ways to sublimate that violent energy, like smashing guitars into pieces or shouting into a microphone. If the people who set off bombs or commit school shootings had the opportunity to become artists, maybe they would be doing political art and not bombing!

We have to refocus the rage that exists in society and provide creative outlets for it. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “The first man who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” We will always want to kill each other, but we can find new forms to channel our frustration into some sort of symbolic violence and prevent the emergence of real violence.

When weapons are widespread, you can either push to make them ubiquitous or rare. I believe that you have to organize actions that move in one direction or the other. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union acquired more and more nuclear weapons to outdo each other. Disarmament remains the harder direction to take. But I want to live in a world that is moving toward common trust rather than universal fear.
 

Pedro Reyes, “Disarm,” installation shot, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

The post Disarm: Transforming Guns into Art, from Mexico to the U.S. appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

This conversation is part of “The Met Reframed,” a year-long artist residency for Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) that has included performances, premieres, conversations, panels and special presentations by Miller. “The Met Reframed” is made possible by Marianna Sackler.

350.org’s “Do the Math” documentary about the rising movement to change the terrifying math of the climate crisis and challenge the fossil fuel industry.

The discussion below has been edited for length and clarity.

BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s a great pleasure to be here with you, Paul. Since we’re talking about art, it’s worth saying that at some level, we’re engaged in a kind of planet-scale performance art project right now and the question it raises is, what happens if you pour an enormous quantity of carbon dioxide into the upper atmosphere? What happens is that the way the planet looks in every dimension begins to change, quite quickly. Last summer, for instance, our joint art project melted the Arctic. Eighty percent of the summer sea ice that was in the Arctic that was there 40 years ago is now gone. If you go stick a pH strip in the ocean now it comes out a different color than it did 40 years ago because the ocean is 30 percent more acidic. We’re taking the big physical features of the planet and changing them in the most profound, dangerous and horrifying ways. And one of the reasons that we’re doing it, or that the fossil fuel industry is able to get away with it, is because we don’t notice: it’s happening just slowly enough that it takes concentration to see it happening. Not always. When the subways fill up with the Atlantic Ocean as they did last October, it’s pretty obvious.

Five years ago I founded the organization 350.org, with May Boeve and Phil Aroneanu, who are here tonight. They were undergraduates at the time and now they run the operation, which has turned into the biggest grassroots environmental campaign there’s ever been. We’ve organized about 20,000 rallies in every country on earth except North Korea, and from the beginning, part of what we were doing was performance art as well. We thought that one of the reasons there was so little action against climate change was not because people weren’t scared about it, but because it felt so big and each of us felt so small that it seemed pointless to do anything. So we decided that we would try to make people see that they were part of something very large.

350 parts per million is the most carbon we could safely have in the atmosphere. The most important scientific instrument in the world just clicked past 400.

Our first global day of action, in the fall of 2009, was the most widespread day of political activity in the planet’s history, according to CNN. We had 5,200 demonstrations happening simultaneously in 181 countries. Here in New York, we took over a bunch of the Jumbotrons in Times Square and showed pictures as they came in from around the world. We decided early on that images would be extremely important in our campaigns. In fact, we couldn’t have done the advertising that we did before the advent of Flickr, which allowed people to instantly download photos and allowed us to spread them all over the place.

I wrote the first book about climate change 25 years ago, and part of this subject is inevitably about numbers. We’re called 350.org because 350 parts per million is the most carbon we could safely have in the atmosphere, a number we’re well above. Sometime this week, the instrument on the side of Mauna Loa that tracks carbon in the atmosphere—the most important scientific instrument in the world—will click past 400 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s why the Arctic is melting and forest fires are spreading and so on. We’re not at all afraid of data and science. It’s the great tool that we have to understand the peril that we’re in, but environmentalists have been much too concentrated on appealing to that side of the brain that enjoys bar graphs and pie charts, and much less good about appealing to the side of the brain that understands things on a more visceral level, where art and music can be a huge help.

We need every tool we can think of—maybe, most of all, art.

So on one day in 2010, we tried more consciously to make art. It was the lead-up to a big UN conference on climate, and we wanted to remind these negotiators who never really get anywhere that the world was paying attention. The medium that we most like to use is human bodies in large numbers, and as many of them as possible, because at this point art around the climate crisis is probably most useful when it’s engaged in pointed dialogue with ongoing political efforts—i.e. it’s not just someone making a sculpture about climate change in a vacuum—and because of the work that we do with mass movements, we think that it should be done, whenever possible, en masse. We believe that the singular vision of artists is best quickly translated into things that require and employ and engage lots and lots of people to do.

In 2010, 350.org launched eARTh, the world’s first ever global satellite art project. In over 16 places around the world, the public created art so large it could be photographed from space.

We walk this line between art and activism at all times, and this is by far the biggest thing that human beings have ever done. In the lifetime of everybody in this room, this planet has left the Holocene—the ten thousand years of benign climatic stability that underwrote the rise of human civilization—and moved into something else. The only question is how far in we’re going to go, and the answer to that will be determined by how engaged we manage to get people. Art is an important, maybe even critical, part of that fight. We won the argument a long time ago. Scientific reason, however, has not prevailed against the pile of cash on the other side of the table. So we need every tool we can think of—maybe, most of all, art.

PAUL D. MILLER: I met Bill a while ago and I’ve been very interested in his books and writings. I just want to show you some photos. This is me DJing an Earth Day concert with The Flaming Lips. This is the same place where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and there were about 200,000 people there, responding to the music. But the music I used was made using the sound of ice, after I had taken a studio to Antarctica and gone through several of the main ice fields.

DJ Spooky performing at the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Earth Day, 2009.

DJ Spooky in the Arctic Circle during a Cape Farewell expedition, 2010.

This is me hanging out in Antarctica, where I explored several of the main ice fields for six weeks. I was making acoustic portraits of ice, and one of the things that struck me was the scale of devastation. Here you can see the side of a mountain that’s been scraped away by the sinking glacier. It looked like the entire landscape had been hit by a nuclear bomb and the detonation was moving in slow time. When I was taking these photographs and sound samples, I worked with a group of scientists out of Cold Regions Research Labs. Many of them were talking about time and sampling. When you dig down into the ice, there’s tens of millions of years waiting in the dust, because the dust is what tells scientists what was happening and gives a very precise portrait of the environmental context.

So, I was thinking about that, together with an essay by the moral philosopher Adam Smith, who wrote a critique of water and diamonds. He was trying to figure out why people would go to war over diamonds, whereas water, which was essential to life, was taken for granted. Our body is made up of over 90 percent water. The human brain is about 70 percent water, but people take it for granted. And meanwhile diamonds, which you can’t eat or use for anything, kings would go to war over. So he wrote “Of Water and Diamonds,” to figure out why people would add value to this kind of useless material and why something that was utterly essential was taken for granted. It was one of the first philosophical essays about free culture and free material.

