Juliano Mer-Khamis e a Liberdade

(Em inglês)

Construa com... garrafas de plástico

Lacoste censura excluindo trabalho de artista palestina por ser muito... pró-palestina

ACTUALIZAÇÃO:

O Musée de l’Elysée decidiu retirar, ontem dia 21, o seu apoio à concretização do Lacoste Elysée Prize dado considerar intolerável a censura imposta pela Lacoste à artista palestina Larissa Sansour!

Communiqué de presse

Lausanne, 21 Decembre 2011 – Le Musée de l’Elysée a décidé de suspendre l’organisation du Prix Lacoste Elysée 2011. Introduit en 2010 pour soutenir les jeunes photographes, ce prix est d’un montant de 25.000 euros.

Pour cette édition 2011, 8 artistes ont été sélectionnés pour concourir. Il leur a été demandé de produire 3 photos sur le thème de la joie de vivre.

Chacun d’entre eux, doté d’une bourse de 4000 euros, avait carte blanche pour interpréter ce thème comme il l’entendait, de manière directe ou indirecte, avec authenticité ou ironie, en se basant, ou pas, sur son travail antérieur.

Un jury d’experts devait se réunir à la fin janvier pour choisir le gagnant de ce prix.

Le Musée de L’Elysée vient de prendre cette décision de tout suspendre, en raison du souhait du partenaire privé d’exclure Larissa Sansour, une des 8 candidats retenus.

Nous réaffirmons notre soutien à Larissa Sansour, pour la qualité artisitque de son travail et de son engagement.

Le Musée de L’Elysée lui a même proposé d’exposer sa série « Nation Estate »dans son enceinte.
Depuis 25 ans, le Musée de l’Elysée défend avec force des artistes, leur travail, la liberté artistique et la liberté d’expression. En prenant cette décision aujourd’hui, le Musée de l’Elysée est fidèle à son engagement envers ses valeurs fondamentales.

O post original:

A charge de kalahasch, à censura da Lacoste, no seu artigo “LACOSTE ECARTE UNE ARTISTE PALESTINIENNE DE LA COMPETITION” publicado no Le Post.

A imagem original, objecto da charge, foi concebida pela artista gráfica palestina Larissa Sansour  especialmente para concorrer ao Lacoste Elysée Prize 2011.

Esta imagem é uma das que compõem o trabalho apresentado a concurso por Larissa Sansour e que podem encontrar no seu site pessoal.

As três peças apresentadas a concurso, serão integradas num projecto mais global, em desenvolvimento, de fotografia e vídeo denominado "Estado Nação", uma ideia que foi despoletada pela apresentação da candidatura da Palestina à ONU.

Situado no interior de um pedaço sombrio de arquitetura hi-tech, esta narrativa fotográfica antevê "la joie de vivre" de um Estado palestino nascendo das cinzas do processo de paz.


Nesta visão distópica, os palestinos têm o seu estado na forma de um arranha-céu único: o "Estado Nação". Cercado por um muro de concreto, este colossal arranha-céus hi-tech abriga toda a população palestina - finalmente, vivendo uma boa vida. Cada cidade tem o seu próprio piso: Jerusalém, o terceiro; Ramallah, o quarto. As viagens entre cidades anteriormente perturbadas por checkpoints são feitas agora pelo elevador.

Buscando um sentimento de pertença, o átrio de cada andar reencena praças e monumentos icônicos - as portas dos elevadores do piso de Jerusalém abrem-se para a Cúpula do Rochedo, em tamanho real. Construído fora da cidade de Jerusalém, o edifício também tem vistas para a cúpula de ouro a partir dos andares superiores.

O projeto "Estado Nação" consiste em 8-10 fotografias de grande formato. Está programado para produção no início de 2012.

Além da série de fotos, uma versão em vídeo da sci-fi "Estado Nação" está actualmente em produção.

É interessante notar que para esta edição do Lacoste Elysée Prize 2011, fora escolhido o tema "joie de vivre" e as instruções, segundo o “Le Monde” teriam sido assim formuladas: 

"Todos são livres para abordar o tema como lhe aprouver, seja directa ou indirectamente, com autenticidade ou escárnio, com base numa obra já existente ou pela criação."
A composição fotográfica elaborada por Sansour,  tinha sido elegida em Novembro como uma das oito finalistas do Lacoste Elysée Prize 2011.

Em Dezembro, quando Art Review publicou os trabalhos pré-selecionados, a composição não apareceu e o nome de Sansour tinha sido apagado da lista dos finalistas.

Uma imagem capturada pela The Electronic Intifada do site oficial do Lacoste Elysée Prize 2011 prova que o nome de Sansour constava da lista de finalistas pelo menos até 12 de Dezembro, tendo sido posteriormente removido.

Full size

Ainda segundo o Le Monde foi a Lacoste que pressionou o museu Elysée de Lausane, - que também não fica nada bem na "fotografia", até pelas acrescidas responsabilidades enquanto organismo cultural  - recusando apoiar um trabalho "demasiado pró-palestino". Para evitar a "má publicidade", os organizadores pediram a Larissa Sansour para assinar um documento onde se afirmava ter sido ela que tinha decidido pessoalmente abandonar a competição "a fim de se consagrar a outras oportunidades." Ao que ela se recusou, afirmando-se "profundamente chocada".

Neste momento as sugestões que correm contra este despudorado acto de censura são as seguintes:

a) A mais comum : Boicote a todos os produtos da Lacoste;

b) E a sugestão do blog "Lunettes rouges": Escrever aos 7 artistas entretanto selecionados para lhes pedir que se retirem do concurso por solidariedade. Aqui estão os seus endereços (todos os endereços de e-mail são públicos e provenientes dos seus sites):

• info@charlesfreger.com;
• info@ph0.ch; 
• metzger.olivier@neuf.fr; 
• contact@trishmorrissey.com; 
• taiyo-nico@gmx.net; 
• info@annaskladmann.com; 
• info@juliasmirnova.com

c) Sugerir aos membros (presumivelmente) independentes do júri que recusem a atribuição do Prémio sobre a pressão da censura.

Sam Stourdzé, director do Musée de l'Elysée (laurence.hanna-daher@vd.ch), que, é preciso dizer, ofereceu uma exposição individual a Larissa Sansour, 

e na hipótese de os membros do júri serem os mesmos do ano passado, os membros independentes são contactáveis através dos seguintes endereços: 

• michel.mallard@gmail.com;
• contact@henricartierbresson.org pour Agnès Sire;
•  tomwatt@artreview.com 

E já agora os endereços dos dois membros do júri que representam a Lacoste são: 

• contact@felipeoliveirabaptista.com (com a peculiaridade de ter um nome bem português);
•  info@christophepillet.com

Estas últimas sugestões são respigadas

“With Friends Like These…” por Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery

December 17, 2011

                                   “With Friends Like These…”

MY GOD, what a bizarre lot these Republican aspirants for the US presidency are!

What a sorry bunch of ignoramuses and downright crazies. Or, at best, what a bunch of cheats and cynics! (With the possible exception of the good doctor Ron Paul)”.

Is this the best a great and proud nation can produce? How frightening the thought that one of them may actually become the most powerful person in the world, with a finger on the biggest nuclear button!

BUT LET’S concentrate on the present front-runner. (Republicans seem to change front-runners like a fastidious beau changes socks.)

It’s Newt Gingrich. Remember him? The Speaker of the House who had an extra-marital affair with an intern while at the same time leading the campaign to impeach President Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern.

But that’s not the point. The point is that this intellectual giant – named after Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist ever – has discovered a great historical truth.

The original Newton discovered the Law of Gravity. Newton Leroy Gingrich has discovered something no less earth-shaking: there is an “invented” people around, referring to the Palestinians.

To which a humble Israeli like me might answer, in the best Hebrew slang: “Good morning, Eliyahu!”  Thus we honor people who have made a great discovery which, unfortunately, has been discovered by others long before.

FROM ITS very beginning, the Zionist movement has denied the existence of the Palestinian people. It’s an article of faith.

The reason is obvious: if there exists a Palestinian people, then the country the Zionists were about to take over was not empty. Zionism would entail an injustice of historic proportions. Being very idealistic persons, the original Zionists found a way out of this moral dilemma: they simply denied its existence. The winning slogan was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”

So who were these curious human beings they met when they came to the country? Oh, ah, well, they were just people who happened to be there, but not “a” people. Passers-by, so to speak. Later, the story goes, after we had made the desert bloom and turned an arid and neglected land into a paradise, Arabs from all over the region flocked to the country, and now they have the temerity – indeed the chutzpah – to claim that they constitute a Palestinian nation!

For many years after the founding of the State of Israel, this was the official line. Golda Meir famously exclaimed: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!”

(To which I replied in the Knesset: “Mrs. Prime Minister, perhaps you are right. Perhaps there really is no Palestinian people. But if millions of people mistakenly believe that they are a people, and behave like a people, then they are a people.”)

A huge propaganda machine – both in Israel and abroad – was employed to “prove” that there was no Palestinian people. A lady called Joan Peters wrote a book (“From Time Immemorial”) proving that the riffraff calling themselves “Palestinians” had nothing to do with Palestine. They are nothing but interlopers and impostors. The book was immensely successful – until some experts took it apart and proved that the whole edifice of conclusive proofs was utter rubbish.

I myself have spent many hundreds of hours trying to convince Israeli and foreign audiences that there is a Palestinian people and that we have to make peace with them. Until one day the State of Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the “Palestinian people”, and the argument was laid to rest.

Until Newt came along and, like a later-day Jesus, raised it from the dead.

OBVIOUSLY, HE is much too busy to read books. True, he was once a teacher of history, but for many years now he has been very busy speakering the Congress, making a fortune as an “adviser” of big corporations and now trying to become president.

Otherwise, he would probably have come across a brilliant historical book by Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities”, which asserts that all modern nations are invented.

Nationalism is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. When a community decides to become a nation, it has to reinvent itself. That means inventing a national past, reshuffling historical facts (and non-facts) in order to create a coherent picture of a nation existing since antiquity. Hermann the Cherusker, member of a Germanic tribe who betrayed his Roman employers, became a “national” hero. Religious refugees who landed in America and destroyed the native population became a “nation”. Members of an ethnic-religious Diaspora formed themselves into a “Jewish nation”. Many others did more or less the same.

Indeed, Newt would profit from reading a book by a Tel Aviv University professor, Shlomo Sand, a kosher Jew, whose Hebrew title speaks for itself: “When and How the Jewish People was Invented?”

Who are these Palestinians? About a hundred years ago, two young students in Istanbul, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the future Prime Minister and President (respectively) of Israel, wrote a treatise about the Palestinians. The population of this country, they said, has never changed. Only small elites were sometimes deported. The towns and villages never moved, as their names prove. Canaanites became Israelites, then Jews and Samaritans, then Christian Byzantines. With the Arab conquest, they slowly adopted the religion of Islam and the Arabic Culture. These are today’s Palestinians. I tend to agree with them.

PARROTING THE straight Zionist propaganda line – by now discarded by most Zionists – Gingrich argues that there can be no Palestinian people because there never was a Palestinian state. The people in this country were just “Arabs” under Ottoman rule.

So what? I used to hear from French colonial masters that there is no Algerian people, because there never was an Algerian state, there was never even a united country called Algeria. Any takers for this theory now?

The name “Palestine” was mentioned by a Greek historian some 2500 years ago. A “Duke of Palestine” is mentioned in the Talmud. When the Arabs conquered the country, they called it “Filastin”, as  they still do”. The Arab national movement came into being all over the Arab world, including Palestine – at the same time as the Zionist movement – and strove for independence from the Ottoman Sultan.

For centuries, Palestine was considered a part of Greater Syria (the region known in Arabic as 'Sham').  There was no formal distinction between Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Jordanians. But when, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the European powers divided the Arab world between them, a state called Palestine became a fact under the British Mandate, and the Arab Palestinian people established themselves as a separate nation with a national flag of their own. Many peoples in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America did the same, even without asking Gingrich for confirmation.

It would certainly be ironic if the members of the “invented” Palestinian nation were expected to ask for recognition from the members of the “invented” Jewish/Israeli nation, at the demand of a member of the “invented” American nation, a person who, by the way, is of mixed German, English, Scottish and Irish stock.

Years ago, there was short-lived controversy about Palestinian textbooks. It was argued that they were anti-Semitic and incited to murder. That was laid to rest when it became clear that all Palestinian schoolbooks were cleared by the Israeli occupation authorities, and most were inherited from the previous Jordanian regime. But Gingrich does not shrink from resurrecting this corpse, too.

All Palestinians – men, women and children – are terrorists, he asserts, and Palestinian pupils learn at school how to kill us poor and helpless Israelis. Ah, what would we do without such stout defenders as Newt? What a pity that this week a photo of him, shaking the hand of Yasser Arafat, was published.

And please don’t show him the textbooks used in some of our schools, especially the religious ones!

IS IT really a waste of time to write about such nonsense?

It may seem so, but one cannot ignore the fact that the dispenser of these inanities may be tomorrow’s President of the United States of America. Given the economic situation, that is not as unlikely as it sounds.

As for now, Gingrich is doing immense damage to the national interests of the US. At this historic juncture, the masses at all the Tahrir Squares across the Arab world are wondering about America’s attitude. Newt’s answer contributes to a new and more profound anti-Americanism.

Alas, he is not the only extreme rightist seeking to embrace Israel. Israel has lately become the Mecca of all the world’s racists. This week we were honored by the visit of the husband of Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front. A pilgrimage to the Jewish State is now a must for any aspiring fascist.

One of our ancient sages coined the phrase: “Not for nothing does the starling go to the raven. It’s because they are of the same kind”. 

Thanks. But sorry. They are not of my kind.

To quote another proverb: With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Morreu hoje Cesária Évora. É viva Cesária Évora.

SODADE

Lançamento d'O Vinho do Peres - 20 de Dezembro

NB: É do "Peres" mas não é meu. É do Miguel Peres, meu filho.

Os "Senhores do Mundo"

Como o "Sol" destrata os factos.

Condenações nos protestos da greve geral 'talvez seja aviso' para futuro - Sociedade - Sol

Curiosa a forma como o Sol "tratou" esta notícia.

1. Ligando a violência julgada à greve geral em título de caixa alta. Quando se sabe que a violência nada teve a ver com a greve geral, nem com a manifestação promovida pela CGTP-IN.

2. Usando as declarações do advogado António Vaz, fora do seu contexto, visando, em minha opinião, demover os timoratos a participarem em futuros eventos de protesto.

Se não vejamos:

a) Depois de as usar parcialmente no título de caixa alta "Condenações nos protestos da greve geral 'talvez seja aviso' para futuro";

b) Reforça a ideia do "aviso" sem identificar o seu autor, no primeiro paragrafo:
"O advogado de um dos detidos nos protestos ocorridos frente à Assembleia da República no dia da greve geral disse hoje que a condenação de dois arguidos poderá significar «um aviso para manifestações futuras»."

c) No segundo paragrafo identifica o autor e apenas insere o que lhe interessa destacar:
"«Talvez seja um aviso para manifestações futuras», disse aos jornalistas António Vaz, advogado de Eva Massy, de 16 anos, condenada a seis meses de prisão, com pena suspensa por um ano pelo crime de ofensa à integridade física por ter arremessado uma pedra contra os polícias."

d) E finalmente... no SEXTO paragrafo, contextualiza as declarações de António Vaz:
"O advogado de Eva Massy considerou «injustas» as penas, tendo em conta «as contradições das provas produzidas», sublinhando que o tribunal decidiu «dar credibilidade aos depoimentos contraditórios dos polícias»."

REVEJA E VERIFIQUE A DIFERENÇA:

"«Talvez seja um aviso para manifestações futuras», disse aos jornalistas António Vaz, advogado de Eva Massy, de 16 anos, condenada a seis meses de prisão, com pena suspensa por um ano pelo crime de ofensa à integridade física por ter arremessado uma pedra contra os polícias."
"O advogado de Eva Massy considerou «injustas» as penas, tendo em conta «as contradições das provas produzidas», sublinhando que o tribunal decidiu «dar credibilidade aos depoimentos contraditórios dos polícias»."

Dia dos Direitos Humanos 2011

Sebastián Piñera, apoiante respeitoso de... Pinochet

Mais uma humilhação para Obama imposta pelo lobby nacional-sionista

Jewish groups demand Obama action over Belgium envoy's anti-Semitism remarks - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

Pode ler a história seguindo o link, aqui fica uma breve resenha:

"Uma distinção deve ser feita entre o anti-semitismo tradicional, que deve ser condenado e o ódio muçulmano para com os judeus, que deriva do conflito entre Israel e os palestinos", teria dito Howard Gutman numa conferência sobre anti-semitismo, organizada pela União dos Judeus Europeus, e realizada em Bruxelas na semana passada, passando a argumentar que "... um tratado de paz entre israelitas e palestinos iria diminuir significativamente o anti-semitismo muçulmano. "

Ocorre que Howard Gutman é judeu e é embaixador dos EUA (pois…) na Bélgica.

O bom senso de Howard Gutman, não agradou ao lobby nacional-sionista que desde logo começou a fazer campanha, obrigando a Administração Obama a rebaixar-se emitindo um comunicado, onde afirma:

 

"Condenamos o anti-semitismo em todas as suas formas, e que não existe qualquer justificação para o preconceito contra o povo judeu ou Israel,"

Notícias da Palestina

Notícias de 6-12-2011:

14:48 Prisoners’ Families Appeal to Allow Entry of Winter Clothes into Prisons

14:28 Qaraqe Calls on European Parliament to Investigate Palestinian Prisoners Situation

13:33 PCBS: Half of Households Exposed to Israeli Violence

12:22 Israeli Soldiers Arrest 7 Palestinians in Bethlehem, Qalqilya

12:04 Erekat and Feltman Discuss Efforts to Resume Negotiations

11:37 Israeli Court Rules to Expel Jerusalem Lawmaker to West Bank

09:56 Israeli Bulldozers Demolish House near Jerusalem

09:37 Israeli Forces Raid Beit Hanoun 

Fonte: WAFA