[spectre] December on -empyre- soft-skinned space : "Crusades and Art as Illegality and Provocation”

[Christina McPhee]

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December on -empyre-  soft-skinned space : "Crusades and Art as  
Illegality and Provocation”



http://subtle.net/empyre


Please join guest moderator Ana Valdés (SE) as she engages with a  
group of activist artists, curators and scholars, including Susan  
Meiselas (US), Cecilia Parsberg (SE), Jan-Erik Lindstrom (SE), Raul  
Ferrera-Balanquet (MX),  Loretta Napoleoni (UK) and Dahr Jamail ().

  As Ana writes:


"The Crusades were the expansion of Europe, stretching its  
territories North and South, to colonize and spread the Christian  
Word, meanwhile conquering new  markets, new source of raw material,  
new peoples and new lands. The historical metaphor oj the Crusades is  
still alive concerning and in presentday Middle  East, both as a  
memory and in relation to contemporary conquests, as well as in the  
rhetoric of empire.

  Today artists, writers and theorists merge in the world, document  
it and, instead of trying to conquer it, show passion and compassion,  
denounce, take part, engage themselves.  Since Emile Zola wrote  
"J'Accuse" and Pablo Picasso painted "Guernica", a constant stream of  
artists has been exerting their right to dissent and the right to  
question power, the status quo and existing norms.

  The walls in Palestine, Tijuana, Ceuta and Melilla are not only   
symbolic; they build the shape of Fortress Europe, not only the  
geographic, but the mythological Europe, the supposed cradle of
  Modernity.  The Crusades were the clash and the confrontation.  
Today's artists and  intellectuals search its meaning, study its  
effects. Films, photos,  texts and installations talk about jails,  
fences, workers with precarious jobs  paperless immigrants, political  
turmoil and mayhem. Fine Arts is today the  arena of political  
discussions and activist practices.

I've asked some friends and colleagues to join me during one month to  
discuss our practices and our engagements, inspired by the above,  
under the framework of -empyre-. "

-- Ana Valdés, writer and activist

  initiator of Crusading  http://www.crusading.se, in partnership  
with Jan-Erik Lundström,  BildMuseet in Umeå, http:// 
www.bildmuseet.umu.se


  subscribe at http://www.subtle.net/empyre




Guest biographies:


   
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-->Ana Valdés is a writer, social anthropologist and activist,  
working with Gender, Class and Race issues in cyberculture. She has  
published several books and started in the year 2000 the network  
Equator, http://this.is/Equator, together with the visual artist  
Cecilia Parsberg. Since 2005 she runs together with the BildMuseet in  
Umeå, http://www.bildmuseet.umu.se the Crusading network. Ana Valdés  
texts deal with borders and multiple identities. Some titles: “The  
Alphabet Garden”, Serpent’s Tail, “Columbus’s Egg”, Faber and Faber.
She was a political prisoner for four years during the Uruguayan  
dictatorship.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
->Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and member of the  
cooperative Magnum Photos since 1976. She is the author of Carnival  
Strippers, Nicaragua, Kurdistan In the Shadow of History  and  
Encounters with the Dani. She is best known for her documentation of  
human rights issues in Latin America. Meiselas has had one-woman  
exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles  and New  
York. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow.


------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----->Cecilia Parsberg lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She is a  
visual artist who works with relational concepts, and is educated at  
Valand Academy of Fine Arts, Göteborg University, with a post grad  
Diploma from Dundee University. Throughout the nineties her work  
dealt with power and sexuality, how power structures permeate our  
daily lives. Her gaze changed from the outsider to the participating:  
the image exist between us, the task of the artist is to “activate  
the image”. The theoretical concept The Action was articulated  
through five art works in South Africa, during three years. The last  
five years, she has been articulating her art projects as real  
political posture. Cecilia argues that this sphere is a possible  
place for artist's work.
An account of her work and earlier exhibitions can be found at http:// 
this.is/Parsberg


---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 >Jan-Erik Lundström is the director of BildMuseet, Umeå university,  
Umeå, Sweden, a museum of contemporary art and visual culture. He is  
equally involved in curating, organizing, lecturing and writing.  
Among his latest exhibitions are Politics of Place, Killing Me Softly  
(Tirana Biennial), Projects for a Revolution (Mois de la Photo,  
Montreal), Double Vision (Prague Biennale), Same, Same, but Different  
and Människor i Norr(Peoples of the North). He was the chief curator  
of Berlin Photography Festival, 2005, where he produced the  
exhibition After the Fact, a major survey of documentary practices in  
contemporary art. And he will be the chief curator of the 1st  
Biennial of Thessaloniki in 2007. He is the author of numerous books,  
including Nordic Landscapes, Tankar om fotografi (Thoughts on  
Photography), Irving Penn and Horizons: Towards a Global Africa. He  
has been guest professor at HISK, Antwerp, Belgium and at the  
Kunstakademie, Oslo, Norway. Lundström is a prolific international  
lecturer and writer, contributor to symposia internationally and to  
cultural magazines such as Glänta, European Photography, Paletten and  
tema celeste.



-----------------------------------------------------------------------> 
Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958.  
MFA in Multimedia and Video Art, University of Iowa, 1992.   
Interdisciplinary artist, writer, Fulbright scholar and executive  
curator of Arte Nuevo InteractivA, a leading new art exhibit and  
laboratory in Latin America. He heads the Multimedia Department at  
the Superior School of the Arts of Yucatan, México.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------> 
Loretta Napoleoni is the author of Terror Incorporated and Insurgent  
Iraq. She is an expert on financing of terrorism and advises several  
governments
on counter-terrorism. She is senior partner of G Risk, a London based  
risk agency. As Chairman of the countering terrorism financing group  
for the Club de Madrid, Napoleoni brought heads of state from around  
the world together to create a new strategy for combating the  
financing of terror networks. Born and raised in Rome, in the mid  
1970s Loretta Napoleoni became an active member of the feminist  
movement and a political activist. She was a Fulbright scholar at  
Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced  
International Studies in Washington DC and a Rotary Scholar at the
London School of Economics. As an economist she worked for several  
banks and international organizations in Europe and the US. In the  
early 1980s she worked at the National Bank of Hungary on the  
convertibility of the florin that became the blue print for the  
convertibility of the ruble a decade later. Ms Napoleoni is also a  
journalist and has worked as a foreign correspondent
for several Italian financial papers. Her work appears regularly in  
many journals and publications, including several European  
newspapers. She  lectures regularly on the financing of terrorism.  
She has written novels, guide books in Italian and translated and  
edited books on terrorism; her most recent novel, Dossier Baghdad, is  
a financial thriller set during the Gulf War. She was among the few  
people to interview the Red Brigades in Italy after three decades of  
silence.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------> 
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has reported from  
occupied Iraq for 8 months. He has reported from Syria, Jordan,  
Turkey and
recently from Lebanon during the 34-day Israeli assault on that  
country. He has reported for The Independent and the Guardian in the  
UK, the Sunday Herald in Scotland and Inter Press Service. His  
dispatches from Irak can be read on www.dahrjamailiraq.com.