THANKS TO ELOF HELLSTRÖM FOR POINTING OUT THIS VIDEO ON SARAJEVO! PTL.

Talk Real

Published on Jan 17, 2018

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or if a tree falls in the forest, and there is nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?

WARSAW — Defying an order from the European Union’s highest court, the Polish government said on Monday that it would continue logging in Bialowieza Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe and a habitat for hundreds of bison.

The decision is the latest challenge by Poland to the legal authority of the European Union, which Poland joined in 2004, and could result in financial penalties. The arch-conservative and nationalist government that took power in Poland in 2015 has been chastised by the authorities in Brussels; last week, it was formally warned that its efforts to consolidate power over the judiciary in Poland threatened the rule of law.

The Bialowieza Forest, a Unesco World Heritage site, is a relic of ancient woodlands in the middle of the European lowlands, at the border of Polandand Belarus.

It has been at the center of a heated debate since Poland’s government tripled the logging limits last year and, in February, repealed protections for areas that include a large number of trees that are more than a century old.

After months of debate between Warsaw and Brussels, the European Commission sued Poland before the top court of the European Union. In a preliminary decision on Friday, the European Court of Justice ordered that all logging in the forest, which is home to protected habitats and species, be immediately suspended.

On Monday, Poland’s environment minister, Jan Szyszko, who had called the logging a “protective” effort to combat a bark-beetle infestation, said that he ordered an end to the cutting in a third of the forest, but that the logging would continue in the remainder.

By doing so, Mr. Szyszko said, the authorities were conducting “an experiment.” After several years, the ministry will compare the condition of both parts of the forest to determine “who is in the right” — Polish officials and foresters, or the European Commission and dozens of scientists and environmental advocates, who have vehemently opposed the logging, saying it will damage the forest irreparably.

“We thank the commission very much for such a big interest in our forest,” Mr. Szyszko said with a hint of sarcasm. “But we will not be insulted by those who don’t know about the rules of protection of environment.”

Advocates expressed shock.

“I’m speechless,” said Przemyslaw Chylarecki, a zoologist at the Museum and Institute of Zoology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “The court has been crystal clear about the unconditional ban on the large-scale logging and the minister is resorting to these embarrassing gimmicks.”

Mr. Chylarecki said that the ministry’s experiment was pointless.

“It will be years, possibly decades, before we will be able to compare the results of both approaches,” he said. “Meanwhile, we have three harvesters working in the forest along with a team of loggers, which means that up to 1,000 trees are cut every day.”

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Tomasz Wesolowski, a forest biologist at the University of Wroclaw, in southwest Poland, said the government’s experiment was deceptive, because much of the area where the logging will be forbidden was new forest.

“They are going to protect trees that were planted a year ago,” he said. “The vast majority of what should be protected unconditionally will be in the other zone, cut down, day by day.”

Curated by Antonia Alampi

Participating artists Ibrahim Mahama

Does history cease to exist when a memorial is removed from public view and civic sanction – or is that act of removal, a forceful repudiation of the past, itself an act of choice and agency in history? [1]

The recent events of Charlottesville (US) [2] encouraged again an urgent debate on mainstream media about the racist and colonial monuments that adorn our cities. Monuments and memorials of colonial and imperial legacy that are rarely contextualized still stand in public space and have not been combined with counter perspectives that would allow for a narrative that is more adherent to the truth about the events or the people, which the sculptures represent.

On Monumental Silences by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama is a response to the presence of these types of monuments, in many cities in Belgium and Flanders, and to their messages full of racism, white supremacy, imperialism and patriarchy. By engaging with the infamous monument of Father De Deken in Wilrijk (by Jean-Marie Hérain and erected in 1904), this project will confront the audience with the values and propaganda this image still performs and inspire a reflection on how such an image could be transformed. On Monumental Silences brings to the fore not only the need to re-challenge the narratives monuments bear, but also the question of how to actively intervene, by considering which subjects continue to be denied a voice, a place in history and a representation, what side of the events is missing a story. While the shoot is largely and overwhelmingly visible, where can we find the counter-shoot? As Ray Minniecon, an Aboriginal student at Murdoch University, stated “Monuments are not just a window into our past; they are a window into ourselves. We can choose.” [3]

CALENDAR
– 16.01.2018, 16:00-21:00

The project will commence on January 16th with ‘Silent Recreations’, a performative and participatory action by the artist. A soft clay copy of the monument of Pater de Deken will be modified, reshaped and re-imagined together with the audience and in a moderated discussion with historian, diversity and inclusion expert Omar Ba. History will become a malleable matter to act upon and reshape towards a future counter-monument to that of Father de Deken.

