International News Digest
HAMBURG’S ARTISTS MAKING GAINS—AND RESISTING CITY MARKETING
A group of Hamburg artists who squatted historical buildings slated for development has made gains in its battle for affordable housing, art spaces, and the preservation of a local architectural gem known as the “Gängeviertel” neighborhood. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, the City of Hamburg is slowly but surely moving toward buying the inner-city area back from the Dutch investor Hanzevast. which had planned to demolish the buildings and replace them with luxury apartments and shops. “It’s true that not everything is yet set in stone,” noted Michael Osterburg, head of the local GAL-citizens parliamentary group. “However, there’s an agreement.” According to the report, Hamburg may have offered the Dutch investor nearly three million dollars. In addition to the artists, more than 150 Hamburg architects have joined the movement to save the historic buildings while promoting in the long term the artists’ concept for the area.
As Die Zeit reports, the group of artists has not been entirely won over by the city, despite the growing municipal support for their cause. The newspaper printed the artists’ manifesto “Not in our name, Hamburg brand!,” which calls on the city to stop describing the artists as the “creative class” in its advertisements. The Gängeviertel is not the only cause célèbre in the city. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, another sixty-six prominent artists and cultural figures have joined forces to protest cuts to the local state cultural budget. In an advertisement on two pages of the main Hamburg newspaper, the city’s theater directors, museum directors, actors, musicians, and writers took a stand against the cuts, which would reduce the cultural budget by more than fourteen million dollars in 2010. Armin Sandig, the president of the city’s art academy, described the cost-cutting measures as a catastrophe “for public spirit and humane living.”
VLADIMIR POUTINE EMBRACES STREET ART
Prime minister of Russia Vladimir Poutine has made his own homage to street art. As Agence France-Presse reports, Poutine said that street art expresses “talent and creativity” in both form and content. “Graffiti is becoming a true art,” said Poutine during a televised prize for hip-hop music, much to the approval of the hip-hop artists on hand for the event. While lauding graffiti, the prime minister also gave the thumbs-up for break-dancing, albeit likening the dance to “propaganda in favor of a healthy mode of life” incompatible with drinking and drugs. “Even street rap, which can be a bit raw, has a social content and talks about problems, most notably those of young people,” said Poutine, who gave out prizes in the categories of graffiti, rap, and break dance. The prime minister gained some new fans—and the prospect of even more. “It would be cool to record a song together with Poutine,” said the winning rapper Roma Jigan. “Make some noise for him so that the whole world can hear him.”
BAMAKO BIENNIAL HONORS AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS
Seven photographers have been honored at the eighth photography biennial “Rencontres de Bamako” in Bamako, Mali. As Agence France-Presse reports, the Nigerian photographer Uche Okpa Iroha, who is a founding member of the collective Blackbox, won the Seydou Kéita Prize. The South African artist Jodi Bieber took the European Union Prize for her work on marginalized South African youths, while the Congolese artist Baudoin Mouanda, who has focused on the devastating wars in his country, was awarded the Bolloré Young Talent Prize. Berry Bickle (Zimbabwe) and Abdoulaye Barry (Chad) jointly won a special prize from the jury, which was presided over by Malick Sidibé. The work of three other photographers—Guy Wouete (Cameroon), Salif Traoré (Mali), and Zanele Muholi (South Africa)—was also honored. This year’s biennial—organized by the Malian ministry of culture and the French public organization Culturesfrance—focused on the theme of “borders.”
OROZCO’S “SKELETON SCULPTURE” COMES TO NEW YORK
A special large-scale work is on its way to New York’s Museum of Modern Art for the museum’s upcoming retrospective on the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. As Agence France-Presse reports, the retrospective, which begins December 9, features a sculpture created from the skeleton of a whale. The sculpture has already been on the move. Orozco discovered the skeleton—which measures over thirty-eight feet and weighs around twenty-five hundred pounds—in February 2006 in lower Southern California. To date, the work—titled Matrix Movil—has been on view at the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico.
PARIS’S 104 LOOKS FOR A NEW DIRECTOR
The Paris artist-residence site 104 is looking for a new director just one year after its inauguration. As Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre reports, the two current directors, Robert Cantarella and Frédéric Fisbach, announced that they would not be seeking to renew their contracts, which end in March.
The problems would initially appear to be financial. “The City of Paris has announced a drop in subsidies,” explained Cantarella. “That means that we will have to reduce again the part of the budget earmarked for artists.” Cantarella and Fisbach do not know how more reductions can be made. “Already, in recent months, it was difficult for us to give even the minimum to the artists in residence.” Instead of cuts, Cantarella and Fisbach estimate that 104 would need nearly three million dollars in order to fulfill its role as a site not only for artist residencies but also for the democratization of culture, among other goals.
Instead of fulfilling its mandate, 104 is currently running a deficit of almost one million dollars after just one year of operations. The extra funding is not likely to come soon—at least not from the municipal coffers, which have been squeezed by the collapse of the real estate market. Yet Fabre suggests that putting the blame on financing hides “a form of denial regarding the management and the organization of the site, where, moreover, the visitor numbers have been far less than satisfactory.”
The City of Paris will be initiating a search for a new director or directors in the coming days. “We will be turning to managers more than to artists,” noted Christophe Girard, the head of 104’s board. For Fabre, redefining the project will be a “delicate” task. Girard argues that creation and transmission/distribution/dissemination can be brought together successfully only through “an arsenal of concrete actions” at the site. “To reach that goal,” explains Girard, “we will have to come to terms with artists living and working for a longer time at this site.”
ZAHA HADID’S MAXXI II MUSEUM OPENS IN ROME—WITH A DANCE
Rome’s MAXXI II—a new museum designed by the star architect Zaha Hadid for twenty-first-century art—has been inaugurated with a choreographed piece by Sascha Waltz. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Eva-Elisabeth Fischer reports, Hadid’s “spectacular” building was opened earlier in the year for previews only. This time, Sascha Waltz and guests—thirty-eight dancers, accompanied by a cellist, two trumpeters, a percussionist, and a string quartet—were positioned throughout the building. Inaugurating museums is becoming a specialty with Waltz, who created dances for the Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, as well as that city’s recently reopened New Museum. But Fischer is not convinced by the combination of Hadid’s design with Waltz’s dancers—or perhaps even with visitors. “On the inside, in the midst of the clear forms and lines in Zaha Hadid’s museum for art of the twenty-first century,” writes Fischer, “everybody ultimately comes across as an ungainly amorphous mass. The rooms are kept in black, white, and gray, with some of them sloping off obliquely and with others, in narrow passages. . . . After two or three hours in this house, one seems only to brachiate—like a disturbance in a captivating harmony—up and down metal steps or concrete paths.”