Dynamic Africa
Formerly, "This is Africa/fyeahAfrica".
(Profile Photo by Mama Casset)
DISCLAIMER:
I do not endorse any of the products or opinions shared on this site, nor do I claim any of the work posted here to be my own - except where stated. All posts originally made by me are credited. If no credit is given then the work is either my own/written by me or reblogged from another source.
A LITTLE ABOUT ME:
Student, 24
Based in Cape Town, South Africa
From Lagos, Nigeria
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(As an unemployed media student, all donations go into ensuring my survival in this cruel world and future projects I hope to embark on).
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(since Oct. 21th 2012)
EVENT: TOYIN ODUTOLA, My Country Has No Name, May 16 – June 29, 2013.
Opening reception for the exhibition: Thursday, May 16th, from 6 – 8 PM at 513 West 20th Street.
Photo from French photographer Luc Choquer’s Potraits de Français.
Photo from French photographer Luc Choquer’s Potraits de Français.
Finnish-Ethiopian singer Mirel Wagner’s latest single “Is This What Love Looks Like” carries with it the artist’s signature minimalist folk sound, coupled with haunting but soulful vocals that slowly pour out a daunting tale of the gritty hopelessness of unconditional love.
The Lagosian attire for Yoruba men (the southern tribe), where I’m from, usually consists of the Buba which is a box shaped shirt made out of cotton that will either hit shy of his hips or hang long to his knees; Sokoto, which are trousers that are usually quiet loose; and Agbada (this is the master piece): It’s an oversized, flowing robe with wide arms and beautiful embroidery around the neck and chest area. This goes on top of the Buba shirt. All my collections are always inspired by the these simple silhouettes, textures and colors.
Film Festival: Bringing Human Rights Issues to Life
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns to New York screens from June 13 to 23, 2013, with a program of 20 challenging and provocative films from across the globe that call for justice and social change. Now in its 24th edition, the festival will once again be presented at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and this year adds downtown screenings at the IFC Center.
The festival will launch on June 13 with a fundraising Benefit Night for Human Rights Watch featuring the HBO documentary Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington. The film is Sebastian Junger’s moving tribute to his lost friend and Restrepo co-director, the photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the Libyan civil war in 2011. The main program will kick off on June 14 with the Opening Night presentation of Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Mock’s ANITA, in which Anita Hill looks back at the powerful testimony she gave against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and its impact on the broader discussion of gender inequality in America. The Closing Night screening on June 23 will be Jeremy Teicher’s award-winning drama Tall As the Baobab Tree, the touching story of a teenage girl who tries to rescue her younger sister from an arranged marriage in rural Senegal.
Traditional Values and Human Rights: Women’s Rights
Traditional values are often cited as an excuse to undermine human rights. In addition to Tall As the Baobab Tree, five documentaries in this year’s festival consider the impact on women. Veteran documentarian Kim Longinotto’s Salma is the remarkable story of a South Indian Muslim woman who endured a 25-year confinement and forced marriage by her own family before achieving national renown as the most famous female poet in the Tamil language. Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief’s Rafea: Solar Mama profiles an illiterate Bedouin woman from Jordan who gets the chance to be educated in solar engineering but has to overcome her husband’s resistance.In Karima Zoubir’s intimately observed Camera/Woman, a Moroccan divorcée supports her family by documenting wedding parties while navigating her own series of heartaches. It will be shown with Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s Going Up the Stairs, a charming portrait of a traditional Iranian grandmother who discovers her love of painting late in life and is invited to exhibit her work in Paris. Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s candid HBO documentary Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer centers on the women of the radical-feminist punk group, two of whom are currently serving time in a Russian prison for their acts of defiance against the government.