If we start thinking about how we assign value, ice and water were really interesting materials for my art projects here at the Met because nobody owns them. We’re here in a museum, which is a place where objects are taken out of circulation, they’re put in a container and someone just walks by. Your average person sees a painting for less than seven seconds.

DJ Spooky visited the remote northern Arctic Circle with Cape Farewell in the autumn of 2010, to work on the follow up to his Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica project.

During my research, I wanted to examine data, so I was looking at Bill’s work. I was looking at how other artists used data and I eventually landed upon Johannes Kepler. In 1611, he was on his way home and a snowflake landed on his sleeve and he was stunned by the geometry of the ice. He went home and wrote one of the first mathematical treatises looking at mathematics in nature, Six Sides of a Snowflake. I used this to generate a series of algorithms looking at ice.

The snowflake has a hexagonal form. Anyone who’s into architecture can see this is a recursive section. There’s a famous phrase from Schiller, where he calls architecture “frozen music,” so let’s remix that and say, “music is liquid architecture.” One of my favorite writers, Douglas Hofstadter, wrote about patterns in nature and patterns in mathematics in Gödel, Escher, Bach. You can understand the permutations when you look at the mathematics. It’s algorithmic, so I created a software series of patches that would use maximums P and B to transcribe the algorithms, and then take those algorithms and use them to generate artificial versions of snow and ice. This is the fractal geometry based on those algorithms we presented at the Met. The electronic music in the show is based on the sound of ice.

DJ Spooky performs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 23, 2013.

One of the other projects I did here at the Met was called The Nauru Elgies, where I looked at financial data of what I called the “Easter Island of global finance”—a place called Nauru in the middle of the South Pacific, where a lot of the money from the Soviet Union went to when it was collapsing. I was interested in how economics shape the collection of art, but again with ice and water, who owns it? It’s an open medium.

This year I’m representing the Maldives at the Venice Biennale, based on the Nauru project. The Maldives is going to be one of the first nation states to sink under the conditions for global warming, so what I’m doing with that project is looking at the ocean currents that are erasing the islands and taking the data from that and creating a series of compositions. What you’re going to be seeing here is the mathematics of pattern recognition, but applied to these ocean gyres—what I call “gyre sonifications.” The islands are being destroyed by this movement, but there’s very specific circularity in patterns and that’s where I think the art will be derived from. Venice is also sinking, so I want to leverage this idea of the first-world response and the Venetian archipelago versus this more remote, canary-in-the-coal-mine kind of place called the Maldives.

Former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, holding parliament under water to demonstrate the urgency of climate change for his country, 2009.

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Q&A

PM: Bill, I have a question for you. We were talking about Walt Whitman and Thoreau earlier, and about Teddy Roosevelt busting the trusts. Do you want to riff on the 19th-century relationship to the trusts?

BM: We’re in an age where, at least as much as the end of the 19th century, money rules. The biggest campaign contribution in the post–Citizens United era came two weeks before the last election, from the Chevron Corporation, and it was designed to make sure that the House of Representatives remained in the hands of climate deniers. It was successful: nothing will happen in Washington for the next two years.

On the way in, I saw the enormous sign explaining that the Koch brothers were building the next wing of the Met. You know, they’re also on the list of performance artists who are filling the planet with carbon. They’re probably number one and two on the whole list and part of their art has involved taking an area called the Tar Sands in Alberta where an native people lived quite happily for a very long time and turning it into a—well, the technical name I believe would be Mordor. So yeah, we’re in a big fight with the fossil fuel industry. It’s their political power that’s kept science at bay for a quarter century.

So, May and Phil and I, among others, have launched this huge campaign to get colleges and universities and museums and hospitals and everybody else to divest the stock they hold in fossil fuel companies just as we did a quarter century ago about apartheid in South Africa. In fact, Desmond Tutu, who was one of the great heroes of that fight, made a short video that said, “Look, if you could see the famine and drought in Africa right now, you’d know why I was asking you to take up those same tools again.”

The arc of the physical universe is fairly short. It bends towards heat and if we don’t win soon, we’re not going to win.

So the good news is that we’re building this movement and we’ve now got 340 college campuses where this fight’s under way. Four of them have already divested. Last week the brave undergraduates at the Rhode Island School of Design took over their president’s office and hung a big banner out the window, and it said, “We may be art students, but we can do the math.”

Audience Member no. 1: Since we’re addicted to our lifestyle, and fossil fuels created our lifestyle, is there anything we can do? Do we have the political will to change?

BM: Sure, the good news is that it’s completely possible to imagine what the next world looks like. If you want to see what it looks like, go to Germany. There were days last summer when Germany generated more than half the power it used from solar panels within its borders. We don’t have the political will at this point, even though, unlike Germany, we have assets like Florida, Texas, California and Nevada. But there are more solar panels in Bavaria than there are in the United States and the reason is precisely that lack of political will.

That’s why we fight so hard around divestment, and around the Keystone Pipeline. It’s why we try to build movements. Hopefully, we can muster the political will if we put our minds to it. On occasion in the past, we’ve made changes in political will quite quickly. Whether we can do it in time to catch up with the physics of climate change is the thing that haunts me, because unlike other social issues, this one does come with a timeline. Dr. King always had absolute confidence that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The arc of the physical universe is fairly short. It bends towards heat and if we don’t win soon, we’re not going to win.

On the other hand, Dr. King had to be far braver than we do. No one’s yet shooting at you for talking about climate change, although in the Maldives last year they put the president—our good friend Muhammad Nasheed—in prison because he was taking on this issue. He’s a great man and he’s now in prison, where he already spent many years before he won an election to overthrow the despot. Now the military is back in control. I’m sure you’ll [Paul] figure out some way in Venice to say something pointed about what’s been going on in the Maldives.

One of the things that dealing with climate change enforces is a brute sense of realism about how much you have to do in how little time.

PM: During the process of setting up the pavilion, there was actually a coup among the curators. There’s a lot of interesting discussion about who was representing the Maldives, because the curators who were attached to the previous regime were pulled off the project. As an artist, I wanted to amplify that dispute.

BM: What President Nasheed did was a great example of actual performance art. He taught his entire cabinet to scuba dive. They held an underwater cabinet meeting and they passed a resolution that they sent to the UN demanding that they take action to get back to 350 parts per million and it got extraordinary coverage around the world.

Audience Member no. 2: Since half the planet now lives in cities, and it’s probably eventually going to be one big city, how do you help people who live in urban environments understand about climate change?