– 27.01.2018, 16:00-midnight

Opening & Public Program

On Monumental Silences, by Ibrahim Mahama, marks the first act in a series of interventions within a three-year collaboration between Extra City and the Middelheim Museum, in which the function of monuments in the city of today is critically re-assessed.

In addition to the Middelheim Museum, this project is made possible thanks to the generous support of APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia. We thank also AIR Antwerpen for their cooperation.

[1] Paul Daley, Statues are not history. Here are six in Australia that need rethinking, The Guardian, August 24, 2017. Find more here
[2] Started in August 2017 when a group of white supremacists who had gathered to protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee (a Confederate soldier in favor of slavery) violently attacked counter protesters.
[3] Ibidem.

Location Kunsthal Extra City, Eikelstraat 25-31, 2600 Antwerpen

By HOLLAND COTTERJAN. 12, 2018

‘We live in a culture of digital now-ness, twitter-surfing, trivia bingeing — which has become a culture of not-knowing history. I became acutely aware of the imbalance at the time of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August. Suddenly, there history was — an old history of American racism and nativism — speaking to the present loud and clear.

The rally was built around a single object: an equestrian monument to the Confederate leader and Civil War hero Robert E. Lee. A small alt-right army had gathered to protest its threatened removal by the city from a public park. Probably no one had given the statue a serious glance for years. But the alt-right had, and understood its power, which lay in its twofold history. This sculpture represented the Civil War, but it was of a later date. It was made in 1924, when a brew of Lost Cause nostalgia and resurgent racist anger was saturating the South. In that context, the image of Lee was both a memorial to the past and the standard for a white supremacist future.

The Charlottesville rally was, as it was meant to be, explosive. And in the aftershock came a wave of monument-fever. In Charlottesville itself, anti-right protesters pulled down and smashed a second Confederate statue. In the same week, in Baltimore, Md., on an order from city hall, workmen hoisted four Confederate statues onto flatbed trucks and drove them off into the night.

The iconoclastic impulse spread north to New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to review a number of controversial monuments, not necessarily Civil War-related, that stood on city property. He called together a group of historians and artists together to take on the task. And this week, the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers — — led by Tom Finkelpearl, the New York City cultural affairs commissioner, and Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation — released a statement of the group’s findings.

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It’s a very by-committee document; measured, all-bases-covered, weighted with consensus, short on surprise. If anything could bring a fever down, this could. It lists a set of wide-angle questions the commission applies in making judgments. If monuments have the power to write history, who, in any given case, is wielding that power? Was the history true when written, and has that truth changed over time? Does the history serve positive or negative ends? Promote inclusion or divisiveness? If monuments are, like history, intrinsically complex, not easily defined as “right” or “wrong,” is complexity alone enough to justify a contested monument’s continuing presence?

After the questions, and a group vote, come suggestions for actions the mayor can take. He can let a monument stand as is; re-contextualize it through added signage or programming; move it to another public site, such as a museum; change or expand its meaning by adding new art; or remove it from view. (Destroying is not an option, and in my opinion should never be.)…

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE WAY CITIES ARE BEING COLONIZED BY MASSIVE SHOPPING MALLS…

SEE LINK: EXPRESS

“The massive document leak, which lay bare the financial secrets of some of the world’s biggest businesses and super-rich individuals, shows the singer invested in a Maltese firm which purchased the £5.1 million Aušra mall in Lithuania.

Malta is a well-known tax haven, and foreign investors pay just five per cent on any profits earned by firms registered there.

The Paradise Papers show Bono, whose real name is Paul Hewson, invested in Nude Estates, a firm registered on the Mediterranean island.

Nude Estates then purchased the Aušra shopping centre soon after it opened in 2007 and incorporated a company in Lithuania to hold the business.

