IDEALS

BRUSSELS, (Jun. 3, 2010) IPS/GIN – Coca-Cola, recently indicted
for causing serious damage to water and soil in India, might seem
like an odd champion of environmental protection.

Yet the global beverages giant was given a platform to present
itself as ecologically progressive by one of the European Union’s
(EU) most powerful bodies.

The public relations exercise on Jun. 2 did not go unchallenged.
As Salvatore Gabola, a representative of Coca-Cola Europe, started
to address ‘Green Week’, an annual EU conference, he was
interrupted by a group of protestors. Unfurling two large banners
in Coke’s trademark colors of red and white, the group chanted
slogans accusing the corporate-dominated event of “dirty
greenwash”.
Read the rest of this entry →

HAVANA, (May 8, 2009) IPS/GIN – Too bold for some tastes and too
dissident for others, some of the Cuban exhibits at the recent
Havana Arts Biennial brought to mind the late 1980s and early
1990s, when the visual arts were in the vanguard of national
culture.

“I don’t know if what is being done today has the quality and power
of what was produced by the so-called 1980s generation. I just know
that something is on the move. The spark of life is back,” a
41-year-old visitor to the inauguration of the Tenth Havana Arts
Biennial, who said she had witnessed “years of inertia,” told IPS.

“They are making a very strong statement. Even the titles of the
works challenge the status quo,” added a 38-year-old man who said
he did not remember exhibitions like “Volumen I”, movements like
“Arte Calle” (Street Art) or the “Castillo de la Fuerza” (now a
museum) project, which in their time revolutionised the Cuban
cultural scene. Read the rest of this entry →

WASHINGTON, (May 19, 2009) IPS/GIN – A new documentary from a
shadowy non-profit, the Clarion Fund, has ties to groups widely
accused of Islamophobia.

“The Third Jihad” purports to educate U.S. citizens about the
threat of a “cultural Jihad” by the country’s own Muslim-American
population. The film goes to great lengths to define itself as an
expose of radical Muslim elements, not the faith at large. Read the rest of this entry →

MEXICO CITY, (Apr. 2, 2010) IPS/GIN – “What a sad childhood Juanito
had/ when shooting started in his barrio/ he was left lying on the
ground/ so young/ he went to his grave”.

This is a verse from “Carlitos”, one of the songs of the Mexican
hip hop group MC Crimen from Ciudad Jurez in the north of the
country, on the U.S. border. Read the rest of this entry →

KOLKATA, India, (Apr. 4, 2010) IPS/GIN – After sitting out the
slowdown in the art market until last year, Ambica Beri, owner of
an upscale art gallery here in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata,
is cautiously hosting shows again this year.

The positive signs that the market is indeed recovering are so far
holding up, say Beri and other arts professionals. Read the rest of this entry →

BUENOS AIRES, (Mar. 25, 2010) IPS/GIN – “I wanted to take a
self-portrait, and I thought about keeping a straight face, but it
came out all weird, with these very long arms,” says Liliana
Cabrera about the photo she took with a camera she made herself,
out of a condensed milk tin, at a workshop in an Argentine prison.

The pinhole camera workshop is held at Unit 3, a federal women’s
prison in Ezeiza, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

About 15 inmates are taking the course, and there are more than 80
women on the waiting list. The workshop teaches them to make a
camera and take and develop photographs. Read the rest of this entry →

JOHANNESBURG, (Mar. 25, 2010) IPS/GIN – “Some said, how can women
dancers tell us about climate change? Some said, how can dancers
talk about planting trees? Others asked, how can women dancers
build schools? But now the government says a drum has managed to
fill our granaries, a dancer has managed to build schools.”

With these words, Kamoto Community Arts director Mary Manzole
illuminated how a Zambian women’s dance group used theatre for
development to encourage villagers to plant more than 5,000 trees
and erect three classroom blocks in three years in Zambia’s
Southern Province.

Manzole was speaking during the Celebrating SADC Women in Theatre
and Dance Festival held in Johannesburg earlier in March. Read the rest of this entry →

SAKHNIN, Israel, (Jun. 30, 2009) IPS/GIN – In this Arab town in
northern Israel, Michael Zantovsky, the Czech Republic ambassador,
is throwing an end-of-term party, an event markedly different from
customary diplomatic bashes.

Ambassador Zantovsky is a resourceful diplomat: he’s timed his
soccer celebration well, kicking off “The European Cup in Sakhnin”,
an innovative project designed to bridge divisions between Jewish
and Arab children through the universal game, to crown the end of
his country’s six-month mandate at the helm of the rotating EU
presidency. Read the rest of this entry →

SANTIAGO, (Jul. 13, 2009) IPS/GIN – “La Familia. Historia privada
de los Pinochet” (The Family: Private History of the Pinochets),
a book that delves into the personal life of the late Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet and his immediate family, has had a mixed
reception in this country and in Ecuador, where a man claiming to
be his illegitimate son may soon identify himself.

The book by Chilean journalists Fernando Vega and Claudia Farf†n
begins and ends with the little-known love affair between Pinochet
and an Ecuadorean beauty called Piedad NoÇ, which began in Quito
in 1957, when Pinochet, then an army major, was stationed in
Ecuador. Read the rest of this entry →

MEXICO CITY, (Mar. 14, 2010) IPS/GIN – Ten-year-old Jessica
Algoneda leaps in the air, raising her arms and spinning around at
her primary school in the Mexican capital, as if in honor of
Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dance and poetry.

Algoneda and her fourth-grade classmates are in a group of students
taking music and dance classes at the Ponciano Arriaga public
school, in the historic centre of the capital city. Read the rest of this entry →