ecopolis

Shock around the world. Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at the end of a campaign rally.

The death of the charismatic former prime minister also threw the campaign for the next election into chaos and created fears of mass protests and an eruption of violence across the south Asian nation, which has nuclear weapons and a support base for Muslim extremists.

Kara Walker, You Do, 1993-94 (detail). Cut Paper on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. The use of the traditionally proper Victorian medium, gives evidence of the her critical and artistic processes, creating a theatrical – yet controversial – space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate, seduce and inflict violence on one another.

Kara Walker, “Art in the Twenty-First Century”, production still, 2003 © Art21, Inc.

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

The exhibition at Witney Museum presents a comprehensive grouping of the artist’s work to date, featuring more than 200 paintings, drawings, collages, shadow-puppetry, light projections, and video animations that offer an extended contemplation on the nature of figurative representation and narrative in contemporary art.

Drawing her inspiration from sources as varied as the antebellum South, testimonial slave narratives, historical novels, and minstrel shows, Walker has invented a repertoire of powerful narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the living roots of racial and gender bias. The intricacy of her imagination and her diligent command of art history have caused her silhouettes to cast shadows on conventional thinking about race representation in the context of discrimination, exclusion, sexual desire, and love. “It’s interesting that as soon as you start telling the story of racism, you start reliving the story,” Walker says. “You keep creating a monster that swallows you. But as long as there’s a Darfur, as long as there are people saying ‘Hey, you don’t belong here’ to others, it only seems realistic to continue investigating the terrain of racism.”

Witney Museum of American Art
Until February 3, 2008

Kara Walker, Darkytown Rebellion, 2001. Cut paper and projection on wall
Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Boy George – The War Song

George Alan O’Dowd, better known as Boy George (born June 14, 1961 in Eltham, London) is a rock singer-songwriter and Club DJ. His music is often classified as blue-eyed soul, since he was heavily influenced by Rhythm and Blues and reggae. Mainly O’Dowd is a essential part of the British new romantic movement which emerged in the late 1970s and was popularised in the early 1980s. He and Marilyn, born Peter Robinson were regulars at ‘The Blitz’, a highly stylised nightclub in London run by Steve Strange of the musical group Visage, and a place which spawned many early 1980s pop stars such as Spandau Ballet.

Publication date: 17/03/2005 • 304 pages • 242×161mm • ISBN: 1844133907 Order this book

From 1979 he worked as a DJ alongside Jeremy Healy until he joined forces with DJ Michael Craig and drummer Jon Moss in 1982 to form the 80’s super group Culture Club. Over the next four years, the group made history with their music including the huge hits “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me”. The group split in 1986 and reformed in 1998.
http://www.culture-club.co.uk/

Dread-locked Boy George challenged the traditional boundaries of gender: wore makeup, exotic outfits and brought this androgyny to a mainstream market, which was later dubbed as gender bending.

Today Boy George is recognized foremost as a leading dance music DJ, a solo artist and for his Broadway musical Taboo.

Boy George Feb 2007 DJ Tour Press

Katyal, Sonia, “Semiotic Disobedience” . Washington University Law Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 2006
Available at SSRN: Katyal, Sonia, “Semiotic Disobedience” . Washington University Law Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 2006:

Download from : Stanford Law School

Nearly twenty years ago, a prominent media studies professor, John Fiske, coined the term “semiotic democracy” to describe a world where audiences freely and widely engage in the use of cultural symbols in response to the forces of media. Although Fiske originally referenced the audience’s power in viewing and interpreting television narratives, today, his vision of semiotic democracy has become perhaps the single most important ideal cited by scholars who imagine a utopian relationship between law, technology, and democratic culture. In this Article, I seek to introduce another framework to supplement Fiske’s important metaphor: the phenomenon of “semiotic disobedience.” Three contemporary cultural moments in the world – one corporate, one academic, and one artistic – call for a new understanding of the limitations and possibilities of semiotic democracy and underline the need for a supplementary framework.

As public spaces have become converted into vehicles for corporate advertising – ads painted onto sidewalks and into buildings, schools, and other public spaces – product placement has soared to new heights of power and subtlety. And throughout, the law has generously offered near-sovereign protection to such symbolism through the ever-expanding vehicle of intellectual property protection. Equations between real property and intellectual property are ubiquitous. Underlying these themes is a powerful linkage between intellectual and tangible property: as one expands, so does the other.

