In the Si 8 Do project, Seville activists convened in a neglected barrio during the Euromediterranean Conference on Sustainable Cities, which was taking place in Seville.
Mayor Gilberto Kassab passed a Clean City Law that banned all public advertising in Sao Paulo, one of the world's most populous cities. The mayor gained the support of the city's elites in pressing the law as an anti-pollution measure targeting "visual pollution". The city was quickly stripped of its ubiquitous billboards, signs, graffiti and other public ads.
In early 2012, a group of artists, activists and assorted other odd balls got together to form People's Tours. The idea was to give walking tours in the Boston area. Standard enough. But instead of the usual history, we would talk about social justice, contested spaces, important protests, and shady corporations.
So far, the group has consisted of Dave Taber, Heather McCann, Kristin Parker, Neil Horsky, and Tim Devin.
What would a chemical attack on NYC look like? How would poisonous gases spread, through the lines of the subway and above ground? These are some of the questions the NYPD and a team of researchers hope to answer this July, when they’ll disperse colorless, odorless, and apparently harmless gases called perflourocarbons around the city and track their movement.
In 2009, the dissident artist created a work to honour the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. He recalls how the project, Remembering, angered China’s rulers – and changed his career for ever
This is an edited extract from The Start podcast
A feminist group in France has been transforming the streets of Paris after noting that just 2.6 per cent are named after notable women.
Tourists on the Ile de la Cité got a surprise when they found that almost all of the street signs in central Paris had been changed overnight.
Students at art colleges across China are taking a strong stance in the midst of the largest wave of protests to have gripped the country since 1989. As demonstrations against the government’s strict Covid-19 policies erupted across the country over the weekend, students rallied on campuses to create protest art and graffiti.
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile — the setting of Patricio Guzmán’s transfixing cinematic essay “Nostalgia for the Light” — is a place where heaven and earth converge. Or some might say heaven and hell.
The Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf opens “The Gardener” with the declaration: “I am an agnostic filmmaker.” From anyone else, this might seem like a simple statement, but not from the complex Mr. Makhmalbaf. In 1974, when he was 17, religious and involved in a guerrilla group, he stabbed a policeman, for which he received a bullet to the stomach and a prison sentence.
Cheril Linett is a female artist from Chile, with a background in performance art and stage performance, who primarily focuses her artwork on feminist issues in Chile, especially ones involving violence, murder, hate crime and different kinds of oppression and assault, but also creates artwork reflecting issues in other parts of Latin America.
In 2009, conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi demoted the publicly-funded Italian Theatre Insitute (or ETI) to "disposable" status, hacking funding for the arts considerably. ETI promoted Italian companies abroad, managed the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, the Duse theatre in Bologna, and Rome's Teatro Valle--the oldest theatre in Rome, located between the Pantheon and Piazza Navona, Campo dei Fiori and the Senate.
Artist Luke Jerram created a genderless sleeping figure made of glass lying on a piece of cardboard and exhibited in the streets of London. The artist said in an interview "For every person you see sleeping on the streets, there are many others sleeping in hostels, squats and other forms of unsatisfactory and insecure accommodation.
“Piano Stairs” is an interactive playful musical stairway installation created into the Odenplan underground station of Stockholm to make people use stairs more often than elevator. The project was part of a Wolkswagen initiative called “The fun theory” whose main objective and mission is to “change people’s behaviour for the better by making it fun to do.”
Cosmic Generator presents a network of characters working in nonsensical, and at times absurd, economies. Artist Mika Rottenberg uses footage from actual discount dollar stores in Calexico, CA; Mexicali, Mexico; and Yiwu, China to recreate the imaginary “life” of a product, from its production in the factory to the moment it is sold.
In December – as many around the globe were preparing for the holidays – Sama, a former attorney, remained hunkered down in her house in Kabul, Afghanistan, trying to comprehend how her world had changed.
Our City is a startup nonprofit based in Oakland and working with cities everywhere. They work with governments, cultural institutions, companies, community organizations, designers, and residents to produce
events, installations, and workshops that use public design to improve cities.
The “Wearable/Portable Architecture project” discussed the possibilities of having a locale create portable architecture based on the conditions of its environmental, urban and cultural conditions. It is structured to find ways in providing new arguments and sustaining an artistic impetus to our immediate environment.
Two design students were awarded the Futurapolis prize last Wednesday for their project to adapt the Furan (underground river) , a response to the migration crisis.
China's only seaside theater festival has been held in the resort town of Aranya in north China's Hebei Province. Artists from around the world traveled there to take deep dive into the world of dramatic performance. For theatergoers, there were interactive activities including cross-border installations such as seaside talks, environmental drama readings, screenings, theater houses, parades and bonfires by the sea.
Beauty in Transition is an artistic project created by multi-media artist Jody Wood, that established a pop-up mobile hair salon providing beauty services including a hair wash, cut, color and/or style service to willing participants living in homeless shelters. By provoking face-to-face dialogue in a calming recuperative salon environment, this project aims to facilitate empathetic understanding and to unravel the reductive label of homelessness.
Cheril Linett is a female artist from Chile, with a background in performance art and stage performance, who primarily focuses her artwork on feminist issues in Chile, especially ones involving violence, murder, hate crime and different kinds of oppression and assault, but also creates artwork reflecting issues in other parts of Latin America.
The odd spaces exiting under bridges and viaducts around the world are often left aside, urban spatial residues mostly abandoned or occupied informally by homeless people drug users etc. The former pro boxer Nilson Garrido saw the space under the Alcantara Machado viaduct (in the Mooca neighborhood of Sao Paulo) as an opportunity to create a Boxing Academy.
Creative Time, Social Practice Archive: In 2000 Heavy Trash, an anonymous arts organization of designers, architects, and urban planners, implemented its Aqua Line project throughout various parts of Los Angeles. The project involved the installation of false "Future Station Location" signs in the downtown area, notifying passersby of the impending construction of a subway that would connect the downtown to the Westside.
In 1995, Bogota was a chaotic city. Among others, it presented high ranges of homicides, delinquency, corruption, no sense of belonging, traffic chaos and financial problems.
"Once the New York City Marathon was cancelled, a group of New York City marathon runners decided to turn their personal loss of not being able to compete into a much bigger win by organizing volunteers to help the storm-ravaged communities on Staten Island, the race’s starting point. “Let’s put these legs and healthy spirit to good use,” says the group’s Facebook page.