BM: This is a really good question. When I was just out of college, my first job was at The New Yorker, and I wrote the “Talk of the Town” column for five years. I wrote a long piece about where everything in my apartment came from. I followed all the supply lines: I was in the Brazilian jungle because Con Ed was buying oil from Brazil and so on. For me, it was a necessary project to remind myself of the physical basis of our existence. Now I’m afraid it’s getting easier and easier to remember, because Mother Nature is doing her best to remind us. I mean, what was Hurricane Sandy but a pointed reminder that this place is a deeply physical artifact and it will be overwhelmed—it is being overwhelmed.

Audience Member no. 3: Paul, you talk in your work about structure and pattern. What I’d like to put on the table here is I do think we have to come to grips with the fact that this system cannot address the environmental emergency because of its structure, because of its underlying patterns. In other words, the system operates according to certain dynamics and rules. Profit is in command. The United States is struggling to maintain its dominant position as the leading empire in the world. The U.S. military is the single largest institutional purchaser of oil in the world. This gets to your other point, Paul, about imagining and envisioning other forms of society. What I’m suggesting is that to confront the reality of global warming, let’s confront the reality of the system, and let’s confront the fact that there is a real alternative, a revolutionary alternative in which society can be structured on principles of social and sustainable development, in which we restructure an economy away from fossil fuels, in which we marshal resources and capabilities to confront this urgent environmental emergency and in which we imbue people with the values of becoming protectors, not plunderers, of the planet.

BM: For me, one of the things that dealing with climate change enforces is a brute sense of realism about how much you have to do in how little time. It’s plausible that it would be easier to deal with climate change if we had an entirely different economic system. It’s plausible that it would be easier to deal with climate change if everyone subscribed to a nature-based religion. It’s implausible to me that those things are going to happen in the very brief window of time that we have. Hence, the need to figure out how to use what we have to make what you correctly state will be massive change.

It’s no accident that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations 30 years after James Watt invented the steam engine, rather than the other way around.

In fact, if one were looking to transform our economy and society, the quickest way to do it would be to demand the rapid diffusion of renewable energy technology across the landscape. Not only is it lower in carbon, but it is inherently far more democratic than what we have at the moment. If you think about fossil fuel, it did more to shape the world around us than anything else. It’s no accident that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations 30 years after James Watt invented the steam engine, rather than the other way around. If we are able to move to a world where we do not have a huge centralized power plant, or a few people like the Koch brothers who are able to dominate our political landscape, but instead a world with millions of solar panels on tops of millions of rooftops, we’d begin to make some real progress in eroding pillars of power. To me, that’s probably a far more practical step than trying a frontal assault on all of American or world politics and economics.

PM: I definitely want to respond to this as well. There was almost nothing in what the gentleman in the audience said that I could disagree with. The facts are very clear, but as an artist, I have to say that part of the battle is getting people to imagine a change, whatever that change is. If you look back at the 18th century, there was this thing called the Little Ice Age. It was caused because one volcano blew up and put all these clouds in the air, and there were a couple summers with no summer whatsoever. During that time, there were revolutions; governments collapsed. People were starving and crops failed throughout most of Europe. So, climate change caused all these revolutions. Amusingly enough, the U.S. military now considers weather a weapon. The War College now actually studies the impact of weather on major combat zones.

Audience Member no. 4: It’s easy to get discouraged by corporate power, but if there’s a cultural shift and the population gets hold of an idea, things can move very quickly. It’s really about turning public opinion. The Koch brothers’ money is intimidating, but we’re talking about influence on the political system, on our political decision makers. The bottom line is that the people in Congress, in the White House, and in the Governor’s office don’t care about money per se. They only care about being reelected.

BM: This is an important point. There are few people in this room who are, like me, old enough to have been alive on the first Earth Day in 1970. Back then, 20 million Americans—then one in ten of our population—took to the streets to do something. That gave such a scare to our political leaders that Richard Nixon, a man who didn’t care about the environment at all, within the next five years signed every important piece of environmental legislation that we still use: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

The Keystone Pipeline is one of the few issues where the president has a free shot. We’re going to find out what the guy is made of when he makes that decision.

My own experience in Washington has been eye-opening. I haven’t spent much time there in the last two years, and a fair amount of the time there has been spent in jail, but it is a place ruled by money. There are however, some great exceptions. I live in Vermont. My senator, Bernie Sanders, is a stand-up guy if there ever was one. Lisa Jackson, who just stepped down as the head of the EPA, was the honest person in the first Obama administration. She was great and gutsy and smart and willing to buck the system. I liked her better than just about any bureaucrat or civil servant I’ve ever come across. She was actually thinking of the common good the whole time. So, there are people who are trying to do the right thing.

The trouble is the place is just awash in money. If you tell me how much money someone has taken from the oil and gas industry, I can predict with unerring accuracy how they’re going to vote on things like the Keystone Pipeline. It’s a far better predictor than their party identification or anything else. So, Washington is one of the places where the fight with the fossil industry is happening, but we can fight it as effectively on college campuses with endowments in portfolios, and in local governments. We have now had 11 city governments announce that they’re divesting from fossil fuel, including, most recently, Seattle and San Francisco.

When we started on the Keystone Pipeline stuff, one of the tactical decisions we made was we weren’t really going to attack the president. We thought it’d be more painful for him if we tried to hold him to his words from his campaign, so when we surrounded the White House, five people deep all around, every single sign was just a quote from Barack Obama in 2008, saying thing like “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” Well, that got the year-and-a-half reprieve from the Keystone Pipeline that now is coming to an end. I’ve got to say, this will be an interesting moment for the president. The Keystone Pipeline is one of the very few issues where he has a free shot. He gets to make the decision; Congress is not in the way. So we’re going to find out a lot about what the guy is made of when he makes that decision.

The post Performing Climate Change: DJ Spooky Talks with Bill McKibben appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

When President Obama signed a spending bill into law last March, an obscure, anonymously introduced section, the Farmer Assurance Provision, outraged Americans across the political spectrum. Labeled the “Monsanto Protection Act” by critics, the rider strips the Department of Agriculture and federal courts of their powers to stop the planting of genetically engineered (GE) crops, even if they are shown to pose health risks. Monsanto’s products are already ubiquitous. The company’s patented GE soybean seeds, Roundup Ready, are grown by 93 percent of U.S. soybean farms, which must also use its accompanying herbicide, Roundup.

Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, claims it is committed to fighting rural hunger and providing sustainable agriculture for a growing population. Supporters like Forbes Magazine, which labeled Monsanto “Company of the Year” in 2010, claim it “has been working to make humanity better fed.” Even nonprofit organizations like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have praised the benefits of GE crops, although the scientific rigor of prominent nonprofits has been questioned as their links to Monsanto have come into view.

The corporation has deep ties to the U.S. government, and it spends millions of dollars each year lobbying American politicians and advertising to defeat local efforts to label GE ingredients in food products. U.S. diplomats push the use of GE products and have sought penalties for European countries that ban Monsanto products.

