Art visual np2

Photo by Erin Caner from the Trinity at Alice Yard blog. A mausoleum in Lapeyrouse cemetery in Port of Spain is juxtaposed against the PowerGen energy plant, which provides electrical power to Trinidad and Tobago in this photograph by Erin Caner from the Trinity at Alice Yard blog. The image appears as part of a discussion of the role of religion in Trinidad life. READ MORE here .

FILM REVIEW: This is It Since his death in June, the image we've had in our minds of Michael Jackson is of a man overwhelmed by drugs, with a frail body, enduring a rapid and undignified decline; reeling in the aftereffects of plastic surgery. Jackson's personal life, soft voice, bizarre behaviour, as well as the reported details of the state of his corpse, did not help. We heard of the phantom needle marks all over the King of Pop's body, black marks on his legs, his peach fuzz of hair which he constantly covered with wigs, the state of his skin and his nose, claims that he penciled in his eyebrows and lips. But This is It , which I saw this week, brings to the forefront another aspect of the story. The film is based on rehersal footage for a planned series of concerts (called 'This is It') which was to be held at London's O2 arena. The series was scheduled to begin in July 2009 and continue through March 2010. But less than three weeks before the curtain came...

'Sweeter than Roses', a "work in progress" from Here Comes the Clowns by Tanya Marie. Tanya Marie is a graphic designer working in Trinidad who paints. This work in progress is from a series she's posted on her blog. Check out Tanya's blog here .

FROM THE ORGANISERS: Magical Hands on the Magic Drum...Mihkail Salcedo joins us with an Intimate Session at Live Thursday at Drink! wine bar (Corner Roberts, Rosalino and Warren Streets, Woodbrook, Port of Spain ****Showtime 9 pm ****

Franz Kafka imagined it, Texas administration achieved it. Incarcerating and justice world is ruled by administrative processes and collection. Last example comes from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice which lists every information about death penalty condemned: crime description, name of the victim, age, race etc. and the "offender" last statement. What kind of human respecting administration collect such deeply private information and post it on the internet ? It reminds me of those incredible websites I found out being in US, collecting every information about sex offenders and murderers (crime, name and precise address) after those ones spent the time in prison that justice decided they should spend. This seems to me as a total violation of the principle of justice and once more human respect. This is a model of society functioning like a paranoiac machine denying the individual to only deal with categories.

Flyer for Embah's 'Measuring Tape' featuring his 'Monument 11' Go check out Embah's latest exhibition, 'Measuring Tape' at the Fernandes Industrial Estate, Laventille. The exhibition has been on since September 29, viewing hours 10am to 6pm. There will be a "toast" in Embah's honor tonight from 6pm, hosted by Abovegroup .

vs Amnesty International just publish a report about how Israel authority is rationing water in West Bank and Gaza, leaving any Palestinian with four times less water than any Israeli. This confrontation is obviously even more scandalous when you observe Israeli settlements in the middle of the West Bank owning prolific well irrigated farms and luxurious swimming pools... That is actually one of the aspect of asymmetric wars which allows a total control (therefore a dependency) of the stronger camp on the weaker one, and this control is specially present on infrastructures. This way, the war can be lead in a very sly way, a kind of violence which does not say its name...

Paris based office EXYZT (see former posts here and here ) released this interesting project in Liepaja (Latvia). What used to be Cold War military barracks is being transformed into a "cultural farm" trying to re-activate a guetto-like district in the town's suburbs. Faithful to a cheap and a crude language, EXYZT seems to succeed to tell an interesting story about trees taking over the barrack and hosting human creativity. Merci Elodie pour l'info !

There are big questions looming over This Is It, which opens today at MovieTowne, Port-of-Spain, where they've been selling advanced tickets for weeks. Is it going to be any good and possibly serve as a fitting tribute to the dead Michael Jackson? Or is it simply shameless commercial exploitation by his chagrined concert promoter? (Jackson was in rehearsal for 50 concerts in the United Kingdom for concert promoter AEG when he died of a drug overdose.) Of course, it's probably a combination of both elements. But there's a growing sense that if the film (apparently part documentary, part concert) is no good, then that will be the final insult in what has become a shameless (but predictable) exercise in squeezing as much money as possible out of Jackson's death. THE FILM first screens this morning at 10am and there are more screenings throughout the day including at 5.45pm, 7pm and 8.30pm . Apparently, the whole thing is for "two weeks only", in line with the w...

From Dibujos ( Drawings ) on Luis Vasquez la Roche's website L.V.L.A .

