Artivism, Politics and Islam–An Empirical-Theoretical Approach to Artistic Strategies and Aesthetic Counter-Narratives that Defy Collective Stigmatisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-197
Author(s):  
Monika Salzbrunn
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The Arts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Art And Activism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The City ◽  
Collective Representations ◽  
Conceptual Overview

What are the interrelations between art and activism, activism in art and the use of art in activism in a context of growing stigmatization of Muslims? To what extend have the arts been political until today and how does political activism resort to art (poetry, performance, painting, photography, music, video etc.)? Starting from the Situationists’ movement and following Rancière’s “Politiques du sensible”, we reflect on the link between the aesthetic and the political. After a conceptual overview about artivism and political engagement as a research topic and related methodological challenges, we provide concrete examples for artistic strategies, namely how Muslims engage in various media in order to reverse stigmata and collective representations. We give insights from three research projects, “Undocumented Mobility (Tunisia-Switzerland) and Digital-Cultural Resources after the ‘Arab Spring’”, “(In)visible Islam in the City – Material and Immaterial Expressions of Muslim Practices in Urban Spaces” (both funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) and the ERC project “ARTIVISM. Art and Activism. Creativity and Performance as Subversive Forms of Political Expression in Super-Diverse Cities”. In each case, Muslims (mostly from North Africa and from Senegal) develop music- and performance-based artivistic strategies in order to counter stigmatization and suspicion of terrorism.

scholarly journals Waves of Data

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-83
Author(s):  
Greg Niemeyer
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
City Planning ◽  
University Of California ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The City ◽  
Positive Effect

With Brittney Silva’s tragic May 2014 death fresh in everyone’s memory, the city of San Leandro began collaboration efforts between them and University of California, Berkeley to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. A course was developed at UC Berkeley called Sensing Cityscapes, offered Fall 2015, aiming to collect data about human activities too often ignored. As part of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the class aimed to harness methods not just from city planning, engineering, and architecture, but from the humanistic disciplines, cognitive science, art, public health, and performance studies, bringing students together from each field. We now are bringing the installation back to the streets of San Leandro with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant for a project called San Leandro Lights. Transferring the project from the lab back to the street, we hope that the positive effect for individuals we observed in the lab will remain, and that responsive lighting will create a dynamic culture of attention.

Festival as methodology: the African cultural youth arts festival

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Peter R. Wright ◽  
Peter M. Wakholi
Keyword(s):  
Research Approach ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Identity Exploration ◽  
Arts Based Research ◽  
Content Type ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The Arts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Performance As Research

Purpose – The purpose this paper is to consider festivals as sites for inquiry and learning. Design/methodology/approach – The research employed a pluralistic approach to the inquiry drawing on critical African-centred pedagogy, participatory action research, and performance as research inquiry. These arts-based research methods allowed insights to be gained in ways that were congruent to the arts and participants who enacted them. In total, 12 young people and six elders of diverse African heritage as well as two artists were participants in the research. Findings – The research revealed that the festival as a research methodology was both dialogic and performative and a rich site for the exploration of identity negotiation. Through these arts-based approaches the aesthetic elements often missed by traditional social science methods were highlighted as key in exploring acculturation socialistaion experiences and deconstructing exclusionist discourses emanating from the dominant culture. Research limitations/implications – The research affirmed the power of multi-modal approaches to research and the importance of evocative discourses in identity exploration and development. Originality/value – This research is the first known attempt to theorise an arts-based festival as a research approach in reference to enculturation and cultural memory.

Hygienic assessment of learning environment conditions (by the example of higher educational institutions of the city of Ufa)

2020 ◽  
Vol 99 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-411
Author(s):  
Elena Ju. Gorbatkova
Keyword(s):  
Ionizing Radiation ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Republic Of Bashkortostan ◽  
Average Relative Humidity ◽  
Higher Educational ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The City

Introduction. The important factors affecting health and performance of young people are the conditions of education, in particular, a comfortable microclimate in the classrooms of higher educational institutions. Materials and methods. In view of the urgency of this problem, an analysis was made of the microclimate parameters of educational organizations of different profiles (Ufa city, the Republic of Bashkortostan). 294 classrooms were studied in 22 buildings of 4 leading universities in Ufa. A total of 3,822 measurements were taken to determine the parameters of the microclimate. The analysis of ionizing radiation in the aerial environment of classrooms. There was performed determination of radon and its affiliated products content. In order to assess the conditions and lifestyle of students of 4 higher educational institutions of the city of Ufa, we conducted an anonymous survey of 1,820 students of I and IV years of education. Results. The average temperature in the classrooms of all universities studied was 23.9±0.09 C. The average relative humidity in all classrooms was 34.2 ± 0.42%. Analysis of ionizing radiation (radon and its daughter products decay) in the aerial environment of the classrooms and sports halls located in the basement determined that the average annual equivalent equilibrium volumetric activity of the radon daughter products (EROA ± Δ222Rn) ranged from 28 ± 14 to 69 ± 34.5 meter, which meets the requirements established by SanPiN. Conclusion. The hygienic assessment of the microclimate parameters of educational institutions of various profile revealed a number of deviations from the regulated norms. The results indicate the need to control the parameters of the microclimate, both from the administration of universities, and from the professors. According to the results of the study, recommendations were prepared for the management of higher educational institutions in Ufa.

