ecopolis

Climate change is the symptoms of suffering on the planet. The plants, animals and human beings suffers because every day the balance of nature is sacrificed on the altars of the god of profit. Giuseppe Serravezza and Patrizio Mazza, coordinated by Tonino Girau, will lead us in the adventure of complex prevention and treatment of cancer, but also on the prospects opened up by the new local law. The talk is broadcast live on the Internet Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 21, at www.oistros.it/lunapiena web – it is advisable to book the activities at lunapiena@oistros.it or email to skype contact casaoistros.

The Superga air disaster took place on Wednesday, May 4, 1949, when a plane carrying almost the entire Torino A.C. football squad, popularly known as Il Grande Torino, crashed into the hill of Superga near Turin killing all 31 aboard including 18 players, club officials, journalists accompanying the team, and the plane’s crew. The team was returning from a friendly match for José Ferreira against Benfica in Lisbon.

The victims:
Players
* Valerio Bacigalupo
* Aldo Ballarin
* Dino Ballarin
* Milo Bongiorni
* Eusebio Castigliano
* Rubens Fadini
* Guglielmo Gabetto
* Ruggero Grava
* Giuseppe Grezar
* Ezio Loik
* Virgilio Maroso
* Danilo Martelli
* Valentino Mazzola
* Romeo Menti
* Piero Operto
* Franco Ossola
* Mario Rigamonti
* Julius Schubert
Club officials
* Arnaldo Agnisetta, manager
* Ippolito Civalleri, manager
* Egri Erbstein, trainer
* Leslie Lievesley, coach
* Ottavio Corina, masseur
Journalists
* Renato Casalbore, (founder of Tuttosport)
* Luigi Cavallero, (La Stampa)
* Renato Tosatti, (Gazzetta del Popolo)
Crew
* Pierluigi Meroni, captain
* Antonio Pangrazi
* Celestino D’Inca
* Cesare Biancardi
Others
* Andrea Bonaiuti, organiser

Along with Beuys Everybody is an Artist maxim was born the performance pieces. Embodied art, which contributed to create a sort of semi-mythological persona bound between showman and shaman, audacity and megalomania. Embodied reality: in 1979 he was one of the five hundred signatories who founded the German Green Party.

Beuys’s project 7000 Eichen – Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung, was begun in 1982 at Documenta 7, the greatest art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.

His plan called for the planting of seven thousand trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high above ground, throughout the greater city of Kassel.

Beuys actions’ were central to his use of sculpture as an evolutionary process. Also the use of evocative materials to recall forth multiple associations. As much for Eva and Franco Mattes and their Synthetic Performance in Second Life.

All their actions are performed through their avatars, which were constructed from their bodies and faces. People can attend and interact with the live performances connecting to the video-game from all over the world. The series started in January 2007.

The couple are reenacting historical performances such as Beuys’ work “7000 Oaks” in the synthetic world of Second Life. An action which encourage the synthetic viewers to contemplate possibilities for new meaning of Art embodiment.

The first virtual tree and stone were planted on March the 16th 2007, exactly 25 years after the original oak was planted.

The 7000 basalt stones have been stacked on an island in Second Life: Odyssey. The diminishing pile of virtual stones will indicate the progress of the project, which will go on until all 7000 oaks and stones will be placed.

Second Life inhabitants will have the chance to take part to the performance, placing stones and trees in their lands.

But what kind of performance is that? Self-awareness, probably.

Imagine ergo sum. With the minimal effort, thou.

Children of Men is a 2006 dystopian science fiction film co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. It was loosely adapted from P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men by Cuarón and Timothy J. Sexton with help from David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. It stars Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Caine.

Set in an apocalyptic United Kingdom of 2027, the film explores a grim world in which two decades of global human infertility have left humanity with less than a century to survive. Societal collapse, terrorism, and environmental destruction accompany the impending extinction, with Britain, perhaps the last functioning government, persecuting a seemingly endless wave of illegal immigrant refugees seeking sanctuary. In the midst of this chaos, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) must find safe transit for Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a pregnant African refugee.

But Slavoj Zizèk, in his paper The Clash of Civilisation at the End of History, read also another story, situated on the background:

“Children of Men is obviously not a film about infertility as a biological problem. The infertility Cuaron’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilization is moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment: unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ – say the Last Men, and they blink.”

A more articulated reflection about contemporary politic framework is depicted in Violence, last Zizek’s book. The premise of Zizek’s idea is that the subjective violence we see – violence with a clear identifiable agent – is only the tip of an iceberg made up of ‘systemic’ violence. In this book Zizek delves into the supposed ‘divine violence’ that propels suicide bombers and examines the hidden causes of violent outbursts from the Parisian suburbs to New Orleans. Using unconventional references – Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud – he calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today’s democracies.

Photoclima, a new book lauched by Greenpeace, presents images of some of Spain’s most emblematic places have been altered to show what they could look like if action is not taken to tackle climate change. It’s realized by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez and presented by the Guardian.

Naomi Klein released this year her new 4 years research titled “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” that destruct the myth of “free market” democracy. It all started from a bunch of guys called the Chicago Boys, headed by Milton Friedman, that experimented their ultraliberist process of social and economic engineering. A process based on a deviated form of capitalism defined “disaster capitalism”.

They started from Chile to apply massively their visions on society, being the economic consultant for the Pinochet tiranny. The natural disaster that destroyed tens of thousands of lives in New Orleans is seen as an ‘opportunity’ to put the city’s schooling and public housing in private hands. 9/11 became the excuse for the creation of a vast, private-security industry.

Then the Iraq war, organised around the idea that following the shock and awe military strategy, the country could be organised as a pure, free-market paradise, partly because country and people alike were so traumatised that they would offer no opposition. In the book is explained as the Shock and Awe strategy started as a psicological strategy to cure madness in the ’50s to become a global political strategy to “cure” societies that don’t want to apply for the free market circus.

Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the “coercive interrogation techniques” that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay, but it all started from the psicological tests of the 50’s. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been “de-patterned” with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. The same Shock and Awe tecnique are now being used bot just on individuals but also on populations. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.

Here an excerpt form the book:

“In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that “Katrina accomplished in a day … what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying”. Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman’s plan “an educational land grab”. I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”.

Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as “the shock doctrine”. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo”. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that “injuries” should be inflicted “all at once”, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.”