STATE OF THINGS:

The  Spring workshop, originally planned for an investigation into Vilnius, has gone through a series of permutations. The Workshop has since been hitched to the Lithuanian project for the Venice Architecture Biennale, led by Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas, “the SWAMP.” However a series of meetings among the participants of r-lab in which the discussion moved from travelling to Vilnius to travelling to Venice ended in our taking the decision to organize a workshop expedition to a notorious Swamp in Lithuania: located within the Curonian Spit on the Baltic Sea,  along a strip of territory split between  Lithuania and Kaliningrad Russia on the Baltic coast.  With the famous artists colony in Nida, where Thomas Mann once resided and that Hermann Goring would later expropriate for Nazi leisuretime, and with the mysterious Kūlgrinda submerged pathways known only to locals crossing the extensive swamplands, this region could provide several key analytical tools that could possibly contribute to the Venice SWAMP school.

Some other quick notes: SALT AND DRY LAND RATIOS, SAILORS AND PERCENTAGES OF ACCIDENT LIABILITY, SWAMPS AND CONSERVATION OF FOODS, ETC., AND THE UTOPIAN PRE-CONDITION OF NO PROPERTY, A POSSIBILITY TO BE LOCATED IN THE SWAMPS AND LAGOONS IN THIS REGION.

Kūlgrinda

Tartufo, Pandora and pasta;

Bo’s suggested links from our discussion yesterday.

Last night was great! Here is the radioprogram I mentioned: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/985053?programid=950

Suggested by Orestis:

This is the talk I was referring to when I brought up the idea that salt could help us measure the limits and physical boundaries of the swamp.
Daniel Fernández Pascual is a guy that holds a project called Cooking Sections at the Royal Institute of Art in London in which they try to understand how food systems are being used in order to organize the world.

The part where he speaks about salt begins at 11.45 but I strongly suggest you dedicate 15 minutes to see the whole talk. For me it was key to understand how to establish strong visual relations between concepts and everyday life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIXJski4i7

Travel itinerary suggested by Francesca:

As the trial of General Ratko Mladic, overall commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the war of 1992-1995 comes to a close, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia will effectively shut up shop.

But questions will remain about the fate of hundreds of others accused of violating the laws of war. Bosnia Herzegovina will continue to try people in its courts, but in that republic the question of going on with prosecutions divides opinion.

During the 24 years of its work the Tribunal indicted more than 160 people. They ranged from guards at the infamous Omarska camp, where non-Serbs were held in appalling conditions in 1992, to the architects of the assault on Srebrenica three years later, where more than 8,000 Muslim men were murdered.

When Mevludin Oric goes back to eastern Bosnia he sometimes spots men who he last saw in 1995 executing hundred of his kin from Srebrenica. “They are walking, laughing in my face,” says Mevludin, “and saying ‘I am the one who killed Muslims, Turks’ and they are walking free”.

first met Mevludin in 1996, a few months after he had played dead in order to survive the machine-gunning of hundreds of prisoners by Serb troops. He gave evidence in three trials in The Hague.

Today his features have aged even more than you would expect over that passage of time and it is quite clear that Mevludin has never been able to put those terrible events behind him.

He does not see the issue of war crimes even-handedly either. His cousin, Nasser Oric, was a well known commander of Muslim forces in Srebrenica who himself stood trial in the Hague, accused of murdering Serb prisoners.

He was acquitted, but a subsequent prosecution was launched in a Bosnian court last year. When it was thrown out the day after our filming, Mevludin was jubilant.

“Every people, Serbs, Muslim, Croats, consider those indicted from their own people as not guilty, but they consider only ‘the others’ guilty,” says former Bosnian Serb parliament speaker Momcilo Krajisnik, noting “there is a lot of subjectivity.”

rough translation: the bas-relief with the Duce (Mussolini) on a horse, in the act of a Roman salute, with the motto “Believe, Obey, Combat” has been covered by an illuminated writing: “No one has the right to obey.”  This is how the monument, in Piazza Tribunale in Bolzano has been de-powered, (desecrated), by overlaying on the bas-relief …a sentence attributed to Hannah Arendt, “no one has the right to obey.”

from La Repubblica: 

Bolzano, il bassorilievo del Duce coperto da scritta Hannah Arendt