nomadological

Swallows and Cherry Blossoms, Utagawa Hiroshige, 1830, Art Institute of Chicago: Asian Art

Clarence Buckingham Collection Size: 37.5 x 12.7 cm (14 ¾ x 5 in.) Medium: Color woodblock print, chu-tanzaku

Horace Bristol

- Soldiers with child (Taiwan)

Colosses | Fabrice Fouillet

Statues are often idealized works of art, ideological, political or religious representations, and turn their subjects into fascinating eternal figures.Once erected to keep alive the memory of a particular person or event, in a given culture, it lasts through many generations and establishes itself a symbol for the community.Statues are even more influential when they are outstanding. An edifice can be said to be monumental when it is unusual, extraordinary. It has to be abnormal, as exceptional as the political or religious power itself, also inseparable from its symbolic aspects.    

The series “Colosses” is a study of the landscapes embracing those monumental commemorative statues.Although hugeness is appealing, exhilarating or even fascinating, I was first intrigued by the human need to build gigantic declarations. Then, I asked myself how such « works » could be connected to their surroundings. How can they fit in the landscapes, despite their excessive dimensions and their fundamental symbolic and traditional functions?

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

An in-progress primer on gayborhoods, gentrification and radical queer resistance. 

“Housing is a Queer Issue” Queer to the Left poster.  

Queer to the Left is a Chicago-based multi-racial group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people committed to working in coalition with queers and non-queers to promote economic, gender, racial, and sexual justice. Our current work focuses on building affordable housing and promoting fair community development that does not undermine important community institutions

“A Map of Polk Street Gentrification” Gay Shame SF poster. 

GAY SHAME is a Virus in the System. We are committed to a queer extravaganza that brings direct action to astounding levels of theatricality. We will not be satisfied with a commercialized gay identity that denies the intrinsic links between queer struggle and challenging power. 

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The End of San Francisco

150: A few months earlier, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal had approached Gay Shame to do an interview. He had seen some of our wheatpastes about gentrification on Polk Street. Of course we were skeptical, but we made a consensus decision to go through with it – it’s not like anyone else was going to be talking critically about gentrification in the Wall Street Journal, make we could at least get in a good quote or two. I volunteered to do the interview, since I was living on Polk Street myself and knew the most about it. I put together a modified business outfit complete with a frosted asymmetrical mullet and smeared lipstick, and gave a detailed description of the gentrification and its effects.

152…the end of San Francisco as a place where marginalized queers could try to figure out a way to cope. I was talking about Polk Street, one of the last remaining public spaces for homeless youth, hustlers, trans women, street queens, drug addicts, seniors on disability, and migrants of all types, but fast becoming a hot destination for fashionistas and office drones to sip green apple martinis. The Wall Street Journal didn’t exactly talk about this form of ethnic cleansing – they decided Gay Shame was fighting for the neighborhood’s “gritty ambience.” But the article did reveal that Larkin Street Youth Services hired out the kids in their shelter to plant palm trees in front of the architecture firm spearheading the gentrification, at the preposterous rate of six dollars a day. And it reprinted the WANTED poster we’d made for the head of that architecture firm.

Lower Polk Neighbors [Association] is allegedly an organization striving for neighborhood “beautification” and “cleanliness”, but is actually a pro-gentrification attack squad that works with the police to rid neighborhood streets and businesses of “undesirables,” i.e. hookers, hustlers, drug addicts, homeless people, trannies, needle exchange services, working class queers and other social deviants. Lower Polk Neighbors claims to be open to all, but primarily consists of wealthy property and business owners, slumlords, developers, bureaucrats, robber barons, police officers and vigilante social purists.

Christina B. Hanhardt’s 2004 Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence 

Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for “safe space” have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines.

Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Flag Wars (2003) “is a poignant and very personal look at a community in Columbus, Ohio, undergoing gentrification. What happens when gay white homebuyers move into a working-class black neighborhood?”

Also recommending QUEER (IN)JUSTICE: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (2011) by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock

A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system

In March 2003-three decades after Stonewall-police stormed the Power Plant, a private Detroit club frequented by African American LGBT people. Over 350 people were handcuffed and subjected to homophobic slurs. Some were hit on the head and back; others were slammed into walls. Their supposed crime was later chalked up to a bizarre infraction: “loitering inside a building.” Three years earlier, Freddie Mason, a thirty-one-year-old Black gay man was arrested after a verbal altercation with his landlord, and then anally raped with a billy club covered in cleaning liquid by a Chicago police officer. Bernina Mata, a Latina, was sentenced to death on the theory that being a “hardcore lesbian” caused her to kill. A Tennessee police officer’s brutal beating of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman, was even caught on camera. Within a year, she was dead-the third African American transgender woman in Memphis in three years whose murder remains unresolved. Events such as these illuminate a long shadow of criminalization of LGBT people in America.

A week on the road in North Korea

Alexandra Lange on mausoleums old and new: 

"How might modern-day magnates translate the look of their home or office into the afterlife? … Olsen told me that, from railroads to polished granite and from embalming to lasers, cemeteries have always followed trends in technology and culture. Cities of the dead aren’t disconnected from cities of the living but are rather extensions of them. Technology does not separate us from the past; it democratizes public memorials, whether in stone or in pixels."