Yet at the same time, there is another facet that is often left out of the picture, involving the increasing response of artists who have chosen to expand their activities past the boundaries of cultural dissent and into the boundaries of asserted illegality. For every movement toward enclosure that the law facilitates, there is an opposite, underappreciated movement toward liberation from control – a moment where social activism exposes the need for alternative political economies of information. And yet the difference between these marketplaces of speech – one protected, one prohibited – both captures and transcends the foundational differences between democracy and disobedience itself.

Just as previous discussions of civil disobedience focused on the need to challenge existing laws by using certain types of public and private property for expressive freedoms, today’s generation seeks to alter existing intellectual property by interrupting, appropriating, and then replacing the passage of information from creator to consumer.

This Article suggests that the phenomenon of semiotic disobedience offers a radically different vantage point than Fiske’s original vision, one that underlines the importance of distributive justice in intellectual property. Thus, instead of interrogating the limits of First Amendment freedoms, as many scholars have already done, I argue that a study of semiotic disobedience reveals an even greater need to study both the core boundaries between types of properties – intellectual, real, personal – and how propertization offers a subsidy to particular types of expression over others.

SONIA KATYAL
Fordham University School of Law
140 West 62nd Street
New York , NY 10023
United States
212-636-7424 (Phone)
212-636-6899 (Fax)

What crosses your mind when you hear someone talking about prostitution?

Prostitutes in the Bolivian city of El Alto sewed their lips together as part of a hunger strike to demand that the mayor reopen brothels and bars ordered closed after violent protests by residents last week. “We are fighting for the right to work and for our families’ survival,” Lily Cortez, leader of the El Alto Association of Nighttime Workers, told local television via Reuters.

“It’s not only us owners and the sex workers who are affected, there are thousands of waiters, cooks, bartenders, taxi drivers and street vendors who will be without income,” said Ramiro Orellana, spokesman for the business group. Prostitution in Bolivia is legal but pimping is outlawed.

Hunger strike in El Alto. REUTERS/David Mercado

The commercial exploitation of the human body is nothing new. Italian Politics stressed hypothesis to build a SexDrive Park. A sort of drive-through service, placed on fast and anonymous ways like Cristoforo Colombo in Rome, targeted at truckers and sex travelers. The government’s focus is looking at improving protection of prostitutes and clients, exclusion of uncontrolled activities of streetwalkers on city streets, places of cult, hospitals and publics places attended by underage.

Contrary to the urban picture of prostitution painted by the social recognition of sexual entertainment as sex work, the violence and the trafficking of human beings for sexual exploitation and slave labour have become two of the fastest growing worldwide problems in recent years. Victims do not agree to be trafficked or sold: they are tricked, lured by false promises, or forced into it in order to work.

The harm of prostitution is graphically evident in its health consequences. (Not only) women in prostitution suffer the same injuries that women subjected to other forms of violence against women endure, including bruises, broken bones, black eyes, concussions, and loss of consciousness. The reproductive health effects include a high incidence of unwanted pregnancies, miscarriage, multiple abortions and infertility. In addition to HIV/AIDS, chronic pelvic pain and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are alarmingly high among women in prostitution.

In May, 1998, Sweden became one the of the first countries to prohibit the purchase of sexual services with punishments of fines or imprisonment (Swedish Government Offices, 1998). In so doing, Sweden has declared that prostitution is not a desirable economic and labor sector. Another example : Venezuela ruled that “prostitution cannot be considered work because it lacks the basic elements of dignity and social justice.”

Prostitution is a sign of economic marginalization and social inequality. Prostitution institutionalizes the buying and selling of (not only) women as commodities in the marketplace. For example, Second Life “Khannea” took her first client on her very first day in Second Life, and since then has been busy working. Khannea charges 750 Lindens (about $3 at current exchange rates) per half hour “of varied activity,” but clients generally tip more. On one occasion a man in game paid her 5,000 Lindens.

David LaChapelle, Lil’ Kim, Keep it Real, photograph for Atlantic Records, May 13th, 1999, C-print

While the most invisible part of the sex industry is the buyer and his role and responsibility in creating the demand for prostitution. Italy allowed brothels to operate legally until 1959. Italy now provides a certain amount of social protection and laws to stop pimps exploiting prostitutes. Giulio Amato recently purposed to serve legal papers in clients’ homes in order to shame them. The main problem is a socio-cultural censoring of women’s sexuality, and culture’s objectification of the fe-male body. Prostitution expresses the worth of all human bodies.

