Friday, October 3, 2014

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Collective reading of Bergvall’s Drift

Posted: 02 Oct 2014 07:23 AM PDT

whitechapel gallery, writer in residence, caroline bergvall, driftReading, interventions and screening. A moving meditation on exile, sea travel and migration.

Over the next six months, Caroline Bergvall, the new Writer in Residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, will investigate how writing, reading and listening can be understood within the context of visual art, through a series of events and online interventions exploring language and performance.

Caroline Bergvall is an international writer and artist of Norwegian and French origins based in London and Geneva.

She works across art forms, media and languages. Projects alternate between books and printed matter, audio pieces, collaborative performances, installations.

A strong exponent of writing and reading methods adapted to contemporary audiovisual and contextual situations, as well as multilingual identities.

Her linguistic explorations and sparse spatial or audio works revisit literary models and expose difficult language-led historical/political events, and she frequently performs her writings live.

For her first event as Writer in Residence, on 9 October, Caroline Bergvall has invited a great rosta of poets, writers, performers and activists to read with her from her current interdisciplinary and collaborative project ‘Drift'.

Drift is a moving meditation on exile, sea travel and migration that takes its inspiration from the ancient pool of English and Nordic poetry as well as the lyrics of pop songs.

Bergvall's cutting-edge texts also reshape damning reports into contemporary sea migration disasters.

Holly Pester, Sophie Mayer, Shezea Quraishi, Carol Watts, Jonathan Skinner, Mikhail Karikis, Cherry Smyth, Chris McCabe, Joelle Taylor, Tony White, Marj McDaid, Rod Mengham, Olumide Popoola, Hester Reeve, Susan Johanknecht and Amaara Raheem will raise the words.

Three micro interventions by Almir Koldzic, Professor Clare Lees and Tom Martin will punctate this rich collective reading.

As will a screening of ‘Liquid Traces’ a docu-report on the ongoing ‘Left-to-Die Boat’ case by the researchers Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller.

The boat in question was infamously abandoned in the Mediterranean by the Italian navy and international shipping at the end of March 2011 initially with 50 men, 20 women and two babies on board. Eleven survived.

To book tickets click here. To see how to get to the Whitechapel Gallery, click here.

AIDS 2014 conference info

Posted: 02 Oct 2014 06:52 AM PDT

AIDS conference, Melbourne, young people Not in Melbourne? Here are some of the key resources on adolescents and young people from AIDS 2014.

By Mikaela Hildebrand.

In July this year the XX International AIDS Conference took place in Melbourne, Australia.

In this blog post, we have listed sessions related to adolescents and young people for people who were not able to make it in person as well as for people who may have missed a session or two.

We have categorised the sessions under five different categories: Prevention, New Science, Testing and Treatment, Social Change and Advocacy

1) Prevention: sessions with the leading experts on adolescents and young people in HIV prevention and the evidence and experiences from programs that work, including examples of social media campaigns.

2) Testing and Treatment:  sessions covering a wide range of issues such as liver disease, perinatal infected children and children who inject drugs.

3) Social Change: sessions covering the roles and struggles among various communities and their responses to create change.

4) Advocacy: sessions covering adolescents and young people, including when they share perspectives and insights based on experiences, leadership in the AIDS response, the need of education and their work in collaboration with young people and youth organizations.

In addition, there are also links to some of the key adolescent and youth publications launched at AIDS 2014 – if you know of others, please leave a comment and we will update the blog with your resources.

We hope that with this blog, adolescents and young people can get informed and commit to taking action for evidence-informed responses for adolescents and young people today!

There are some really good articles, but if I have to recommend one: "Where Are Headed?" with L'Orangelis Thomas Negron and Susan Kasedde, UNICEF gave powerful speeches about where are young people headed while sharing personal stories with worldwide realities [see video].

As adolescents and young people who attended this conference prepare activism back home, it's important to know the updates and new data from around the world.

Having awareness of the current epidemic and new scientific discoveries makes us more informed and better equipped to make change in our communities.

ACT 2015: one goal, many voices is a movement building initiative that aims to secure a post-2015 development framework that advances the SRHR and HIV response for young people.

Thanks to Keren Dunaway from UNAIDS in Geneva for helping put this list together.

Furies launched for poetry day

Posted: 02 Oct 2014 02:59 AM PDT

furies, poetry anthology, poetry day, for books sakeFURIES, the first poetry collection from For Books’ Sake, was launched last night.

Compiled following an open call for submissions that attracted over 700 entries from around the world, the anthology is edited by Eve Lacey and includes a foreword from Jenni Fagan, acclaimed author of The Panopticon.

FURIES features both emerging and established voices, including published and prize-winning authors from Imtiaz Dharker to Rebecca Goss and Patience Agbabi.

Some of the best women's writing out there today, united in celebration of women warriors past, present and future.

Or, as Jenni Fagan puts it: 'This is the poetry of wronged and revolutionary women, the new verse that emerges when poets take a sinner and spin her anew.

'Here, Furies arise from history and myth to set the story straight once and for all.

'For many, the Lazarus trick spans only the space of a verse in which they tell their tale.

'The rest of the resurrection, the living on beyond the page, relies on the reader to keep telling and retelling, and then telling once more.

'Traditionally, ghosts haunt because they still have something left to say. This is their stage.

'To be voiceless is to question whether one even exists — so listen to these voices — for all of those who cannot speak out and for all those who are waiting to hear these words and know them as their own; to all those who understand that rape is a war we must all continue to challenge and fight in every country, every day, from now until the human race finally, truly, evolves.

'Until then — let it be known that we stood side-by-side on the long road home and said, enough is enough.'

The poets featured in FURIES are: Patience Agbabi, Kalliope Amorphous, Jodie Ashdown, Claire Askew, Kaddy Benyon, Emily Blewitt, Malika Booker, Diana Brodie, Nic Campeotto, Vahni Capildeo, Geraldine Clarkson, Meg Cowen, Imtiaz Dharker, Jo Dixon, Francine Elena, Suzanna Fitzpatrick, Victoria Gatehouse, Rebecca Goss, Françoise Harvey, Sandra Ireland, Ailie Kerr, Anna Kisby, Jenifer Browne Lawrence, Sophie Mayer, Jennifer Militello, Devon Miller-Duggan, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Bridget Minamore, Helen Mort, Shelley Puhak, Angela Readman, Susan Richardson, Isabel Rogers, Julie-ann Rowell, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, Claire Trévien, Amber West and Rebecca White.

Published in October to coincide with National Poetry Day – 2 October – all profits will be donated to Rape Crisis England & Wales.

Available in hardback or digital form from For Books’ Sake.

The theatre: home of structural gender inequality

Posted: 02 Oct 2014 01:28 AM PDT

Theatre, gender imbalance, Tonic Theatre, women writersIn the West End this week only one production in the main theatres written by a woman.

I suppose I like my theatre a bit radical and a bit edgy, I've always thought of it as a site for enormous social change messages – think Cradle Will Rock.

So I was a surprised at the findings of Tonic Theatre's latest survey.

In the West End this week only one production in the main commercial theatres will have been written by a woman.

And it's not just a London thing.

Of the 179 theatres and theatre companies that are funded by the Arts Council England, only 37 per cent of the artistic directors are women.

It seems like the more you look at the ‘big name’ writers, producers and directors the fewer women you find.

Tonic was founded in 2011 to address these issues.

Tonic Theatre began by thinking individually and strategically about how the theatre industry functions – the working methods, the decision-making processes and the organinsational structures.

The next step was thinking about how these processes might create barriers for women.

Once they identified the barriers they worked with top-level theatre partners to create solutions and to put these into practice.

Their latest programme "Advance" is a six-month programme funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

It works in conjunction with some of the biggest names in artistic direction to ensure that female talent gets to the top of their institutions.

Tonic's director Lucy Kerbel, speaking in the Independent, said she was optimistic the programme "will lead to real and sustained change, not just within these theatres but because of their position in the industry, far more broadly".

Look forward to seeing the results.