balcony culture and community art

i invite all of you who read this blog to particiate in this lil piece of community art.  by sending me pics and photos.  and words.  and whatever you want to digitally.  and i will print them out and incorporate them into this balconey art.

so i have been thinking a lot about community, art, and borders for the past few months.

one of the things that i have realized is that making art seems to stress me the fuck out.  i get knotted up about the art piece being good enough.  or whatever.  so i started sketching in an art journal.  just trying to loosen up.  and searching for my vision of the world.  i started taking photographs of the world around me.  loving the digital camera that lets me just snap. snap. snap. and then run home and see what i saw.

and these practices definitely helped.  to open myself to my own vision.  but the notebook started to feel too small and confining.  and i love taking pictures.  but i still wasnt feeling myself as free.  i was still caught up on perfectionism and meaning.

so habibi bought this 6 foot piece of canvass and i have been painting for the past couple of days.

at the same time in talking to lex about porch culture in the south and stoop culture in the north and i was saying: man, i miss having a porch.  and then i said.  oh but we have balconeys here in cairo.  and realizing that there is a very definite balconey culture here because everyone lives in an apt.  and even cheap apts have at least one balconey.  and that i want to make our balconeys a site for urban street art and contributing to a culture of balconeys in abdeen, cairo, egypt. i also wanted to do an art project with aza.  and so she will be painting and drawing

so i am painting this latest piece and i when it is completed.  i will hang it on our balconey.

and i want to invite all of you who read this blog to particiate in this lil piece of community art.  by sending me pics and photos.  and words.  and whatever you want to digitally.  and i will print them out and incorporate them into this balconey art.

send it to me at primitivedragonfly at yahoo dot com or leave a link in the comment section…

as to the type of art i am looking for.  i am pretty open about it.  take a walk through your neighborhood and take pictures or sketches.  a poem.  questions.  a story that you want to share.  photos of you or your family friends community.  art.  posters.  your ordinary heroes/heroines.  a piece of art/painting/writing created by someone else that you want to bring forth.  the possibilities are endless.

i am really excited that this piece will:

1. contribute to the visual community of the neighborhood

2. mean that aza gets to paint

3. will act as a bridge between my online communities and my offline communities

4. will bring forth a more complex picture of middle east africa for those who do not live here and a more complex picture of europe and the americas for those who do not live there. and show the interconnections between these multiple sites of expression and communication

5. find another way to break through the censorship, imprisonment, and torture of bloggers in egypt

where ive been

hey there

you may have wondered why i havent been posting as frequently lately. well, as i had stated before i was cocooning.

and in the interim i thought you might want to be alerted to some things going on in our lil world.

like:

#i have been guest blogging at flip flopping joy for the past week.  and will be doing so for at least another week or so.  so if you want to check out the posts…

messy but necessary

1. one of the things i have learned in community building is that communities are not monolithic.  now this may seem to be an obvious point.  but one of the principles of my community work has been that we must follow the leadership of the oppressed marginalized excluded.

and in theory.  on paper.  on screen.  that looks really ethical.

in practice.  on the ground.  off line.  these clear lines get much messier.

some posts about the iranian protests

non-violence, palestine, and land

after years of thought and work, i have stopped referring to myself as non-violent.  non-violence to me is a series of tactics that one uses in order to achieve a more just world.  non-violence is a tactic.  not a goal.  in the non-violent org i used to work for (the same one that joy worked for in palestine) we used to joke: non-violence is the answer.  non-violence is the answer.  non-violence is the answer.  now what was the question?

fluency and coalition

1. We as a society give so much more credit to a white person who is fluent in a third world or people of color language, cultural style and lifestyle than we give to a person of color or third world person who learns intimately a white person’s language and cultural style.

For the white person who masters the others language he or she is made into a ‘master’ of that language and culture. And of Language and Culture in general.

In a person of color such parallel mastery of white folks language or another poc or third world communities language is considered to be ‘par for the course’. In other words it is to be expected of a poc with any ambition to be able to mimic the language and cultural norms of white folks. I am not sure why this is exactly.

i am also also blogging at raven’s eye.  and have altered some what the format of the blog.  you can check it out here.

also i just posted an article here at vegans of color:

survival foods

saqqara pyramids

coptic cairo yesterday

air

photos from a couple of hours walk in coptic cairo…

on my way home

here are some photos that i took on my way home yesterday.  basically of a couple of streets on my ‘block’ (if you can call it a block…) what i love about my lil hood is the texture.  so many layers of walls and dirt and windows and trash and people and kids playing futbol and music and color and cloth and water and feces and light and shadows and time and heart and generations.

mamatoto sticker

a little sticker that i made…

clothesline

1. some really amazing beautiful things and people have come into my life recently. it is like once i lift the grey veil, i start to see things in a different light. i will write more about this later. but i just want to say: thank you. thank you. thank you.

2. yesterday we went to an artist workshop/gallery.  it is amazing (i know i use that word alot) to see the kind of creativity being expressed and encouraged.  i fell in love with that space.  and it so inspired me to think through art, writing, movement, and community.

at the cafe