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kvwviiju · 2 years

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What SW opinions do you even have that get people so fucking angry?? I’m so sorry you’ve recieved hate on this website, I love your art and I’d hate to see you go :(

gonna assume you mean Star Wars and not s*x w*rk bcus those are two wildly different things, and I’m not going anywhere, i was just venting. i might be opening myself up to more hate here but my opinions aren’t even that bad, these are just the ones that seem to rattle people

• i don’t like the sequels. i tried too but i dont, too much wasted potential and there’s only a handful of characters i like (my SO on the other hand loves them, and we coexist normally because we’re grownups who can respect each others opinions)

• i think reylo is creepy, and i dislike both characters. kylo had a lot of potential that I felt was wasted. i don’t give a shit if people ship it though, live your best life, like the characters you want to like.

• bobas characterisation in tbobf doesn’t work for me. In prior media, like the original trilogy, the clone wars, and comics/books he was arrogant and very morally grey. I have no problem seeing a more grown up, well rounded and kinder boba, but I felt like that development happened way too quickly and that it’s kind of jarring

• Star Wars’ target audience is largely children and whilst it isn’t above criticism for that reason (media made for kids can be incredible) some of you forget that target audience and get legitimately mad about children engaging in a space made for them. Star Wars has never been high art, nor is it meant to be, and nor does it have to be to be enjoyable. remember that Star Wars started as camp pulp fiction.

• i enjoy the prequels more than the sequels. i grew up with them and I like their world building, and my favourite bits of Star Wars media come from that world building.

• this was a big one for a while, but i once said on here that liking fictional characters that are villains (so in Star Wars, characters like crosshair, other imperials, etc) doesn’t make you a bad person nor a fascist because they aren’t real. liking them doesn’t mean you support their fictional viewpoint, and even if you did, that perspective isn’t real and isn’t necessarily reflective of any of your real world views and opinions. believe it or not, that was controversial to some people.

• disney sucks and doesn’t care about you, however - claiming you hate the company and media they produce but continuing to consume it and support them is not an example of forced consumption under capitalism, and that is a privileged viewpoint. Disney is not a necessity in the way food and products are and can be in our daily lives. independent media does exist and is fully accessible - the reason you refuse to seek it out and support it is that you’re lazy, or simply don’t actually want to, contrary to what you may claim.

#asks #if you disagree with any of these points that absolutely fine #but don’t get angry about it

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daylflay · 4 years

Text

It’s Always Darkest

Before the Dawn

“It’s always darkest before the dawn”; that’s how the old adage goes. Having said that, it’s currently pretty difficult for most of us to see past the dark. COVID-19 continues to spread (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-argentina/argentina-announces-mandatory-quarantine-to-curb-coronavirus-idUSKBN216446), the economy inexorably spirals downward (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/echoes-of-the-great-depression-us-economy-could-post-biggest-contraction-ever-2020-03-19), and my home state of California has just been put into lockdown (https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/19/newsom-orders-all-40m-californians-to-stay-home-in-nations-strictest-state-lockdown-1268248). The world is currently facing a crisis the scale of which arguably hasn’t been seen since said world was at war with itself, and for some, at least in America, that crisis started in 2016 when our current president was elected; for others, it started back during the 2007/2008 financial crisis; regardless of when the crisis started, the only path forward starts with labor.

During the early 20th century, when industry was changing the nature of then-modern life, global conflict’s grisly violence shocked sensibilities, and the meaning of life in Western culture started being questioned by the masses, a group of writers/artists known as the Modernists rose to the occasion and attempted to encapsulate the malaise and spiritual unease of their milieu. Poets like Edward Arlington Robinson chose to focus on the cynicism of the moment, as portrayed in his poem, Richard Cory. At the end of Robinson’s poem, the titular Richard Cory commits suicide: “And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.” I’m personally a highly cynical individual, and can very much understand Robinson’s disposition, but in this particular moment of ours, amidst a pandemic, I believe there’s much merit in the antithesis of my usual misanthropy; I think it’s optimism that gets us through this, not the other way around, and that will take work in our current social climate. Ezra Pound was another Modernist, and famously cynical, but he did have a somewhat famous catchphrase that I think is helpful in spite of his problematic nature: “Make it new”. Though neither Robinson nor Pound achieved the success they desired via their poetry, both economically and otherwise, until their latter years, they still labored on and continued writing, because they understood the importance of what they were creating; they understood that the moment in which they lived demanded their sacrifice. In our current moment of crisis, when nothing is certain and everyone’s on edge, we have to take our usual misplaced hatred and diametric opposition towards each other and work towards transforming it all into something else; we have to make it new.

