Chinese government blocks youtube

The Tibetan uprising has not been so violent in over a 20 years – the attention to the Tibetan government in exile during the Olympic games 2008 will be followed by protests worldwide and censorship will be undermining freedom in mainland China. Just one day after the protest in Lhasa, the Chinese government has decided to block access to the video sharing platform Youtube after riots in Lhasa have been reported with a dozen of videoclips.

Belarus Free theater

Living in a dictatorship regime, often unable to travel, performing in apartments and in vacant buildings throughout Minsk – using a phone number to communicate with their audience, who ventures to the outskirts of the city to watch the performances of the Belarus Free theater company. This description only scratches the surfaces of daily life of the theater makers. The technological encounter performs with a different form, not as consumer product, but that of activator, tactical spy, the feature of the global flow of information capital, often unrecognized.

This article is describing the state of urgency, the harsh existence and astonishment for such cases where limitations in the freedom of expression are daily routine in one of the most forgotten corners of Europe. Read the full article here

Red dawns Festival

I traveled to Ljubljana to attend the 9th edition of the feminist and queer festival Red Dawns where a mix of performances, acts, workshops and interventions were hosted in collaboration with the autonomous cultural space of Metelkova between march 5-9, 2008. I attended dance performances, storytelling evenings, workshops and music evenings, not only witty music and queer talk, not at all, but with a leading red thread of ecycling and education of/from technology, topics and machines that needs to be unpacked and divide of roles.

Donna Metzlar (Genderchangers) during the workshop presented how to reassemble hardware and discussed issues of internet privacy.

The poetry of e-waste addressed and opened during the workshop led by Gözüm opened with collective recyclin’ letter mis usage. A great tool, if you have already separate boxes with letters that helps you in your creativity. building a game of letters, on keyborads waste. a simple use of buttons, attached to a plastic frame, that which is considered only a sensor for the inputs on the screen, now transforms into a repository of meanings, metaphors and images. plain plastic. Thank you for such a great workshop.

Ksenija Glavc opened Natasa’s car and illustrated layers and dimensions of car-repair and Emeli Ronhdale showed how queered fashion can be, something that does not only reveal an attitude of dissent and confronts the fashion world, but also that opens a dialog with the intimate and the hidden. Using scars as simply attaching red marks for cloth decoration can be very subtile in action, but an exploration of terror and  violence.

Also a new book was launched by Marina Grzinic and Rosa Reitsamer (eds): “New feminism: worlds of feminism, queer and networking conditions” with 60 contributors intervening on radical issues about global capitalism, migration and the relation to representation – at the marginal level.

In addition a public action performance took place in the streets of Ljubljana inspired by Noha Ramadan’s work “the body as a site of action”.