Militant Artshow at UBC (is really fuckin good!)
BLOG POST posted on Novembre 18, 2010 by d.
Allow me a quick moment to encourage those of you who are able, to make the trek up to the UBC art gallery to check out a show: http://www.belkin.ubc.ca/current/mark-boulos - i dont really know anything about this particular art institution or this artist, but the show is worth the 5 hour bus ride.
Without reveling everything, let me try to incite you with a few descriptions and comments. The first screening focuses on MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta), an indigenous insurgent movement in Nigeria targeting those responsible for the destruction of their land, and who have been exceptionally effective in redirecting power back into local community’s whilst massively disrupting Command.
Upon two large screens positioned across from one another are montages of crazy shit! It begins with footage taken from a camera mantled upon a speedboat (the favorite armored war machine of mend), as it whips around an offshore oil drill of Shell (the favorite target of mend). The rig is an absolute fortress, with blasts of fire shooting from various directions, creating an inferno that engulfs its tropical surroundings. On the opposite screen- stock figures race past in a blur. This juxtaposition is edited into a visual and audio unison throughout the rest of the montage, featuring stockbrokers losing their fuckin minds. A number of close-in ‘interviews’ have MEND insurgents in beautiful regalia, such as cloth balaclavas adorned with seashells. The sequence ends with a cult of MEND insurgents evoking a war god firing their AK-47’s into the air and ceremonially chanting hymns of death for the white invaders.
The second film is projected upon three screens and features a number of militants of the Philippines Maoist- New Peoples Army. For anarchist to view this would enable us to better appreciate J. Sakai (author of 'Settlers: Myth of the White Proletarian' and a bunch of other stuff available at https://secure.leftwingbooks.net/) , when he says ‘There is a specter haunting the 3rd world, and it is Maoism”
Again using a montage of interviews and situations, which in this film utilize a harmonizing of perceptions- as opposed to the brutal contradictions, an assemblage of voices speak from the jungle. The camera films a guerrilla patrol along a perimeter not more then a 100 meters from state soldiers, a local war lord is served ‘peoples justice’, a queer militant discusses love and sex in the guerrilla camp and more that I wont ruin for you!
Anyways, just get the fuck up there if you can, and I would love to yap to anyone who does, as so far the commentary surrounding the show is the obvious artsy-banality and reactionary-shit.
barricades!
d.
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