Niebla: short film about a village forgotten amid the fog
"As in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic-realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Niebla's precise setting is uncertain-somewhere in rural Latin America-and the story's narrator is El Pep, an old man being interviewed in his living room by a documentary film crew about the mysterious fog of the title and the resulting visitation by a strange flock of flying sheep. 'The character is strongly based on my grandmother,' Ramos says. 'She was a very complex person, with many frustrations in life. She was born during the Mexican Revolution, so she experienced a lack of material possessions all her life. But she was also very kind and loving with her family (well..., most of the time). She was a combination of marked strenghs and weaknesses. At the end of her life, she suffered from dementia. 'My mind is leaving me,' she used to say, distressed, when she noticed. The only moments we could communicate with her were when we asked her about her past life. Those memories were the last to vanish.'"
(Emilio Ramos)
Fig.1 Emilio Ramos (2006). 'Niebla (Fog)', Short Film | México-Spain | 8 min. | 2d/3d digital
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem
"The University of British Columbia's class SPAN312 ('Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation') contributed to Wikipedia during Spring 2008. Our collective goals were to bring a selection of articles on Latin American literature to featured article status (or as near as possible). By project's end, we had contributed three featured articles and eight good articles. None of these articles was a good article at the outset; two did not even exist."
(Wikipedia)
1). Jon Beasley-Murray, (18 March 2008).'Wikipedia', weblog post.
2). Jon Beasley-Murray, (18 March 2008). 'Was introducing Wikipedia to the classroom an act of madness leading only to mayhem if not murder?', Wikipedia.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
multilingual and multicultural networks of shared interest
"Hundreds of thousands of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans have started blogging, opening up a library of human knowledge in local languages to those who are willing to listen, and making the internet a far more multilingual and multicultural place (Block, 2004). A recent Technorati study found that Chinese and Japanese have overtaken English as the dominant languages of the blogosphere, and that growing native-language communities are emerging all over the net.6 Thus, the language issue in the context of Web 2.0 technology is increasingly less about content-creation and access, and more about content-transfer. Translating between two languages requires an appreciation of the 'intellectual, ideological and social understandings upon which speech is based' (Powell, 2006: 522). This is certainly one of the areas where Web 2.0 faces some serious challenges. Specialised sites, such as Global Voices Online (see Box 2), however, have been developed to organise, translate and distribute this local knowledge. And even when people are not blogging in their native languages, they are sharing knowledge about their local realities. Knowledge-creation is itself a hugely empowering experience for any individual, and the benefits of such empowerment will become more diffused as more people from the developing world join the global online discussion."
(Alberto Masetti-Zannini, p.21,22)
Alberto Masetti-Zannini, Web 2.0 and International Development NGOs
Knowledge Politics Quarterly, Volume 1 Issue 1 (Oct 2007), edited by Craig Berry
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
"The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965-80, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 120 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of media-including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art-the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue."
(July 25, 2007 at 9:00am by MOCA)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