The New

The idea of making something new can result in positive and negative developments, and Brooke Erin Duffy delves into some of the latter in The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. In Duffy’s article, she rallies against a new form of exploitative labor unique to the digital era: “While critical discourses of precarity and instability offer a decidedly bleak view of the contemporary labor market, individualist appeals to passion and entrepreneurialism temporally reroute employment concerns. That is, affective mantras like ‘Do What You Love’ shift workers’ focus from the present to the future, dangling the prospect of a career where labour and leisure harmoniously coexist. This illusory coexistence is well suited to descriptions of work in the culture industries, widely understood as environments where low pay and long hours are a tradeoff for creative autonomy”. I think Duffy’s ultimately correct in her assessments, but this present moment of ours compels me to momentarily disregard the nefarious implications of the modern labor market. I think that if you’re able to create entertaining content for people during this dark period of time, and you get to “do what you love” while doing so, then you’re providing a mutually beneficial service when people need such a thing most. It’s during moments like these that the best in people can shine through the ominous haze, and the individuals I’m tracking are (mostly) no exception. For the most part, the people I’m paying attention to are already professionally involved in media to some degree, so they’re not vying for employment on the same level the individuals Duffy refers to in her article are, but that makes their intent clearer to an extent.

Rick Wilson always makes attempts to simultaneously espouse his ideology while humorously attacking individuals on Twitter, but he’s also been posting a lot of entertaining memes/gifs recently. Just today (3/19/20), he posted two of them within a couple of hours of one another: One was a gif pulled from a South Park episode, which itself was a reference to the film The Human Centipede, and it read, “I wonder if Hannity likes the cuttlefish or the vanilla pudding.”; the other was an image of Donald Trump in a Star Trek costume, and it read, “Glad we have a space force instead of a pandemic response team”. Rick was not being incredibly nice to either Sean Hannity or Donald Trump, but the overtly humorous images are bound to brighten the days of folks that are rightfully upset with both Hannity and Trump for their respective roles in exacerbating the current crisis.

Mehdi Hasan is generally a solemn tweeter, which is sensible considering that his occupation as a journalist entails that he maintain a certain sobriety when communicating anything to the public. Mehdi’s approach to producing sunnier-than-usual content today involved (somewhat) praising a man he loathes, and bestowing loving and kind thoughts upon his children: In a tweet directed at Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Mehdi tweeted a link to a Clickhole (a humor/satire website) article whose headline read, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point”; in another of Mehdi’s heartfelt tweets of the day, only a minute separated from the prior tweet, Mehdi responds to a tweet by Time magazine editor Anand Giridharadas that read, ‘What have you watched, read, or heard in this strange, dark time that has given you comfort and joy?’, to which Mehdi says, “My kids”. It’s a nice moment from Mehdi, and a reminder of what’s important during times like these.

Like with most things in life, women, relative to men, have to deal with additional complications attached to their actions online, and that unfortunately remains true even when it comes to them trying to do moral and selfless things. In The Unwanted Labour Of Social Media: Women Of Colour Call Out Culture As Venture Community Management, Lisa Nakamura, like Brooke Duffy criticizes exploitative digital labor practices, especially germane to women: “Digital labour is ‘difficult to conceptualise’ because the internet creates new styles of labour: it not only traffics far more in the immaterial, it is also arrayed along new axes of production, new forms of compensation, and new forms of gendering and racialisation. It is this kind of labour that interests me. I am specifically interested in the hidden and often-stigmatised and dangerous labour performed by women of colour, queer and trans people, and racial minorities who call out, educate, protest, and design around toxic social environments in digital media.” All of the women I’m following fall into at least one of the aforementioned social/cultural categories, i.e., they’re all women of color, and one of them is trans. These women, even while being entertaining are still politically conscious, and just by existing on Twitter are making a statement while simultaneously making themselves vulnerable. Having said that, they still persist in generating entertaining content for everyone’s sake despite it all.

