The Artful Basterd

borntobeabeast:

Binge prevention and healthy snack ideas here :)

(via howtobeterrell)

5centsapound:

Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi 

As a photographer, sculptor, and installation artist, ‘Maïmouna’ Patrizia Guerresi reveals unique and authentic sensibilities in her narration of the beauty and subtleties of racial diversity and multiculturalism. Over an established career, she has developed her own symbolism, which combines cosmological and ancestral traditions belonging to various European, African, and Asian cultures. Her personal commitment to Baifall Sufism has led her to produce an aesthetic that is able to bridge time, space and civilisations, as well as figuration and abstraction.

The human body is seen as the nucleus and temple of the soul, a place that houses a delicate, higher awareness; the very conduit for encompassing natural and cosmic forces. More about mysticism than any singular religion, her work is visionary in that it restores those elusive qualities of sacredness and unity in our frequently dehumanising and fragmented contemporary visual world. Her classic iconographic style explores the universality of human experience and reclaims the often hidden nurturing powers of feminine energy. Presented as a kind of free flowing epic, the viewer is left to read the significance of her imagery and quietly meditate on its potential to personally engage with its audience. As if her figures were speaking directly to each one of us.

From her earliest experiments with the physicality and archetypal imprinting of the psyche, through to her latest, evermore metaphoric ‘inner constellations’, Maïmouna insists on a cross-cultural discourse and an expansion of the boundaries that normally dictate our individual attitudes. She invites us to see further and to look deeper – past skin colour, preconceptions, and ethnic landscapes – into the wider paradigm of inclusion. She leads us through apparently simple notions of dimensionality into the exquisite, mystical and fragile complexities of life from within. - Rosa Maria Falvo, 

(via s-tsahai)

reclaimingthelatinatag:

Paintings by Colombian painter Débora Arango (November 11, 1907 – December 4, 2005): La lucha del destino (The Struggle of Fate), Justicia (Justice), Adolescencia (Adolescence), and La celestina (The matchmaker).

Débora Arango used her artwork to explore many politically charged and controversial issues, her subjects ranging from nude women to the role of the Roman Catholic Church to dictatorships.Though she was often shunned during the years when she was producing some of her more provocative works, she is now viewed as one of the most important artists of Colombia, as a feminist and as a political artist. [x]

(via stopwhitewashing)

dynamicafrica:

Was watching this documentary, did a quick search on Gannibal and realized that May 14th, today, is the anniversary of his death.

NOTABLE AFRICANS: Major-General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, also Hannibal or Ganibal or Ibrahim Hannibal or Abram Petrov

Much of his early life is unknown but historians speculate that the most famous black figure in Russian history, who was kidnapped at the age of seven and taken to the court of the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople, could have been from either present-day Eritrea, or Cameroon. It is also speculated that he may have spoken Kotoko, an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in West Africa.

During the year of his kidnap, the Sultan of Constantinople was either Mustafa II (reigned 1695–1703) or Ahmed III (reigned 1703–1730), and in a German biography written anonymously and informed by Gannibal’s first-hand accounts it states that, “the children of the noble families were taken to the ruler of all the Muslims, the Turkish sultan, as hostages”. These children would either be killed or sold into slavery. It is also said that Gannibal’s sister Lahan was kidnapped at the same time but died during the voyage after being brutally raped.

The following year, 1704, Gannibal was ransomed and taken to Moscow where he was adopted by Emporer Peter the Great. In 1705, Gannibal was baptized in St. Paraskeva Church in Vilnius, with Peter the Great as his godfather.

Gannibal was sent to France where he received an education in the arts, sciences and warfare. By the completion of his education in 1722, he was fluent in several languages. Whilst in France, he fought with the forces of Louis XV of France against those of Louis’ uncle Philip V of Spain and rose to the rank of captain. During this time he adopted the surname that he is known by in honor of the Carthaginian general Hannibal (Gannibal being the traditional transliteration of the name in Russian). Whilst in Paris, his biographer Hugh Barnes claims that he met and befriended Enlightenment figures such as Denis Diderot, the Baron de Montesquieu and Voltaire.

