[-empyre-] welcome Cecilia Parsberg

["Ana Valdes" <agora158@gmail.com>]

I am very happy to have Cecilia onboard, we have worked together the
last 5 years and her work and artistic integrity has been very
inspirating and triggered in me many discussions about ethics and the
postcolonial. The project Crusades had not being done without our
discussions and collaboration.

The work she and Susan Meiselas do are to me linked together and the
exhibition Jan-Erik Lundström and me worked with, started with the
idea to make Susan Meiselas and Cecilias work to "speak to each
other". Nicaragua 1978, Palestine 2002, is not the same struggle, the
same grief, the same frustration in us as activists and writers and in
the people, victims of wars and conflicts?
Do Art and Literature contribute to the relief, or do we "use" the
pain of others as ramps for the own work? I am asking myself those
questions and find in Susan and Cecilias artistic works a very
respectful and honest answer.
Ana

ps: Cecilias posts have, for an unknown reason, haft technical
problems. Please, if you want to answer something to her post, please,
answer to -empyre- and to her private adress, ceciliaparsberg@this.is
Cecilias homepage is a beutiful entry to her work, http://this.is/Parsberg

I also hope Susan Meiselas find a little bit time in her busy schedule
to join us and discuss!


> Hi all
> I am invited to join Empyre. To present my photodocumentation and
> essay at www.eurozine.com
> (Read the full essay at: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/
> 2006-05-30-parsberg-en.html)
>
> Here I have recorded the result of the "swarming" (se below) around
> the Israeli wall. The international swarming.
> How come people travel to the wall and paint on it? They paint
> windows , holes, texts, modernistic paintings. The imagery on the
> Israeli wall differ from 70:ies barricade-political images or
> traditional street-graffiti. It is an international multitude, a
> writing carpet. (see the full documentation on www.this.is/TheWall
> and click on The international art on the wall)
>
> Do you , in Empyre, think that art today plays a role in the
> politics, or affect politics?
> "One hundred policemen cannot attain what beauty is able to bring
> about in a violent person."
> said Edi Rama, Minister of Culture, Albania
>
> What is politics? For me politics is what the everyday life looks
> like for a citizen.
> Here on the Israeli wall, people come and they make fiction, in the
> gap between the reality of a law (the Israeli wall /constrainment)
> and the reality of the international law: the International court
> of Justice has declared the Israeli wall be in breach of
> International standards. (9th of July 2004)
> This gap is an anomie, a non place, This  space  exist because of a
> situation where citizen's human rights does not meet a law that
> reflects or meet these rights. "To show law in its non-relation to
> life and life in its non-relation to law means to open a space
> between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the
> name of 'politics'", Giorgio Agamben writes in his book State of
> Exception. Is it in this sphere that these artists are active?
>
> The art work can not be separated from the action to make the art
> work...
>
>
>
> about swarming:
> A swarm is not merely the analog of an organism, it is indeed an
> organism, in every important and scientific sense of the word.
>
> A swarm is made up of effectively autonomous members.
>
> Like a cell or a person, it behaves as a unitary whole, maintaining
> its identity in space, resisting dissolution; neither a thing nor a
> concept, but a continual flux or process.
>
> A swarm is an organism whose existence in both time and space
> outreaches the individual member.  The individual has no awareness
> of the swarm as a whole.
>
> As Stephen Johnson writes in Emergence, "Local turns out to be the
> key term in understanding the power of swarm logic.  We see
> emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies when the individual
> agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors
> rather than wait for orders from above.  They think locally and act
> locally, but their collective action produces global behavior."
> ------
> Swarm Intelligence-based techniques can be used in a number of
> applications. The U.S. military is investigating swarm techniques
> for controlling unmanned vehicles. NASA is investigating the use of
> swarm technology for planetary mapping.
>
> ----------
>
> /flower
> cecilia

--
"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth
with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you
will always long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci