Category: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

YOANI AT THE COURT OF PRINCE CLAUS / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

YOANI EN LA CORTE DEL PRÍNCIPE CLAUS, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

www.princeclausfund.org/en/what_we_do/awards/index.shtml

www.einnews.com/pr-news/159005-algerian-publisher-barzakh…

Yoani Sánchez (Cuba)

Yoani Sánchez (1975, Havana) is a leading figure in the use of social networking technologies to breach imposed frontiers. A graduate in philology, she is now dedicated to computer sciences and their capacity to alter perceptions and generate social change. She works as a webmaster, columnist and editor for Desde Cuba, an online news portal. Determined to promote freedom of information and to speak out regardless of danger, in 2007, Yoani Sánchez set up a blog, Generation Y.

Her regular posts offer punchy accounts of the day-to-day environment. Avoiding direct criticism and global politics, her blog provides subjective insights into the practical difficulties people face. Emphasising the vital importance of material autonomy for any form of active citizenship, her subjects include unaffordable food, shortage of proteins and vegetables, the turgid proceedings of parliament and the lack of meaningful reforms.

Sánchez operates in a context of strict control and censorship, working clandestinely, under threat of arrest. Local access to internet is limited and filters set up by the authorities slow and block connection to Generation Y. Local supporters circulate her writings in emails and USB memories, and volunteers translate her Spanish reports into 22 languages. Generation Y’s growth has been exponential. It is now one of the most-followed blogs in cyberspace, and a compilation has been published as Cuba Libre.

Yoani Sánchez is awarded for raising global awareness of daily Cuban realities through her blog, for her inspiring and courageous example in giving a voice to the silenced, and for demonstrating the immense impact internet communications technologies can have as tools for social change and development.

September 6, 2010

YOANI IN THE PRINCE CLAUS AWARDS…!!!! / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Algerian Publisher Barzakh Editions to Receive Principal Prince Claus Award of EUR100,000
PR Newswire

AMSTERDAM, September 6, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — This year, on 17 December, the Principal Prince Claus Award of EUR100,000 will be presented to the Algerian publisher Barzakh Editions at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In addition, ten other laureates will be presented with awards of EUR25,000 at ceremonies in their respective countries by Ambassadors of the Netherlands. Since 1997, the Prince Claus Fund has given annual awards to artists, intellectuals and cultural organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The 2010 Prince Claus Awards are announced today to commemorate the birthday of Prince Claus (6 September 1926 – 6 October 2002).

Barzakh Editions is an independent publisher in Algiers that has created a platform for a new generation of Algerian writers, thereby opening the doors for an exchange of ideas between Algeria and the rest of the world. Barzakh Editions was established in 2000 by Sofiane Hadjadj and Selma Hellal in the aftermath of Algeria’s black decade of violence.

During and after the black decade, numerous Algerian writers emigrated for reasons of cultural isolation, economic crisis and political violence. As a result, a considerable amount of Algerian literature is published outside of Algeria, making it expensive and unavailable for much of the population.

Barzakh Editions has succeeded in creating breathing space in the deadlock between an authoritarian state and a powerful Islamic movement. Driven by a passion for books and the conviction that freedom of speech and thought are essential to the development of the country, Sofiane Hadjadj and Selma Hellal have made the work of local and exiled authors accessible and affordable. They have released more than 110 publications in Algeria, many of which have been translated and published in other African and European countries.

The Award honours Barzakh Editions for providing Algerians with a voice, for facilitating the much-needed critical reflection on Algerian reality, for building a bridge between various languages and cultures, and for creating a beacon for the country’s creative potential.

The other ten Awards of EUR25,000 –

Literature
Ana Maria Machado (Brazil)
Kwani Trust (Kenya)

Journalism
Mehrdad Oskouei (Iran)
///YOANI SANCHEZ (Cuba)/////
Aung Zaw (Myanmar/Thailand)

Visual Arts
Dinh Q. Lê (Vietnam)
Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev (Kyrgyzstan)

Film/Photography
Maya Goded (Mexico)
Jia Zhang-Ke (China)

Architecture
Decolonizing Architecture institute (Palestine)
For information and visual material: www.princeclausfund.org/press

Copyright 2010 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved

September 6, 2010

CLAUS’S CUBAN ROOM (BUT WITHOUT CLAUSTROPHOBIA) / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Report from the 2010 Prince Claus Awards Committee
June 2010

The Prince Claus Awards

The Prince Claus Fund’s Awards Programme celebrates and brings to public attention outstanding achievements in the field of culture and development. Awards are given annually to individuals, groups, organisations or institutions in recognition of their contribution within the Prince Claus Fund’s areas of interest.

Each year in December, the Principal Prince Claus Award of EUR 100,000 is presented to the Principal Laureate at a prestigious venue in Amsterdam in the presence of members of the Royal family and an audience of 600 international guests. The Prince Claus Awards of EUR 25,000 are presented to the recipients in their respective countries by the Netherlands Ambassadors.

Procedures

Participants in the Fund’s expanding network of colleagues, partners and experts in relevant fields are invited to nominate candidates for the annual Prince Claus Awards, and are requested to provide insights and give second opinions on potential laureates.

A total of 98 nominations were received for the 2010 Prince Claus Awards. Research and documentation on these nominations was considered at a first meeting of the 2010 Prince Claus Awards Committee on 17 and 18 December 2009. A short list was established and the staff of the Fund’s Bureau then carried out further research and gathered extensive second opinions from advisors in the Fund’s network. On 20-21 May 2010, the Awards Committee met again for in-depth assessment of the short-listed candidates and the selection of 11 recommended recipients of the 2010 Prince Claus Awards.

2010 Prince Claus Awards Committee

Peter Geschiere (Chair), Professor of Anthropology, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

N’Goné Fall, Curator, Architect, Cultural Consultant, Dakar, Senegal / Paris, France

Rahul Mehrotra, Architect, Urban Designer, Professor of Architecture, Mumbai, India / Cambridge, USA

Laksmi Pamuntjak, Poet, Writer, Jakarta, Indonesia

José Roca, Curator, Bogota, Colombia

Fariba de Bruin-Derakhshani is Secretary to the Committee.


Criteria and considerations

The Prince Claus Awards are presented to artists, intellectuals and cultural operators in recognition of their outstanding achievements and contributions in the field of culture and development. The awards are given to individuals, groups and organisations around the globe, but primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Quality is a sine qua non for a Prince Claus Award. The quality of a laureate’s work is assessed in professional and personal contexts and for its positive impact on wider cultural and social fields. The creation of interactions and links between different cultures, the fostering of commonalities and the initiation of shared cultural currents are highly valued. The Prince Claus Awards recognise artistic and intellectual qualities that are relevant in the contemporary context. They legitimise experimentation and innovation, recognise audacity and tenacity, support inspirational developments and seek to enhance their beneficial impact on societies.

Policy

The Prince Claus Fund maintains a broad view of culture that accommodates all types of artistic and intellectual disciplines. This open approach encompasses the transmission of culture and achievements in education, media and the applied arts. It includes fields such as science and technology that interact with and impact on the domain of culture and development. Proposals from every cultural field and area of potential are welcomed. The Fund seeks originality, experimentation and groundbreaking initiatives. Mutual exchange, interculturality and the transcending of borders are high on the Fund’s agenda, and it has a keen interest in vocabularies and vernaculars that develop into universal languages linking people in different cultures.

The Prince Claus Fund aims to provide protection to culture in places where it is threatened and to explore ‘zones of silence’. The Fund continues its interest in previous themes, such as Humour and Satire, Culture and Nature, the Positive Results of Asylum and Migration, and Creating Spaces of Freedom.

2010 Theme: Frontiers of Reality
Frontiers of Reality is a crucial theme for contemporary culture and development. Perceptions of reality vary according to our knowledge and the cultural, political and social environment in which we live. In former times, notions of reality were relatively established, stabilised by fixed conventions and perspectives limited by time and distance. Information about events and the impact of discoveries filtered slowly into societies, and the borders and edges of reality altered gradually. Today, new technologies and media provide increased and accelerated access, spreading information quickly and bringing voices from previously isolated or repressed groups. Many new versions of reality are surfacing. It is the collage of this collective experience that really makes our world so we need to assimilate and make sense of these new perspectives.

At the same time, the universal human desire for security and stability tends to resist knowledge that challenges established definitions of reality. Communities and societies develop diverse ways, both subtle and overt, of restricting and limiting alternative views. The drive for dominance and power leads to aggressive and life threatening control of the frontiers of reality. Discrimination, censorship, criminalisation of expression, media distortion, propaganda, border controls, travel restrictions and militarisation are forms of reality control.

People who work at the frontiers, often in difficult or dangerous contexts, are instrumental in bringing attention to different experiences and cultural ideas. Their explorations and practices break through current limits. In selecting the theme of Frontiers of Reality, the Prince Claus Fund aims to honour those who open up different perceptions and make significant contributions to the construction of new knowledge, better understanding, empowerment and greater equity – essential factors for local and global development and stability.

Recommendations for the 2010 Prince Claus Awards

The 2010 Principal Prince Claus Award

Barzakh Editions
Algeria

Barzakh Editions is a remarkable independent publishing house that has created a platform for a new generation of Algerian writers ­and opened a door for the flow of ideas between Algeria and the world.

Founded in 2000, in the aftermath of crisis and a context of cultural isolation, economic crises and political violence, its name refers to an intermediate zone where souls are in transit, where personal realities are confronted and assessed against other realities. Many Algerian writers had emigrated during the conflicts of the past decades and the remaining writers had few possibilities. Connections with neighbouring countries were limited. Most Algerian literature was published in France, Lebanon or Egypt, expensive to import and thus beyond the reach of the majority in Algeria. During this particularly harsh period when it seemed that the country would become increasingly isolated, Barzakh Editions succeeded in creating a space between an authoritarian state and a powerful Islamist movement that seemed to hold the country in a deadlock. Driven by a passion for books and a conviction that freedom of thought and expression are essential for development, co-founding editors Sofiane Hadjadj and Selma Hellal began to make the work of local and exiled authors accessible and affordable, to encourage creativity and experimentation, and to provide publishing opportunities for local authors, both the established and new voices.

Barzakh Editions has published more than 110 books of consistently high quality in both content and presentation. Novels and poetry are primary fields, alongside a range of genres and subjects such as philosophy, urbanism, photography, theatre, social history, biography, political essays and artists’ catalogues. Barzakh has succeeded in breaking through restrictive frontiers that seemed to close up the country and limit the space for cultural exchange in various ways. Through its collaborations with French publishers, works by Algeria-based authors are translated into French and Italian for wide distribution. Barzakh publishes authors from francophone sub-Saharan Africa and Arabic translations of French literature. It has developed networks and exchanges with Arab, African and European countries, and fosters the local audience through discussions, poetry readings and art exhibitions.<

The Principal Prince Claus Award honours Barzakh Editions for giving concrete form to Algeria’s voices, for opening up a much needed space for critical reflection on Algerian realities, for building a bridge connecting different languages and cultures, and for creatively breaking through the threatening cultural isolation of the country.

Ten 2010 Prince Claus Awards

Decolonizing Architecture institute (DAi)
Palestine

Decolonizing Architecture institute’s unique practice is dedicated to the identification of architecture’s role as a central tool in spatial power relations and in the making of conflict. It seeks to subvert and propose new ways for the re-use of architecture’s dominating potential. The work has significant implications for citizens, strategists and policymakers in diverse regions and contexts around the world, and is contributing to a new perspective on urban planning and innovative methodologies for the processes of reclaiming spaces.

