Tag Archive for 'culture'

An illustrated post, regarding Dr.Lorenz, animal behaviour and choices we make

Published by
boris kislitsin
 in memory. 0 Comments

There was one scientist called Mr. Lorenz quite a while ago. He was a peaceful man and naturalist, one of the founders of behaviourist theory for which he was awarded a noble (The Nobel?) prize. He studied birds’ and animals’ behaviour and discovered imprints, or programmed patterns which all of us follow.

Illustration 1: portrait of programmed chicken

8 differencies

In one of his famous experiments he separated ducks from their eggs. He fed and took care of the new born ducks. They accepted him as a mother duck and after they grew up even tried to copulate with his shoes. Red wellington boots, named after an English aristocrat with a surname starting with a capital W, not the ducks of other sex were the object of their lust. I know what you are probably thinking about. No, I am not going in that direction. I am not going to make a parallel with “as seen on TV” culture, e.g a pair of trainers, named after Greek goddess of victory. I will not bore you with my thoughts on how Goddess Nike became Nike TM. I will not spoil your pleasure of coming up with allegories yourself. I will merely stick to the subject of this post, which is memory.

Continue reading ‘An illustrated post, regarding Dr.Lorenz, animal behaviour and choices we make’

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Culture, memory and snow

Published by
abraxus
 in memory. 0 Comments

I came across an article called “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html   A quote from there:

 …Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood. Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4. Memory varies widely from person to person. Researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures. “We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory.  People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.

So, what would be my first memory? Here’s another one. I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by sleds. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.

What I wanted to say, it took me about 20 minutes or so… watching snow. It was so beautiful to see its falling and everybody in the street didn’t seem to pay any attention to it… Continue reading ‘Culture, memory and snow’

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Welcome to Tijuana…( a manifesto)

Published by
silvia
 in void space. 1 Comment

A Border Is…

BORDER CULTURE IS A polysemantic term.
Stepping outside of one´s culture is equivalent
to walking outside of the law.
Border culture means boycott, complot, ilegalidad,
clandestinidad, contrabando, transgresión,
desobediencia binacional; en otras palabras,
to smuggle dangeros poetry and utopian visions
from one culture to another, desde allá, hasta acá.
But it also means to maintain one´s dignity outside the law.
But it also means hybrid art forms for new contents
in gestation: spray mural, techno-altar, poetryintongues,
audiograffity, punkarachi, videocorrido, antibolero, antitodo:
art world: en otras palabras y tierras, an art against the
monolingües, police´s monoculture, tapados, nacionalistas,
esteticistas en extinción…
But it also means to be fluid in English, Spanish, Spanglish and Ingleñol. Cause Spanglish is the language of border diplomacy.
But it also means transcultural friendship and
collaboration among races, sexes, and generations.
But it also means to practice creative appropriation,
Expropriation and subversion of dominant cultural forms.
But it also means a new cartography; a brand new map
To host the new project; the democratisation of the East;
the socialisation of the West; the ThirdWorldisation of the North and the FirstWorldisation of the South.
But it also means a multiplicity of voices away from the center, different geo-cultural relations among more culturally akin regions: Your home and mine, digamos, a new internationalism postcentris.
But it also means regresar y volver a partir: to return and
depart once again. Cause border culture is an experience
and to arrive is just an illusion.
But it also means a new terminology for new
Hybrid identities, constantly metamorphosing:
Sudaca, hispanic, mestizaje, social thinker, not bohemian-accionista, performer, intercultural and postpostmodern.
But it also means to develop new models to
interpret the world-in-crisis, the only world we know.
But it also means to push the borders of countries
and languages or, better said, to find new languages
to express the fluctuating borders.
But it also means experimenting with the fringes between art
and society, legalidad and ilegality, English and Español,
male and female, North and South, self and other
and subverting these relationships.
But it also means to speak from the subconsciente,
desde acá, desde el medio. The border is the juction not the edge and monoculturalism has been expelled from the margins.
But it also means grassroots, raíces, not government´s
censorship, for censorship as racism is the opposite of border culture.
But it also means to analyse critically all that lies on
the current table of devates; multiculturalism, the latino, ethic-ethnic art, even border art.
But it also means to question and transgress border culture.
What today is powerful and necessary, tomorrow is arcane and ridiculous; what today is border culture, tomorrow is institutional art, never vice versa.
But it also means to escape the current co-optation
of border culture.
But it also means to look at the past and the future at the same time. 1492 was the beginning of a genocidal era.
Soon, a new internationalism will have to gravitate around
our spinal cord.
Not just Europe, not just the North, not just white,
not only you, compañero compañerita del otro lado
de la frontera, el lenguaje y el océano.

Silvia

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