Demonstration in Paris to support migrants against the coming anti-immigration bill

 

Thousands of people marched on Saturday 19 April 2023 in Paris against the immigration law brought by the French Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin. 

I was there with friends, and would rather report on it here, on my blog, rather than wait until I'm back at the newsroom.

Here is a short video clip I took:

In the French capital, demonstrators marched behind a banner proclaiming "No to the Darmanin law, against repression, imprisonment and deportations, for a welcoming migration policy", in a reference to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

The protesters also took aim at Operation Wuambushi (Take Back) being carried out by the authorities on the French Indian Ocean Island of Mayotte to send back illegal immigrants, most from neighbouring Comoros, currently housed in unsanitary shanty towns.

They also demonstrated to support proper healthcare for workers waiting for papers.

The controversial bill, entitled "Controlling immigration while improving integration", is aimed, among other things, at providing greater scope for deportation, especially for foreigners who commit crimes. 

It also stipulates a minimum level of French be required before a multi-year residence permit is granted and allows for mandatory fingerprinting as well as tightening requirements for the renewal of long-term permits.

Merci Rock & Folk

 

'I Inside the Old Year Dying' - PJ Harvey's 10th album

PJ Harvey's tenth studio album 'I Inside the Old Year Dying' will be released July 7th 2023 on Partisan Records, and is available to pre-order on gatefold 140g vinyl and CD, along with some newly designed merchandise products. 

There are a limited number of hand-signed lyric cards available from the official PJ Harvey store.

PJ Harvey says, "After many years of work I am very happy to release this collection of new songs. It was a difficult album to make and took time to find its strongest form, but it has finally become all I hoped for it to be." 

I Inside the Old Year Dying marks PJ Harvey's first album in seven years, produced and mixed by her long-time creative collaborators John Parish and Flood.

"On this album PJ Harvey builds a sonic universe somehow located in a space between life's opposites, and between recent history and the ancient past. Scattered with biblical imagery and references to Shakespeare, all of these distinctions ultimately dissolve into something profoundly uplifting and redemptive." - John Harris, March 2023

PJ will be on Lauren Laverne's breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music on Wednesday April 26th between 8:30 and 9am BST for the premiere of lead single, 'A Child's Question, August'.

PJ Harvey announces new single, arriving this Wednesday!

 

It's titled "A Child's Question, August" - extract: 

Premieres 26 Apr 2023

PJ Harvey’s new song ‘A Child’s Question, August’ is out this Wednesday April 26th. Pre-save: https://pjharvey.lnk.to/acqaID. The clip from the accompanying music video is directed by Steve Gullick.

PJ Harvey's last album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, came out in 2016, but she's been busy since then, with, in 2020, the reissue of her entire catalogue, and last year the release of PJ Harvey: B-Sides, Demos and Rarities. 

She also released a novel-in-verse written in the Dorset vernacular English, titled Orlam, and provided the music for acclaimed Irish comedy Bad Sisters, written with the composer Tim Phillips. 

In 2022, she announced that her 10th studio album would be arriving this summer!

'All The Beauty And The Bloodshed'

 

Finally found time to see the Nan Goldin film, what a great lesson in activism!!

 'All The Beauty And The Bloodshed' - Official Trailer

R.I.P. Mark Stewart

 

I'm listening to our conversation from January 2019 on Soho Radio, and I can't believe the news:

https://www.mixcloud.com/sohoradio/morning-glory-2101019/

"One of the key countercultural figures of European post punk, industrial funk and electronic dub has died today" - The Quietus 

#MarkStewart #Bristol

With him, Miranda Sawyer, Inkie and Mad Professor in March 2019, at the British Library:

IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU: ALFREDO JAAR IS BACK IN LONDON

 

Spent a great couple of days in London to introduce the opening tour of Alfredo Jaar's new exhibition in London, ending up meeting brilliant art historians, philosophers like Chantal Mouffe, and one of my favourite artists: Sonia Boyce!

More on the exhibition in my coming piece of writing for Art UK.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Alfredo Jaar | IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU | 2023

Alfredo Jaar18 April - 24 May 2023Goodman Gallery, London

In his media critique, Jaar continues to seek out what we might call slips of the eye – those moments when ideological univocality founders and we glimpse those unspoken truths, those unacknowledged histories that insist on reappearing – Tom McDonough, OSMOS Magazine

IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU is a potent survey of works by Alfredo Jaar which chronicles the artist’s forty-year critique of the Western media. The exhibition features important works which span the artist’s career, from the early 1980s through to new works created in 2022, which have not been exhibited before. It is the largest presentation of Jaar’s Press Works series to date.

In the early 1980s, when Jaar moved from the military dictatorship of Chile to Ronald Reagan’s United States, he felt at odds with the Western art world: “While I admired the American avant-garde and the conceptualists, when I looked around New York I didn’t see the world being reflected in the art that was being made. It was a world of fiction”. Engaging with the Western media was an equally alienating experience. Confronted with a heavily biased news agenda, Jaar become an avid observer of the media itself, paying close attention to areas of emphasis alongside areas of erasure. His routine of four decades involves reading daily international newspapers from around the world.

Jaar’s practice has developed as a means of intervention – isolating specific adverts, articles or magazine covers and displaying them anew within a museum or gallery context. At times, the artist doctors the image to change the intended message – as with works in the exhibition, such as You and Us (1984), Life Magazine, April 19, 1968 (1995), Welcome to the USA (TIME) (2018), War Criminal (2022) and Mea Culpa (2022) – but his approach is mostly just to lift the image directly from its original context in the hope that this displacement will allow us to see our reality in a different way.

The title of the exhibition is derived from one of the early works which feature at the start of the exhibition, titled You and Us, in which the artist radically reverses the message of a CBS advert rolled out on New York City subways in the mid 1980s. The original advert stated, “If it concerns you, it concerns us”, alluding to the power of the public to inform their coverage. Jaar’s reversal of the words “you” and “us” suggests that the original message is a fallacy and a manipulation: “it is actually the power forces at play behind the media outlets – in this instance a TV channel owned by the General Electrics Corporation that manufactures refrigerators but also bombs and aeroplanes – that are setting the media agenda” – Jaar.

Recent works exhibited for the first time include Liberation (Brexit Let It Be) (2019), War Criminal (2022) and Mea Culpa (2022). Here, the artist highlights media coverage of Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “pointing once again at what the mainstream press can avow and what must remain disavowed, what can be shown and what demands to return to visibility” (Tom McDonough, OSMOS Magazine).
IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU also features a series of works from the 1990s and 2000s in which Jaar focuses on the mass erasure and misrepresentation of Africa from the Western media agenda, taking aim at publications such as Life Magazine, The Economist, The New York Times and TIME. A centrepiece of the exhibition is a new large-scale lightbox edition of Searching for Africa in Life (1996), an iconic work in the artist’s oeuvre which was exhibited at the 8th Triennial of Photography in Hamburg last year (curated by Koyo Kouoh) and is now permanently installed at the library of The New School in New York.

This major index of LIFE magazine’s coverage from the 1930s through to the 1990s reminds us that images are far from innocent, always representing an ideological position on the world: Jaar includes every one of the magazine’s front covers across 60 years, a total of 2128 – placed in chronological order – to reflect the scant coverage of Africa by one of the most influential magazines in the world. The appropriation of these magazine covers is a formula that Jaar adopts in other significant pieces, such as From Time to Time (2006), which expose the three themes on Africa dealt with the most by the Western media: animals, famine and disease. The dearth of coverage relating to the life, culture, society, and scientific developments happening on the African continent is inadvertently raised as part of the problematic image – or ‘non-image’ – of Africa that is fed to the Western world.

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is a New York-based artist, architect, and filmmaker who considers social injustices and human suffering through thought-provoking installations. Jaar has explored significant political and social issues throughout his career, including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders and the balance of power between the first and third world. He is known as one of the most uncompromising, compelling, and innovative artists working today.

Major solo museum shows this year are held at Pinakothek del Moderne (29 March – 27 August) in Munich, at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA), which will be a major anthology exhibition featuring four newly commissioned works (opening 22 July), and at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago (opening 14 September).

Over the course of his career, Jaar has realised over seventy public interventions around the world and has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013) and Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021) as well as Documenta (1987, 2002). Jaar’s work can be found in collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MASP, Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; M+, Hong Kong, among others. He was awarded the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and received the prestigious Hasselblad award for 2020. In September 2019, Jaar’s The Garden of Good and Evil was placed on permanent display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom.

IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU runs concurrently to another solo presentation in London by Alfredo Jaar, titled Alfredo Jaar: 50 Years Later (19 April – 19 May), at Cecilia Brunson Projects. The exhibition marks the time passed since General Augusto Pinochet’s coup over Chilean President Salvador Allende’s democratic government on 11 September 1973. This exhibition constitutes the most comprehensive review of Jaar’s work on Chile in recent years, with key historic pieces that established him as one of the most eloquent and uncompromising commentators on state-sponsored brutality and violence to date.

-

SEE MORE HERE: https://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/london-gallery-alfredo-jaar-if-it-concerns-us-it-concerns-you-2023

Newsletter from the European Correspondent

 

My recent contribution to this great European newsletter:

 

Good morning, From ever-increasing outrage about French President Macron to a flopping four-day workweek in Belgium, this week has been a ride for Western Europe.  Meanwhile, Biden is being blamed for anti-UK sentiments after a visit to Ireland, while British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been probed over failure to declare a financial conflict of interest. But while Paris still burns, the city is hosting two major Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibitions, focusing on music and his collaboration with Andy Warhol – something to look forward to. Editor's note Belle de Jong, Brussels   French union leaders outraged as Macron signs pension reform into law French President Emmanuel Macron signed his controversial pension reform into law on Saturday, prompting angry reactions from unions. They are now calling for a 'tidal wave' of protests on 1 May. Melissa Chemam Paris, France Union leaders described the hurried promulgation of the law as "provocation", adding that the president had 15 days to validate it but chose to do it immediately. 〉Article by RFI: Outraged union leaders 〉Article by Libération: Updates on the reforms

France Melissa Chemam Correspondent from Paris Two Basquiat exhibitions in Paris shine light on art superstar American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of two major exhibitions in Paris this spring, one focusing on music, the other on his collaboration with Andy Warhol. African music and art had a key influence on Basquiat, from his Haitian roots to his deep interest in diverse African-American and African cultures, as shown in these exhibitions. 〉Article by RFI: Text and slideshow ⌲ France joins world leaders in voicing concern over fighting in Sudan Violence erupted on Saturday morning in Sudan after weeks of deepening tensions between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander of the heavily-armed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). France has joined the US and the UN in voicing "deep concern" and called on military factions "to do everything to stop" the violence. 〉Article by RFI: World leaders voice concern ⌲

-

Lowkey | Free Assange

Lowkey | Free Assange (Acoustic Version)   

 - featuring Mai Khalil 

 

20 Mar 2023

Free Assange has been released on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, as part of States of Violence, a collaboration between a/political, WikiLeaks and the Wau Holland Foundation. States of Violence brings together artists, agitators and icons such as Ai Weiwei, Dread Scott and The Vivienne Foundation to unveil and oppose techniques of government oppression, from war and torture to police brutality and surveillance. The world’s most outspoken individuals turn the spotlight on global power structures, releasing material which lays bare the darkest truths of our contemporary reality. This is presented alongside “SECRET+NOFORN” (2022), a body of work by the Institute for Dissent & Datalove, which comprises the highest classification of cables, SECRET and NOFORN (meaning no foreign nationals), from the 2010 WikiLeaks Cablegate publication of U.S. diplomatic cables. It is the largest-ever physical publication of top secret government cables, never before available in the UK in hardcopy. The video features a clip from 'Collateral Murder' released by WikiLeaks on the 5th of April 2010. It shows a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. States of Violence 24 March - 08 April, 2023 a/political, 6 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AA Tues - Sun, 10am - 6pm Follow us on Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/apoliticalorg Subscribe to our newsletter | http://eepurl.com/hgO6fD Subscribe to our channel |    / apoliticalorg   #julianassange #WikiLeaks #hiphop #contemporaryart #hiphopmusic

Two Basquiat exhibitions in Paris shine new light on superstar artist

 

1.  Culture

MODERN ART

Two Basquiat exhibitions in Paris shine light on art superstar

Issued on: 15/04/2023 - 16:56

Text by:Melissa Chemam with RFI

5 min

Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat on display at the Philharmonie de Paris,

 as part of the exhibition "Basquiat Soundtracks". © Melissa Chemam/RFI

American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of two major exhibitions in Paris this spring, one focusing on music, the other on his collaboration with Andy Warhol.

As short as it was, the life of Basquiat (1960-1988) produced an incredible number of creative periods, styles and artworks.

Covering the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, two new exhibitions at the Philharmonie de Paris and the Louis Vuitton Foundation offer fresh insight into how music, pop art and his Afro-Caribbean heritage informed the artist's work.

From sound to sight

Music was a key influence on Basquiat, from the songs his Haitian father played him, to his formative years in a band, and his deep interest in diverse African-American and African genres.

With its show "Basquiat Soundtracks", the Philharmonie delves into the relationship between Basquiat's keen interest in music and his visual art.

From bebop to jazz and later hip-hop, music from Black Atlantic culture – comprising African, American, British and Caribbean influences – were especially key in the painter's life and work. 

The Philharmonie describes the exhibition as “a feast for the ears as well as the eyes”, presenting Basquiat's artworks alongside musical instruments and audiovisual media.

Basquiat emerged as a self-proclaimed poet, musician, DJ and artist in late-1970s New York, using the street as a canvas for his words.

At the time, the city was the hotbed for two surging musical movements: avant-garde "no wave" and soon-to-explode hip-hop.

'Basquiat Soundtracks', Philharmonie de Paris

Basquiat was then the unofficial leader of the underground band Gray. He frequented New York’s downtown clubs, sharing stages and dancefloors with a generation of punk-influenced artists experimenting with new forms of performance and expression.

At the same time, Basquiat embraced emerging hip-hop culture, inspired by Black history and struggles. He even teamed up with rapper friends to produce a 1983 single, "Beat Bop", complete with original cover art.

Jazz and especially the music of Charlie Parker also had a key place in Basquiat’s paintings, used as references in many of his early paintings.

Basquiat meets Warhol

At the Louis Vuitton Foundation, it is Basquiat’s work with pop art pioneer Andy Warhol that takes pride of place in "Basquiat x Warhol. Painting four hands".

Between 1984 and 1985 especially, Basquiat and Warhol created around 160 paintings together, including some of the largest works of their respective careers.

Fellow New York artist Keith Haring, who witnessed their collaboration, described a “conversation occurring through painting, instead of words”.

"Andy would start one [painting] and put something very recognisable on it, or a product logo, and I would sort of deface it," Basquiat said of their creative process.

"Then I would try to get him to work some more on it."

The exhibition also features are individual works by Basquiat and Warhol, as well as other artists from the downtown New York art scene of the mid-1980s.

African energy

Some of Basquiat's most powerful work relates deeply to his Haitian origins and African inspiration.

At the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the large sculpture "Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper)" and the 8-metre canvas "African Mask" particularly stand out.

Produced between 1985 and 1986 but never exhibited while neither Basquiat or Warhol were alive, "Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper)" evokes the lynchings of African-Americans. 

"African Masks" is the most monumental work in the exhibition. While Warhol described it as “a masterpiece of African art”, Olivier Michelon, one of the co-curators of the exhibition, told RFI: "It is not an African masterpiece, it is a painting made in New York, in 1984, by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with African iconography." 

• Basquiat: from street to canvas
• Meet the African comic book heroes taking the world by storm

Basquiat visited the African continent just once, after his collaboration with Warhol. But according to Michelon: "As an African-American, with origins in Haiti and the Caribbean, it's clearly something that interested him. He also worked quite a bit on myths and rites from West Africa, notably Yoruba legends."

At the Philharmonie, Basquiat’s work is placed in the context of the Black Atlantic: “the intangible, diasporic continent where music is a place of memory”, as the curators describe it.

His work bears witness to “a spiritual continuum” from the Mississippi Delta, birthplace of the blues, to the coasts of Africa and the Caribbean, to which Basquiat was linked by Haitian and Puerto Rican ancestry.

One country in particular held a powerful appeal for the artist: Côte d'Ivoire.

Basquiat went there in 1986, exhibited in Abidjan, and planned to visit the country again in August 1988. But he would pass away of a heroin overdose, aged 27, a few days before his flight.

"Basquiat Soundtracks" is at the Philharmonie de Paris until 30 July 2023. "Basquiat x Warhol. Painting four hands" is at the Louis Vuitton Foundation until 28 August 2023.

-

Click to read and see slideshow:
 https://www.rfi.fr/en/culture/20230415-two-basquiat-exhibitions-in-paris-shine-light-on-art-superstar

-

Basquiat soundtrack... @ Philharmonie!

 

More soon.

"Racism makes people physically ill"

 

Reading this revealing interview; may have found a name for a certain form of pain...

Guardian Interview

Extraordinarily stressed and vigilant? How racism makes people physically ill

Arline Geronimus was once called the biggest threat to youth in the US. But her theory of how injustice affects our health is more influential than ever

by Nesrine Malik, a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

Extract:

After decades of research into public health, Geronimus is an expert in what she calls “weathering”, a term she coined: “the physiological effects of living in communities that bear the brunt of racial, ethnic, religious and class discrimination”.

Read the entire interview here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/04/extraordinarily-stressed-and-vigilant-how-racism-makes-people-physically-ill

Weathering, she adds, “is critical to understanding and eliminating population health inequity” and involves not just the physical and environmental stressors of being marginalised, but the “psychosocial” ones as well – high stress, constant vigilance, a lack of trust that things will be OK.

The process, she has observed in her research, leads to premature ageing, chronic conditions and early death.

In her new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress on the Body of an Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, the pandemic seems to vindicate her thesis.

It wasn’t just a person’s age that made them vulnerable to the virus, it was also their weathering.

It was already established that Covid killed people in racialised communities at a much higher rate than white ones, but that, according to Geronimus’s research, was because they had higher rates of heart diseases, diabetes and inflammation; all risk factors that made Covid more deadly.

Even before the pandemic, people in these communities scored high on the “allostatic load score” – the presence of stress hormones such as cortisol along with inflammation, their belly fat distribution linked to stress, and high blood pressure – leading her to conclude that “if you have a weathered body, you’re more likely to die of infection at a younger age”. That, tragically, has turned out to be consistent with the patterns of death in the pandemic.

(...)

Geronimus has always faced fierce resistance. “That’s why I wrote the book,” she says. “Earlier in my career, people were very cold. There were headlines in books and newspapers like: ‘Research queen says: let them have babies’. This was the early 90s, the height of neoliberalism and underclass rhetoric. I had no constituency. It wasn’t just that I ran up against more rightwing or neoliberal people. In the popular press, I was a heretic. I got death threats. It was all ideological.”

(...)

She doesn’t receive nearly as much vitriol as she used to, but she still thinks that we’re not there yet. People are so brainwashed by the myths of the American dream, social mobility and self-improvement that they are led to believe that one way or another it’s minorities’ own fault for not thriving.

In the US, Gerominus says, the belief is that “black Americans are not working hard enough” or are fatalistic and “stress-eating, lying on the couch”. The truth she has seen is that they are in fact constantly resourceful, pulling together as a community and “solving the unsolvable” in the face of daily, structural challenges.

To this day, only “part of the idea” of weathering has been incorporated into mainstream public-health consciousness. “There’s language to talk about it that we didn’t have 30 years ago, of structural racism or systemic racism, social determinants of health – everybody’s now conversant in these concepts.” This covers the part “where your body is eroded by the corrosive effects of being a part of an exploited, oppressed group”.

But the other part of weathering is still not widely grasped: the coping part, the part where the people being weathered “stand up, try to be resilient, and try to withstand all the structural barricades and the exposure or the exhaustion. Weathering means both things – it is both shelter and storm.”

This second part is often ignored, reducing community or group-based dynamics and demands to identity politics positions in a culture war. “What we misread as selfish competitive identity politics is about social identities that have been imposed on groups. But many of the hardships and adversities they face are because they’ve been racialised.”

(...)

Her biggest hope is that people start to think about things in terms of weathering and that it leads them in different directions, away from the same old failed policies. She hopes that solutions are offered for public-health crises outside the usual ones relating to urban development and lifestyle improvements.

(...)

“We tend to think of social mobility as moving up to something better,” she says. “But whatever moves you to opportunity also moves you away from things that give your life purpose and meaning, and people who validate your view of the world and don’t just assume what your moral fibre is or your intellectual abilities are just because of what social identity has been imposed on you.” There are, she says, “real minuses to social mobility and even the pluses don’t get you out of weathering. If we really think that being socially mobile is a sign of good character then we need to make sure that persistence and tenaciousness and sacrifice doesn’t make you sick or disabled or die young. We shouldn’t stand for that.”

-

Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of an Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society is published by Little, Brown (£25)