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In recent years, however, international resistance to Monsanto has grown. Vietnamese activists are aiming to prevent Monsanto’s entry into their country, where the company is still notorious for producing Agent Orange, a herbicide that caused severe health problems for more than a million people in the wake of the Vietnam War. In India, environmental activists blame Monsanto for the alarming rise in debt and suicide among farmers. And in Mexico, thousands of peasant farmers are protesting plans to introduce GE corn into the country.

In Argentina, the world’s third-largest producer of GE crops, a group of women calling themselves the “Mothers of Ituzaingó” are fighting against the aerial spraying of Roundup. Residents of Ituzaingó, a working-class neighborhood of Córdoba that borders commercial soy farms, have reported a cancer rate more than 40 times higher than the nationwide average.

The above video shows a recent anti-Monsanto protest in Buenos Aires led by Goldman Environmental Prize winner Sofia Gatica, who has been campaigning against the company since her daughter died of a kidney malformation days after birth. On May 25, people around the world will join her struggle in a global March Against Monsanto.

The post Monsanto in Argentina: Rhythms of Resistance in Soybeanland appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Do you sometimes feel that the news is getting stranger as it gets more overwhelming, more 24/7 and less reliable? That the line between “reality” and scary potboiler fictions is getting hazier and more slippery day by day? Did you think Homeland had a documentary vibe?

The news in late March and early April was particularly choc-a-bloc with stories in which gray fact seemed suffused with fictional Technicolor. Clearly there was stuff to do here.

Writers have been describing the horrors, large and small, of public life in verse since way before Alexander Pope. Calvin Trillin has been subjecting the U.S. political process to acerbic rhyme since 1990.

I did not invent this wheel but it spins ever faster. I don’t expect to run out of material any time soon.

This piece is a collaboration with Standard Culture, where Anthony Haden-Guest is cartoonist-in-residence, and can be found on their website.

The post Planet News: The New Real is the Surreal appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

A victim’s body lies amid rubble at the site of a building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, on April 25, 2013. Photo by A.M. Ahad, AP.

A photograph. The whole body is buried under debris. Only one part is sticking out: an ID card with its string wrapped around the wrist and the fingers. The face shows that he couldn’t have been more than 18. Just a youth. The ID card is wrapped around his fingers in such a way that even if his body and facial features were obliterated his loved ones would be able to identify him.

The boy is one of approximately 650 workers killed in a garment factory at Rana Plaza in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The building owner, his father, four factory bosses and two engineers have been arrested.

Gazing at the young worker’s last recorded gesture, I will say that this is the natural instinct of a person about to be gobbled up by the overwhelming horror of becoming nonexistent, in the socioeconomic context of global capitalism. But the number of turns with which that youth of the photograph has wrapped the identity card around his fingers—isn’t that a reflection of his immediate reality? A portrait of the progressive process through which his existence was turned into nonexistence.

The spate of horrific mishaps, from conflagrations to cracks in the walls, occurring within the garment sector is sending a coded message to the brain of each worker: “You may become an unclaimed dead body at any moment. A car from one of the charity organizations may swiftly take you to an unmarked grave. And your family and loved ones may have to spend the rest of their lives carrying the pain of waiting and wailing for you.”

How close to death was he when his consciousness sent him the message that he needed to wrap his identity card so tightly around his fingers? Here, in Dhaka and in Bangladesh, it is very easy for living people, even those with permanent addresses and identities, to become unclaimed dead bodies through terrifying garment factory fires.

Thus far, around 650 people have been found dead, with nearly 100 bodies not yet identified. 32 bodies have been buried in unmarked graves, while another 65 are being kept in hospital morgues. Where do they belong? It was only last November that, in another factory disaster, the authorities weren’t able to identify 52 dead bodies found among the smoldering ruins of the burned-down Tazreen Garments.

It was during the military-backed caretaker government when the database called the National ID Card, or also the voter ID card, was first introduced with great fanfare; it was even supposed to be updated regularly. But has this system been used to identify any of the unidentified bodies or help locate any missing persons? No. Conversely, in places like Nepal and India, these kinds of databases are being used effectively to locate the missing.

Does the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) have a list of all the workers’ names and contact details? It seems unlikely. Can the owners of the factories whose workers died in the rubble, or are still fighting for their lives, provide a list with their employees’ names? Despite living in an era of unprecedented access to information, factual details about the workers and laborers employed in the highest foreign-currency earning sector in the country is in shambles.

Why is it like this? Because the workers are poor. They are the subalterns. They don’t carry weapons. They don’t have the opportunity to commit corruption. They vote because they believe it is their civic duty. They believe in their politicians. However old they may be they are always referred to as “our junior.” And the factory owners have the capacity to force all of the workers—from 25 to 75 years old—into death traps like Rana Plaza by threatening to beat them with sticks.

How widespread corruption must be in every sector, from the center to the peripheries, for us to witness such brutality without recourse to justice. From the construction firm to the suppliers of the bricks, rods, cement and sand—all are complicit. This is a joint “production,” a murderous accident-cum-narrative resulting from corruption in every sector. Political and economic, both types of corruption have contributed here via institutionalized and non-institutionalized channels.

The still photographs flooding the news—a woman lying facedown on sand and pulverized brick, whose arm has been run through by a metal rod; a foot, braceleted, sticking out from a body buried under the rubble; a man fallen onto a woman; just a hand; a foot wearing a formal shoe sticking out of formal trousers; a lonely identity card hanging; that youth who, with his ID card wrapped around his fingers—all seem to say even in death, “We won’t let you forget us.”

While I was seeing all this I was reminded of “The Monument,” a poem by Alauddin Al-Azad about the destruction of memorials to the martyrs, or the short film Chaka (dir. Morshedul Islam, 1993), about an unidentified dead body. But when the reality is so much more brutal, and the struggle to survive so much more poignantly tragic, those depictions simply become sophisticated performances.

One hundred twelve people died in the Tazreen Fashions factory last November because of a lack of emergency equipment. That body-numbing horror is only surpassed in the disaster at Rana Plaza. It is likely that this shortage of equipment will take on even more frightening proportions in the future. The adjective “deadliest” will have to be added, yet again.

Translated from the Bengali original in BdNews24.com for AlalODulal.org by Tibra Ali

The post Bangladesh: A Last Gesture Recorded appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Melvin Haywood, pictured above, spent eight years in solitary confinement at Tamms supermax until the Prisoner Review Board granted him parole from prison. Though the Department of Corrections held him in isolation for eight years, as a “C#,”one of the 270 Illinois prisoners floating in the system with indeterminate sentences, the notoriously tough parole board determined that he did not need to be in prison at all. He credits Goodwill and the Safer Foundation for helping him transition back to society after 30 years of incarceration. Since his release, Haywood has worked to prevent violence by educating and mentoring youth: “To stop the violence, it’s got to come from people from the streets, from the inside—not the academics.” Photo by Lora Lode/Tamms Year Ten, 2012.

Illinois Lost Its Head

In 1998, Illinois opened a prison without a yard, cafeteria, classrooms or chapel. Tamms Supermax was designed for just one purpose: sensory deprivation. No phone calls, communal activities or contact visits were allowed. Men could only leave their cells to shower or exercise alone in a concrete pen. Food was pushed through a slot in the door. The consequences of isolation were predictable: many men fell into severe depression, experienced hallucinations, compulsively cut their bodies or attempted suicide.

The first men at Tamms were transferred there from other prisons around the state for a one-year shock treatment intended to break down disruptive prisoners and make them more compliant. But the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) left them there indefinitely. A decade later, more than a third of the men at Tamms had been there since it opened, and for no apparent reason.

Research has shown that supermax prisons don’t reduce prison violence or rehabilitate prisoners. On the contrary, isolation induces or exacerbates mental illness, creates stress and tension, worsens behavior and undermines the ability of people to function once they get out.

Mothers of men in isolation at Tamms supermax protest the guards union AFSCME for supporting a prison condemned by international human rights monitors. Their signs are based on the “I AM A MAN” placards first used by striking AFSCME sanitation workers, whom Martin Luther King, Jr. supported just before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. The mothers said that closing Tamms is about human dignity, not jobs, and reiterated King’s message that workers’ rights and human rights are inseparable. They marched to AFSCME headquarters on April 4, 2012, the 44th anniversary of King’s death, and told the crowd, “Human suffering cannot be the basis of the southern Illinois economy.” Geneva, Rose and Brenda’s sons spent nine, eight and 14 years respectively in isolation at Tamms. Photo by Adrianne Dues, April 4, 2012.

Despite its uselessness as a form of correction, Tamms had many strong supporters: the powerful union to which the prison guards belonged, the nearby towns that welcomed the well-paid jobs, and state officials who thrived on tough-on-crime politics. They all deployed a single phrase meant to paralyze any possible dissenters: the worst of the worst. This slogan was applied to the men at Tamms to suggest they deserved the worst possible treatment—long-term solitary confinement that human rights monitors uniformly describe as cruel, inhuman and degrading, if not outright torture. Challenging this label and this punishment became the project of Tamms Year Ten, a campaign launched in 2008, a decade after the supermax opened.

Punching Above Our Weight

Two years earlier, a group of Chicago artists, poets and musicians formed the Tamms Poetry Committee. Two of them, Laurie Jo Reynolds included, had been members of a group that had protested plans to construct the supermax. Following the practice of two women who sent holiday cards to the prison, we sent letters and poems to every man at Tamms to provide them with some social contact. Their replies demonstrated the necessity of this project: “Hi Committee, is this for real? I can’t believe someone cares enough to send a pick-me-up to the worst-of-the-worst. Well, if nobody else has said it, I will: THANK YOU.” But we quickly found ourselves deluged with pleas for help: “Hey, this poetry is great, but could you please tell the governor what they’re doing to us down here?”
 

“Photo Requests from Solitary” was one of many projects launched by Tamms Year Ten to build publicity for the campaign. The men in Tamms were invited to request a photograph of anything in the world, real or imagined. The resulting requests were touching and often surprising. They included: the sacred mosque in Mecca, comic book heroes locked in epic battle, Egyptian artifacts, Tamms Year Ten volunteers and a brown and white horse rearing in weather cold enough to see his breath. Willie Sterling III asked for a photograph of a vigil at Bald Knob Cross on top of a hill in southern Illinois to pray for his deliverance from Tamms and to be granted parole. Tamms Year Ten caravanned down to the cross, held a litany of song and prayer and celebrated with a dinner. The next day, we drove family members to visit loved ones at the prison. Sterling was transferred from Tamms, and on July 27, 2012, he was paroled after 36 years in prison. Photo by Rachel Herman, May 6, 2011. See more “Photo Requests from Solitary” on The Daily Beast.

Photographers from across the country offered to fill photo requests for men in isolation. Chicago animator Lisa Barcy, Dutch photographer Harry Bos and Baltimore filmmaker Stephanie Barber each orchestrated a version of one prisoner’s detailed request for a lovesick clown: “A lovesick clown: holding a old fashioned feathered pen: as if writing a letter: from the waist up: in black and white. As close up as possible: as much detail as possible: & the face about 4 inches big.” From left to right: photos by Lisa Barcy, Harry Bos and Stephanie Barber, 2012.

By 2008, we had connected with men on the outside who had spent years in Tamms and family members of current prisoners. Together, we launched the Tamms Year Ten campaign. Our goal was to educate the public about Tamms and hold the IDOC, legislators and then-Governor Blagojevich accountable for the use of long-term isolation. Prison reform is hard enough, but getting people to stand up for “the worst of the worst” was considered hopeless. Attorneys and veteran prisoner advocates warned that this campaign could endanger the men and increase support for the prison. But we believed that recent controversy over solitary confinement and torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib opened a new space for debate. And in any case, after a decade of isolation with no end in sight, the men in Tamms didn’t have much to lose.

Outrage Properly Directed

It was hard to know where to begin. Not many people had even heard of Tamms, located at the southern tip of Illinois, 360 miles from Chicago. Our members consulted with legislators from all over the state and sought advice from every quarter. A turning point was meeting Julie Hamos, an Evanston legislator known as a problem-solver. Her moral outrage was gratifying: “Ten years? This is unacceptable.” She felt that the best strategy was to force the IDOC to publicly justify itself. But that meant we had to have enough information to stand up to intransigent prison officials and law-and-order politicians. So we read, researched, filed Freedom of Information Act requests, extracted data from the public record and gathered statements from prisoners and their family members.

State Representatives speak at a press conference introducing HB6651, a bill to reform Tamms supermax prison and the first legislation in the country curtailing the use of solitary confinement. Shown from left to right: Former Tamms prisoner Reginald “Akkeem” Berry, Sr., Representatives Julie Hamos, Karen Yarbrough, Eddie Washington and Connie Howard, and Tamms Year Ten members Stephen F. Eisenman and Jean Snyder. Snyder litigated on behalf of men in Tamms with serious mental illness while she was with the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center. Photo by Laurie Jo Reynolds, May 25, 2008.

On April 28, 2008, our friend, the late Representative Eddie Washington from Waukegan, chaired public hearings on Tamms to focus legislators’ attention on the issue. We were supported by attorneys who had litigated on behalf of men at Tamms with mental illness. The testimony was often wrenching, but the IDOC was unmoved. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the audience—more than a hundred people came out—catapulted our legislative campaign. Through forums, lobby days, press conferences, rallies, prayer vigils and parsley-eating contests, we gained the support of 70 organizations and 27 legislators for a reform bill sponsored by Hamos. She also initiated roundtable discussions between Tamms Year Ten, the IDOC and legislators. The highlight of these meetings was seeing the real experts—the men recently released from Tamms—confront their former captors.