Founded in 2007, DAi is run by scholars, activists and architects Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman and Alessandro Petti, as a residency involving local and international practitioners. Looking forward to the future evacuation of colonising forces from Palestinian territories, Decolonizing Architecture offers practical possibilities for their re-appropriation. Its materials document various methods of dismantling and re-formulating Israeli settlements and military bases. Drawings and projections show how spaces can be transformed, and models also provide evidence in legal process. People can relate to these visual representations and are empowered to imagine the reconfiguration of their devastated environment. DAi’s plans reflect both the place of refuge and site of origin, and offer visions for the restoration of historical sites. Spreading their ideas through exhibitions, lectures, videos and publications, DAi challenges individuals and communities to think and plan for an unthreatening built environment.

Decolonizing Architecture is honoured for introducing a non-traditional approach to development in conflict and post-conflict situations, for providing valuable speculation on the future realities of disputed territories, for its critical challenge to outdated urban planning theories based on a more peaceful world, and for highlighting the role of architecture and visualisation in creating and altering the frontiers of reality.

Maya Goded
Mexico

Photographer Maya Goded (Mexico City, 1967) creates subtle images of hidden or shunned communities. Her first project, Tierra Negra (1994), is a collection of moments from her three-year sojourn with Mexicans of African descent, a group whose contribution to Mexican identity is seldom acknowledged. Goded was then drawn to investigate female sexuality, prostitution, tenderness and gender violence in a society that defines women’s roles strictly and maintains notions of womanhood wreathed in myths of purity, fragility and motherhood. Her five years of intense interaction and work with prostitutes and pimps in Mexico City are published in Plaza de Soledad (2006) and Good Girls (2007). Her nine books to date include sensitive studies of the grief of relatives of murdered and sexually abused women, the conditions of traditional healers, and the endurance needed to attain socially defined beauty.

Goded’s images are imbued with unusual intimacy and genuine presence that spring from mutual trust established over a long period of time. This bond is evident in the body language she captures, creating empathy in the viewer. She explores people living in harsh situations constructed around notions of power and control – both the strong, whose refusal to conform threatens established norms, and the vulnerable, whose lives are distorted by social prescription. Each image is accompanied by the name of the person portrayed and a few telling details that foster a sense of connection.

Maya Goded is honoured for her profound and intimate photography, for challenging preconceptions and giving unique insight into little-known realities, and for celebrating otherness and human commonalities that transcend socially constructed barriers.

Jia Zhang-Ke
China

Filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke (1970, Fenyang) breaks away from previous generations’ historical dramas and political idealisations to convey other kinds of realities. He depicts episodes in the life and loyalties of a teenage pickpocket (Xiao Wu, 1997); working conditions and workers facing unemployment, aging and broken state promises (24 City, 2008); the displaced and soon-to-be displaced figuring out how to proceed as public buildings are demolished, houses submerge under the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam and human ties are stretched to the limit (Still Life, 2006). The realities of home, belonging and security for ordinary people in China unfold in parallel narratives amid the demolition of social fabric and the erasure of memory and connection in the name of economic progress.

Jia combines humanistic realism with striking aesthetics and rich cultural texture. He uses local people and professional actors, dialects, on-site sounds, improvisation and interpretive imagination to express individual experiences as realistically as possible. A master of the long shot that gradually fills with subtle gestures and details, Jia makes time palpable and delights in ironies and allusions: a spaceship lift-off, a tightrope-walker between high-rises. He captures universal human experiences that exist regardless of context, and shows Chinese ways of coping, maintaining deeply held values, surviving with the quiet dignity, restraint and resourcefulness of the ‘still living’.

Jia Zhang-Ke is honoured for the outstanding aesthetic and intellectual qualities of his work, for his committed social engagement in focusing on the realities of ordinary contemporary lives, for his significant contribution to local cultural identity and confidence, and for creatively transcending and altering the frontiers of reality. <

Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev
Kyrgyzstan

Gulnara Kasmalieva (1960, Bishek) and Muratbek Djumaliev (1965, Bishek) are cultural catalysts in the Central Asian region, which is in many respects a Zone of Silence. Their practice embodies the transition from a deeply rooted tradition of art making towards the use of contemporary languages. Graduates of Kyrgyz State College of Fine Art, they accessed international ideas when studying in Russia during the period of perestroika. Returning to Bishek they experimented with new technologies and developed documentary-style videos and photography that provide unprecedented representations of Kyrgyzstan’s passage to independence and the impact of Soviet-era legacies on life and identity.

Their extensive practice includes the seminal video installation A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope (2006), documenting contemporary experiences along the historical trade route as it encounters rapid globalisation. They weave different perspectives together, picking up on popular visual culture, showing local reinvention and adaptations, and bringing the new nation-states together in an innovative exposé of intersecting frontiers of reality.
At ArtEast, the cultural centre they run in Bishek, Kasmalieva and Djumaliev are active as curators and leaders with a mission to stimulate the next generation. They provide gallery space for regional and international exhibitions, courses in contemporary theory, practice and art management, access to media equipment, workshops, networking and collaborations, enabling young artists to get in touch with artists, curators and critics in other contexts.

Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev are awarded for their groundbreaking art practices, for their significant contribution to contemporary culture in Central Asia, for establishing a space of freedom and opportunity for young artists, and for creating original representations of the intersections of different realities.

Kwani Trust
Kenya

Kwani Trust is revolutionising creative literary production in Kenya and across Anglophone Africa. Starting in 2003, it launched an independent literary journal, Kwani? (Swahili for ‘So what?’), to challenge the institutionalised academic control of authorship and entrenched literary conventions of an older generation. Kwani’s editors, Binyavanga Wainaina and Billy Kahura, actively encourage new talent, original sensibilities and creative use of language. Poetry has a strong presence, alongside humour and slang. The wide range of stories, personal narratives and commentaries reflect day-to-day realities, exploring topics such as urbanisation, relationships, ethnicity, injustice and politics. The pool of contributors is constantly expanding and includes writers from many African countries.

