North Africa

Arts & Democracy audio transcript on the role of Culture in Revolutionary Times

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Reposted from freeDimensional

Arts & Democracy Project’s most recent nation-wide conference call was focused on recent events in Egypt and the extraordinary pro-democracy movements sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East.  The call highlighted how artists, art spaces and cultural organizers in the region and in the U.S. are participating or responding, and how more cultural workers can engage in positive ways. With Dalia Basiouny, writer & theatre artist (Egypt); Ahmed Issawi, Alwan for the Arts (Egypt/NYC); and Khaled Mattawa, poet & professor (Libya/Michigan), among others.

A recorded transcript is available.



Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson


“At any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.”

… a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine’s review of Paterson’s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News:

Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating this natural phenomena into a poetic and beautiful artwork on Deal Pier in Kent. Harnessing everyday technology, lightening signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and projected as short bursts of light. As the pattern of lightening strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly, with a subtlety that contrasts with the power and drama of the storms they reflect.

To watch the pier by night is a genuinely magical experience with each flash anticipated with mounting tension. Every sporadic burst is accompanied by an appreciative emotional thrill and a sense of awe at the fact that somewhere out there the ominous rumbles of thunder and lightening are mounting. The work connects spectators to the vastness of the world beyond, collapsing the distance between the individual and remote meteorological events.

It’s an interesting way of making art that represents scientific data in an open-ended way. Paterson turns Deal Pier a kind of lightning rod for the world; the romantic-era majesty of a lightening storm is reduced to data, but then remade as flickers of light.

The artwork was originally intended to run throughout January but has apparently gone down so well that it’ll remain there until February 28, weekdays 5-10pm, weekends 5pm-8am.

www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology