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We are sitting in my flat watching the war on Iraq on BBC World. The coalition forces continue to talk about “precision bombs” despite the heavy civilian casualties. A friend of mine, a fellow filmmaker, looks at me with a sense of resentment and resignation. He then remarks that it is events like this war that make him question the significance of cinema. I am silent for a while because even though I have felt a sense of futility in making films, I can’t accept the thought. I have lived my life for cinema and the potential it has to effect change.

The two Vietnam Veterans and Anti-War activists Darnell Stephen Summers and Dave Blalock with their definition of Resist...Refuse...Rebell

Darnell »Stephen« Summers was born on July 9, 1947 in Detroit Michigan, USA. He volunteered for the US Army and served from 1966 to 1970. While home on leave before going to Vietnam in 1968 he became involved in the struggle to found the »Malcolm X Cultural Center« (MXCC) in Inkster Michigan, a suburb of Detroit and was one of the spokespersons for the »MXCC«.

During my military time in former yugoslavia i had to photograph more than 4500 soldiers for their military IDs. This happened 3 years before the war, which started 91.
In the age of 19 and not enough politically grown to realize what i ve got in my hands, the negatives were just trash for me, after i printed 4 copies for each soldier. So all together something like 18000 prints in B/W.
Then in 91 i went to the croatian war as a war photographer.
During and especially after the war i had to think about all this young boys, i was taken a photographs of.

»Once we fully recognise secular magic's role as a cultural agent, our sensitivity to the play of puzzlement, fictiveness, and contingency in modernity will be heightened.« Simon During, Modern Enchantments (Harvard 2002)
»The purpose of this paper is to instruct the reader so he may learn to perform a variety of acts secretly and undetectably. In short, here are instructions for deception.« Some Operational Uses for the Art of Deception, Commissioned for MKULTRA (CIA) from magician John Mulholland in 1954.

Friday, February 23th, 2007

exploitation
imagineered urbanism
islamic banking
laundered dollars
permanent exception
slavery in the 21st century
The World Economic Forum Davos
"The world" island resort, Dubai

Friday, February 23th, 2007

Anti War I think doesn't work anymore as a word. And I want to explore why. Is it that war itself is a situated historical something and we've moved beyond that historical period? Is it that we are no longer positioned in a clear way, so that we can identify war?

- I think the last time anti-war worked, as a word, as an image, of letters, was when massive demonstrations happened all over the world, hoping to prevent the invasion of Iraq. When the invasion happened, the word didn't work anymore. Anti-War became an anti-word. Can we say anti-massacre?

An occupation, military or civilian, is lived out at many different levels, modalities and distances. The suffering that is visited upon those whose freedoms are curtailed, whose movement is blocked and whose lives are threatened is rarely matched by the misgivings of those implicated in inflicting the occupation, or those associated with it through citizenship or other modes of inscription. Our concern here is with the question of how the occupiers might vigilantly live out an occupation beyond the simple rhetorics of resistance.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Provocation is a means of visualizing a religious identity in a secular context. As a hybrid of the notions of vocation, "a divine call to God’s service," and provocation, "a means of arousing or stirring to action", provocation can be understood a means of asserting a believer's democratic rights to practice his or her religion fearlessly.