A recent example of Italian culture body censoring was the Nolita campaign. Shot by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, the image shows anorexic French actress Isabelle Caro, for Italian fashion label Nolita. The image was published in newspapers and featured on billboards during Milan fashion week. Then it was banned. Toscani called the ban “censorship” and said he was considering legal action. I call “censorship” the image itself: a pretty woman in a standard position, which witness an essential advertising technique to accomplish the (sex) industry based on the exploitation of a (female) body. The problem is (not only) the stigmatised body of the under-weight model. And the the solution is (not only) the medical certificates for under-weight models, attesting their good health from doctors with expertise in recognising eating disorders.

Sex industry and sex worker is also a way to neutralize the term prostitution. Of course legalization would create a whole regulatory framework: a whole regulatory set of systems for regulating who’s involved, how they are involved, health issues, access to healthcare, how to deal with the police, how to get services around sexual assault or domestic violence. As ministry Amato said “prostitution is a complexion to deal with in light of social security” un elemento complesso da gestire in un’ottica di sicurezza sociale”

Soon we will end up with prostitution as Social workers. You will need a license, certification, or registration. The rules for getting these things will depend on the State where the worker lives. This certification will make it easier to get some jobs. Pimps will become businessmen and the buyers simply customers. Soon we will end up in the perfect paradox: you will prostitute yourself to become a legal one. Let’s strike immediatly for your (social) rights.

Mamma Roma is a 1962 film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prostitute Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), tries to start a new life selling vegetables with her 16 year old son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo). When he later finds out she was a prostitute he succumbs to the dark side with petty crime and goes to prison. This project of self-gentrification and of “urbanizing” an illiterate provincial youth is doomed, not least by the reappearance of Mamma Roma’s old lover and pimp, Carmine—quite literally “a force from the Past”—who twice compels her to return to the streets she walked for thirty years.

Festival In Rome

20-24 October 2007: Porn Competition in Berlin

20 September – 24 October 2007: Pr0n Competition on the Net

The CUM2CUT Indie-Porn-Short-Movies-Festivalcomes again! It is an independent pornography competition, a four day marathon in which participants are invited to release a short film, which will be shown during the Berlin Porn Film Festival.

Unlike mainstream porn, the CUM2CUT competition focuses on the activities of the international, independent and countercultural queer movement and presents a platform where artists, filmmakers, djs, actors, hackers, excited minds and everyone interested can collaborate.

In this context, queer means to express sexuality beyond the boundaries of identity and to cross the limits of fixed genders and stereotypes. At the same time, the idea of being queer is closely connected with the D.I.Y. attitude: CUM2CUT wants to encourage everyone to express themselves using their bodies and media from an independent point of view, thereby creating new experimental queer languages.

This year CUM2CUT is raised to a double level, it is not only a Porn Competition (20-24 October 2007), but also a Pr0n one!

As usual all the short movies must be pornographic. Aim of CUM2CUT competition is always related to the idea of promoting and enjoying the pleasure of sharing pornography all over the city. But whoever would like to participate in remote, this year have the chance to eroticise the network, mixing codes and technology, through the Pr0n competition (20 September – 24 October 2007).

An expert jury formed by people involved in porn/queer subculture and experimental cinema will select winners respectively for the Porn and Pr0n Competitions. The winners will receive a prize (stay tuned…!)

In order to open not only the boundaries of sexuality but also those of artistic expression, the videos produced must be licensed under the Creative Commons.

If you want to participate to the CUM2CUT Festival go to the registration areas. According to the competition chosen, subscribe your team on the Porn or Pr0n form.

Louise Bourgeois is one of the world’s most respected sculptors. Over a long career she has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism, yet has always remained uniquely individual, powerfully inventive, and often at the forefront of contemporary art. This major survey, in the artist’s 95th year, provides an unprecedented opportunity to reassess her work, which is characterised by its obsessive subject matter and experimental approach to materials and techniques.

Louise Bourgeois, TEMPER TANTRUM, 2000
Pink fabric

Beginning with her earliest drawings, prints and paintings, the show features over 200 works in materials as diverse as latex, bronze, marble, and mirrors, as well as her most recent works using fabric. It’s also another chance to see Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman 1999, which was shown in the Turbine Hall when the gallery opened in 2000.

This exhibition explores Bourgeois’s core themes of femininity, sexuality and isolation, and demonstrates that even in her 90s she continues to defy convention.

Until 20 January 2008 at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG