“Just occupy”

She is a spoken word artist and community activist of West African and Caribbean heritage, working in her local community to empower youth and marginalised groups through non-formal education and creativity. She has contributed to many youth initiatives in UK including the African Diaspora Emerging Leaders Network as Secretary General- African Diaspora Youth Network in Europe, ADYNE , the Face and Voice of African Youth living in Europe.

Ayo, a British woman with Jamaican and Nigerian roots, works on themes such as identity, culture, social inclusion and human rights through song, poetry and narrative, to express the challenges as well as alternative views on why we keep certain issues like race, gender and colonialism hidden.

met her on the cosmic Kometa festival in the beginning of July 2017 where we were volunteering, attending her performance and sharing the time and space in her openned, accepting and loving company afterwards.

“The world needs to heal, we need to heal”

George F. is a writer of creative non-fiction, who travelled extensively across Europe and Asia

working with socially excluded groups ranging from the homeless to heroin addicts and street kids.

Direct action and self housing master, George is one of the most literate fuck the privilege practitioners. Them fuck the life genderless and ownless.

Since F. stands for fuck off, we are happy they didn’t fuck off our filming.

It was the end of 2018 in Badu village near Kolkata, where Jana Sanskriti’s Muktadhara festival begins every second year.

A theatre of the oppressed organisation, working with and among people in the villages for 30 years, created a center there,

where all the members are sharing a co-living and co-working community. In the festival time, this is where more than 70 people are exchanging daily,

many coming from the western parts of the world and many from different regions of India or around.

Packed schedule of workshops of theatre of the oppressed and presentations weren’t giving much time or space for taking the interviews.

Yet we publicly asked participants to join our film mission and share their pain of the world, if feeling called.

Since the center was full of life, we thought a near ambient of nature will work the best for sharing and filming.

Next to the center there is a lake with a grassy shelter, calling to sit there. When we were walking by, there was no one around, it was peaceful and quiet.

All the rest is captured to witness in the episode, to share George’s experienced wisdom and

spontaneous multicultural exchange without words spoken.

You can dig deeper in the European underground in George’s non-fiction,

Total Shambles (2015) and Good Times In Dystopia (2019).

“As I grew up I’ve actually seen the evolution of women”

When Tuhi was a child, women in India were staying home, taking care of the family.

As the only and female child, her father always wished her to be a son, and follow his footsteps, to become a doctor.

Disobeying the norms or expectations of strict society and parents while surviving, is even more challenging than in the West.

But one of the first female tattoo artists in India, who survived eating disorders and depression, found a way.

Welcome to her experience of life.

“It is taking the vulnerability and exposing it to people”

Tweni Tweni is Alexis Akrovatakis and is Ben Smith.

When you get choreography, dramaturgy, costumography, live music and performance in one shot.

Both from the worlds of underground, blending them in an explosion that perhaps even annoys you with no limits,

contradictions and bizarreness.

Because inside the borders it doesn’t provoke, doesn’t rise questions and doesn’t push to question,

how much your ideologies are including or excluding. What is a performance and what is real?

What is a mask and what is pure vulnerability, a medium for humanity’s limitations, either physical, mental or emotional?

Where does physical theatre transform into dance and where does the circus start,

where the performance transcends into meditation, pure presence.

A messenger, who nevertheless also cannot escape the planet’s concepts but has the courage to fight against the limiting

one’s with every breath and presence. Despite becoming the limitation itself, as a mirror of the world.

Filmed at Kometa Festival 2017 in Riga.

White dominance is the devil

Who really believed Donald Trump could win serious elections and run one of the crucial roles in the global future, right? Many look at USA as other planet where the madhouse of hate is happening on every day basis, while here in Europe we pretentiously believe we are the region in the world with the most evolved and protected human rights. That we have learned so much from our very long history already that we became Enlightened and therfore humans. Everyone else is uncivilized.

Writes: Tjaša Kosar //

This will not be about Trump, although the reason why he got elected should be taken extremely seriously all over the globe already years ago. Election analysis showed it was blatant racism that gave Donald Trump to the world, wrote Amanda Marcotte for Salon.com, while Pulitzer’s, Nobel’s price winner and Princeton professor Toni Morrison said for Huffington Post "fear of losing white privilege made his win possible." We believe racism and it’s gun fights on the streets belong to USA. That this is a country where this horrible era of enslavement was happening, so of course now they have this problem. Guess what. Slave traders were Europeans and between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America, to feel demand for labor in plantation agriculture. Out of these 10.7 million Africans how many were they shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000.We don’t want to see the essence of the problem and where it is coming from. We don’t want to see why the problem is still here. Rising and rising.

Legacy of the Atlantic slave trade lingers long after slavery was abolished. It extended to Asian continent (India, China, etc.), Oceania (Australia, New Zealand), South America (Brasil, etc.).
Ethan B. Kapstein writes, “slavery and the global slave trade continue to this day; in fact, it is likely that more people are being trafficked across borders against their will now than at any point in the past.”

“For years, racism has been defined by the violence of far-right extremists, but a more insidious kind of prejudice can be found where many least expect it – at the heart of respectable society, wrote Reni Eddo-Lodge in the long-read in Guardian.

Racism can not be discussed without critical whiteness

“For years, racism has been defined by the violence of far-right extremists, but a more insidious kind of prejudice can be found where many least expect it – at the heart of respectable society, says Reni Eddo-Lodge in the long-read in Guardian. “If all racism was as easy to spot and denounce as white extremism is, the task of the anti-racist would be simple. People feel that if a racist attack has not occurred, or the word “nigger” has not been uttered, an action can’t be racist. If a black person hasn’t been abused or spat at in the street, it’s not racist. But racism thrives in places where those in charge do not align themselves with white extremist politics. The problem must run deeper,” the author reflects.

World Economic Forum statistics of comparing Europe harassing specific groups (Jews, Muslims, Women in religious dresses) with the rest of the world are shocking.

“I don’t know about what the situation is here in the UK but in continental Europe, in my country, and in all that – here I would ideally use a dirty word but I will not. Three, four points, parts of Europe which extends Slovenia, Croatia and up – Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, a little less Baltic countries. It’s kind of a neo-fascist racism and rehabilitation of fascism,” told Slavoj Žižek for Chanel 4. Let’s not forget, the far right is on the rise in the last years even in the most liberal parts of EU like Scandinavia. World Economic Forum statistics of comparing Europe harassing specific groups (Jews, Muslims, Women in religious dresses) with the rest of the world are shocking.

The EU’s handling of the migrant crisis stems largely from Western intervention in the Middle East and therefore the continuation of Western imperialism, says Daniel C. Blight in an essay of whiteness and contemporary art. Not even half of EU member states have implemented national action plans against racism or ratified the Protocol that would allow taking to court, reports Amnesty International, which also reported a year ago about despite a sharp increase in attacks targeting migrants and refugees, German authorities are ignoring racist motives in these attacks. European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) reported strong surge of nationalistic populism, xenophobic hate speech were key challenges in Europe in 2016.

“We tell ourselves that good people can’t be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people. We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power. When a large proportion of the population votes for politicians and political efforts that explicitly use racism as a campaigning tool, we tell ourselves that such huge sections of the electorate simply cannot be racist, as that would render them heartless monsters. But this isn’t about good and bad people,“ Reni Eddo-Lodge is continuing in a text with the title Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race.

"The west was built on racism"

“The west was built on racism and it is time to face that. It is the lie that the three great revolutions – of science, industry, and politics are solely responsible for the advancement of the west. But in truth, none of this so-called progress happened without genocide in the Americas, barbaric slavery of African people and the colonization of most of the world by European powers. The dead white men we are trained to revere created the knowledge that justified this conquest and murder. But this narrow, Eurocentric parade of dead white men as the center of knowledge is finally being challenged in our institutions. And this is not a battle about ‘inclusion’ or ‘diversity’. It is not a debate that is simply academic. The knowledge that the establishment is so quick to defend, produced the racism that shaped the unjust world we live today…”
“The uncomfortable truth is that the world has been created in the founding fathers’ image of white supremacy. In the west we panic about childhood obesity, while in the Global South, a child dies every 10 seconds because of poor access to food. The myth of enlightened Europe, spreading the truth and progress across the world is so powerful because it helps us sleep at night. But global inequality is not an accident. It is by design. It provides the cheap labour and materials that mean we can afford so much for so little.” dr. Kehinde Andrews, associate professor in sociology at Birmingham City University with his research specialism in race and racism for Guardian

The time to see the invisible power structures

Have you ever had a moment in your life when you were looking at your skin and wishing it would be different? Would you be thinking what consequences that would bring? Racism is structural. It is institutionalised, a social construct, “expressed in the practice of social and political institutions. It is reflected in disparities regarding wealth, income, criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power and education, among other things,” would the first lines on simple Wikipedia tell to an internet explorer for meanings.

When we are talking about skin color our first association is not white. What if we start the other way around, where meanings like white privilege, white extremism, white dominance, white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, colour-blindness, whitewashing, critical whiteness, white allies, start. What if white people, especially Europeans, look themselves in the mirror? How can they understand how this meanings manifest in practice, in the system, in society, in homes? We believe with putting them in the shoes of “others”. With actively listening to the “others”. Starting with not the absence of (critical) whiteness. And this space is meant to be full of it. Without being European-ish "polite".

“The comfort of being

‘naturally better than’

is hard to give up.”

- Toni Morrison

FUCK WHITE TEARS (2016)

25min documentary - by Annelie Boros

SOURCES:

(1) Marcotte, Amanada. 2017. New election analysis: Yes, it really was blatant racism that gave us President Donald Trump. Available on: http://www.salon.com/2017/04/19/new-election-analysis-yes-it-really-was-blatant-racism-that-gave-us-president-donald-trump/. (21.6.2017)
(2) Blay, Zeba. 2016. Toni Morrison: Fear Of Losing White Privilege Led To Trump’s Election. Available on: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/toni-morrison-fear-of-losing-white-privilege-led-to-trumps-election_us_58330ee2e4b058ce7aac0964. (21.6.2017)
(3) Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2017. Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Avaliable on: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race. (21.6.2017)
(4) Channel 4 News. 2017. Available on: https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10154845916691939/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED. (21.6.2017)
(5) C. Blight, Daniel. 2017. Incoming: Photography, Contemporary Art, Whiteness. Available on: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2017/03/incoming-photography-contemporary-art-whiteness.html. (21.6.2017)
(6) Amnesty International. 2017. Available on: http://www.amnesty.eu/en/news/press-releases/eu/discrimination/roma/racism-and-discrimination-europes-key-human-rights-problem-0299/#.WVJgR1FpwdV. (21.6.2017)
(7) Council of Europe. 2016. Available on: http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/ecri/Library/PressReleases/AR-2017-250-EN.asp. (21.6.2017)
(8) Guardian. 2017. Available on: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2017/jan/18/the-west-was-built-on-racism-its-time-we-faced-that-video. (21.6.2017)
(9) Wikipedia. 2017. Available on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism. (21.6.2017)
(10) Saunders, Doug. 2016. The real reason Donald Trump got elected? We have a white extremism problem. Available on: https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-politics/the-real-reason-donald-trump-got-elected-we-have-a-white-extremism-problem/article32817625/?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theglobeandmail.com&service=mobile. (21.6.2017)

DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES, EARS OR MOUTH

A multimedia platform, blending journalism and storytelling, documentary and film, essay and portrait, words and visuals. A shelter for regenerative art and social practice.

Current project

Mental disorders are the primary driver of disability worldwide, states the World Health Organization. Is mental illness political, cultural, social, economical? Through a 7 year period, on 5 continents, in 10 countries, affected people, artists and experts try to shed light on socio-economic causes. Enhanced with performative elements and associative montage, this journey confronts you with ourselves and the environments we are living in. Is there some pattern?

Multi Media Advocacy

2 Last Weeks Slide

“Just Occupy"

Ayo Wallace is an inspirational British woman with Jamaican and Nigerian roots (and many more), who works on themes such as identity, culture, social inclusion and human rights through song, poetry and narrative, to express the challenges as well as alternative views on why we keep certain issues like race, gender and colonialism hidden.