Positive response to the journal led to a variety of popular activities: Poetry Open Mic, a monthly performance event; Sunday Salon Nairobi, a prose reading series; writers’ forums, public debates, workshops and competitions; and the annual Kwani? Literary Festival, which features continental and global cultural figures.

Kwani Trust publishes short-story collections and books such as The Life and Times of Richard Onyango (a Kenyan artist) and Kenya Burning (a visual narrative of 2007 post-election violence). Recognising the economic constraints of local readers, it also produces affordable pocket-sized editions and distributes literature from other African countries. It uses new technologies to reach wider audiences, has built a global network and facilitates local participation in international events.

Kwani Trust is honoured for establishing a dynamic platform for new African voices and perspectives, for its progressive influence and energetic dedication to developing a supportive environment for literary expression, and for crossing social and cultural frontiers to expose new facets of reality.

Dinh Q. Lê
Vietnam

Visual artist Dinh Q. Lê (1968, Ha-Tien) is the co-founder of two transformative institutions that are opening up possibilities for Vietnamese artists. The Vietnam Foundation for the Arts is a Los Angeles-based centre that counteracts isolation through exchanges and collaboration. And Sàn Art, the first independent not-for-profit art space in Ho Chi Minh City, runs local and international exhibitions, residencies, projects, a reading room, discussions, lectures and networking opportunities.

Brought up in Vietnam during the American war, Dinh Q. Lê moved to the USA aged 10. Surrounded by Hollywood and western media interpretations of his homeland, he studied and began his art practice. He devised an innovative technique based on Vietnamese craft heritage, literally and metaphorically weaving images and fragments into complex combinations of different traditions, histories and modernities. These ‘surreal memory landscapes’ dramatically portray the schizophrenic realities of exiles and migrants.

Returning to Vietnam, aged 25, he continues his explorations of contradictory realities. The Farmers and the Helicopter (2006), a documentary video on passionate local desire to recreate the iconic destroyer of Vietnam’s traumatic past, contrasts with South China Sea Pishkun (2009), a 3D animation of the mass crashing of helicopters into the South China Sea during America’s panicked retreat from Saigon – the Vietnamese view still widely unknown. Other works examine genocide, consumerist glitz in disadvantaged places, and the promotion of Vietnam as idyllic paradise for tourists.

The Prince Claus Award honours Dinh Q. Lê for his strong creative work exploring different constructions of reality, for providing inspiration and practical opportunities for young artists, and for advancing free thought and contemporary visual expression in a context of indifference and hostility.

Ana Maria Machado
Brazil

Ana Maria Machado (1941, Rio de Janeiro) creates compelling children’s stories that deal with prejudices and human rights. She developed a passion for storytelling during her traditional rural upbringing, studied humanities, became a visual artist and curator, was arrested and exiled during the dictatorship, completed a PhD in linguistics and semiotics, lectured and worked as journalist. The author of more than 100 books, translated into 11 languages, she opened the first children’s literature bookshop in Brazil.

Machado shares a way of looking at the world that is original, funny and poetic. She has a mother’s faith in the child’s imagination, an ear for natural patterns of everyday spoken language and a painter’s eye for colour, composition and detail. Her experiments with narrative structure, symbolic language and combinations of the real and the fantastic are evidence of her consummate mastery of the writer’s craft. Above all, Machado is able to express complex concepts with skilful simplicity and subtle passion. Edged with excitement, tension and humour, the intriguing scenarios she creates become personal encounters with difficult subjects such as racism, gender discrimination, poverty and identity. Machado interrogates Brazil’s historical memory, bringing past experiences alive as part of everyday life in a way that appeals to children. In From Another World (2005), her characters and the readers confront the realities of slavery through the unquiet ghost of a slave girl who seeks their help. Presenting distilled wisdom in an unpretentious style, her stories encompass understanding of difference, courage in the face of tyranny and respect for others, and insist on delight and the joy of living.
Ana Maria Machado is awarded for her outstanding children’s literature, for opening frontiers of reality for young people and communicating essential human values to impressionable minds and hearts, and for her significant contribution to recognition of the importance of children’s literature in the formation of worldviews.

Mehrdad Oskouei
Iran

Independent filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei (Tehran, 1969) penetrates subaltern segments of Iranian society to give voice to unknown perspectives, challenge preconceptions and offer unique readings of people’s lives and experiences. Graduating from Tehran’s University of Arts, he started in theatre and short fiction films before turning towards realistic reporting. He has developed a hybrid cinematic language that combines documentary, poetic and dramatic sensibilities, enabling him to convey the multiple layers of reality.

Oskouei’s personal concern and commitment to the people he films creates trust, which is the vital spark in his works. In The Other Side of the Burka (2004), an investigation of high female suicide rates in a patriarchal enclave in southern Iran, he achieves an unprecedented degree of openness. The women tell their own stories, describe their suffering and discuss their situation with honesty and clarity in close-up face-to-face interviews; documentary facts ­of the women’s rooms, work, routines and the community rituals enacted to deal with symptoms are interwoven with evocative metaphors and moments of psychological pain, the glimpse of a shoulder, the corpse beneath the burial cloth.

His 24 films offer in-depth encounters with orphans, widowers and juvenile delinquents, and examine Iranian experience of broken homes, rhinoplasty and urban youth cultures. Passionate about the role of film in social development, Oskouei founded the Short Film Society and runs workshops to stimulate young filmmakers.

Mehrdad Oskouei is honoured for his moving, informative and evocative films, for his honest engagement with his subjects and his commitment to accurately representing their concerns, and for working in difficult contexts to break down prejudice and generate social justice.