Patti Harrison is trans and Vietnamese, and doesn’t hide either from her 100,000-strong Twitter following, so she’s someone whose very public existence is a powerful declaration of pride in of itself. On March 15th, and also today (3/19), Patti shared how she was spending her isolated time at home, in typically candid form: (3/15) “I am playing @AbzuGame right now on PS4 & it is really good also I am high and online! Love the websites on here. This tweet go viral now!”; (3/19) “Uh oh…craft alert…I hand-painted these @Margiela tabi boots. And Per @tweetrajouhari I added an awful foot tattoo of Elsa from Frozen.” Patti, by simply sharing the details of her seemingly enjoyable time at home, invited her Twitter feed into her life, and she was happy to do so, which must’ve made a plethora of her followers feel markedly less alone with such a vibrant personality keeping them company virtually.

Kashana Cauley is a black woman, who, like Patti, has upwards of 100,000 followers, which inevitably results in some negative attention, but she tweets on regardless. Kashana hasn’t been very active on Twitter recently, but when she does tweet, she makes it count, as evidenced by this tweet from March 15th: “Ask not what staying home on the couch can do for you, but what staying home on the couch can do for your country.” That tweet of hers was liked by over 100,000 people, which exceeds her follower count. The amount of people that it reached, and the amount of people who interacted with it, is astounding, and the amount of humor and joy she surely brought to those lives, even if just for a moment, is commensurately astounding.

Candace Owens, unlike the aforementioned women, is not exactly one to diffuse joy; in fact Candace loves doing the exact opposite. Her presence on Twitter is almost exclusively designed to anger people and start fights, which is why I’m so shocked that even she is attempting to lighten up the mood during this somber period of time. This is a tweet of hers from today (3/19): “I wanted to do panic buying, but then I checked my account. Turns out I can only afford to panic…#CoronavirusHumor…Lighten up folks.” If even Candace is willing to perform humorously in favor of the greater good, as opposed to inflaming tensions with her usual provocative rhetoric, then I have hope for the dawn.

The Dawn

In Of Modern Poetry, Wallace Stevens communicates the spirit of Ezra Pound’s directive to “make it new”: “The poem of the mind is the act of finding what will suffice. It has not always had to find: The scene was set; it repeated what was in the script. Then the theatre was changed.” Our global theatre has officially changed, and each and every one of us has a responsibility to work towards finding what will suffice in this maelstrom of ever-changing circumstances. For me, that means working on a script for a movie that has zero chance of actually existing (which means that I have zero chance of profiting off of any of this), because I’m just hoping that it makes someone out there smile.

In my last blog post, I imagined what a contemporary addition to George A. Romero’s living dead cinematic universe might look like. Personally, the act of simply thinking and writing about this silly, hypothetical project has brought me some sense of joy during all of this, and that’s saying a lot for someone as typically nihilistic as myself. I’m going to add to said hypothetical entry in Romero’s saga, entitled Gen-Z, with a speech delivered towards the end of the “film”. This speech is delivered by a Communications student at the university in Fullerton, California in which the living dead outbreak originated. A number of the university’s students have barricaded themselves in the campus, and are about to engage in a last stand against the hordes of living dead. Their survival is unlikely, so they’ve decided to gather one last time in an attempt to rouse one another before their climactic battle.

This is the speech that the student delivers: “I remember my first official day on this campus vividly, but not fondly. It was the first day of the Fall ’18 semester, and I guess classes just let out because I saw what felt like thousands of people suddenly rush across campus. It was like the running of the Titans, and I was wearing orange. Or the running of the dead, and I was alive, as the case may be. College was never part of my plan, so I had never toured any university campuses, and I did not know what to expect. I kind of freaked out and started questioning all of my decisions, like: Why did I decide to attend a school with 40,000 students if I don’t even like small groups of people? And why did I major in Human Communication Studies if I don’t even like myself? It was overwhelming to me that I could be surrounded by people, yet feel so alone. Then I walked over to my first class, and I saw some of the same faces that I’m looking at today. Everything can be overwhelming when you feel like you’re alone, but what I started to learn that very first day, and what this major continues to teach me, is that I am not alone; none of us are. I have not had the pleasure of knowing everyone on this campus, but we have all walked this path together despite that: We have all been stressed out because of Finals, we have all battled personal demons, and zombies, we have all lived life with its many complexities, and we did it all together on this campus. To this day, I still do not like myself all that much, but that’s okay, because none of this is really about me; it’s about all of you. Look to your right, and to your left, and in front of you, and maybe behind you; that is why we do what we do; we fight alongside each other, for each other. In this era of social media, divisiveness, and the living dead, nothing is more important than empathy, and that is the core tenet of our work here. We have been trained to understand each other, and that means that it is incumbent upon us to help mend our fractured communities; our fractured country; our fractured world. It is going to be a lot of work, but it’s work worth doing, because we’re not just doing it for ourselves. As Zac Efron once said in the 2006 hit film, High School Musical: ‘We’re all in this together.’ Rest in peace, Zac, this one’s for you. Now let’s go kill some fucking zombies!”

#Rick Wilson #Mehdi Hasan #Patti Harrison #kashanacauley #candace owens #coronavirus #covidー19 #earobinson #ezra pound #wallace stevens #highschoolmusical #zac efron #california #georgearomero #livingdead #zombies

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justgotham · 7 years

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When it premiered in 2014, the premise of Gotham was easy to explain: the show is a prequel to the Batman mythology as comic book readers, animated series watchers, and moviegoers already know it. It's telling not just the origin story of Bruce Wayne's alter ego, but the origin stories of the theatrical, malevolent bad guys who'll plague his version of the city. And perhaps the most sympathetic downward spiral has been the transformation of umbrella boy Oswald Cobblepot into the criminal mastermind known as Penguin. Gotham added another step past the point of no return for Oswald this season when he was jilted (and nearly murdered) by Edward Nygma (Cory Michael Smith), who Oswald claimed to be in love with. For both characters to stay on their trajectory towards city-threatening super-villainy, they couldn't have a happy ending. Yet some Gotham fans cried "queerbaiting" on social media when the relationship was never consummated. In an interview at Bustle HQ, Robin Lord Taylor says that "queerbaiting" accusations "baffled" him. Homophobic backlash, he sadly anticipated. But not that.

"So, of course I expect 'f*ggot this' and 'gay that,' and 'they ruined the show,'" Taylor says. "We had a little of that. But on the other hand, I was not expecting on the progressive side of things, still that same exact insistence on putting people into a definable box — into a box that [viewers] can also identify with — as opposed to letting an experience happen."

Taylor is protective of Oswald, murderer though he may be, but more protective of presenting an authentic experience. As he talks about his character's romantic awakening and some fans' perception that the show had cultivated 'shipping via performative homosexuality with no intent of "following through," he leans forward in his chair and punctuates his words by lightly punishing the tabletop.

The criticism is especially frustrating to Taylor because since he heard from the writers that Oswald would be developing these feelings, he's taken an active role in helping the show tell a story that doesn't "ring false." When I ask him how he first reacted to the pitch, he chooses his words carefully and gives me the fears first.

"My big concern was like, OK so, this is the first time I’ve heard about any sort of alternative sexuality to Oswald, be it anywhere on the spectrum," Taylor says. "Even any mention of any sort of romantic interest. I myself am gay, so I knew that this is not going to be a traditional story of someone coming out of the closet."

While other Gotham baddies want power more than anything, power is just a vehicle for Oswald to achieve something else: validation and love. Taylor sees the former Gotham City mayor as a person who's "very emotionally, physically, sexually immature," possibly because his self-worth "has been beaten out of him" after years of abuse and ostracization.

"I wanted to be true to what I know and understand of human sexuality and it’s not that you" — he snaps his fingers — "wake up one day, and you are gay. And to say that you are gay means that you identify with a group of people; it’s a cultural thing," Taylor says.

For him, Oswald doesn't claim that orientation, nor any other. Taylor was determined to keep his character's discovery "a romantic, yearning need to connect with somebody" rather than strictly sexual interest, because Oswald's understanding of himself is so limited.

"It was the Riddler — the first person who showed any respect or understanding or even enjoyment of Oswald’s company," the actor says. "Who's to say that if it was Barbara that it couldn’t have been her? I wanted to keep that ambiguous. Because what I understand of my own personal experience being gay... this is something that I’ve been thinking about my entire life. It’s always been a part of my life."

Of course, Oswald's wooing of Ed didn't go exactly as planned. (Isn't it just like the Penguin to kill the competition to get her out of his way?) But Taylor says these two characters are inextricably linked to each other, even if Nygmobblepot 'shippers should get used to the idea that there's no white picket fence on the horizon.

"It's a one-sided romance thing, but in [the April 24 episode], it’s when the Riddler announces himself and he’s taking pills and he’s having hallucinations and he’s hallucinating Oswald and you can see in those exchanges — not romantically, he didn’t have that for Oswald — but there still was a love and a respect and a need on his part too to connect with him," Taylor says.

You'll remember that scene: it's where Ed has a vision of his old friend Oswald singing a sultry Amy Winehouse song. (They recorded his vocals, by the way, in the same studio where Winehouse laid down hers — an experience Taylor says made him ask himself, "What the hell am I doing?")

"If you watch it back and you notice: this is the first time you see Oswald in the traditional tux and tails and top hat, which is the traditional Penguin look," Taylor says. "And I love that he didn’t come up with that look initially. That was the Riddler. So it’s almost like Riddler created part of me. And they’ve created each other, there is no one without the other."

It's the coexistence of their kinship and their bad blood that make Riddler and Penguin quintessential Gotham bad guys. And that brings Taylor back to the misguided complaints that those crazy two kids just can't make it work.

"It’s never going to be the show where people live and fall in love and live happily ever after. This is a story about how these people become psychopaths," he says. That's the theme of the series for the actor: "What happens when love is ripped away? When the access to love or to be gentle or be respectful — when connection between two humans — when that is ripped away, what’s left after that? And in this case, this is how these people go from villains to super-villains."

It wouldn't be Gotham if it were populated with happy, fulfilled people. This heartbreak is bringing Oswald ever closer to the villain fans know from Bruce Wayne's canonical future, and his new alliance with Dr. Strange's "freaks" is a part of that. But in spite the vast range of reactions to Oswald's Season 3 arc, the actor is pleased that it provoked a reaction at all.

"What I love about it is that it created this much bigger conversation," Taylor sums up. "I'm talking about queer politics. I'm talking about where people fall on the spectrum. This is a giant conversation that we’re having, that’s originating in a Batman story."

Even a heightened world like Gotham's can still have a lot to say about the world we live in, and Robin Lord Taylor is determined to keep it (close to) real.

#Gotham #Oswald Cobblepot #Robin Lord Taylor #Edward Nygma #Cory Michael Smith

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prideguynews · 6 years

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Interview

On Friday Oct 5, the UN Unbiased Pro on the Security against Violence and Discrimination primarily based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Id, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, gave a push conference in Tbilisi to share the preliminary findings of his official pay a visit to to Ga on twenty five September – 5 Oct.

He mentioned that the pay a visit to was an essential opportunity to assess the implementation of current countrywide and international human rights expectations to fight violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in the country.

The pro will present his findings and suggestions to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2019.

All through the push conference, Madrigal-Borloz completely elaborated on the specifics of his report, the conclusions he experienced designed as a result of analyzing the present predicament in phrases of violation of the rights of LGBT folks, and his suggestions for long run actions needing to be taken by the related skateholders.

The UN pro recommended the motivation of the Georgian government to handle violence and discrimination against the LGBT local community users, but expressed worry that implementation is slipping limited of what is urgently required.

The unbiased pro positively evaluated the government’s attempts and reforms for improving upon the life of LGBT folks but mentioned the predicament in Ga is even now rather hard: beatings are commonplace, harassment and bullying regular, and exclusion from family members, training, perform and health and fitness options are not abnormal.

He also highlighted that LGBT folks are particularly vulnerable to violence, unwell-treatment and discrimination, numerous going through it on a daily basis at the hands of persons, criminal gangs, and even their individual households.

“In modern yrs, the Georgian government has taken considerable actions to handle the predicament of LGBT folks, who are amongst the most discriminated against and vulnerable communities in Ga,” Madrigal-Borloz stated. “The Governing administration of Ga has previously taken the most essential stage: recognizing the eradication of violence and discrimination as just one of its key priorities, and firmly declaring sexual orientation and gender identity as shielded grounds. I encourage the authorities to continue on together this path I am certain that regard, peaceful coexistence and tolerance are cherished Georgian values and I am specified that they will deliver a basis exactly where all Georgians who materialize to be gay, lesbian, trans or bisexual will dwell free of charge and equivalent.”

Following his eleven-working day pay a visit to to Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Batumi regions, Madrigal-Borloz pressured that trans folks, particularly trans women, obtain it hard to obtain State solutions, a obstacle exacerbated by prerequisites for legal recognition of their gender identity, and disempowerment ensuing from a reliance on the belief of health-related physicians, unneeded in this situation.

Soon after the push conference, Mr Madrigal-Borloz gave an interview to find media associates, such as Ga Nowadays.

We questioned him to elaborate on the great importance of his report about the life of LGBT folks in Ga, his belief about the perform of NGOs working in this course and about the most scandalous situations of modern times connected to supporting LGBT rights.

When questioned about the alterations his report may convey to Georgian reality, Madrigal-Borloz expressed hope that it will absolutely have an effect on and increase the predicament in phrases of the violation of LGBT rights, as lengthy as it can be made use of as an instruction for long run actions.

“I hope that my report will be witnessed as a technological input into what could be a system of motion. Some of the actions that I am recommending, for example legal recognition of gender identity, must essentially go very far in endorsing the rights of trans women.

“The adoption of a policy of zero tolerance in relation to detest speech on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, accompanied by the adoption of efficient actions of investigation and sanction, must go very far to curtailing detest speech. So, sure, I am hoping that it will convey a very precise modify!”

As for the Georgian NGO-s working to assist the rights of LGBT folks and restrict the violence against them, the Unbiased Pro positively evaluated their perform, but pressured that much more actions and actions must be taken for improved final results:

“I think that the perform of NGOs is outstanding. They reveal excellent high-quality in their perform. The NGOs I’ve satisfied have a very sturdy worth foundation and are obviously aiming at the suitable targets and aims. But they have to have to be supported much more. The international local community and all sectors of society must assist them much more, mainly because I never think that they deal with to address all the requires. There are organizations that doc hundreds of situations of violence, but my functioning idea is that there are countless numbers of situations of violence and there must be much more assist so that they can essentially doc them.”

We questioned Madrigal-Borloz to convey his belief about the modern scandal connected to Georgian footballer Guram Kashia, who wore a rainbow armband in assist of LGBT rights and uncovered himself severely criticized by some users of Georgian society some folks even referred to as for him to be stripped of the Countrywide Crew captaincy.

“First of all, he has my complete assist. I obtain it extraordinary when users of the general local community, and particularly public figures, occur out in assist of a local community that is subject matter to violence and discrimination. It was the suitable and a brave thing to do. As for the reactions and aggression to it, I think it is connected to misinformation in society. If folks perform to have an understanding of the degree of the violence that goes on against LGBT folks, the the vast majority would essentially think 2 times before criticizing any individual who is trying to remove these violence. I think we have to have to make guaranteed that folks have an understanding of that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks are in our households, in our neighborhoods, in our colleges, and they are folks who are finding crushed, finding bullied, and we have to have to cease that,” he advised us.

Victor Madrigal-Borloz, from Costa Rica, took on his purpose as the UN Unbiased Pro on the Security against Violence and Discrimination primarily based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Id for a 3-12 months time period starting off on 1 January 2018. He also serves as the Secretary-Standard of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), a world wide network of around a hundred and fifty rehabilitation centers with the vision of complete enjoyment of the suitable to rehabilitation for all victims of torture and unwell treatment.

The Unbiased Specialists are section of what is recognised as the Specific Processes of the Human Rights Council. Specific Processes, the premier overall body of unbiased specialists in the UN Human Rights process, is the normal identify of the Council’s unbiased reality-finding and checking mechanisms that handle either precise country situations or thematic challenges in all sections of the entire world. Specific Processes specialists perform on a voluntary basis they are not UN team and do not obtain a income for their perform. They are unbiased from any government or organization and provide in their unique capability.

By Ana Dumbadze

eleven Oct 2018 17:05

The post UN Expert Assesses Human Rights of LGBT Persons in Georgia appeared first on PrideGuy - Gay News, LGBT News, Politics & Entertainment.

#gay #gay news #lgbt

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jaipurphoto · 7 years

Photo

An interview with Flurina Rothenberger, who will be exhibiting her series, I Love to Dress Like I Am Coming from Somewhere and I Have a Place to Go.

Tell us about your beginnings as a photographer. I was raised in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa and photography there was very present in daily life. When I moved to Switzerland for my studies, I felt lost and had troubles relating to the country.

Photography became a kind of safety belt to investigate this place of my origins.

Ever since I started photographing in Africa in 2000 the developments in the different regions of this great and complex continent has remained incredibly fascinating. My understanding of the semantics of images and my questions on them developed parallel with the issue of mobility, with regard to both the course of my own life and the course of time in general. My fascination with images quite clearly stems from the culture in which I spent my childhood. Like all children my surroundings had an impact on me and taught me how to relate to the things I saw or experienced. In Côte d’Ivoire a different expectation to photography, to a portrait, prevailed than was the case, for instance, later during my studies in Switzerland.

Photographing in the cultural space of African societies is the most enjoyable for me, because the coexistence of seemingly divergent facts is possible. Especially today, when the visual style and the narrative of visual stories is strongly oriented on digital media, this is even more pronounced. Current technologies of picture-taking don’t destroy the cultural, traditional heritage. Instead, these innovations create a conceptual space in which modern and traditional references coexist. They reflect both a local and a global identity.

What stories and subjects are you drawn to? I’m drawn to stories which by nature of their context can’t be carrier of a single message. They reflect the complexity of modernization. Africa is a continent of both: unbelievable speed and reluctant transitions.

In most areas economic growth goes hand in hand with a growing disparity between rural and urban population. Most subjects I photograph, relate to the increasing proportion of young people moving into, out of, and through African cities.

What I question through the lens is the result of rapid change, inclusion and exclusion, new and old ties and how mobility is re-negotiating roots and citizenship.

What kind of photography do you do? Can you define it? The topics I address merge from a dense tissue of life, including a social, cultural, traditional, political and economical context. Understanding the fabric of urban social life includes both space and body. As the shape of built environment changes, so does the nature of communities, the relationships, the lifestyle and the fashion in which citizenship is worn on the body. The kind of photography I’m interested in links portrait to architecture, links disciplining space to fixing identities. Photographs which illustrate the material city coming to life through it’s city-dwellers and their strive to turn urban space into something that might work for them. Into spaces of belonging.

What reactions have your work, and the series ‘I Love to Dress Like I Am Coming from Somewhere and I Have a Place to Go’, in particular, received? A common reaction to my work and also the book, is that people say they enjoy the images because they reflect aspects of daily life which are rarely shown in media when addressing the African continent. Frankly, this often surprises me. On a continent of this size and with such different countries, it seems only natural that one can find a range of realities and lifestyles alone within one single neighborhood. These reactions show that there is a demand for diverse visual stories from the African continent. And luckily these are now here. Affordable tools for digital storytelling and internet access have led to a range of local storytellers from Africa sharing their individual perspectives with a broad audience. Could you share a few more of the witty quotes that you encountered while making the series? There are too many. The art of playing around with words, truthful and witty is one of the things I enjoy most in my daily encounters in different African countries. Yesterday, the taxi driver’s reaction to my Swiss origins was: “Ah, in your country gardening is forbidden, right?” I looked at him a little puzzled and he laughed: “Because if you dig, you will find all our money hidden in that ground!"

What struck you as most significant about the young Africans you encountered, was there a common thread? Migration, mobility, the constant negotiation of coexisting values, these aspects shape young people’s identity in contemporary Africa. I witness that in many countries young Africans are taking their education very seriously, but remain with limited opportunities to apply the knowledge that they have gained. That’s highly frustrating and demands inventiveness.

What particularly reflects youth is the blending of different elements – the re-mixing, the ability to create contexts in which different identity-establishing elements are allowed to coexist and, in addition, can mutually benefit each other. The oral and visual culture of the present such as video clips, lyrics and image worlds on social media, as well as the slang of individual communities, reflects these multiple references extremely well.

Parallel to their course of life most of the young people I associate with identify not only with specific, local references – which are sometimes very conservative – but also with a belongingness to “Global Blackness”. Neither of the two references disappears in favour of the other. They coexist. This greatly enhances creativity, but above all it allows young people to break free of old patterns and boldly take new paths. I experience these young people as being in a state of “make or break”.

The widespread longing for movement and migration, which many young people carry within themselves, also contains criticism on the society in which they currently live.

Being able to not only observe, but also to accompany the actors of this generation, to actively participate in documenting their own present creates incredibly diverse insights as to where Africa is heading and is much more rewarding than when I, as the photographer, concentrate solely on my own perspective.

Exotization remains a very blinkered way of looking at communities and lifestyles very different from that of the Western world. How does one avoid this trap? The stereotype is literally a vital organ of photography. Its something all photographers do and play with. The question is how it is used and whether it leads to a devaluation of one’s counterpart. Many prevalent notions of Africa are historically constructed by hegemonic powers and are ultimately unfounded. The prerequisite for creating new images is to acknowledge past, distorted notions as facts and to accept their consequences for the present. One thing that Westerners can learn from Africans is the virtue of listening. It helps to avoid traps. A portrait shoot is an intimate moment between two people, two individuals who agree to share something with each other. It’s easy to challenge stereotypes – we do it by creating new ones and different ones.

JaipurPhoto’s tagline reads ‘A festival on wanderlust'. How do you think this concept is connected with the work you are presenting? I studied photography because I longed to return to the African continent. Hence wanderlust has always been a drive in my work. But a synonym for wanderlust is also exoticism. The exotic perspective is always one formed from the outside. It’s also a good thing to question and document topics outside familiar grounds. Another reason as to why it is so important that more photographers - e.g. from Africa have equal access to different places in the world. The photographs I’m showing are taken from my building archive of work from the African continent. Neither I nor the people I portray can erase distorted views from the past. However, we can both of us, at eye level and with equal effect, help write the present as well as the future. As a photographer in Africa, there is precisely one thing I value about my white skin: it makes sure I don’t forget this exact fact – my shared responsibility for a collective visual memory.

Are there any memorable, striking or funny incidents from your photography-related travels that you would like to share with us? There have been too many funny and memorable incidents, since all my travels are photography related. Teasing and joking is a daily habit in Africa, - and I will happily generalize on this one, it’s the lubricant to a healthy social life! Since I often return to the same countries over the years, it happens that I meet people again in the very same spot I portrayed them years ago! Thats always a small celebration. What has also led to memorable odysseys is returning a portrait copy to the owners. Often the photographs travelled through half the country and many hands before reaching their destiny. Facebook has made this easier but also a lot less exciting!

Have you ever been to India? And to Jaipur? What do you expect from the Indian audience? I am very excited about this visit because it will be my first visit to India. I don’t have any specific expectations but I’m very much interested to learn about the local debates on photography and of course also the audience’s perspective in regards to Africa.

#interview #photography #arts #photofestival #jaipur #india #travel

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