2 Last Weeks Slide

Watch Two Last Weeks

Rahul, who grew up in an underprivileged environment in New Delhi with a population of 29 million, leaves his extended family and the neighborhood for the first time in his life for 5 months and flies to Ljubljana, a city of less than 300 thousand people, between Eastern and Central Europe.

George F.

“The world needs to heal, we need to heal”

George F. is a writer of creative non-fiction, who travelled extensively across Europe and Asia working with socially excluded groups ranging from the homeless to heroin addicts and street kids. Direct action and self housing master, George is one of the most literate fuck the privilege practitioners.

Tuhi Dutta

“As I grew up I’ve actually seen the evolution of women”

When Tuhi was a child, women in India were staying home, taking care of the family. Today Tuhi is grown up and one of the first female tattoo artists in her country.

TweniTweni

“It is taking the vulnerability and exposing it to people”

Tweni Tweni is Alexis Akrovatakis and is Ben Smith. When you get choreography, dramaturgy, costumography, live music and performance in one shot.

admin

admin has 8 articles published.

George F. is a writer of creative non-fiction, who travelled extensively across Europe and Asia

working with socially excluded groups ranging from the homeless to heroin addicts and street kids.

Direct action and self housing master, George is one of the most literate fuck the privilege practitioners. Them fuck the life genderless and ownless.

Since F. stands for fuck off, we are happy they didn’t fuck off our filming.

It was the end of 2018 in Badu village near Kolkata, where Jana Sanskriti’s Muktadhara festival begins every second year.

A theatre of the oppressed organisation, working with and among people in the villages for 30 years, created a center there,

where all the members are sharing a co-living and co-working community. In the festival time, this is where more than 70 people are exchanging daily,

many coming from the western parts of the world and many from different regions of India or around.

Packed schedule of workshops of theatre of the oppressed and presentations weren’t giving much time or space for taking the interviews.

Yet we publicly asked participants to join our film mission and share their pain of the world, if feeling called.

Since the center was full of life, we thought a near ambient of nature will work the best for sharing and filming.

Next to the center there is a lake with a grassy shelter, calling to sit there. When we were walking by, there was no one around, it was peaceful and quiet.

All the rest is captured to witness in the episode, to share George’s experienced wisdom and

spontaneous multicultural exchange without words spoken.

You can dig deeper in the European underground in George’s non-fiction,

Total Shambles (2015) and Good Times In Dystopia (2019).

When Tuhi was a child, women in India were staying home, taking care of the family.

As the only and female child, her father always wished her to be a son, and follow his footsteps, to become a doctor.

Disobeying the norms or expectations of strict society and parents while surviving, is even more challenging than in the West.

But one of the first female tattoo artists in India, who survived eating disorders and depression, found a way.

Welcome to her experience of life.

Tweni Tweni is Alexis Akrovatakis and is Ben Smith.

When you get choreography, dramaturgy, costumography, live music and performance in one shot.

Both from the worlds of underground, blending them in an explosion that perhaps even annoys you with no limits,

contradictions and bizarreness.

Because inside the borders it doesn’t provoke, doesn’t rise questions and doesn’t push to question,

how much your ideologies are including or excluding. What is a performance and what is real?

What is a mask and what is pure vulnerability, a medium for humanity’s limitations, either physical, mental or emotional?

Where does physical theatre transform into dance and where does the circus start,

where the performance transcends into meditation, pure presence.

A messenger, who nevertheless also cannot escape the planet’s concepts but has the courage to fight against the limiting

one’s with every breath and presence. Despite becoming the limitation itself, as a mirror of the world.

Filmed at Kometa Festival 2017 in Riga.

Writes: Tjaša Kosar //

Racism can not be discussed without critical whiteness

"The west was built on racism"

The time to see the invisible power structures

“The comfort of being

‘naturally better than’

is hard to give up.”

- Toni Morrison

SOURCES:

A multimedia platform, blending journalism and storytelling, documentary and film, essay and portrait, words and visuals. A shelter for regenerative art and social practice.

___

It is a never ending journey against any kind of dominance.