Zero dB

"On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights musicians are uniting against the use of music to torture by joining www.ZerodB.org The Zero dB project (zero decibels = silence) was launched today by legal charity Reprieve which represents over 30 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Many of Reprieve’s clients - and hundreds more held in US secret prisons across the world - have been subjected to deafening music played for hours, days and often months on end in order to ‘break’ them.

Zero dB aims to stop torture music by encouraging widespread condemnation of the practice and by calling on governments and the UN to uphold and enforce the Convention Against Torture and other relevant treaties.

Reprieve’s client Binyam Mohamed from North London - still held in Guantanamo Bay - suffered 18 months of torture in a Moroccan secret prison. During this time his penis was routinely slashed with razor blades, yet he describes the sensation of feeling his sanity slip during psychological torture as even more horrific. He spoke to Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, his lawyer, in Guantánamo Bay:

“They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb.... There was loud music, [Eminem’s] ‘Slim Shady’ and Dr. Dre for 20 days.... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night.... Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”

There is a long and growing list of supporters who are outraged by the use of music to torture: James Lavelle of UNKLE, Matthew Herbert, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, Massive Attack, The Magic Numbers, Elbow and Bill Bailey have so far pledged their support of the initiative and made statements against the use of music to torture.

Musicians and the wider public are making their own silent protests against music torture which are being shown on zerodb.org. A series of silent protests and actions are planned through 2009."

City Sense at GarajIstanbul

City Sense: Surveillance, Secrecy, Security, Control
curated by Nat Muller in collaboration with NOMAD

A playful evening pondering media, control, surveillance, secrecy and art in urban environments.
Date evening event: 20 September 2008, 8 pm
Place: GarajIstanbul, Tomtom Mah. Yeni Çarşı Cad. Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sk. No:11a 34433 Galatasaray-Beyoğlu / İstanbul

It is no big secret that urban centers have become sites of surveillance and control. Gone are the days that the urban city dweller could carelessly drift – as the 19th century flaneur, strolling from one area to the other, and then disappear anonymously into the crowds. As our urban experience might have become more anonymous in regard to social interaction, our behavior – how we move, what we see, hear, taste and smell - is becoming more regulated, watched and controlled. Anonymity, it seems, is no longer an option. Our urban sensibilities are often directed, mediated and pre-programmed, either by security measures or by other overt or hidden codes of conduct. It is no coincidence then that how we consciously sense our cities – our “City Sense” – ultimately defines how we position ourselves as citizens.

CitySense offers a playful interpretation on how to actively engage your urban senses and reveals the hidden, and questions the exposed in an evening choc-a-bloc with video screenings, live food and smell installations, live audio-visual performances, and a party to close off the night.

Performance Installations by: Maki Ueda, Wietske Maas. Live Performances: Sasker Scheerder & Radboud Mens, Edwin van der Heide, Koray Tahiroğlu, Not at Home. Video Screenings and installations: MediaShed, Nicolas Provost, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay & Pascal Lievre, Daniël Melse, Matteo Venet, Mattias Geurts, Dimitri van Loenen, Başak Kaptan, Efe Hızır, Dilara Kurtoğlu, Denizcan Yüzgül, and Burak Arıkan.

More info:
http://www.garajistanbul.org/
http://www.kosmopolis.nl/

TransDance:2

If you happen to be in Cairo this Friday...

"TransDance, initiated by HaRaKa in 2008, is a series of mini-festivals of a transdisciplinary nature, focusing on dance and movement. It comes as a product of the long research project CONNECTIONS which aimed at raising critical questions around mobility, trans-cultural dramaturgies and transdisciplinarity in the production of contemporary dance.

HaRaKa and 100Copies would like to invite to TransDance:2--an evening of improvised dance and music, exploring relations between Sound and Movement, live and unpremeditated, with four musicians/composers and three choreographers/dancers invited to the stage: Adham, Hassan Khan, Reem Hegab, Shaimaa Shokry, Mahmoud Refaat and Nina, Karim Lotfy."

Venue: Rawabet Theatre, Hussein Mimar Street, Off Mahmoud Bassiouny St., Downtown, Cairo (Next to the Townhouse Gallery)
Date and Time: Friday, July 18th, 2008, 7pm

(G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL

DIDIER FIUZA FAUSTINO/BUREAU DES MÉSARCHITECTURES
May 14 - June 28, 2008

"This May, Storefront will inaugurate a solo exhibition of French artist and architect Didier Fiuza Faustino and his Paris-based practice Bureau des Mésarchitectures (Mathieu Herbelin, Cláudia Martinho, Tony Matias, Guillaume Viaud). Faustino's largescale onsite installation (G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL, designed specifically for Storefront for Art and Architecture, will occupy the entire body of the gallery and engage its iconic façade by temporarily interrupting its role as movable, morphable barrier. Using chain-link fence as a medium to entirely encase and isolate the facade's panels, (G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL will explore the complex role that barriers and thresholds play in defining and creating public and private space, ideas central to Faustino/Mésarchitectures' work."