When Opportunities Are Seized, They Multiply

In 2009, the stars began to align. Amnesty International issued a statement condemning the conditions at Tamms as “harsh,” “unnecessarily punitive” and “incompatible with the USA’s obligations to provide humane treatment for all prisoners.” The organization contacted Illinois state officials, urging them to support our reform legislation. So did Human Rights Watch. Then Representative Luis Arroyo encouraged us to present our case to the House Appropriations Committee during its annual review of the IDOC budget. He opened the session with remarks about how international human rights monitors—and his own constituents—wanted the torture at Tamms to end. The hearing became a referendum on the supermax.

A month later, and just a year after the campaign went public, our new governor, Pat Quinn, announced he was replacing the IDOC chief with a reform-minded director whose first task was to review the supermax. This was followed by a Belleville News Democrat exposé that described men at Tamms with untreated schizophrenia and knots of scar tissue from self-mutilation. It also documented cases in which men entered Tamms with short sentences but wound up with life terms because of their mental illnesses. Their investigation revealed that more than half the men at Tamms had never even committed an offense in another prison. Amnesty released another, more strongly worded statement asserting that “the conditions at the supermax flout international standards for humane treatment.” In September 2009, the IDOC director announced a 10-point plan for reform that included an improvement in conditions, meaningful due process hearings and an administrative review of each man in Tamms. We had cracked the nut.

Torture Is a Crime, Not a Career

By 2011, the promised reforms were stalled, in spite of a new federal court ruling that men at Tamms had been deprived of their due process rights. But at just this point, Representative Arroyo became Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, and pushed not for the reform, but for the closure of Tamms. And in February 2012, Governor Quinn followed suit due to the state’s budget crisis and human rights concerns. In response, downstate legislators and the guards’ union (AFSCME) orchestrated a scare campaign, falsely asserting that closing Tamms would make the prison system more dangerous. Family members, outraged by the union’s shamelessness, responded: “Torture is a crime, it shouldn’t be a career.” The battle played out in the media, the courtroom and especially the budgeting process. Last year was considered “one of the most contentious episodes in the history of Illinois penitentiaries” and the mothers, sisters, nieces, children and spouses of Tamms prisoners were at the forefront of the struggle to shut the supermax down. They lobbied legislators weekly in Springfield and led marches and rallies in Chicago.

Children look on at a mud stencil outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, part of a tactical media project led by Nicholas Lampert and Jesse Graves to publicize the torture at Tamms. Teams of activists traveled the city with buckets of mud and imprinted walls and sidewalks with this unique form of ecological messaging. Photo by Sam Barnett, April 11, 2009. Design: Mathias Regan.

Illinois has no private prisons and a Democratic supermajority in both chambers, yet it is notoriously difficult to close any state facility. We don’t have 50,000 people in prison because of an amorphous “prison industrial complex” hell-bent on selling uniforms, steel doors and honey buns. This state’s mass incarceration can be explained by a powerful guards union, Democratic legislators beholden to it, downstate legislators zealous to protect jobs in their districts, and mass media that promote fear-based policies. It takes guts to close a prison anywhere, but it is especially hard in Illinois. Yet Governor Quinn exemplified true leadership and closed Tamms on January 4, 2013. He chose fiscal prudence over pork-barrel spending; evidence-based policies over myth and fear; and human rights over vengeance.

Why Artists?

Artists were fundamental to the campaign to close Tamms. Accustomed to attempting the impossible, artists are well qualified to affect law and policy. And compared to the regular political players, they have the freedom of the outsider: they are in the world, but not of it.

For much of the last year, the Tamms Year Ten office and its documents were showcased as an exhibition in the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But our campaign didn’t just use art forms like poetry, photography, graphic design and songs for the purposes of politics; it was itself what we call Legislative Art.
 

In 2012, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition “Tamms Year Ten Campaign Office,” in the Sullivan Galleries, served as the hub for the campaign to close the supermax. The office contained all the files and ephemera from the then five-year-long political battle and was the site of an active campaign. Volunteers met and worked around the clock while gallery visitors stopped by to observe, ask questions and even sit down and help. Photo by Tony Favarula, 2012.

For centuries, artists have been concerned with systems of ratio, perspective, symmetry, geometry, anatomy, tactility and optics. For the last 50 years, they have taken on ecology, real estate, advertising, media, cybernetic, genetic, language, gender, racial and class systems. As political artists with real-world political goals, we needed to engage with government systems. Prison policies are made by governments and that is where you go to change them.

This campaign required the endurance, commitment and even obsession that serious art always does, as well as the unity associated with a religious or political movement. People who had stumbled alone forged a collective path. Tamms prisoners sent critical information, galvanizing testimony and prayers. Men once active in enemy gangs publicly spoke side by side about the damage of isolation. Even families of men no longer in the supermax lobbied for sons left behind. Artists lent their skills, advocates issued statements, attorneys battled in court—and principled public officials stood their ground. Out of isolation came solidarity.

We are enthusiastic about Legislative Art because it is stimulating, unpredictable and rewarding. But mainly because it is necessary. Real-world politics is new terrain for most artists, but it’s too important to leave to the politicians.

—

Below are a selection from among dozens of letters written by men after they were transferred out of Tamms, thanking Tamms Year Ten volunteers for their help in closing the supermax.
 

“To my brothers and sisters by another Mother, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your tireless efforts and indefatigable labor in moving the Mountain of the state with nothing but teaspoons and chopsticks and paper clips. You showed that faith alone is enough to move great obstacles when they are only standing upon sandy ground.”

The Tamms prisoner who wrote this letter started to hear voices and cut himself while in solitary, and was subsequently diagnosed with several mental illnesses. In the same letter, he wrote that “all the medication in the world won’t make me forget what I suffered at Tamms.”

“Being in Tamms felt like being held underwater and drowning, not being able to breathe. Leaving that place was as if you suddenly came up for air. You’re gulping in air. You feel alive and real again. Every step of the journey of transitioning from Tamms has been a revelation of things both big and small. Our natural human senses, having been so repressed at Tamms, were suddenly and shockingly activated simply by boarding the I.D.O.C. bus. The smell of diesel fumes was overpowering, its presence a turbulent mixture of ambivalent sensations; foreign yet familiar, comforting and nauseating, pleasurable yet unsettling. Shuffling into the bus was a formidable task: the waist and leg shackles severely hindered our movement and were as uncomfortable as they were difficult, yet every prisoner from the first to the last man had the biggest smiles on their faces.”

“I think back when I first heard of the ‘Tamms Poetry Committee.’ I thought I needed to read a poem like I needed a 25th hour a day to spend in that box! Who would have known though, through patience, steadfastness + perseverance, such an innocuous sounding group would transform into this mighty dynamo that would eventually shut down a Supermax prison! Amazing.
“Sadly, I believe the ones to benefit the most from this will be those who will never have to go to Tamms. For those who spent time there, they are damaged on some level, to some degree. While none of us will ever be the same, some are broken beyond repair.”

A former Tamms prisoner shares his elation at experiencing relative freedom in small ways. Elsewhere in the same letter, he writes:
“Hey, we can finally go outside with more than one person. Still takes time to get use to it. THANK YOU! …
“The support we received from everyone is inspiring and emotional. YOU WILL NEVER KNOW HOW MUCH YOU ALL TOUCHED US! THANK YOU ALL! …
“I can finally wear some sweat pants. No more jumpsuits. I even have my own bowl. It may sound trivial, but I haven’t had one in over eight years. A MILLION THANK YOUS!”

This drawing was made by a boy whose father was held in Tamms, as he anticipated the closure of the supermax. Once it closed, Tamms Year Ten sent a copy of the drawing as a New Years Day card, signed by volunteers, to each man transferred from Tamms to other prisons. The positive feedback has been tremendous.

—

This piece is part of an ongoing Creative Time Reports series on U.S. prison reform, which also includes dispatches on solitary confinement from filmmaker Angad Bhalla and photographer Christoph Gielen. You can view more of the “Photo Requests from Solitary” featured above via The Daily Beast.

The post Tamms Is Torture: The Campaign to Close an Illinois Supermax Prison appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful,” 1967–72. Image courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

In this episode of Forms of Life, host Nato Thompson speaks with Martha Rosler about the political concerns that have galvanized her artistic practice since she first made innovative artworks engaging the subjects of war, gender, consumerism and poverty. Her early photo-collages, performances and videos, including House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72), Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974–75) and The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75), stand as seminal examples of politically engaged art. Speaking with Thompson, Rosler reflects on her motivations during a period in which she was deeply involved with feminist and anti-Vietnam War activism on the one hand, and conceptual art on the other, noting, “I was more interested in changing the world than changing the art world.”

It’s a prodigious aspiration, one she relentlessly pursues to this day. When the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler adapted her Vietnam War-era series “Bringing the War Home” to address the divide between the brutality of war and the luxury of American consumerism in the present. Last year, as a keynote speaker at the Creative Time Summit, she confronted issues of class through the lens of the American garage sale, previewing the “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” she mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art last fall.

In this Forms of Life conversation, Rosler reviews the significant cultural changes she has witnessed throughout her career as an artist, activist and educator, and looks ahead to her next show. But first, the artist dispels a pervasive rumor about her past: born and raised in Crown Heights, not Canada, she proudly avows, “I am so Brooklyn.” By the end of this conversation, you won’t doubt it.

—

Forms of Life is a monthly podcast hosted by Creative Time’s Chief Curator, Nato Thompson. Guests are culture makers whose work posits new ways of looking at political realities. By addressing a wide range of issues such as alternative economies, calcified political structures, new forms of collective living, or simply being a thorn in the side of normality, Forms of Life interviews provide an opportunity to think counterintuitively about social conditions people face around the world.

Special thanks to The Clocktower Gallery and ARTonAIR.org for their support.

The post Making Art in a World of Ferment:
A Conversation with Martha Rosler appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Angad Bhalla, Still from Herman’s House, 2012.

Herman Wallace may be the longest-serving prisoner in solitary confinement in the United States: he’s spent more than 40 years in a six-by-nine-foot cell in Louisiana. Imprisoned in 1967 for a robbery for which he admits guilt, he was subsequently sentenced to life in prison for a killing he vehemently denies committing. My documentary film, Herman’s House, recounts the remarkable expression his struggle found in an unusual project proposed by then New York-based artist Jackie Sumell, who invited Wallace to imagine his “dream home.” The undertaking quickly became an interrogation of justice and punishment in America.

Someone once told me that the key to a good documentary is access. Yet I somehow found myself making a film where I had no access to my main subject, Herman Wallace, or my primary location, his prison cell. At the start of this unconventional endeavor, I realized that the whole idea of “access” was crucial to the story of a man who has spent more than four decades in solitary confinement. Without access to Herman, I aimed to create a viewing experience that pushed the audience to contemplate what life in solitary would be like and, in a way, mirror Herman’s efforts at envisioning life on the outside after so many years.

The case of the Angola Three—Herman and two other men held in solitary cells in Louisiana’s Angola Prison for decades—represents a particular travesty of justice. Many believe these three Black Panther activists were targeted and tied to two separate prison guard murders to quash their dissent. But with over 80,000 people being held in solitary confinement in the United States, it would be too simple to dismiss this case as an exception.

In this first clip, we get a glimpse of how Jackie, after having written to Herman for a year, proposed the idea of working with him to design his dream home.

After our first phone call, I knew Herman’s voice would be powerful enough to carry the story. Still, we faced the challenge of deciding what to show each time Herman speaks. Working with editor Ricardo Acosta and animator Nicolas Brault, we created visuals that didn’t paper over the lack of footage of Herman, because not being able to see him was an important reminder that he was in solitary. Instead of hiding the darkness, we let the screen fade to black with him.

In this next clip, Jackie has embarked on phase two of her project with Herman, looking for land and support in New Orleans to actually build the house. She meets Malik Rahim, who introduced Herman to the Black Panther Party while they were held together in a New Orleans jail before Herman was sent to Angola. Malik knows Herman intimately and also understands Louisiana politics well. It was important that the racial tensions that surround prisons and Jackie’s position as a white artist coming from New York to support a black prisoner in Louisiana be made explicit.

While Jackie and Herman’s unique friendship is the driving force of the film, we wanted to introduce other people whose lives Herman has touched. In this clip we meet Michael, with whom Herman was able to interact during the one hour each day they were not confined to their respective cells. Unlike Herman, who is being held in solitary (and prison) for his political views, Michael’s reason for being put in solitary is more common: he was seen as a “problem” prisoner. But, as Michael explains, extended time in solitary can have a devastating psychological impact. People who do not have any mental illness when they’re placed in solitary often end up developing severe anxiety, depression, anger, paranoia and psychosis from being there.

Herman’s House opens at New York City’s Cinema Village on April 19 and will be broadcast nationally on PBS’s acclaimed series POV on July 8.

You can also read this piece via Alternet.

