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Take Care of Yourself by Sophie Calle.
From July 10 to September 7 on July 10 at SESC Pompeia , Sao Paolo. Promoted by SESC São Paulo and Associação Cultural Videobrasil.
“I received an email telling me it was over.
I didn’t know how to respond.
It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.
It ended with the words, “Take care of yourself.”
And so I did.
I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),
chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.
To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.
Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me.
Answer for me.
It was a way of taking the time to break up.
A way of taking care of myself.”
When a boyfriend dumped her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 107 women to read it.
Sophie Calle is a French artist who works with photographs and performances, placing herself in situations almost as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She also imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. She has been called a detective and a voyeur and her pieces involve serious investigations as well as natural curiousity.
In this “tour de force of feminine responses… executed in a wild range of media,” Sophie Calle orchestrates a virtual chorus of women’s interpretations and assessments of a breakup letter she received in an email. In photographic portraits, textual analysis, and filmed performances, the show presents a seemingly exhaustive compendium with contributions ranging from a clairvoyant’s response to a scientific study, a children’s fairytale to a Talmudic exegesis, among many others. Examining the conditions and possibilities of human emotions, Take Care of Yourself opens up ideas about love and heartache, gender and intimacy, labour and identity. 107 women (including a parrot) from the realms of anthropology, criminology, philosophy, psychiatry, theatre, opera, soap opera and beyond each take on this letter, reading and re-reading it, performing it, transforming it, and pursuing the emotions it contains and elicits.
Further information.
Also: Subjetividades em Trânsito workshop by Kika Nicolela , 14 – 17 July, Sesc Avenida Paulista, part of Olhares sobre o acervo do Videobrasil.
Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel, follows China’s industrial neo-colonialism in African lands at FotoGrafia Rome International Festival of Photography, April 4th – May 25th 2008. The subject choosen for this edition is Seeing normality. Photography portrays daily life that – according to Marco Delogu – shows “how photography for us is the best instrument to describe every day life: a concept that comes from a will to tell normality in opposition to extraordinary”.
Ni hao, ni hao. “I had been walking along a street in Brazzaville only 10 minutes when a merry band of Congolese kids interrupted their ballplaying to greet me. In Africa, white visitors usually hear greetings like “hello, mista” or “hey, whitey,” but these smiling kids lined along the street have expanded their repertoire. They yell “hello” in Chinese, and then they start up their game again. To them, all foreigners are Chinese.” Serge Michel comments in FP.
The work Inverted Affects, by Lisa Bey, starts from a series of videos made by young and teenagers with the cameras of their mobiles. All the videos, most of them anonymous, are freely available on the net and have been gathered by Laura Bey straight from some of the most famous and visited videoblogs. The videos “borrowed” here bear witness to scenes of young violence, fights and many diverse clashes. However, in many of them, it is easy to detect that these violent scenes have been feigned and recorded; these performances of street violence have been made by the youths themselves as some kind of game or entertainment to be then enjoyed and shared through the videos of its entry. This work was included in the e-show “Link-a” curated by Juan Martín Prada and produced by MediaLabMadrid (Madrid, Spain)and was awarded with the third prize of Biennal IbizaGraphic 2006 (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Ibiza.[via Rhizome]In order to watch it , you need to have latest version of Flash player installed on your computer.
If Vietnam was the first TV war, Iraq is the first YouTube war. A huge amounts of unedited video footage will appear on video-sharing sites from all sides. US soldiers can take their own cameras into combat and have internet access on their bases, so much of the material comes direct from the war zone. Try searching in YouTube and Google Video: “Iraq” or “Iraq kids”.
The problem with this footage is that it rarely has any context. A clip might be new, it might be years old, it might be guerrilla journalism, or it might have come from CNN. It might not even be from Iraq. As with anything online, the attribution of all these clips is very uncertain. Here one of those clips:
