Burning Man – Must See Festival

Burning-Man-Unicorn

A magnificent unicorn struggles to emerge from the cracking dust-covered playa

Burning-Man-Flames

Rotating installation that breathes four hot streams of fire into the air at night.

Sand(wo)man made out of metal bowls celebrates the universe with outstretched arms, a fertile womb and dancing feet.

Over 200 feet long and 50 feet high, this awe-inspiring Conexus Cathedral, built in 2006, was a hallowed place that inspired both reflection and dancing.

Burning Man

Never knew what it was. Now I know … a bit.

Freelance Journalist Meredith Price describes the magic of the Burning Man Project, held yearly in the Nevada desert, with the help of some truly amazing photos.

Every year, over 40,000 people come together in a Utopian experiment showing the most stunning artwork, grandiose costumes and outlandish art cars and there is some fire too.

Held in Black Rock City, Nevada, the festival is named Burning Man after the ritualistic burning of a wooden effigy in the shape of a man.

Via the Tripbase Blog

The 10 Burning Man Principles are:

  1. Radical Inclusion
    Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
  2. Gifting
    Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
  3. Decommodification
    In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
  4. Radical Self-reliance
    Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
  5. Radical Self-expression
    Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
  6. Communal Effort
    Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
  7. Civic Responsibility
    We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
  8. Leaving No Trace
    Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
  9. Participation
    Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
  10. Immediacy
    Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

Waddenzee (Wadden Sea) becomes Unesco World Heritage Site

Waddenzee

This photo shows a large part of the Dutch Waddenzee (Wadden Sea): a large shallow water areal between a couple of islands in the Norh, the provinces North Holland below left, Friesland to the right and Groningen which is not shown on this photo. Right of Groningen it spans further across to Denmark above between the German North Sea Coast and German’s Wadden Islands. You can see the large dike (Afsluitdijk) connecting the two provinces. The Dutch word wad means a shoal that becomes dry at ebb tide. There are many of them and during ebb you can walk from several places on the mainland to several island. It is a real adventure and can be dangerous if not well planned time wise.

During its 2008 session the Unesco has entered the Waddenzee (Wadden Sea) in its register of Unesco World Heritage Sites

Its announcement reads:

The Wadden Sea (Germany / The Netherlands) comprises the Dutch Wadden Sea Conservation Area and the German Wadden Sea National Parks of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. It is a large temperate, relatively flat coastal wetland environment, formed by the intricate interactions between physical and biological factors that have given rise to a multitude of transitional habitats with tidal channels, sandy shoals, sea-grass meadows, mussel beds, sandbars, mudflats, salt marshes, estuaries, beaches and dunes. The inscribed site represents over 66% of the whole Wadden Sea and is home to numerous plant and animal species, including marine mammals such as the harbour seal, grey seal and harbour porpoise. It is also a breeding and wintering area for up to 12 millions birds per annum and it supports more than 10 percent of 29 species. The site is one of the last remaining natural, large-scale, intertidal ecosystems where natural processes continue to function largely undisturbed.

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Herewith The Netherlands counts 8 listed World Heritage Sites.

Feed People to the Pigs – A Mirror for the Pork Eaters among us!

Stroom  AVL Foodmaster 01 by Eveline van Egdom

Joep van Lieshout of Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) is “at it” again:

This summer Stroom organizes an exposition as part of a two year curriculum titled Foodprint in order to study the relation between food and the city. If you understand Dutch you can read more at Stroom’s blog Foodprint and here is their Dutch blog’s summary of the exhibition. The exhibition will run until August 23, 2009.

At the exhibition Joep, who recently sold some work – including his version of a pod hotel – to Brat Pitt at Art Basel, has reversed the “normal” slaughterhouse where pigs are slaughtered to feed the humans. He installed a slaughterhouse where humans are slaughtered to feed the pigs. A mirror for the pork eaters among us.

The photo is by Eveline van Egdom. I will certainly visit it to make some photos myself.

100 sexless Artists – Would You believe Italians to be as Puritan as Americans?

It’s a pity for the English language readers that Gotz Primke of Le Gourmand writes in German only: He really offers good content and inspired me for this topic:

Charlier's penis of Christo, which comes with clue "Wraps in very special things".

Belgian artist Jacques Charlier has put together a veritable gallery of portraits based on conceptual analysis and personal interpretation of the “artistic attributes” of major representatives of modern and contemporary art, thus enabling, among other things, a humorous and satirical re-reading of recent art history. He had submitted 100 posters “100 sexes d’artistes” containing 100 more or less sexually tainted parodies of those 100 Artists for the 2009 Venice Biennial. His idea was to offer a clue and let the public guess who he was referring to. This photo points to Christo who wraps everything. However, both the curators and the mayor of Venice refused the posters as they feared the artists involved would be offended. Jacques interviewed all artists but one. They all reported to feel no offense.

Jacques protests with a site against this censorship and with an official vernissage (or is it venissage in this case?). See the above video.

The Brussels Museum of Modern Art backs his protest with an exhibition until September 13, 2009.

Now I wouldn’t have thought Italians to be as puritan as Americans. Would You?

This brings back memories of another protest at a Venice Biennial the one of 2005:

2005-september-Art-en-Route-in-Venice-IMG_0519

That of the Guerilla Girls against the “male chauvinist pigs” still ruling the Venice Biennial…L’Histoire se repete… Lol: yesterday it was 500 years ago that John Calvin was born…a sign of Calvinism in Venice maybe?

2009 The Hague Sculpture – Read My Lips

2009 The Hague Sculpture _MG_0007

On Tuesday June 9, 2009 I was present at the official opening of the 2009 The Hague Sculpture exposition by the Prime Minister of The Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende.
First there was a opening session in one of the oldest churches of The Hague, The “Kloosterkerk” (or church of the convent). The CEO of The Hague Sculpture , The Mexican Ambassador in The Hague, a trustee of The Hague Sculpture and some other persons held speeches. The Prime Minister got the first brochure of the exposition. Thereafter the company moved outside where the sculptures of Javier Marin were installed, for the official opening ceremony.

There the company stopped at the sculpture from which I took the above photo on beforehand. In a sequence of my photo’s there was an exchange between the CEO and Xavier Marin. I have made a small “video” of this exchange, because there are too many photo’s to present them all here on the blog. Look for yourself:

Picasa Video
I’m not so much a video person. It takes far too much time for me. But this little video (without sound) I could produce reasonably quick with Picasa 3, the free Google photo (management) program. Picasa is also very good for organizing many photo’s…I have approximately 20,000 and counting on my computer, deep sigh.

The Ceremony
Then there was the opening ceremony itself: The freeing of a bundle of balloons that, of course, partially got hung in the branches of the trees over the sculptures. How dumb!

20090609 The Hague Sculpture Official Opening _MG_0153

Storytlr
I have experimented in telling this little story via Twitter by uploading some of the pictures to Twitpic and then putting them together in Storytlr: [ Update: Originally there was a working link here, but unfortunately the Storytlr service has discontinued since March, 2010]

Storytlr-The-Hague-Sculpture-Opening---Read-My-Lips

Unfortunately the thumbnails of Storytlr are a bit too unsharpened to make it a nice looking story. I don’t have a mobile telephone with a camera ( I prefer better quality photo’s of ordinary cameras, but it won’t be long and then the mobiles can compete with ordinary cameras), but it is clear to me that Storytlr is a nice app to spread a life stream story.

More photos of the exhibition on Flickr
If you are interested in more photos of The Hague Sculpture, I refer you to my Flickr Sets 2009 The Hague Sculpture and 2009 The Hague Sculpture – Official Opening on June 9, 2009

PS In the meantime I succeeded to upgrade the Worpress Version of this Blog to WP 2.8, which was a hell of a job, as I tried to cut corners.

Last edited by GJE on March 21, 2010 at 2:31 pm