Traditional Values and Human Rights: LGBT Rights
Three films in the program remind viewers that, despite recent strides toward equality, LGBT communities around the world still struggle for acceptance. Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann’s Born This Way is an intimate look at the lives of four young gay men and lesbians in Cameroon,where there are more arrests for homosexuality than in any other country in the world.Yoruba Richen’s The New Black uncovers the complicated and often combative intersection of the African-American and LGBT civil rights movements, with a particular focus on homophobia in the black church. In Srdjan Dragojevic’s drama The Parade, a fight by activists to stage a Gay Pride parade in Belgrade leads to an unlikely alliance in a black-humored look at contemporary Serbia.
Traditional Values and Human Rights: Disability Rights
Harry Freeland’s In the Shadow of the Sun is an unforgettable study in courage,telling the story of two albino men who attempt to follow their dreams in the face of prejudice and fear in Tanzania.
Crises and Migration
Three documentaries highlight the issues of humanitarian aid, conflict, and migration. In the Festival Centerpiece, Fatal Assistance, the acclaimed director Raoul Peck, Haiti’s former culture minister, takes us on a two-year journey following the 2010 earthquake and looks at the damage done by international aid agencies whose well-meaning but ignorant assumptions turned a nightmare into an unsolvable tragedy.Danish journalist Nagieb Khaja’s My Afghanistan – Life in the Forbidden Zone shows ordinary Afghans in war-torn Helmand who were provided with hi-res camera phones to record their daily lives, giving a voice to those frequently ignored by the Western media.Marco Williams’The Undocumented isan unvarnished account of the thousands of Mexican migrants who have died in recent years while trying to cross Arizona’s unforgiving Sonora Desert in search of a better life in the United States.
Focus on Asia
The festival will screen two important documentaries from Asia.In Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling and inventive The Act of Killing, the unrepentant former members of Indonesian death squads are challenged to reenact some of their many murders in the style of the American movies they love.
Marc Wiese’s Camp 14 – Total Control Zone tells the powerful story of Shin Dong-Huyk, who spent the first two decades of his life behind the barbed wire of a North Korean labor camp before his dramatic escape led him into an outside world he had never known. Wiese is the recipient of the festival’s annual Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking for his film.
Human Rights in the United States
Four American documentaries – including festival opener ANITA – highlight human rights issues in our own back yard. 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film goes behind the scenes of the 2011 movement, digging into big-picture issues as organizers, participants, and critics reveal what happened and why. Al Reinert’s An Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story tells the story of a Texas man who was wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder and was exonerated by new DNA evidence after nearly 25 years behind bars. Lisa Biagiotti’s deepsouth is an evocative exploration of the rise in HIV in the rural American south, a region where poverty, a broken health system and a culture of denial force those affected to create their own solutions to survive.
In conjunction with this year’s film program, the festival will present the photo exhibit Dowry: Child and Forced Marriage in South Sudan. The exhibit is Getty photographer Brent Stirton’s visual investigation into the devastating impact the tradition of child marriage has on girls in this East African nation. It will be featured in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for the duration of the festival.Photo: © 2012 Harry Freeland
Afropolitan Dreams
Artist: Blitz The Ambassador
Stylist: Joshua Kissi
Photography/Creative Direction: J. Quazi King
http://quazimottoonwax.tumblr.com/
Instagram = @Quazimottoonwx
(via streetetiquette)
Cecile Kyenge, Italyâs first black government minister, proposes a law that would give citizenship to the children of immigrants if they are born on Italian soil.
Born in the Congo, Kyenge moved to Italy in the 1980s to study medicine in Rome, before obtaining a position in a hospital in Modena. She met her husband, a native Italian with whom she has two children, after he underwent surgery in her department. Kyenge was at the forefront of a dramatic demographic shift in Italy. As recently as 1991, just 1 in 100 residents held a foreign passport. Today, it’s 1 out of every 12. For every five children delivered in the country, one is born to a foreign parent. Unlike Kyenge, most of Italy’s recent arrivals are poor and employed in jobs that Italians refuse: construction workers, maids, caregivers for the elderly. The foreign-born middle class has yet to establish itself, while the first generation of immigrant children born and educated in the country is just moving into the workforce.
While Italians don’t like to think of their country as racist, the experience of non-white Italians and resident immigrants illustrates a culture that has found it hard to welcome increasing diversity. “How many times have I been told, ‘You’re so beautiful, you don’t even seem truly black?’” says Medhin Paolos, 23, an Italian of Eritrean descent and a member of Rete G2, a group campaigning for a reform of Italy’s citizenship laws. “Where I come from, this is not a compliment.”
A study by the University of Messina and the anti-discrimination group ARCI found that a substantial majority of the children of immigrants reported being insulted on the streets, talked down to by teachers, watched with suspicion in shops, turned away from restaurants and treated rudely by immigration officials. In 2002, the Italian government passed a law requiring all non-Italian residents to have their fingerprints taken, as part of the process for applying for residency.
“There’s the idea that black people stink,” says Jean Zongo, 28, the son of African immigrants. There was a period when he was younger, Zongo was afraid to take the bus at night, for fear of encountering racial violence. More than once, he has climbed aboard to hear a group of young men grunting like monkeys. It’s a charmless display of racism that has migrated from Italy’s soccer stadiums — where Mario Balotelli, the Italian football star of Ghanaian heritage, has famously faced chants of “There’s no such thing as a black Italian” — to youth culture at large. Zongo has traveled to France, Spain and England. Only in his own country, he says, is he made to feel second class. “[Discrimination] is present in just about every aspect of life, in every circumstance,” he says.
Continues thru Aug 4:
“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works”
El Anatsui
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY
The first solo exhibition in a New York museum by the globally renowned contemporary artist El Anatsui, this show features over 30 works in metal and wood that transform appropriated objects into site-specific sculptures. Anatsui converts found materials into a new type of media that lies between sculpture and painting, combining aesthetic traditions from his birth country, Ghana; his home in Nsukka, Nigeria; and the global history of abstraction.
Included in the exhibition are twelve recent monumental wall and floor sculptures, widely considered to represent the apex of Anatsui’s career. The metal wall works, created with bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, are pieced together to form colorful, textured hangings that take on radically new shapes with each installation. Anatsui is captivated by his materials’ history of use, reflecting his own nomadic background. Gravity and Grace responds to a long history of innovations in abstract art and performance, building upon cross-cultural exchange among Africa, Europe, and the Americas and presenting works in a wholly new, African medium.photos: C-Monster
Out of a total of 655 entries, Shire was shortlisted along with six other African up-and-coming poets.
The 24-year-old Kenyan born, England-raised poet has read her work globally, and her poetry pamphlet Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth was published in 2011 by flipped eye.
The judges praised Warsan’s poetry for its combination of substance, beauty and drama. Her work was described as “…beautifully crafted, subtle and understated in its use of language and metaphor yet still able to evoke a strong sense of mood and place that touches the reader.”
“I’ve never been to Somalia, and I’m Somali. So the poems for me are a way of creating a connection to a country I’ve never been to. I don’t know how it feels to belong, or to be home or anything like that,” - Shire
Afro-Cubans and Sierra Leoneans bridge the gap in documentary, They Are We
Can a family separated for 170 years by the transatlantic slave trade sing and dance its way back together again? THEY ARE WE tells a story of survival against the odds, and how determination and shared humanity can triumph over the bleakest of histories.
#towatch
(via blackfilm)
Don’t miss two awesome concerts with leading Tunisian singers Ghalia Benali and Emel Mathlouthi, part of French Institute Alliance Française Festival World Nomads Tunisia! Enjoy Ghalia’s soulful melodic songs 5/15 and Emel’s powerful fiery music on 5/22. Get the two ticket package and save!
Details Ghalia: http://bit.ly/11WFsce
Details Emel: http://bit.ly/ZXmZ0J
