Argentinian artist Raul Lemesoff constructed this art car/book tank  to spread free books and “to contribute to peace and understanding of people [through literacy].” Built from the frame of an old '79 Ford Falcon, a car once used by the Argentine military dictatorship, this creative reuse holds much significance for those on the streets of Buenos Aires and beyond who still remember their country's Dirty War and the estimated 30,000 people disappeared by the state from 1976-83.

This Weapon of Mass Instruction is stocked with approximately 900 donated books, which Lemesoff, in turn, gives away to anyone who happens to be in the neighborhood he's cruising. After several tours through the Argentine capital and countryside, he's taking this mobile unit north to Bolivia and Peru.

It would be amazing to get a fleet of these to lead the next march demanding more funding for public education!

Check out this video, to see the book tank in action.

Graffiti artist Blu strikes a chord in his home country with a new giant mural in Grottaglie, Italy, famous for its olive trees, ancient ceramic tradition and new, ever-expanding waste dumps. As the artist’s contribution to FAME Fest, a yearly event inviting top urban artists to create street and gallery works, Blu chose to highlight the town’s growing problem with his work É Pronta la Torta (The Cake is Ready).

“Southern Italy is in real deep shit with the trash business. Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warning before it was already being built. Guess how come? Now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from Northern Europe to deliver more shit.

This piece comes at the very right moment, considering that there are workers digging another huge hole in the ground near the dump. There are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town councilors are not telling anything to their own people. How morbid is this?” – FAME Fest founder Angelo Milano

Visit this site for additional images and info about Blu’s mural, and check out the award winning film Gomorrah to get a glimpse of the severity and situation surrounding Southern Italy’s toxic dumping problem.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)

As the Tate Modern celebrated its 10th Anniversary, art activists from the group Liberate Tate released balloons carrying oil-soaked fake birds and dead fish in protest of the museums ties to British Petroleum. With the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reaching its 1 month point today and still gushing, this action couldn’t have more appropriate timing.

Liberate Tate distributed a communiqué throughout the museum during the opening promising addition actions to ‘free art from oil’ until the Tate ends its ties with BP. The group stated, “Every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with acts that are harming people and creating environmental destruction and climate change, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade. We call on Tate to become a responsible, ethical and truly sustainable organisation for the 21st century and drop its sponsorship by oil companies. As a public institution the Tate’s Trustees, chaired as they are by an ex-CEO of BP, must abandon its association with BP. All visitors to the Tate must be able to enjoy great art with a clear conscience about the impact of the museum on society and the environment.”

According to Indymedia UK, “the Tate staff [had] burst some of the oil bubble-like black balloons by climbing onto a high gantry, but many remained out of reach and the rotting fish and sea birds hovered above the evening’s celebrations headlined by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. Rumours circulated that Tate would commission a marksman to shoot the remaining balloons down from the top of the former power station.”

For more information on Liberate Tate, visit Art Not Oil, follow them here, or contact them to get involved.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)

Last week giant plastic six-pack rings strangled public sculptures around Vancouver. Initiated by the Plastic Pollution Coalition and developed by Vancouver-based ad agency Rethink, this stunt presented downtown commuters with visual protests against the mass consumption of single-use plastic.

“Nearly every plastic item ever created still exists, and has harmful effects on the environment, wildlife, and humans,” says Manuel Maqueda of the PPC. “Patches of plastic pollution currently cover millions of square miles of ocean in the North Pacific and North Atlantic. In the environment, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller particles that are ingested by wildlife and contaminate our food chain.”

According to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, “…every second of every day in the United States, thousand people buy and open up a plastic bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day in the United States, a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day. More than thirty billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars.” To put this into a more visual perspective, enough plastic bottles are discarded in the US alone every week to go around the planet 5 times.

Gasping at these atrocious numbers and digesting the Environmental Working Group’s discovery that we are all becoming full of the toxic chemicals from plastic we discard everyday, I’m hoping demonstrations like this and others continue littering the urban landscape. It should become common sense that there is no “away” in “throwaway,” especially when it comes to plastic. A plague of public protests refusing this disposable lifestyle needs to spread in every shape, size and manifestation until the masses realize the truths of what these objects and actions are mirroring. Then together we can expose the recycling myth, create solutions, and demand that businesses take responsibility for the end life of their products.

In echoing Tiana Uitto (author of Plastic Manners and coconspirator of this stunt), “We want to make a call to eliminate single-use plastics from the face of the planet” and “embrace a culture of sustainability.”

Visit The Province for local coverage of the protest. For more information on the harmful effects of plastic pollution and ways to become a part of the solution, visit Plastic Pollution Coalition’s site.

In solidarity with the detainees currently on hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions at the Los Fresnos immigration jail (Port Isabel, TX), I’m highlighting Homeland Guantanamos. Much more than an educational online game, this project documents actual detainees’ stories and the abuses they endured while in detention. Approximately 300,000 immigrants both legal and illegal are being detained in the U.S., many without conviction of any crime. This non-linear storytelling/investigative project invites players to discover what’s really happening on the inside.

The game’s assignment: go undercover by working as a prison guard and find the truth about what happened to Boubacar Bah, an immigrant from Ghinea who died while in ICE custody May 30, 2007. Free Range Studios built the virtual facility to match the Elizabeth Detention Center (run by the private company Corrections Corporation of America) where Bah was detained and designed the story around the actual events and people involved. While exploring each room, I found clues to help solve the case including embedded video interviews with Bah’s friends and family, his fellow detainees and their families. The video and written evidence reveal human rights abuses that mimic those committed at Guantanamo and other U.S. secret prisons.

Partnering with Free Range Studios, the international human rights organization Breakthrough used this project to launch a national engagement campaign. Included on the site are innumerable ways to take action, a memorial wall for the 87 immigrants who’ve died while in detention and a searchable U.S. map that locates local Gitmos by zip code. The article that triggered this project along with the recently released video What Really Happened to Boubacar Bah can both be found here. Spreading, creating or participating in projects as informative and comprehensive as this encourages the beginning of the end of real homeland Guantanamos.

“Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.”

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to head Exxon/Mobil, Shell, BP or any other black gold giant? Playing Oiligarchy will give you a glimpse of life through their goggles. To succeed at Mollenindustria’s newest online game you need to expand business as any die hard capitalist would, save money to lobby parties at the elections, and increase the economy’s oil dependence. Oh… and do all that you can to ensure the “virus of environmentalism” doesn’t reach your paid off representatives.

Given a map of Texas, Alaska, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, and D.C. and the ability to teleport yourself to each place at the click of a button, you are free to demolish structures, explore land and drill baby drill.  However, remember to keep an eye on the company bank account, price per barrel, % of addiction, GDP, and historic events to maneuver through the game and maintain healthy profits, or shareholders will most definitely fire you. You must also be receptive to updates on the green revolution and info on local uprisings to avoid potential human empowered obstacles.

The game starts after WWII. If you are able to keep profit at the forefront of your mind and maintain total disregard for human/civil rights and the environment, you will most likely get much further than me. It seems like I’m not cut out to be an oiligarch. I was fired after a mere 5 minutes of playing (years 1946-61) for refusing to participate in politics and not paying attention to supply and demand.

Thanks to neural.it for the scoop on Oiligarchy. To play this and additional games challenging dogma, capitalism, and other aspects of our society, visit Molleindustria’s site. If you happen to be in Barcelona before January 24th, you can view their work in the Crisis. Against Appearances show at ángels barcelona.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)

Walking into Bare Life in Jerusalem's Museum on the Seam, one is immediately absorbed by the exhibit's thick layers of context and irony. The building, which once functioned as Israel's military outpost on the seam between Israel and Jordan when the city was divided (1948-67), is now a venue for contemporary socio-political art. Among the human rights-themed artworks are windows backed by sliding steel doors originally used for armed lookouts.

Bare Life provides the space to reflect on the tension in this ideologically and religiously divided city, and the normalization of its militarization. Thoughts of Apartheid might enter viewers' minds when they approach the exhibit's first installation: the South African artist Kendell Geers's Time of the Harvest constructed with shelves filled with Belgian police riot helmets. From the surveillance works of Sophie Calle to psychologically disturbing photos by Paul McCarthy and absurdist films of Samual Beckett, the museum's curator has woven together the works of 42 diverse international artists. The selected pieces incite the viewer to examine infringements on civil liberties and human rights, the cultural effects of such violations, and the eventual threat of violence and paranoia becoming status quo.

While there I saw Orthodox Jews and Muslim women in hijab meditating on the same works and was inspired to linger even longer to absorb the whole of the experience. The show is open until June. If you miss it, their next exhibit, Heartquake, looks like it will provide an equally intense critique of global and local conflict. To deepen the context of Bare Life, visit the nearby Israeli Occupation Wall dividing the Holy Land or the Western Wall, where you'll often witness soldiers slinging guns on their backs before they begin to pray.

(written for and originally posted on artthreat.net)

The Grassi Museum in Leipzig is hosting the International Sticker Awards through February 17. This exhibition shows some of the latest political, ironic, abstract, and artistic social commentaries directly stuck on parts of the urban environment.

According to Matthias Mueller, Matthias Marx and Andreas Ullrich, three young artists who supervised the show, “Stickers transform the road into a democratic adventure playground.” They are a cheap and simple medium with which one can interact, react, interfere, resignify, and contribute to public space. Due to stickers' ephemeral nature, The Sticker Awards were created as an annual competition to promote and document the development of this art form. For more info, visit the Grassi Museums website (German only), or check out rebelart.net for photos and insight to other political art happenings in Germany and beyond.

(written for and originally posted to artthreat.net)

Artist, author and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen has created the ingenious project Terminal Air to spy on the spies. Developed in collaboration with the Institute for Applied Autonomy, the web-based work facilitates public visualization of flights known or suspected to be involved in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

Eluding national and international law, this governmental scheme involves kidnapping and relocating suspected terrorists to undocumented “dark prisons” where they can be held, interrogated, and tortured indefinitely. Under the guise of national security, US agents use these covert tactics to sidestep habeas corpus and basic human rights.

Terminal Air's flight-tracking software and database monitor specific CIA aircraft flights from 2001 to the present. Their daily routes are displayed in near real-time. Paglen and IAA have designed the flight viewer so that one can easily trace these extraordinary rendition routes around the globe.

To expedite this enterprise, the CIA regularly uses leased equipment and private contractors that often go through civilian airports; thus, their movements are subject to public record. If you're looking for details, down to the history of each plane's use for abductions, the project's data browser is the library for you.

Though the pages take a little time to load, exploring them is worth the wait. Visit IAA's webpage to discover their other tactical media projects, or check out Paglen's site to view his radical artwork and writings.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)

Adel Abidin, an artist who left Baghdad for Helsinki in 2000, has created Abidin Travels, a satirical travel agency to promote vacation trips to his hometown. This artwork functions as both a website that locates flights and an installation. You can enter the mock agency to find brochures and advertisements absurdly combining horrific images of today's Iraq with typical commercial sales slogans.

Book a flight and get details on hotels, rental cars and tours of Baghdad through Abidin Travels. Keep in mind you will probably only need a one-way ticket, as you may not be returning. Your tour will be full of surprises, maybe an explosion here or there, but “all the beautiful places that you might have read about have either been destroyed or looted. There really are no sights left.” This information and other harrowing vacationing tips can be found at abidintravels.com.

Abidin Travels is on view in the Nordic Pavilion of the Venice Biennale through November 21. This and other works covering themes such as: fundamentalism, identity, nationalism, religion, totalitarianism, and common stereotypes can be viewed on the artist's website. While some pieces maintain equal levels of humor and irony, others, like Construction Site and Common Vocabularies, are quite heartbreaking; all Abidin's works are worth exploring.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)