The Hague Goes Mondriaan.

WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW AND BLUE: Citydressing Campaign / Mondriaan to Dutch Design / The Haque (NL)  2017.

THE CITY AS CANVAS
Dutch art movement De Stijl was founded one hundred years ago this year. Inspired by Stijl artist like Piet Mondriaan, Bart van der Leck, Gerrit Rietveld and Theo van Doesburg, studio VOLLAERSZWART developed this citydressing campaign to “Mondriaanising” The Hague.

FREESTYLE
To start the citydressing for the celebration of the theme year “Mondriaan To Dutch Design, The Hague unveiled the largest Mondriaan in the world. The painting with the familiar red, yellow and blue surfaces and straight lines is being exhibited in one of the city’s most striking buildings: City Hall. A unique composition, precisely because of the combination of Mondriaan’s work and the iconic architecture of architect Richard Meier. The Hague City Council decided to honour the world renowned artist, as Gemeentemuseum The Hague has no less than 300 of his paintings in its possession. The design was created by artists Madje Vollaers and Pascal Zwart of Studio VOLLAERSZWART. Last weeks, a number of prominent buildings and locations in The Hague got a Mondriaan / De Stijl makeover.

Special Thanks to: Gemeentemuseum The Hague, Municipality The Hague, The Hague Citymarketing and Cubord Signmakers.

What an amazing celebration! I love all of it. There’s much more to see at the website!

Happy Ēostre Day!

“Ostara” (1901) by Johannes Gehrts.

Eostur-monath, qui nunc Paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a Dea illorum quæ Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant nomen habuit: a cujus nomine nunc Paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquæ observationis vocabulo gaudia novæ solemnitatis vocantes.

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance. – Bede, in De temporum ratione.

Don’t know about you, but Ēostre has smiled upon me, the sun is shining today! Hope everyone has a lovely day, and remember, Jesus is mything in action!

Friendship Benches.

Like many simple ideas, friendship benches and grandmothers is an absolutely brilliant one. Zimbabwe has a wealth of people suffering ills, much like every place else on the planet. Mental and emotional difficulties and struggles are stigmatized all over the world, and even when there are abundant resources, many people won’t reach out because of that stigma. Most places don’t have abundant resources, but they do have troubled people who do not want to be stigmatized. So, what to do? There’s a small program in parts of Zimbabwe, where older women receive training, and they spend time on the friendship benches, where people can come and talk them, and be listened to, which I feel is a cure for a great many ills. Most people simply don’t listen, and often, even when someone does, they get awkward and embarrassed because they can’t fix a person’s problem. What gets missed much of the time is that people aren’t necessarily looking for a fix, they simply need someone to listen, someone to care. The Grandmothers are also happy, because they feel needed, rather than lonely and neglected. Friendship benches are an idea which needs to be widespread, all over the world.

The therapy room is a patch of waste ground, and the therapist’s couch a wooden bench under a tree. The therapist is an elderly Zimbabwean woman, in a long brown dress and headscarf.

Her patients call her “Grandmother” when they come along to sit on her bench and discuss their feelings, their depression or other mental health issues.

[…]

The benches are a safe place for people struggling with depression, which in the Shona language is called kufungisisa, “thinking too much”.

It is a world away from conventional approaches to mental healthcare, but the Friendship Bench project has changed the lives of an estimated 27,000 Zimbabweans suffering from depression and other mental disorders.

The grandmothers, all of whom are trained to improve a patient’s ability to cope with mental stress, listen and nod, offering only an occasional word of encouragement.

[…]

“When they first get to the bench, we use an intervention which we call kuvhura pfungwa [opening of the mind]. They sit and talk about their problems. Through that process, the grandmothers enable that patient to select a specific problem to focus on, and they help them through it,” he says.

Through at least six one-on-one sessions with the health workers, the patients are encouraged to speak about their problems and their mental illness.

Traditionally, elderly women play the role of counsellor for younger members of the community. On the bench, however, the grandmothers listen more, and lecture less.

“We used to talk a lot, ‘Do this, do that’. But now we ask them to open up, open their minds and hearts,” says Sheba Khumalo, a grandmother.

The Guardian has the full story.

The Amazing World of AMKK!

Azuma Mokoto and Shiinuke Shunsuke.

Need to brighten up your universe and recapture a sense of wonder, delight, and glee? Look no further than AMKK, a world of intense, joyful artistry and botany. They are featured on The Creators Project, where you can see so much, and read all about these magical artists, then you can go and wander over to their website, and get absolutely lost in the most amazing, oh, well, just have a wander, it will do your non-existent soul so much good!

The Edinburgh Remakery.

Here’s a grand undertaking, and one desperately needed all over the place. We have become so accustomed to living in a consumer driven throwaway manner, and even when people want to be thrifty, or would prefer to fix something, there’s often no option to do so.

The Edinburgh Remakery is a social enterprise that teaches repair. The shop sells refurbished computers and furniture, and hosts workshops where people can come along and learn how to repair their own things. There’s a big vision behind it: “we want to generate a repair revolution. This means changing the way people use and dispose of resources, encouraging manufacturers to build things to last and to be fixable, and making sure the facilities are in place to allow people to repair and reuse.”

Films for Action has the full story.

The Hat’s Limitation.

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A collaborative project between architect Kosaku Matsumoto and Japan Braid Hat Mfg. Co., ltd.

Japan Braid Hat is known for making blade hats (or Sanada hat) woven with fabric tape and natural grass straw in a swirl-like pattern. Unlike hats made by sewing, they are woven seamlessly together and completely jointless. The hat has an elegant simplicity of shape and form that made feasible to increase the hat’s scale to the limit. How big can a hat really be?

The outcome of this experiment was a hat five times larger than the standard, stretching the technical limit of the craftsman, and extending the very definition of we can see as a hat. It has been expanded so much that the brim cannot bear its own weight, draping toward the ground to cascade and wrap the whole body of who wears it. Like a coat, a veil, or a small, sculptural tent, the hat gives various fluid impressions according to the way it is worn.

By challenging the very definition and the limitation of a hat, the work attempts to discover a scale of new functions and design possibilities in what we understand as a blade hat.

Photo by Nobutada OMOTE.

You can see much more at Kosaku Matsumoto. Via Spoon & Tamago.

Stephen King on the Tiny Tyrant.

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Stephen King has an article up at The Guardian, pondering the rise of the Tiny Tyrant, and the hows and whys of it. Entertaining reading.

I had written about such men before. In The Dead Zone, Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins. He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again. When Johnny Smith, the novel’s precognitive hero, shakes his hand, he realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.

Big Jim Rennie in Under The Dome is cut from the same cloth. He’s a car salesman (selling being a key requirement for the successful politician), who is the head selectman in the small town of Chester’s Mill, when a dome comes down and cuts the community off from the world. He’s a crook, a cozener and a sociopath, the worst possible choice in a time of crisis, but he’s got a folksy, straight-from-the-shoulder delivery that people relate to. The fact that he’s incompetent at best and downright malevolent at worst doesn’t matter.

Both these stories were written years ago, but Stillson and Rennie bear enough of a resemblance to the current resident of the White House for me to flatter myself I have a country-fair understanding of how such men rise: first as a joke, then as a viable alternative to the status quo, and finally as elected officials who are headstrong, self-centered and inexperienced. Such men do not succeed to high office often, but when they do, the times are always troubled, the candidates in question charismatic, their proposed solutions to complex problems simple, straightforward and impractical. The baggage that should weigh these hucksters down becomes magically light, lifting them over the competition like Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar film Up. Trump’s negatives didn’t drag him down; on the contrary, they helped get him elected.

I decided to convene six Trump voters to discover how and why all this happened. Because I selected them from the scores of make-believe people always bouncing around in my head (sometimes their chatter is enough to drive me bugshit), I felt perfectly OK feeding them powerful truth serum before officially convening the round table. And because they are fictional – my creatures – they all agreed to this. They gulped the serum down in Snapple iced tea, and half an hour later we began. My panelists were:

Click on over for the full story.

Wrap My Hijab!

Mona Haydar, a Syrian Muslim-American poet and activist, released her first-ever single and rap music video in honor of the world’s first-ever Muslim Women’s Day on Mar 27 … all while she’s pregnant.

Given the current rise of Islamophobia around the world, Haydar wanted to fight the hate. And what better way to do that than with music?

“This song is a party,” Haydar wrote in a Facebook post.

After the song went live, some people began shaming Haydar and the other hijabis in the video for having fun, as they sing and dance away.

“So even if you hate it – I still wrap my hijab!” the lyrics say in anticipation of the hateful remarks.

But, Haydar did not let the hate ruin the moment, and instead kept on celebrating.

You can read more here. I think it’s a grand song!

The Art of Dolls: Cool, Creepy, New.

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I think the whole concept of dolls is a creepy one, so I appreciate artists who embrace the creepy when it comes to dolls. Whatever your feelings might be, the work of all the artists is exquisite. The Creators Project has a feature on 5 Russian doll artists, who are doing new and wondrous work, because there’s going to be an International Art Exhibition in Amsterdam, in April, Art and Dolls. I do note that the art of dolls still remains stubbornly female focused. I’d like to see artists challenge that narrative a bit more. Let’s look at the featured Russian artists’ work a bit:

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Sisters Popovy.

Michael Zajkov.

Michael Zajkov.

Tatyana Trifonova.

Tatyana Trifonova.

Lidia Krasko.

Lidia Krasko.

Polina Myalovskaya.

Polina Myalovskaya.

You can read and see more at The Creators Project.

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http://adi.amsterdam/en/

The Most Beautiful Wall.

“Art is the purest form of expression,” Kramer continues. “Each artist will have their own way of bringing a message to life, and that’s what I’m looking for: A wall of diversity, that represents [how] immigrants in the US do beautiful things every day. This wall should be a testimony of every single immigrant who feels they’d much rather have a country with freedom to express themselves than a symbol of divisiveness. […] Diversity is a beautiful thing and no one should get in the way of it.”

Right now The Most Beautiful Wall is accepting entries for its digital wall. Submit yours at themostbeautifulwall@gmail.com. Learn more about the project by visiting Maddy Kramer’s website, here.

The Most Beautiful Wall. Go and have a scroll (sideways!) of the beautiful art already up on the most beautiful wall.

Via The Creators Project.

Have Bicycle, Will Embroider.

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The Creators Project has an interesting story about a textile artist, who embroiders portraits with her sewing machine, and likes to do this in rather out of the way places, so the sewing machine is powered by bicycle, often by the sitter!

I’ll admit to being conflicted here. I think it’s a grand idea, but I also get more than a hint of colonial arrogance, too. I’ll think on it some more.

Full story here.