SOMALIA PIRATES

A Spanish tanker picked up seven suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia after they fell into the sea while trying to hijack another vessel. This new has appeared today in the newspaper. We can read news as this one every day, but who are Somalia's pirates? To know those modern-day pirates a bit better I propose you watch this video.

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj5f6ApIjUE

Chema Madoz: Visual metaphors

Last year I visited the exhibition entitled "Chema Madoz" 2000-2005. Madoz is a point of reference in Spain's contemporany art scene because of his unique way of interpreting art trough photography and his searching of visual poetry.

This artist manipulates the objects with studied delicacy. He modifies the objects looking for a balance between the essence of things and their latent significance.

Madoz is a incredible and fascinating collector of ideas that he photographes in black and white. This artist, with his poetic vision provides us with a window to better understand the world around us. As Confucious says: "Everyting has its beauty, but not everyone can see it".

Madoz uses the objecs and his graphic representation as if they were words froma very clear vocabulary. Madoz worked with Joan Brossa on a book (Fotopoemario), and Madoz's work has also been compared to the visual poems of this catalan poet.

The black-and-white format lends a melancholy distante to his work. The scale of greys turns things into shadows. The work with shadows allows the artist to obtain a plastic elegance in his photographs. Chema Madoz works on the delicate border existing between the real and the imaginary. In his works he proposes to us a split between whats exits and what is possible. As usually happen in the plastic arts, what is intellectual in Madoz's work is precisely what is abstract. Madoz has produced images with such a clear surrealist content, that remember the work of Magritte.

Uncanny, but real story

Real life is more impressive than fiction. How many times have you have listen to the sentence “reality exceeds fiction”?
It is difficult for me to imagine an uncanny story, but it is not necessary to imagine one, you can simply swim into daily news to find uncanny, terrible or touching stories.

Chris Biblis was sixteen when doctors diagnosed him leukemia and told him that he needed radiotherapy, and this treatment would leave him sterile and doctors advise him that if he ever wanted to become a father he would need to freeze his sperm before the treatment, so he decided to do it.

Now, he is 38 years old and he and his wife are celebrating the birth of a healthy baby daughter Stella, who was conceived after scientist injected a defrosted sperm into an egg of his wife, Melodie, and implanted it in the uterus.

Five remaining eggs have been fertilized and are now frozen for possible usy by the couple in the future, if they want to have more children. This is a touching story with a promising end because Chris lives 22 years after doctors communicated him his leukemia. He has overcome his illness as well as this year he has celebrated the birth of Stella, his daughter.

A joke about computers

Here is joke for us:
A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike
English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.
"House" for instance, is feminine: >"la casa."
“Pencil," however, is masculine: el lapiz...”
A student asked, “What gender is 'computer'?"
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two
groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether
"computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun.
Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men's group decided that “computer” should definitely be of the…..
feminine gender ("la computadora"), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is
incomprehensible to everyone else;
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for
possible later retrieval;
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending
half your pay check on accessories for it.
(THIS GETS BETTER!)
The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine
("el computador"), because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves;
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they
ARE the problem; and
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a
little longer, you could have gotten a better model.
The women won.

Susan Boyle

This morning I was listening to the radio and I started to become interested in a new about Susan Boyle's video with millions of hits on You Tube.
This woman surprised the judges and audience on TV's Britain's Got Talent with a strong perfomance of "I dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables. Ms Boyle has now become the favourite to win the talent show. Her life will never be the same after that.
She was born with a disability and she was offended when she was a child in school. She asked the teachers for help, but she never received their support. She says "words often hurts more than cuts and bruises and the scares are still there".
She told viewers she had "never been kissed", said she had always wanted to be a singer. Susan Boyle has had a small life. She lives in the same house where she lived with her parents. She was raised there and still sleeps in the same room she did as a child. Susan Boyle, is currently unemployed, is a keen church-goer and community worker who is well-known for her karaoke perfomances. Susan Boyle's story shows us that prejudices are unfair, and that very often big talents are socially rejected.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

Two films about education

The class

Rainer Wenger addresses The Wave members in The Wave.

The film “The Wave” is based on an incident, which took place in 1967 at a high school in Palo Alto, California.
A popular teacher is assigned to teach a week- special project of autocracy. The students are initially unimpressed, and especially bored about the mention of Nazis. So, rather than explains autocracy, the teacher does a real demonstration of this movement.
The film shows us how the totalitarianism can grow easily in modern and democratic societies.
In the film the students have a comfortable life, but if we observe them with more attention, we notice that some of them feel alone, without motivation, without ideas in life and with families who don’t pay attention them. They end up by turning into easy victims of the “Wave”.

The pupils, little by little, starting to feel comfortable with the ideals of “the Wave”. They discover in the group values like unit, force, and identification. In the film, the individual behaviours contribute to collective desires.
Nowadays, realities like social inequality, the need to belong, the rootlessnes help in the promotion to fascist movements.
Among the students, the most weakness character are the first to giving in “the Wave”, others leave the group because they have some values or beliefs, other students go against it, but on the whole the class follow the teacher, who becomes the leader.

The teacher insists on orderly behaviour and suggests everyone adopt a simple uniform (plain white skirts and jeans). The teacher forgets the original point of the experiment and he finds himself by having fanatical followers.
The film is interesting because make us ask ourselves if a new dictatorship is possible in a modern and civilised society.

The Class (between the walls in French) is an interesting journey into a multicultural high school in Paris over the course of a school year. The class is a mix of a documentary and dramatic plot. It is not difficult to empathise with the main character, the literature teacher François Marin. He struggles to maintain order in his class of young teenagers, trying to create a good environment. We can see the process of educating a fresh class of bubbly and wide awake adolescents in a Paris suburban school. Today, teaching in public schools is more democratic, and the teacher allows student participation, and the student is encouraged to talk and become an integral part of the education.
Everything he tries to teach in class is constantly rejected and he finds himself arguing with the students that he so clearly wants to help. As the school year progresses the tension rises, until François finds himself in a difficult position. In my opinion, the students want to find their own identity in the hostile and tough society they live in. In the film the frustration of parents and teachers are clearly portrayed.
The film shows the difference between the education before versus the education now. For me, there are some values, like the respect, that now don’t exist in the classrooms. The lack of motivation due to new technologies and the low quality of education are some of the most problems, that existing in own societies. The quality of public schools is decreasing each year because of the high number of immigrants’ students that comes from different countries. Africans ands Asians are now citizens of France. The student Suleyman says in the film: “I have nothing to say about me because no one knows me”.
In this film the teacher is not a revolutionary person with innovative ideas like Mr Keating in the film “Dead Poets Society”. Mr Keating helps his students with original methods, but in “The Class”, Monsieur Martin tries to do his job the best he can, and sometimes he makes mistakes and he has to assume the consequences. I think the film is very realistic and very accurate.

DE FACTO. JOAN FONTCUBERTA. 1982-2008

I recommended you an interesting exhibition: “De Facto. Joan Fontcuberta 1982-2008. “From nature photography to the nature of photography: That might summarize the artistic career of Joan Fontcuberta.

In this exhibition are showed a selection of works from eighteen of the artist’s projects. In these works Fontcuberta tries to explain, poetically and ironically, the role of the image perceived as a document. He suggests a critical practice of photography. The artist rejects the simple description of reality, which has been historically the traditional concept in photography, so he investigates with humour and imagination in the paradox of the image.

Before starting the exhibition to understand it better I recommended you to watch the documentary where the artist explains their works and read the supporting text to fully capture the real meaning of these images. Like a kind of provocation, he organizes photographic jokes that often question the basis of knowledge (the science ant the monopoly of the reality). The works seen here include Herbarium (fake biological and botanical discoveries), Googlerama (a series of photo-mosaics using Google) and Sputnik (a story about a Russian astronaut who is still lost in the space).

But the project that more shocked me it is “Desconstructing Ossama”. In this work Fontcuberta explains the theory that all the images we see of Al Qaeda are part of a vast conspiracy to manipulate the viewers. The men in the images are, in fact, actors. In 2006 Ben Kalish and Ben Sallad, photojournalists for Al-Zur discovered that a leader of Al Qaeda’s military wing was in reality an actor and singer who had appeared in soap operas (the lies of power, the power of lies).

Finally, Fontcuberta is more interested in the philosophical possibilities than the pictorial qualities of photography because he makes us think as much as look.