Book Review

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-389
Author(s):  
Eduardo Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
City Image ◽  
European Capital Of Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
The City ◽  
The Olympic Games

Evinç Doğan (2016). Image of Istanbul, Impact of ECoC 2010 on The City Image. London: Transnational Press London. [222 pp, RRP: £18.75, ISBN: 978-1-910781-22-7]The idea of discovering or creating a form of uniqueness to differentiate a place from others is clearly attractive. In this regard, and in line with Ashworth (2009), three urban planning instruments are widely used throughout the world as a means of boosting a city’s image: (i) personality association - where places associate themselves with a named individual from history, literature, the arts, politics, entertainment, sport or even mythology; (ii) the visual qualities of buildings and urban design, which include flagship building, signature urban design and even signature districts and (iii) event hallmarking - where places organize events, usually cultural (e.g., European Capital of Culture, henceforth referred to as ECoC) or sporting (e.g., the Olympic Games), in order to obtain worldwide recognition. 

Zygmunt Krasiński wobec sztuk pięknych / Zygmunt Krasiński and the Fine Arts

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Płaszczewska
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Individual Sensitivity ◽  
What Works ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Current ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Summary This is an attempt at examining Zygmunt Krasiński’s opinions and preferences with regard to the fine arts, a theme many critics believed to be missing from his writings. While putting things right, this article looks at the issues involved in his artistic choices, for example, what works or artists attracted his attention, in general, and to the point of him actually drawing on them in his own work or provoking him to some response (critical, approving, emotional, etc.). Furthermore, the article tries to explore the reasons and circumstances which may account for Krasiński’s interest in a given painting, print, or sculpture. It may have been the work’s theme as in the case of his ekphrasis of Ary Scheffer’s Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca and Paolo Di Rimini, where literary tradition provided the impulse, or the mode of its execution, or the personal ties with its author, or, finally, some other factors, like a current vogue or simply Krasiński’s individual sensitivity. The ultimate aim of all these inquiries is to outline Krasiński’s relationship with the arts (beaux arts) in the context of the aesthetic preferences of the epoch.

Bill Dixon's Voice (Letter)

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-231
Author(s):  
ERIC PORTER
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
Wage Employment ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

AbstractIn November 1966 composer and improviser Bill Dixon recorded a seventeen-minute-long “voice letter” to jazz writer Frank Kofsky. This letter may be analyzed as a critical intervention by Dixon, an attempt to change the context of interpretation around improvised music. But the voice letter may also be heard and analyzed as a kind of performance. As Dixon speaks, one can hear the rumbling and roar of the city as well as the staccato sounds of car and truck horns unfolding in dynamic counterpoint to his words. In this essay, I put the voice letter into dialogue with Dixon's personal history, his writings and interview statements, and some of his contemporaneous musical and multi-generic projects, especially his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn. I show how the letter maps Dixon's and Dunn's positions within a geography of intellectual circles, experimental artistic communities, and low-wage employment networks. By extension, I examine how the voice letter, as critical intervention and performance, points us to a nuanced understanding of black experimental music of the 1960s as a socially inflected, self-conscious and, ultimately, serious engagement with various modes of artistic production and thought, carried out under conditions of both precarity and inspiration.

The Fiery Pacific: Volcanic Eruptions and Settler-State Theatricality in Oceania, 1780–1900

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-392
Author(s):  
Diana Looser
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Volcanic Eruptions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Red Color ◽  
Form Part ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
The City

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

“You're Only Ever A Block From The ‘Hood”

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 152-170
Author(s):  
Alex Blue V
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Automobile Plant ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Spatial Reorientation ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
The City

This article explores the use of sound, lyrics, and performance as tools for spatial reorientation and reimagining, identity formation and affirmation, and counternarrative or counterarchive in a rapidly gentrifying contemporary Detroit, Michigan. Two discrete, yet discursively linked case studies are presented—performances by the same artist in two different spaces—that exhibit various modes of “flipping,” slang that can refer to multiple transformative practices in contemporary Detroit. These practices include the use of overdetermined spaces, or spaces that have been declared abandoned or vacant, for something other than their original intent—i.e. using a decommissioned automobile plant as a music video set; sampling, which can be understood as using sonic components from previously recorded songs in the creation of new hip-hop beats; buying homes in a state of disrepair, fixing and reselling them at large profits; and inverting meaning itself, via slang or coded language. Additionally Black techniques of sounding and performance are illuminated, with a focus on echo as a mode of co-creation. These various practices are all responses to the growing wave of gentrification that gains momentum in the city daily. The analysis draws primarily from ethnographic research conducted from 2016 to 2018, culling data from participant observation, recorded interviews, informal conversations, field notes, lyrical and video analysis, and the analysis of mediated accounts, both print and online. As the analysis shows, the strategies utilized by artists in Detroit ensure that no matter how much the spaces in Detroit continue to change, and no matter how much an attempt is made to provide racially curated space through various forms of violence, you’re only ever a block from the ‘hood.

An Age-Old Question: Optical (A)llusions, (In)Decency, and (In)Justice in the Trial of Japanese War Criminals

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
James Burnham Sedgwick
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Logic ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract Timing complicates all dimensions of post conflict redress. Moving too fast suggests prejudice. Going too slow delays accountability and closure. This paper challenges the temporal logic of international justice. The prosecution of aged defendants created aesthetical dilemmas for war crimes operations in post-World War ii Asia. The unsettling optical allusions of frail perpetrators in court — shadows of their former selves — left many observers conflicted: it looked indecent, it felt unjust and underwhelming. The unseemly punishment of weak defendants undercut prosecution attempts to brand perpetrators as monsters. Disappointed reporters and trial authorities fixated on the shabby dress, waning physique, and benign senescence of once-sinister villains. Few questioned the accused’s guilt. Many felt unnerved by the optics. Ultimately, this paper shows how the staging and performance of justice impacts a court’s effectiveness. Unrelenting accountability, bringing all war criminals to justice, feels right. Yet, the aesthetic complications of prosecuting aged accused may not be worth it.

Puccini's La Bohème

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.

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