Yoani Sánchez
Cuba

Yoani Sánchez (1975, Havana) is a leading figure in the use of social networking technologies to breach imposed frontiers. A graduate in philology, she is now dedicated to computer sciences and their capacity to alter perceptions and generate social change. She works as a webmaster, columnist and editor for Desde Cuba, an online news portal. Determined to promote freedom of information and to speak out regardless of danger, in 2007, Yoani Sánchez set up a blog, Generation Y.

Her regular posts offer punchy accounts of the day-to-day environment. Avoiding direct criticism and global politics, her blog provides subjective insights into the practical difficulties people face. Emphasising the vital importance of material autonomy for any form of active citizenship, her subjects include unaffordable food, shortage of proteins and vegetables, the turgid proceedings of parliament and the lack of meaningful reforms.

Sánchez operates in a context of strict control and censorship, working clandestinely, under threat of arrest. Local access to internet is limited and filters set up by the authorities slow and block connection to Generation Y. Local supporters circulate her writings in emails and USB memories, and volunteers translate her Spanish reports into 22 languages. Generation Y’s growth has been exponential. It is now one of the most-followed blogs in cyberspace, and a compilation has been published as Cuba Libre.

Yoani Sánchez is awarded for raising global awareness of daily Cuban realities through her blog, for her inspiring and courageous example in giving a voice to the silenced, and for demonstrating the immense impact internet communications technologies can have as tools for social change and development.

Aung Zaw
Burma/Thailand

Aung Zaw (1968) is the founder and director of The Irrawaddy, the most reliable source of information on realities in Burma. A committed pro-democracy activist, he started in student politics, setting up an underground network to organise resistance to authoritarian rule in 1987. He was arrested and released several times, tortured during interrogation and, following the military coup in 1988, went into exile in Thailand.

Recognising the urgency of keeping channels of communication open between Burma and the world, Aung Zaw founded the Burma Information Group to document human rights violations, lobby for democracy and provide information to international newspapers and human rights organisations. In 1993 he launched The Irrawaddy, the first independent publication on Burma and the most significant resource for up-to-date news on the situation. As editor and contributor he has built up an extraordinary network of trusted sources on the ground, inside one of the world’s most repressive states. In 2000, he set up the website to increase access. Published in Burmese and English, The Irrawaddy is officially banned and the website is largely blocked in a context of almost total control and surveillance of media and information. Dedicated to democracy for all, and to objective journalism, Aung Zaw remains unaffiliated to any political group and he has recently expanded coverage to related regional developments.

Aung Zaw is honoured for his active dedication to achieving democratic government in Burma, for building such a valuable resource for exposing realities that those in power want to hide, for maintaining the flow of ideas and upholding freedom of information, and for his inspiring role in transgressing the containment of violently enforced political boundaries.

www.princeclausfund.org/en/what_we_do/awards/documents/20…

September 6, 2010

HIP HOP 2010 in ALAMAR…! / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

EL HIP HOP DEL 2010 EN ALAMAR…!, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

This Thursday, September 2, 2010, at 3:00 in the afternoon, irremediably

or enviably, the Alamar Siberia will return to the site where

OMNI ZONA FRANCA plus 26 Cuban rappers will throw themselves in an

independent way on the only theme that UNITES EVERYONE which without a doubt will be the Hip

Hop of the Year (no danger no tricks). The audiovisual chronicle will be on

www.twitter.com/OLPL and in my blog POST-REVOLUTION MONDAYS

(www.orlandoluispardolazo.blogspot.com).

August 30, 2010

P350 AND LET’S GO…! / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

A MAGAZINE OF CEMENT PAPER

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

(more photos later in BORING HOME UTOPICS)

A free magazine can be invented over the dusty cartridge of an empty cement sack, opened.

In fact, freedom can be just that: a recycled powder, a remnant, with the rhetoric of its aired texts, without more design than that of a pragmatic parchment.

And the gates of the fringe theater group EL CIERVO ENCANTADO (5th and D, Vedado) served as coliseum for this somewhat eccentric experience: to cut up a cement sack and construct a personal magazine, live (Made in Omar Pérez + Yornel) by means of collage, cut-up, and cut & paste (preschool techniques borrowed by intellectuality).

This past July’s Saturday the 31st, the late night of El Vedado had in that corner a breather from the police oppression that smolders our avenues, on the hunt for an identification card or an island beating (under the digital cameras hanging from lampposts, perhaps by their necks).

“P350”: that’s the name of the Cuban Portland cement and it’s also a magazine that already accumulates a few collection bags.

Concrete creativity. In a special space where the prize-winning filmmaker Enrique Pineda Barnet fits right along with the censured performer Luis Eligio Pérez (from OMNI ZONA FRANCA). Even I.

The fossilized functionaries of the Ministry of Culture never peek their naphtha noses around there. They’re afraid of the democratic nobility and the enchantment of a theatrical stag. It’s just that they have quinquennials of experience closing down editorial projects, from El Puente, to Pensamiento Crítico, even Albur y Diáspora(s). It’s time that they retire or resign from some of their subcommitments of second-fiddle censor.

But P350 will be hard to fetter. The artists Omar Pérez and Yornel simply do not distribute it. They make it and then they exhibit it, carrying their cartons from home to home, like construction snails. Besides, they don’t even do it themselves, but they invite any creator to get in there and get their hands dirty so they can become smeared in the liberty of authorship. Do it yourself…!

P350 is a magazine that, as it gets stronger, like the original cement of its buttress, I’m sure will stick on the throats of more than one Cubanesque hooligan of guayabera and bureau.

Translated by: Joanne Gómez

August 3, 2010

VOICES / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

VOCES, originally uploaded by orlandoluispardolazo.

VOCES IS NOW A REALITY

A document circulates Havana, it surrounds it.

It’s VOCES 1.

A dossier of dissimilar discourse, in and out of Cuba.

A score of writers, and a window for looking in and out of Cuba.

Voices of change and continuity, swift to the point of the implausible.

Unedited and recycled, unheard on paper as well as on screen.

East of Eden. More loquacious than leaders of nothing, marathon runners of the

rhetorical resistance. Facing the crude body, without political

fibbing, pedaling between the spiritual and the stupid, reporting at the

foot of the horde, fictioning the black holes of a sinking vessel

in its nonsensical notion of nation.

Ways of narrating our unideological idleness at the height of the 21st century.

Ways of reformulating everything for the thousandth time. Endemic

enthusiasm of those of us who want to gain if not a voice, at least a

throat.

Future acknowledgment. Meetings of post-Cuban cultures. More a collage

than a choir. Binnacle of bits. Next to last papers. More art of hope

than of expectancy. Bullet-in of blogiterature.

Welcome to VOICES as a lucid reader. We also await you inasmuch

author at the edge of all authority.

Translated by: Joanne Gómez

August 5, 2010

TAKEN FROM VOCES 1 / Yoani Sánchez / Posted by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

That one will not return

Yoani Sánchez

I CAN STILL remember my mother’s sighs in front of the television, during those boring eighties, while Fidel Castro gave one of his marathonian speeches. He was the dreamy stud of many Cuban women who—from seeing him so much—could anticipate what he would say, they knew each of his gestures, even the new wrinkles that appeared on his face.

The attraction which that peculiar countryman of more that six feet, Grecian profile, and surprising oratory generated, took my mother and her friends into a prolonged paroxysm. It was like that until, in 1989, Arnaldo Ochoa’s trial was televised. He was accused of being involved with drug trafficking. My mother sighed once again, but this time opposite the face of the one who would be executed in a few days.

Something was broken within the “fan-club of the beloved and invincible Commander-in-Chief,” because in my house, nobody again listened stupefied to his speeches.

The age marked by Fidel Castro’s personal tantrums seemed to end. His absence in the media made us begin to forget him. Like every sorcerer, he needed to perform his magical moves for us, leaving us widemouthed and contented. He had to take the rabbit out of the hat and the scarf out of the sleeve in order to keep our attention.

Without his demiurgic image many of us ended up leaving our chairs and looking around. How little remained of “Him” in those four years during which we did not hear his speeches, when we didn’t have his punches on the table and his explanations of how the economic plan would bring the “solution” to all problems. Of the man who imposed himself with the strength of his presence, of the lulling us with his long diatribes, some unconnected reflections barely remained, published on the front pages of newspapers.

Suddenly, Pedro Luis Ferrer’s tune, warning us that “If grandpa does not agree, nobody paints the building” began to go out of style, to lose part of its meaning.

For starters, there were dozens of flu outbreaks going around Havana, and nobody thought of calling them by his name. During his long convalescence, practically no new nickname was added to the list of the ones He already held. And Pepito, the eternal rascal of our jokes, stopped mentioning him in his funny stories. Little by little, we had begun to forget Fidel Castro, even while he was still alive.

Homemakers were calm because the Brazilian soap opera kept its stellar nighttime time slot, without the delays that the Great Orator caused. The sports coaches felt lighter since they didn’t have to listen and follow his advice; meanwhile the meteorologists got startled, in the middle of a hurricane, when remembering the precise and irrefutable forecasts of the Expert in Chief.

The ministers, on their part, began to wonder if they had to make decisions for themselves, of if Raul Castro would inherit all the cabinet positions that his brother held. All of them, to some large or small degree, had stopped feeling the huge olive-green weight on his shoulders.

That sensation of lightness came about because since July, 2006, the Commander had not shown himself alive in front of them. All that time he did not give a speech or attend a public event. Neither did he approve a new law nor champion the sports delegations that traveled to international competitions nor sponsor the formal decorations to the presidents that visited the country. He was conspicuous by his absence in the numerous congresses celebrated and in the inaugurations of the new health centers. He practically did not utter any political opinion over how things had to be done in the country. Ultimately, he did not act like Fidel Castro.

And then he returned, like a blabbering elder with shaky hands that had nothing to do with that once well-built military man of Grecian profile, who from a plaza, where a million voices chanted his name, proclaimed laws that hadn’t been consulted with anyone, pardoned death penalties, announced executions or proclaimed the right of revolutionaries to make revolution. Little is left of the man who for hours took over television programming and kept an entire nation on the edge of their seats.

The great improviser of other times assembles now in a little theatre with an audience of young people, to read the summary of his last reflections—already published in the press—and instead of inducing that old dread that made the bravest tremble, he provokes, at best, a tender compassion. A young journalist asks an indulgent question and publicly bids him for a wish: Would you let me give you a kiss? What of that abyss that no audacity dared jump?

We had begun to remember him like something of the past, it was even a noble way of forgetting him. Many were willing to forgive his mistakes and failures in order to place him in some cindered pedestal of 20th century history, where his face—photographed in his last best moment—already appeared next to the illustrious dead. Suddenly he has come out to lewdly exhibit his ailments and announce the end of the world, as if he wanted to convince us that life after him will lose all meaning.

During recent weeks, he who once was called the One, the Highest Leader, the Horse, or with the simple personal pronoun HIM, has presented himself to us stripped of his former charisma, to confirm that the other Fidel Castro—fortunately—will not return again, even if this time, he makes the news again.

Translated by: Joanne Gomez

August 9, 2010

POEMS FROM VOICES 1 / Jesús Díaz / Posted by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

REQUIEM

by Jesús Díaz

This city was born of the harbor’s salt

and there it grew hot, irreverent,

its sex open to the sea

its clitoris guiding sailors

like a lighthouse on the bay.

And inside Chinatown, Tropicana,

Floridita, Alí Bar, Los Aires Libres,

orchestras of women jamming

a chachachá danced by aliens.

She talked, muzzled,

in a muddy mix of Yoruba and Castille,

of gypsy and Catalan, of Babel and Congo,

and all this patois, this creole,

the sweet streaky Esperanto

of Moore hullabaloos, Cantonese chitchat,

Jewish Jerusalemite jargon,

barbaric Spanglish of bars and bayous.

Stupefied, she confused Lebanese with Turks,

Asturians and Basque with Galicians,

Ukrainian Israelites with Polish,

all together and in sync screaming

on tables of tasteless linens

covered with yellow tamales,

gray crab, red shrimp,

the whitest rices dovetailed

publicly with black beans,

plantains like dicks and for dessert

a papaya open like a dare,

a great cigar and a gulp of coffee,

Satan’s preferred infusion, black and smoking.

An expert in contraband she dressed

with brandies, Chinese silks,

or well she wandered in rums or rags

and prayed Sunday at dawn

in churches of Gothic deceit,

false romantic, Baroque colonnades

sustaining the tricky art nouveau of the mansions.

Full of complexes, shameless, ridiculous,

she enjoyed a dark pleasure

impressing the more famous whores:

in her bay a gray Christ,

contaminated by the slow vapors of the party.

There, in the womb, a toy Prado,

a vacuous Capitol and skyscrapers

that never touched a clouds’ ass.

Euphoric tropical peacock

in the stained glass and ocelli of its sea-reflected tail,

her profound pain grazed above all

listening to soap operas on the radio,

snakes of the hopelessness invented by her

that traveled the world proclaiming

the insatiable evil of men.

Then, at night,

she showed her vampire fangs

elevating a hymn for the slaughters

to the music and lyric of La Guantanamera.

And in the break of day

she even gambled her butt cheeks

which she usually lost with cheer.

She gave herself to joy and strange rituals

and awoke dancing, the fucker,

boleros, mambos, rumbas,

in shindigs, cocktail parties and balls,

the devil’s revelry, her most revered angel.

Nothing moved her, not even

the blood her children offered

by burglarizing the Tyrant’s Palace.

She kept carousing, it was said

that nobody could romance her,

shut her music off and leave her

like a faithful wife, so tempered.

A little later the warriors came

reciting what verses

what songs, compositions, madrigals,

to make her forget centuries of partying?

With what wile did they manage to put a spell on her?

She fell in love with virtue like a whore.

Asked for forgiveness on her knees

to expiate her multiple sins.

Sacrificed her congas, her lies,

her scented soaps, her trifles,

her luxuries, passions, outbursts.

She ate a pair of eggs on a frugal table.

Screamed pure and happy until becoming hoarse.

She waited in a long line, interminable,

and to her great dismay, sometimes,

while with a saint or a man

she suffered the delirious nostalgia of the frolic.

Her pronouncement was not enough.

The sons of bitches, us, her bastards,

denied her three times. She never again had

nailpolish, not even

a sip of reflecting alcohol

to take to her lips in her frenzies.

And if she screamed with thirst, we did not hear her.

We were clamoring for the world

Translator: Joanne Gomez

August 10, 2010

TAKEN FROM VOICES 1 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

REPORT AT THE FOOT OF THE HORDE

Orlando Lius Pardo Lazo

I believed in the knowledge of writing.

I believed in the power of freedom.

So when a colleague called me from Mexico, inviting me to collaborate on a magazine entitled Letras Libres, I had no option but to accept on two accounts.

The editors wanted a group picture. In public, under midday light, without the shadows of the Island of Cuba. Currently, in full action of March 2010. An intense snapshot, capable of inaugurating the White Spring in this city without seasons. They asked, of course, for a picture of the Ladies in White in their intrepid pilgrimage leveled next to a Havana that had become the Mecca of the acts of repudiation.

I accepted. I declined. I accepted. I declined again. Then I accepted again. I was afraid to be witness. I felt political panic, not only of writing, but of my own pixels set free. The title of the magazine suddenly sounded like an oxymoron: free letters, what for…?

After a week of doubt and a megabyte worth of e-mails, I felt like the pettiest being in the universe. I decided to do it, or I would never take a worthy picture or grow as an author: an entity with aesthetic authority, even against all types of static authority. Being a chronicler of my age couldn’t turn me in accomplice of that or any other social crisis. I sent my colleague a lapidary email: “yes.”

That dawn from Saturday to Sunday I did not sleep. At 7 in the morning I took the labyrinthic P1 bus route, from the proletarian suburb of the Virgen del Camino to the bourgeois district where the Parroquia de Santa Rita is climbed, in Miramar’s Fifth Avenue.

As soon as I entered, a lady climbed on me. I thought that would be the end. But she just called me aside and asked me to put the camera away inside the church. She was right, I had not considered the commercial obscenity of my lenses in that sacred ground.

I put the Canon in the backpack and I asked the lady for a thousand pardons. I probably stuttered. As (bad) luck has it, she asked me if I was a foreigner, because of my pronunciation that swerved from meticulous to precarious. No, no way (in vain I tried to imitate the most classic Cuban slang). A journalist maybe? Neither. And-then-what?, she relished the question like one who asks: po-li-ce?

Please. My name is Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. I write and take personal pictures of my country, I publish many of them immediately in a blocked blog that a friend let me use online. If you wish, I can leave you the address for you to verify: Boring Home Utopics. As a citizen I represent only myself. Maybe a fraction of the future that never was. I am here precisely to lose this paranoia that now clouds our glances and makes us seem like worse Cubans. Excuse me, can I sit now? Mass is about to start.

And I approached them. Towards the clearest pews, halfway in the luminous ship of the super modern parish, and republican to boot. I, suddenly sitting amongst the Ladies in White, las Damas de Blanco. Hearing them breathe, even. Smelling their perfume, I don’t know if expensive (the are accused of being Miami mercenaries) or cheap or if it was the fragrance of the gladioli, standard of gladiators which they each carried almost hidden inside, like I my camera.

I closed my eyes, I don’t know if I prayed. In fact, I don’t know if I know how to pray. The priest’s voice was grave and the microphones gave him an echo of celestial profundity. Five years back, the very same priest had closed the temple’s doors behind the backs of the Ladies in White, in the middle of an hysterical ordeal, pretendingly popular. If I prayed, I did it so that today, winds of brighter mercy would blow.

When I opened my eyes, one of the women in white extended her hand with a paradisaical smile. I shook it. Everyone greeted everyone as part of the liturgy. I joined in the enthusiasm of solidarity and then I noticed that I was surrounded by people much more tense than I: men on their own, holding nothing in their hands, short hair, graceful plaid shirts or striped t-shirts, belts with cell phones, in their looks a certain mystery of ministerial marble. It was the civil uniform of the Security of the State. Alea jacta est: Cubansummatum est!

At the end of mass, the Damas paraded towards the Virgin that presides over the parish, They asked for the prisoners: the sick and the healthy, the resigned and those who have decided to die of hunger before waiting. They asked for their family members and for the rest of the Cuban country. The asked for the soul of a martyred deceased, whose mother named him like my mother named me: Orlando… And to hear that name in their mouths broke my resistance and I fell apart ridiculously and cried.

I noticed that I was not the only one. And that those tears of life were our little security cord, because the congregation was already moving away from the Ladies in White, even making a point to not touch them: the faithful were fearful of catching the plague of such a prayer. And the ladies dressed in white, still asking for justice and peace. Prudence and forgiveness. Without ever raising their voices. Almost whispering at the ear of our lady of the impossible. The gladioli finally on high, to immediately trespass the threshold of the urban openness, and end up, like the first Christians, so alone and so saved in the leprous sand of the Revolution.

We went out, a procession condemned to repudiation (perchance provoking it like an exercise in virtue). I saw grimaces, adolescent wolves, howling with plastic jars holding tropicola or cubalcohol. I saw fists pointing towards the flat sky of the city. I saw a poor woman, foul-mouthed, ostensibly a convict or lunatic, dancing the demonic conga of one who wishes to delight in crime. I saw uniformed men in all the colors of the rain brawl. I saw cars of all the modern makes, unimaginable for a little country, supposedly underdeveloped. I saw people gesturing from the balconies of 42nd street in Havana. I saw cameras, and I think even a helicopter filming (my cowardly Canon stayed inside the backpack until the end of days). An entire evil alef that twisted wide and long across the Avenue of the Americas, until it reached the headquarters of National Parliament.

Then the Ladies in White, in a double file that seemed to cut noon’s hatred around them in two, chanted, out of tune, those same Sunday decibels that, thanks to the safe-conduct of Pope John Paul II himself, once resounded in the Plaza de la Revolución: freedom, Freedom, FREEDOM…!

And they went tranquilly to the sea, I magnetized with them amongst so much equanimity: women no, myths. I with skin soaking of their sweat after so many blocks. And they went to the stop of the P1 route, no less, in Playa, a bus that I boarded in between professional shoving as if I knew them. In fact, I still don’t know them. I mix-up their names in the headlines that nobody published in Cuba. I don’t even have a picture of our ordeal. As (good) luck has it, I sent my Letras Libres colleague not-so recent images from another colleague who pitied me. I have not yet heard an editorial response.

I know they are being produced with ferocious frequency, but not since 1980 did I survive an act of condemnation in my homeland (I had not ten years then; today I carry almost forty). I know that I must not trifle with this un-spontaneous debacle, but the images reverberate in my nightmares more and more each day, not only on weekends. Many other things were broken and healed on that Day of the Lord.

That is why I prefer to put everything in words now, like the exorcism of a foreigner who doesn’t understand anything in the beginning but will soon understand everything. I know that even the Cardinal of Cuba has taken charitable interest in the matter, and that my voice is implausible in matters of the State or Realpolitik. Precisely for this I write it down, to bet not for the masses with clubs, but for the piety of a new Realpersona.

So that, as my country, we may forget this perverse practice as soon as possible. So we don’t have to tell it to the Cubans who come after us. So that Cubans seeking vengeance never exist. So that the pain that burns these ladies white-hot won’t turn another vital color. So that the dialogue of the hordes doesn’t culminate in disaster. So that a Sunday mistake doesn’t convoke more demons of horror.

And to keep believing in the power of writing.

And to keep believing in the knowledge of freedom.

Translator: Joanne Gomez

August 7, 2010

TODAY VOICES FLY FROM HAVANA / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

INDEX:

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. Reporter-on-the-street Report of the Horde

Claudia Cadelo. Leaders of an Alternative Revolution

Eduardo Laporte. I Don’t Know What The Dogs Have

Melkay. The Best Selection in the World

Wendy Guerra. Between Perseverance and Virtues

Iván de la Nuez. The Near East

Reinaldo Escobar. The Reach of Cyber-Dissidence

Emilio Ichikawa. Role and Screen

Jorge Ferrer. Writing a Cuban Blog (Decalog)

Yoani Sánchez. That Won’t Come Again

Antonio José Ponte. A Childhood Without Comics, an Adolescence Without Pornograpy

Juan Abreu. Pissed / Anal bleach / Nyotaimori.

Miriam Celaya. Open Letter to the London BBC

Maikel Iglesias. Pinar del Río City

Jesús Díaz. Requiem

Luis Marimón. Death of Yumurí.

Mirta Suquet. Prosperity and goodness: The Other Face of the Money of the Martí Enlightenment

Miguel Iturria. Martí: Spirituality and Political Illumination

Ernesto Morales. The Happiness of the Long Distance Runner

Ena Lucía Portela. Hurricane

Dimas Casrellanos. The Limits of Immobility

Yoss. Close But Distant: The Universe Next Door

August 6, 2010