This short movie by Dan Farmer and called Synaptic landscape tries to represent the process of perception and recognition of space by the brain as well as a reconstruction of it as an imaginative procedure. This movie has been produced in the context of Bartlett Unit 15 lead by Nic Clear (previous posts here and here ) which succeed once again an interesting alchemy of talent... Thank you Tyler !

Soca singer Shurwayne Winchester  (courtesy toronto-lime.com) Join Shurwayne Winchester & Y.O.U. tonight as they celebrate their Anniversary with an up-close and personal performance at Woodford Cafe at MovieTowne, Port of Spain at 9pm. There will apparently be a "surprise international artiste", according to the organisers. There is no cover charge for this event, but "donations for the under-privileged for Christmas" will be accepted.

The White diamond is a documentary by Werner Herzog about Dr. Graham Dorrington' s project to fly over the Guyanese canopy with a small balloon in 2004. The movie is mixing the aircraft adventures with the local spirit of this incredibly beautiful site but also with an heavy charge of the past, exploring the story of a similar expedition in 1993 when Dorrington saw his friend Dieter Plage another documentarist, dying by falling from the previous prototype...

Is an interview series featuring Trinidad artists. Over the coming weeks, we'll feature poets, painters, writers, musicians, actors and others. They'll tell us about themselves in questionnaires that follow a standard template of: WHO? WHAT? WHEN+WHERE? WHY? The aim is to get them to literally do all the talking and to capture them at a moment in their lives. The series, which will come out at random intervals, began October 25, 2009, with the brilliant Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo. Capildeo's book, the critically acclaimed Undraining Sea , was launched that month in London. No. 1: Vahni Capildeo, poet No. 2: Embah, painter No. 3: Dave Williams, dancer  No. 4: Adam Williams, potter   No. 5: Akuzuru, experientialist No. 6: Alicia Milne, art school grad No. 7: Lisa Allen-Agostini, writer No. 8: Yao Ramesar, filmmaker No. 9: Jemima Charles, art student No. 10: Amanda Smyth, novelist No. 11: Fedon Honore, Midnight Robber No. 12: Nikolai Noel, graphic artist No. 13: Navy, pe...

WHO: My father (d. 2003) was Devendranath Jawaharlal Capildeo. He wrote poetry including children's poetry. He was also a sufferer from paranoid schizophrenia all his adult life. I remain appalled by (a) the lack of understanding of the rigidities and miseries of mental illness, by people who write fashionable academic treatises on 'madness' and 'creativity' (b) the lack of social provision for the mentally ill in Trinidad. My mother is Leila Capildeo. I am very proud that she was born to the Bissondath and Narayansingh families in Sangre Grande! Her stories of chickens fluttering up to sleep on the ladder that led up to a pommerac tree, and of her father shooting a jumbie in a tree in the Valencia forest, bring Trinidad of earlier times alive to me. (For more on my obsession with trees, see here ). Leila regularly reminds me that she is just an ordinary old Indian woman/housewife.  She will not want me to mention that she won the girls' Island Schol. in the 195...

'Untitled' by Luis Vasquez La Roche He's from Venezuela, lives in Couva, but produces art about Trinidad. Meet Luis Vasquez La Roche here . 

Queen Elizabeth II by Andy Warhol Three Trinidadians were among the prize-winners for this year's Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Alake Pilgrim won the best story (Caribbean region) prize for her piece "Shades", while the wonderful and talented Barbara Jenkins was highly commended for her piece "No News is Good News" as was Heidi Holder for "Love Story No 8 – Jane and Philip". Congrats, and we look forward to more from them all. READ MORE here .

When I read this article on BLDGBLOG two weeks ago, I immediately thought of Fredrik Hellberg's marvelous project for AA intermediary 6 two years ago. Fredrik created a dreamlike Manhattan, some kind of uchronia that Philip K. Dick who have probably loved and which propose an hybridization of antinomic systems whose egoistic presence have to negotiate between one another in order to exist. Koolhaas wrote the "retrospective Manhattan manifesto" with Delirious New York, Fredrik Hellberg could be said to design a nostalgic vision of the future. Here is the text he wrote associated to the project : Manhattan Oneirocritica AA Inter 6 2007- 2008 Tutors: Alistair Gill & Veronika Schmid T his project visualizes the unbuilt twentieth-century visionary projects for Manhattan. It was generated through a quest to explore spatial languages that goes beyond the material and into the deep oceans of the mind, imagination, thought, meditation, fantasy, spirituality, ...

Norbert Palz SUPER ROMANCE To write about a future vision of Architecture asks for a systematic concept on how we can blend competing interests and possibilities, be they of technological, economical or social nature, into a building practice. I don´t have this systematic idea that is applicable for all cases at hand. I mostly work on "Wicked Problems" as Donald Schoen would call them. These are problems that mutate while you work on them. Maybe I am the wrong one to ask to write a manifest. I am not Marinetti. But I know what I strive for. I will try to explain why I am doing what I am doing through an example. A couple of years ago I was visiting the site of the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona with a group of students. I separated myself from the rest to experience the building alone. The site was under full production with stonemasons working and groups of tourists running through the aisles. I was going down to the basement, passing screens that showed some CATIA ...

It was taken by photojournalist Rhondor Dowlat on October 17, 2009, at a labour camp for Chinese workers at Chatee Trace, Cunupia, Trinidad. The picture appeared on the cover of the Sunday Newsday the next day. The workers that week had staged a stunning silent protest, walking from Cunupia to the Uriah Butler Highway before being taken to the Chinese Embassy. By the end of the week, they had been illegally locked into the camp at Chatee Trace, while our officials wined and dinned over the Divali holiday. Read more here . And here . And here . And here . And here . And here . And here .

FROM THE ORGANISERS: "Late Night Lime with Lord Kitchener and Peter Pitts  (Banyan/T&T/1990/60') In support of TUCO's Calypso History Month SFC is pleased to present an important episode from the popular 1990 late night talk show series "Late Night Lime" produced by Banyan Productions. This episode features the Road March King of the World, Lord Kitchener in conversation with calypso commentator Peter Pitts, as they discuss the calypso art form and perform segments from their favorite songs. A+ must. " Screening begins at 7pm at the Fernandes Industrial Centre, Laventille, followed by a feature film. NOTE: StudioFilmClub is a cool weekly film club run by artists Peter Doig and Che Lovelace in the front foyer space in Building 7, Fernandes compound, Laventille, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Doors open most Thursday nights at 7.30; main feature starts at 8.15. All screenings are FREE. CHECK the blog here .

  Pat Chu Foon's iconic sculpture 'Spirit of Hope' has been painted over, as seen in this photo taken by Nicholas Laughlin. The sculpture, located at the intersection of Tragarete Road, Dundonald and Richmond Streets, has been partially coated over in what Laughlin describes as a "new coat of hospital-wall green".  "It tells me how unaware we are, as citizens, of the civic spaces we live and work in, and how irresponsibly we behave towards them. It tells me how little respect we have for the work of our artists and thinkers, and how eagerly the powers-that-be package that work in more palatable forms. It tells me we're far too fond of quick, superficial solutions to our problems," Laughlin writes on his blog which broke the news earlier today.   It is bad enough that the sculpture has been painted over, but worse that whoever did this did not even finish the job. The defaced piece is left wallowing in the ignominy of its own bizarre mutation.  The ...

Alexander McQueen is a fashion designer proposing a very interesting and original vision of the human body and fashion. In his last show in Paris (see all the images below and the video on official website) he presented what I interpret as stakes which would potentially remodel the human body in a kind of intriguing mutant ready to join David Lynch's Dune world. McQueen is also using robots as a representation of otherness. Voyeur cameras peeping at girls in his last show, he also conceive what I would call ejaculatory robots in 1999 which were soiling the model's white dress with sperm/paint. You can watch that on this last video after 40s of visioning.

Stills from Cabezon's 'Reverse Back' video Check the new ROCKSTAR WEDNESDAYS down in Claxton Bay today at 8pm at Uncle's On D' Bay. Featured act: Cabezon.

Author Dr Elizabeth Nunez Will launch her most recent novel Anna In-Between at the Reader's Bookshop in Port-of-Spain at 7pm. Find out more about this novelist here . OOPS SHOULD HAVE SAID : Nunez reads again at the Hotel Normandie St Ann's, Port of Spain, on Thursday along with acclaimed writer Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw.

 Ataklan He'll be performing with his full band for the first time at Woodford Cafe at 10pm. There will also be a DJ Set by Shaun Christian. People can get in free before 10 pm apparently once on a list of some sort.

Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang (North Korea) has been the taller building in Asia for quite a while since its construction in 1987. Only issue, as you may know, is that the construction stopped before its end and the building stayed as a stillborn ruin until nowadays. Its mineral aspect gives it a status of urban mountain or an object of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky 's aliens picnic. However, I happened to read a reportage by Arnaud Lagrange who came back from North Korea with this next picture showing that the hotel's construction started again and is being covered by glass panels. Ryugyong will thus loose its roughness and eventually become what it has been originally designed for, an object of state propaganda and an hotel for North Korea's political elite. And as this article is about Ryugyong I add this video made by Extraneo Group which shows a capitalistic contaminated North Korea settling the fate of the hotel by enthroning it as the main object of the society of spect...