Award-winning Multilingual Arts and Culture Blog Since 2006
Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn’t an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.
Andrzej Wajda, a Polish film director
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. Forster, an English author
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, a 1950 Nobel Prize laureate.
In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism.
Christian Lacroix, a French fashion designer.
I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.
Laurence Sterne, an English author
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| Credit: Ilya Stepanov |
A Russian photographer Ilya Stepanov has recently visited Cairo (Egypt) where he ventured into the infamous Garbage City in Cairo. The suburb Mokattam is inhabited by a community of the Zabaleen, the Coptic Christians who since 1950s have been making their ends meet by managing Cairo’s waste.
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| Credit: Ilya Stepanov |
As We Make Money Not Art reports, “the Zabaleen generally perform this service very cheaply. Waste food is fed to livestock, mainly pigs; what cannot be repaired or reused -steel, glass, textile and plastic bottles- is sorted by hand and sold as raw materials; some material is burnt as fuel. It is claimed that Zabbaleen reuse or recycle 80-90% of the waste they collect (a figure that the most modern waste management systems can only dream of), however this must be put into context of the fact that the Zabbaleen concentrate on wealthier areas“.
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| Credit: Ilya Stepanov |
Ilya has documented the state of utter poverty and antisanitary conditions. As he confesses, he couldn’t get into any house: partly because there was too much garbage blocking the way, partly because of the unwholesome odours. The problem is, photographers and even film-makers have been visiting the area for years now, and each of them leaves to tell us about the terrible conditions in which human beings live. The beings themselves, however, have nowhere to leave. Garbage City is their community, their home, their habitat. Their life.
As most of us would not know about this, the so-called sustainable recycling retains its glamorous appeal; however, another side of the coin is something we would decry in Europe (view comments to this post). The day I posted a photograph of garbage bags stacked by a bus stop in Manchester city centre in 2009, the picture astonished many people. On top of this lies the fact that the Zabaleen community is Christian, and hence the entire story receives an ideological spin: this is how Christians are being treated in an Islamic country.
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| Credit: Ilya Stepanov |
One may contemplate forever, exactly why this kind of situation is possible. Then you watch the trailer to an independent film, Garbage Dreams, and something begins to make sense. The dangerous vapours, the threat of epidemics, the various complexes bred in youngsters by their occupation and by the society’s response, are all costrued by the Copts as “God’s will”. God lives in handmade cardboard boxes hanging between the houses. There is no church in the area, as Stepanov testifies: the House of God cannot stand amidst the waste and dirt. So it hangs in the air. There could hardly be a better illustration to the aloofness of religion in matters of human existence.
Islamic or not, Egypt is an independent country that is, like any other country, subject to epidemics. Considering the tourist appeal, the state powers should be willing to solve the problem with recycling. The Christian denominations, instead of debating female priests, contraception and homosexuality, should pay attention to the extreme conditions in which God’s children live. The mendicants were popular in their own time, but the Zabaleen are not serving God. They serve themselves and make their ends meet by accepting what is regarded as God’s will.
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| Credit: Ilya Stepanov |
As for the Zabaleen themselves, this is a potent reminder of the great divide between the enlightened ones and those who wander in darkness. We speak so much in the West about the power of mind and endless possibilities awakened by our imagination. We love John Lennon’s “Imagine” because – supposedly – it takes us to the better world, at least in our head. It gives us motivation. I love “Imagine”, too, but when I was looking at those photos the only thought that was spinning in my head was: what do these guys and girls imagine? We can imagine a better life by reading Vogue, dreaming of George Clooney, or window shopping. We have an idea of a different life, for which we can strive. Now, imagine: collecting, sieving through, breathing, watching, living the garbage.What other life can you imagine when your head is filled with the waste your family recycles?
It is true, as Abraham Lincoln said, one cannot help the poor by being poor themselves. And fair enough, communities like Cairo’s Garbage City can be found in Europe and Russia. But this is the part of the world, together with Africa, that we, with our potent imagination, should drag out of its state. All wars, revolutions, epidemics etc. will be happening until these garbage cities exist. It is futile to fight the consequences of discrimination and inequality without attacking their roots.
Ilya Stepanov’s post with more photographs and a report in Russian. Apparently, the report will be continued, so bookmark the URL of his LiveJournal.
A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.
Samuel Johnson, an English author
One of the things you will notice when you visit Moscow are the different kiosks in the street. This is not altogether different from the UK: in Manchester street vendors sometimes occupy a space in the arch of a building, or have a small stall. Usually, however, they sell food and drinks from small vans, or fruit, veg, and flowers from the open stalls. The rest tend to rent a shop.
In Moscow, however, there are kiosks like the one in the picture where you can buy flowers, ice-cream, and newspapers. The Mospechat’ means “Moscow press”, and naturally the main articles you can buy here are newspapers and magazines. The same kind of kiosk will usually sell some stationery, and this particular one sells stamps. Stamp and coin collecting is one of the favourite hobbies in Russia. However, whereas coins are normally sold at the antiques shops, stamps can be found in these press kiosks in the street.
Given the budget for their IRN-BRU campaign – mere 150K GBP – PHD North has chosen the simplest solution to the Scottish footie problem. They didn’t show any hard work. In fact, everything seems to be a result of the most pleasurable activity. What happens when a Brazilian man comes to Scotland? He finds a local girl (or the other way around). They get together and nine months later a future legend is born. Crawford Batista, say. Or Robertsinho. Or even Aberdinho. Genius? Yes, so they thought at Cannes, too. PHD North, together with The Leith Agency, Burt Greener and Blonde, won Gold (How-Do reports).
And so I think, by the way. In fact, I think the Russian oligarchs who invest in football should bring those hot Brazilians to Russia. Let our gorgeous Russian girls warm those poor fellas in the winter. Or it may be Brazilian girls who come to raise the fighting spirit of Russian footballers. And then our team will have players under the names of Arshavinho and Bilayletdindo. Why not? It’s IRN-BRU. Phenomenal.
From the onset a web-based project by the Russian photographer Kirill Kuzmin has been attracting a lot of attention from bloggers and readers alike. The aim of the project, artistically titled Bloggers’ Portraits in Black and White, is to discover and showcase the best talents of the Russian blogosphere, going beyond the so-called “top bloggers”.
To acknowledge the importance of the project, one needs to understand the peculiarity in how blogging and Social Media have been developing in Russia in the last 5 years. In the English-speaking part of the planet Google and Facebook are unquestionable leaders, but for the sake of fair play Yahoo!, Bing, Twitter, and the like still have their word to say, as well. This is especially true for blogging: WordPress may be the most popular or most recommended platform, but TypePad, Blogger, Twitter, Posterous, and Tumblr have their share of happy users.
Turn to Russia, and you will find a single most popular search engine – Yandex, and a single most popular blogging platform – LiveJournal. It does not mean that there are no Russians who use Google or WordPress. However, if we consider building a community as an overall important trait of Social Media, blogging included, then it makes every sense to have an account where every other Russian has – with LiveJournal, that is.
The rub is that Google AdSense (and its copycat, Yandex Direct) has lost a bit of its glamour, but the idea of monetising blogging has proved massively popular. So popular, in fact, that the above mentioned “top bloggers” often write for cash. It may be a payment for a post, or a payment to rise to the top in Yandex’s listings. If they do not write for cash, they blog on the subjects that always attract a lot of comments: models’ looks (fat/thin, make-up/no make-up), relationships, sex (including specific body parts), politics, certain personalities from Arts and Culture sphere, etc. Whatever takes the author to the top goes, in short. Sadly, as a result a lot of worthwhile, interesting blogs written by expert authors rarely show up in the Top 10.
The project originated exactly from the disappointment with such state of things. Bloggers who were interviewed and photographed included a ballet expert, an icon painter, a professional cello player, an intrepid citizen journalist, psychologists, cooks, fellow photographers, writers, and even an expert in playing cards.
This is not the first time Kuzmin attempted to defy the perceptions and to show the ‘human’ face of an otherwise alien phenomenon. On one of the previous occasions he spoke to and photographed the so-called Gaestarbeitern – workers from the former Soviet Republics who come to Moscow to earn money to support their families and whom Muscovites themselves often despise. In Bloggers’ Portraits, he deftly deploys photographing techniques to capture intimate, unexpected face expressions and gestures. In doing so, he brings out a person’s true self: a contemplative in one, an eccentric in another, a passionate in the third.
Bloggers’ Portraits by Kirill Kuzmin arrives to a more or less the same point as Mario Cacciottolo’s Someone Once Told Me project. While in the second we get to see a particular phrase that may or may not have shaped a person’s life, in the first we do not always hear the phrase but we do see the person as he or she were shaped. And here the ability of the black-and-white film, with its emphasis on light and shadow, to reveal the hidden gems and corners stands unrivalled. The ballet critic, although a buxom lady, reveals grace in her posture; a man and wife, both journalists, brim with tenderness and mischief; an icon painter agrees to play with her long black hair; another journalist poses as a gullible tourist, complete with a Polaroid in his hands; and a female writer agrees to pose with a whip.
We thus get to see the face of the Russian blogosphere as it is likely to be: not the confident, professional smiles of “top bloggers”, but the more modest and more open physiognomies of the less prolific, or less popular, yet no less expert guys and gals. Bloggers’ Portraits may one day acquire a place at the gallery, but so far you can see those who make the difference on the Russian blogging scene online.
(Although the project is presently in Russian, you can already enjoy the photos).
