Wired cities is a project on non-linear storytelling, exploring the city as a balanced and tactile ecological system.
The map of the city is erased and reconstructed from scratch.
How do artists experience a specific city? Edifices, old and new, that are considered landmarks can be reconstructed and arranged along one’s architectural fantasies. Old and new stories weave maps of collective memories. Analog and digital input are mixed. New skylines emerge out of folding architecture. Photographs and movies become new textures. Continue reading →
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Thursday, september 11th, I met this gypsy women in Skopje. She was sitting on the sidewalk of a big street, and she was shouting and screaming as if she gave a very personal performance. Nobody of the passers by gave her any attention. I was struck by her behaviour. Completely free, the street was clearly her natural habitat.
The moment she noticed my attention for her, she was happy to have some interested public, finally. She grew in her performing role, singing, telling a lot of things that I did not understand. She became more and more sad, concerned. Still none of the passers by gave her any attention. They seemed to be ashamed for what she was telling. Once again, language was acting on a second level for me. Names of children (I guess), mostly girls. Words like mobsters, passports, abortus, dinars and deportation.
I made up my own story about her. The next day I asked Jasna, one of the workshop participants, to translate what the gypsywoman told me. I decided to film Jasna while she was making a simultaneous translation. I will edit both voices on top of each other, as a testimonial and a comment.
A city is a construction in space over a long timespan.
All experiences are related, all senses are mixed. Stories, sounds and images are contextualised into a dynamic database. The growth of the city is a continuous succession of phases.
The city as a shifting entity: from the frantic movement of rush hour madness to the slow giant’s pace of urban development, movement is the defining feature of a metropolitan environment. Continue reading →
The third international Upgrade gathering will be taking place in Skopje, Macedonia, September 11-14, 2008.
Chain Reaction is the annual exhibition and symposium presented by the Upgrade! International organization for 2008. The gathering, which will involve curators and artists from the Upgrade nodes that are working in 27 cities, and which is aimed at both fostering inter-network communication and collaboration as well as exposure of art and ideas to a broad public audience. In Skopje the gathering incorporates an exhibition, symposium and publication as well as a programme of screenings and performances. Continue reading →
A nourishing sunday-morning mask at the choosy juice bar in brussels.
Leave all masks for 15 minutes. Cleanse.
http://www.bechoosy.be
masque bonne mine:
1 carotte rappée / 1 jaune d’oeuf / 1 cuillère à café de crème fraiche / 1 c à c de huile d’olive.
masque lifting (peau sèche):
2 c à soupe crème fraiche / 1 blanc d’oeuf / ananas en purée.
masque peau grasse:
2 c à c argile verte / 3 c à c yaourt / 1 c à s miel / 1 c à c citron + comcombre sur les yeux.
masque peau sèche:
1/2 banane écrasé / 2 c à c miel / 1 c à c yaourt / 1 c à c huile d’amande douce.
bombay impression #01
streaming movie 01:08″
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see where the action was in India, you went to the villages. Today, you go to the cities. What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix as a happy side-effect, the problems of the cities.
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bombay impression #02
streaming movie 00:54″
The growth of a megacity is an Asian phenomenon. Why do Asians like to live in cities? Some parts of central Bombay have a population density of one million people per square mile. This is the highest number of individuals massed together at any spot in the world. Two-thirds of the city’s residents are crowded into just 5 per cent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolize the remaining 95 per cent.
Suketu Mehta — Bombay lost & found
