[-empyre-] week four | engagement with place

[Dale Hudson]

Welcome to our final week of Transnational Environments and Locative places.

This week we continue our overlapping discussions with a focus on engaging place, suggesting ways that we might engage micro-politics to locate and claim places within the larger spaces defined by dominant forms of knowledge, power, and control.

Helen De Michiel’s Love Lunch Community is a series of short videos and website that move from classrooms to social media in an effort to increase awareness about nutrition in public schools. The project is a grassroots intervention to undo the damages of policies derived under U.S.-style democracy that fail to protect children’s health to ensure learning as school lunch programs are increasingly privatized through deals with transnational corporations, such as Coca-cola and MacDonald’s. 

Enrico Aditjondro worked to develop EngageMedia as a portal for video file-sharing around a diverse set of urgent issues regarding environmental and social justice, particularly in the Asia Pacific region, particularly Southeast Asia, but also in parts of South Asia and Southwest Asia (Middle East). The platform aims as participation by designing media to circulate via social media to open discussion across specific contexts. Migrant Worker Stories, for example, emerges in collaboration with advocacy organizations and include capacity-building workshops. 

Tarek Al-Ghoussein and Chris Kleine’s collaborative The War Room creates a place for critical reflection on the transnational environments of war and trade that are created around us in 24/7 broadcasts by state and corporate news channels, such as Al Jazeera, BBC, and CNN. In the case of this project, Al-Ghoussein and Kleine analyzed and recomposed the tele-visuals of the second U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Reassembling still images from these broadcasts into a “war room,” the project allows us to enter into the militant mindset of the United States.

Patty and I invite our guests to post more about these and other projects.



WEEK 4—ENGAGEMENT OF PLACE


Helen De Michiel (Love Lunch Community), United States
Helen De Michiel is a writer/director, producer, and author whose work includes film, television, media installation and new media. Her films in circulation include “Turn Here Sweet Corn,” “Tarantella,” “The Gender Chip Project” and “Lunch Love Community.” At Twin Cities Public Television she produced innovative arts series, “Alive From Off Center,” and “The Independents.” She has designed several participatory media projects for museums and organizations. She writes about issues in public media and the arts, including the co-authored essay with Patricia Zimmermann, “Open Space Documentary,” in The Documentary Film Book (2013). From 1996 to 2010 Helen served as the National, and then Co-Director for NAMAC. From 2002-2007 she served on the Board of Directors for The George F. Peabody Awards for Electronic Media. From 2011-13, she designed and taught a blended online course in participatory media at the University of Oregon. In 2016, she joins University of Colorado’s Department of Critical Media Practices. Her most recently completed project, “Lunch Love Community” (2015) is a transmedia documentary in twelve episodes exploring how Berkeley advocates and educators tackle food reform and food justice in the schools and in the neighborhoods. She is currently writing a book exploring core creative values that the media arts offer for participatory digital culture.

Enrico Aditjondro (EngageMedia), Indonesia
Enrico Aditjondro has lived in Indonesia, West Papua, United States, Australia, and Timor-Leste. He started his journalism career in 1998 when he joined The Maritime Workers’ Journal in Sydney. He moved to Jakarta in 2000 and joined the Southeast Asia Press Alliance, while also traveling and working in Timor-Leste with UNESCO and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). In 2005 he co-founded and was managing editor for Paras Indonesia, which became one of the country’s leading bilingual social-political websites. He has worked for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The International News Safety Institute, Transparency International-Indonesia, and EngageMedia. He is currently working in West Papua as a producer for Big Stories Small Towns, an evolving multiplatform documentary about love, humour, family and belonging.

Tarek Al-Ghoussein (The War Room), United Arab Emirates/Kuwait/Palestine
Tarek Al-Ghoussein is an artist and Professor of Visual Art at New York University Abu Dhabi. A primary focus of Al-Ghousseins's studio teaching is developing a strong formal awareness among students and facilitating the ability to manifest ideas in visual form. As a Kuwaiti of Palestinian origin, much of Al-Ghoussein's professional work deals with how his identity is shaped in a context of inaccessibility and loss. His work explores the boundaries between landscape photography, self-portraiture and performance art. Choosing locations much in the same way a film director does, he moves between abstraction and the specific circumstances found in particular places. Relying on subtle interventions and non-invasive interactions, the images consider various aspects of "identity." Al-Ghoussein has exhibited extensively in Europe, the United States and The Middle East and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in prominent venues such as the 53rd and 55th Venice Biennales; the Singapore Biennale; the 6th and 7th Sharjah Biennales; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea; and Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany and Aperture Gallery, NYC, USA. Al-Ghoussein's work has been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the British and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the Sharjah Art Foundations; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; the Royal Photography Museum in Copenhagen; and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, among several others.

Chris Kienke (The War Room), United States
Chris Kienke is represented by Amos Eno Gallery in New York City, his work has been exhibited in over 60 shows including recent solo exhibitions in 2014 at the University of Wisconsin in Osh Kosh and Jackson State University in Mississippi. Chris exhibited in the Florence Biennale in December 2011 and was included in New American Paintings in September 2009. Kienke has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003 and 2007. His work is in permanent collections such as ABN Amro Bank in Dubai, Savannah College of Art and Design, Sharjah Art Museum (UAE) and the United Kingdom National Collection in Scotland. Kienke received his MFA from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale in 2000 and his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994. Chris is on the faculty of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 


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