The post 40 Years in Solitary:
A Prisoner, An Artist, A Dream appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Lim Sokchanlina, born 1987

Lim Sokchanlina, My Motorbike and Me, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Lim Sokchanlina, My Motorbike and Me, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2006, when Suzuki introduced the automatic motorbike “Smash Revolution” to the market in Cambodia—a nation with one of the youngest populations in the world—it advertised, and became synonymous with, new forms of freedom. Lim Sokhanlina, then 19, observed how longstanding ideas of fashion, mobility, leisure and dating were transformed: a new generation cruised the streets on Japanese motorcycles, wearing trendy clothing imported from Seoul. In this series of critical and humorous self-portraits, Lim and his motorbike team up as protagonists, taking center stage to hint at some of the problems associated with new forms of globalization.

Neak Sophal, born 1989

Neak Sophal, No Rice for Pot, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

Neak Sophal, No Rice for Pot, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

To create No Rice for Pot, Neak Sophal collaborated with women from her home village in Takeo province, where much of her family still lives. Titled after a colloquial complaint frequently voiced by Cambodian women, the series of portraits speak to the woman’s primary responsibility and vital role within most Cambodian families: nourishment. Although the Cambodian economy is growing steadily, one in three people currently live on 61 U.S. cents per day. Neak thus honors the challenge women face in providing for not only their families but also society as a whole, today and throughout history.

Sovan Philong, born 1985

Sovan Philong, The People of the Old Church Building Part 2, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Asia Motion.

Sovan Philong, The People of the Old Church Building Part 2, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Asia Motion.

Tucked away in the dense alleys of Phnom Penh’s historic Chinese area is the Chapel of the Sister of Providence. A church during the French colonial era, the building was converted into a prison for part of the Khmer Rouge period, after which it became a state orphanage for 20 years before closing at the turn of the century. The building continues to house former tenants and employees of the orphanage: 15 families, or around 80 people, have divided the floorplan into small, semi-private apartments under the Gothic ceiling. Photographer Sovan Philong spent one year interacting with and documenting this unique community. After establishing traditional portraits from daily life, Sovan concluded his exploration of the site by capturing ephemera that personalize the community space while serving as idiosyncratic subject matter for another kind of portrait: product advertisements, a line of NGO training certificates and human rights booklets.

Vuth Lyno, born 1982

Vuth Lyno, The Make-up Artist, Thoamada II series, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Over the last five years, Khmer LGBTQ individuals have become increasingly visible through public engagement and community organizing. Although Cambodia is generally a tolerant culture, with young people tending toward greater acceptance than elders, Khmer LGBTQs continue to face common forms of discrimination from family rejection and community discrimination to disproportionately poor legal protection. “Thoamada II” aspires to frame the Khmer LGBTQ community—the individuals, their families, and their memories—as thoamada, or “normal, everyday.” Artist Vuth Lyno stages two thoamada portraits: a family in a domestic setting, and a recreation and improvisation of a particular memory from a woman named Sitha, whose narrative is offered to audiences in the titles and texts accompanying a series of diptychs.

Vuth Lyno, The Salt Seeker, Thoamada II series, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

Sitha, pictured on the left in the photograph above, describes the context of the memory she chose to reenact:

I met my wife during the Pol Pot regime when we were digging a canal opposite each other… During rice transplanting month, I went to ask for some salt from her, but she refused…During harvest month, we met again and started to talk, and we fell in love… This love is difficult, because they didn’t let us meet… After 1979, we didn’t get married properly but we created wedding rituals. I play the role of head of the family, as husband and with her as a wife, and we have adopted three children—two daughters and a son—and have six grandchildren. My children call me dad, and my grandchildren call me granddad.

Pete Pin, born 1982

Pete Pin, Cambodian Diaspora Portraits, 2010. From left to right: My father, John Tha Pin, Stockton, CA, August 2010; Portrait of my father and his English instructor at a refugee camp in the Philippines in 1982. Courtesy of the artist.

Pete Pin, Cambodian Diaspora Portraits, 2010. From left to right: My grandmother, Duong Meas, August 2010, Stockton, CA.; Family portrait circa 1973, one of only two items saved by my family from before the revolution. Courtesy of the artist.

Pete Pin’s ongoing series of diptychs place present-day portraits of individuals in conversation with images from personal archives. Produced on location via a portable studio and scanner set up in homes, community centers and temples of the Cambodian diaspora in the United States, Pin is interested how the process of making photographs within familial or community space prompts intergenerational dialogue among the very families and communities he photographs. Though audiences do not hear the private dialogues, we sense the human in the portrait and the intentionality of selection in the document. Whether in the form of photographs, certificates or airport transfer cards, such material is critical and precious—a tangible connection to memories of life once lived in Cambodia, where most images and archives were lost or destroyed during the Khmer Rouge period.

Vandy Rattana, born 1980

Vandy Rattana, Boeung Kok Eviction 6, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Vandy Rattana, Fire of the Year 3, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Vandy Rattana began his photographic career in 2005 with a concern for the lack of physical documentation of the stories, traits and monuments unique to his culture. Employing a range of analog cameras, his early serial works share a preoccupation with the everyday, as experienced by the average Cambodian. Whether depicting quiet domestic and office interiors or intense scenes of forced urban evacuations from fire or land grabbing, his work is united by a cinematic and intimate sensibility. Vandy’s recent works mark a philosophical shift in their approach to image making and historiography; his practice evolving from engaged observation to active reconstruction of narratives.

Khvay Samnang, born 1982

Khvay Samnang, Untitled, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Khvay Samnang, Untitled, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Throughout 2010, Khvay Samnang studied media sources, surveyed everyday life and scheduled nine documented performances during security guards’ lunch breaks at Phnom Penh’s lakes—vital natural hydraulic systems that have become contested sites as the Cambodian government illegally sells, privatizes and fills them with sand for commercial projects. Over 4,000 families have been evicted from both formal and informal lakeside settlements. Those who protest meager compensation packages are often abused and imprisoned. Khvay entered the lakes, among refuse, vegetation and homes in the process of being dismantled, to pour a bucket of sand over his head. This succinct act, and the resulting images and video, resist the polarizing language of media and instead offer silent spaces of reflection on complex change.

“Out of Nowhere: Photography in Cambodia,” a title borrowed from Zhuang Wubin, is presented in collaboration with IN RESIDENCE, the Visual Art program of Season of Cambodia, co-curated by Leeza Ahmady and Erin Gleeson. IN RESIDENCE is a citywide visual arts program that activates artistic practice through two-month residencies for 10 contemporary artists and one curator, alongside singular exhibitions and transdisciplinary public programs across 15 New York City arts institutions. By extending the artists’ practices as ways of generating and reflecting both experience and knowledge, IN RESIDENCE offers audiences new perspectives on Cambodia’s past and present.

The Season of Cambodia festival of which IN RESIDENCE is a part brings the work of 125 Cambodian artists to New York for April and May 2013. Season of Cambodia is an initiative of Cambodian Living Arts, a nonprofit organization based in Phnom Penh and the United States. For more information about the program and a complete schedule of events, visit Season of Cambodia: IN RESIDENCE.

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