Muziek, kunst & media

Face masks as freedom and belonging

- by standplaatswereld

By Quirina Geijsen Face masks, you can see them everywhere now. They come in different shapes and sizes and are offered in multiple choices of the most beautiful and fashionable patterns. Wearing non-medical face masks is not something new. They were ahead of COVID-19, gaining popularity in hip-hop culture. Especially, at local hip-hop festival Woo Hah!, they represent a sense of fashion, of togetherness and a feeling of ultimate freedom. There, participants of the festival wore face masks for both fashionable as practical reasons. Wearing Face masks in a fashionable sense at hip-hop events probably started with two American rappers …

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While we live – a compass to connection

- by standplaatswereld

Musical journalist Andrea Voets maakte een sociale roadtrip door Griekenland, op zoek naar uitwegen uit een sterke onderstroom van eenzaamheid in de samenleving. Samen met 150 jonge Grieken ontcijferde ze drie sleutels tot contact uit de Oudheid, die we hard nodig zullen hebben in het Nederland van 2020. Tijdens de corona-crisis krijgen eenzaamheid en vervreemding veel aandacht. De meeste analyses focussen op het gebrek aan aanraking en fysiek bezoek, maar dit zijn slechts twee van de talloze onderdelen van betekenisvol contact. Voor al die mensen die écht chronisch eenzaam zijn, is de afgelopen weken niets wezenlijks veranderd: de rest krijgt …

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JA! aldus Nasrdin Dchar

- by standplaatswereld

Beeld: nasrdinspeelt.nl Door Matthias Teeuwen en Elisabeth IJmker JA! is de nieuwste theatervoorstelling van Nasrdin Dchar (met regie van Floris van Delft), wij bezochten het in Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam. Het is een komisch stuk over zijn relatie en uiteindelijke huwelijk met zijn vrouw maar het bespreekt ook de moeilijke kanten van wanneer culturen elkaar ontmoeten en proberen samen te leven. In JA! is Nasrdin Dchar niet alleen zelf bijzonder open en oprecht, hij dwingt de toeschouwer om ook een openheid aan te nemen ten opzichte van de ander. De liefdesrelatie die centraal staat in dit stuk combineert Dchar met zijn kritische …

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Bystander: On a migration experience

- by standplaatswereld

By Peter Versteeg A waiting room with benches and very bright light from a fluorescent tube. Clothes and shoes lying all around. There’s sand on the floor. I have to put my shoes in a closet and wait for the alarm to sound. The moment I sit down on a bench I realize I get impatient. And I think to myself: Ah okay, I know what this is. The refugee’s experience has a lot to do with waiting. Not exactly knowing what you are waiting for and why it takes so long. Okay, I understand what they try to get …

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Film and theory: Knots and Holes

- by standplaatswereld

By Matthias Teeuwen           “What becomes of the medium of film in the hands of an anthropologist?” asks Mattijs van de Port in the introduction to his new film Knots and Holes, an essay film on the life of nets (2018). This project, he tells us, was born from his frustration with the offer of films at ethnographic film festivals: they are all very beautiful and evocative and they manage to take us places we have never been for the length of their duration, but they pass over the most exciting thing about anthropology: theory. “What becomes of theory in …

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Banksy’s Donkey

- by standplaatswereld

  By Peter Versteeg In 2007 street artist Banksy organized a project called Santa’s Ghetto in the city of Bethlehem, where international artists would work on the (‘security’ or ‘apartheid’) wall that separates Palestine from Israel. This was two years after Banksy had painted nine works on this wall. Part of the project was an exhibition in which the artists addressed many social issues on the West Bank. Santa’s Ghetto was also deliberately meant to draw tourists to this conflict zone. In the documentary The Man Who Stole Banksy we follow one particular stolen work on its journey on the …

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Re-viewing The Truman Show

- by standplaatswereld

By Peter Versteeg.   “We accept the world with which we are presented” is probably the best summary of The Truman Show, a modern classic film from 1998. We, however, only become aware of this once we start to know the secret of the film. So, everything that can be said about this film should really get an instant SPOILER ALERT. 

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The representation of Africa in Hollywood movie Black Panther.

- by standplaatswereld

By Rhoda Woets
Almost every month, I join a small group of anthropologists from the VU to go to the movies. Last month, we went to the action movie Black Panther to do a little bit of fieldwork from a soft, lazy cinema chair. Combining a relaxing evening with collecting data for a blog post has little in common with the hardship of fieldwork that anthropologist write about in their ethnographies. No mud on my boots, thank you very much. Let the arm chair anthropologist return, this time freed from an ethnocentric view on culture and armed with 3D glasses.

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Graduation speech Class 2016/2017

- by standplaatswereld

By Dominique van de Kamp         During the pre-master of Social and Cultural Anthropology, we followed a course called “Core themes of Anthropology,” by Ton Salman. In our first class, he mentioned that every anthropologist would like to be a fly on the wall, almost invisible – however impossible *. From that moment on, we started calling ourselves the “Flies on the wall.” Two years later, we handed in our theses and a great part of us went to celebrate together in Rome. There I wrote something about the flies on the wall, which turned out to be my …

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Living with the End

- by standplaatswereld

By Peter Versteeg          Recently Chris Cornell, singer of the bands Soundgarden and Audio-slave, died. Soundgarden is probably best known for their early nineties song ‘Black Hole Sun’, which is the invocation of a sort of natural disaster which will swallow everything that is ugly and false. It is a cry to be released from a depression that is caused by an awareness that life has become hollow and that the earth has been delivered into the hands of frauds, crooks and idiots. Cornell took his own life. Announcing his tragic death, news shows showed exactly this …

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