Gannibal then returned to Russia in 1722. However, in following the death of Peter the Great in 1755, Gannibal was exiled to Siberia in 1727 but was pardoned in 1730 for his skills in military engineering. Peter’s daughter Elizabeth became the new monarch in 1741 and as a result, Gannibal became a prominent figure in her court, rising to the rank of major-general and became superintendent of Reval from 1742 to 1752.

From Wikipedia:

Gannibal married twice. His first wife was Evdokia Dioper, a Greek woman. The couple married in 1731 and had one daughter. Unfortunately Dioper despised her husband, whom she was forced to marry. When Gannibal found out that she had been unfaithful to him, he had her arrested and thrown into prison, where she spent eleven years living in terrible conditions. Gannibal began living with another woman, Christina Regina Siöberg (1705–1781), daughter of Mattias Johan Siöberg and wife Christina Elisabeth d’Albedyll, and married her bigamously in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), in 1736, a year after the birth of their first child and while he was still lawfully married to his first wife. His divorce from Dioper did not become final until 1753, upon which a fine and a penance were imposed on Gannibal, and Dioper was sent to a convent for the rest of her life. Gannibal’s second marriage was nevertheless deemed lawful after his divorce.

On her paternal side, Gannibal’s second wife was descended from noble families in Scandinavia and Germany: Siöberg (Sweden), Galtung (Norway) and Grabow (Denmark and Brandenburg). Her paternal grandfather was Gustaf Siöberg, Rittmester til Estrup, who died in 1694, whose wife Clara Maria Lauritzdatter Galtung (ca. 1651–1698) was the daughter of Lauritz Lauritzson Galtung (ca. 1615–1661) and of Barbara Grabow til Pederstrup (1631–1696). Abram Gannibal and Christina Regina Siöberg had ten children, including a son, Osip. Osip in turn would have a daughter, Nadezhda, the mother of Aleksandr Pushkin. Gannibal’s oldest son, Ivan, became an accomplished naval officer who helped found the city of Kherson in 1779 and attained the rank of General-in-Chief, the second highest military rank in imperial Russia.

Some British aristocrats descend from Gannibal, including Natalia Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster and her sister, Alexandra Hamilton, Duchess of Abercorn. George Mountbatten, 4th Marquess of Milford Haven, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, is also a direct descendant, as the grandson of Nadejda Mountbatten, Marchioness of Milford Haven.

(via stopwhitewashing)

thepeoplesrecord:

U.S. seeks inspiration in Basque cooperative model Mondragón. An article in Time magazine praises the economic model of the industrial group MCC, which has become a benchmark in several US declined areas.
May 20, 2013

When companies all over the world are struggling to fight crisis, and while every country has an eye on the United States to find out when the depression will end, it follows that outstanding North American businessmen are seeing the light through the Arrasate-Mondragón cooperatives.

According to an article appeared in the latest issue of the prestigious Time magazine, executives in charge of enterprise planning and union leaders of the previously buoyant and today depressed industrial belt of Cleveland, Ohio, are seeking inspiration in the economic, industrial and social model of the Arrasate-Mondragón area.

The magazine included a comprehensive report which analyzed the origins of the current corporation founded by the Arizmendiarreta priest, whose success is supported, according to the publication, by the fact that nowadays, MCC is the seventh state’s industrial group and one of the most profitable.

According to figures provided by the writer, MCC is a multidisciplinary group that brings together 256 companies and employs more 100,000 people. Anyway, the interest is focused on the original basis of making the employees members of the enterprise. Those members often have a close association with the company as producers or consumers of its products or services, or as its employees.

Therefore, Time stresses that MCC holds its commitment “to one-worker, one-vote democratic governance through a complex, carefully honed organizational structure in which the corporation serves as a kind of meta-cooperative for the individual companies.”

The article presents the broad spectrum of companies of the Basque group, which ranges from manufacturing equipment, bicycles, and electronics, to an university and its own savings bank, Caja Laboral. Time says that, while many people look to cooperatives as activities at a “hippie small scale,” Mondragón is a consolidated and successful business whose revenue, in spite of the full depression of the Spanish economy, grew by 6 % last year.

According to the magazine, some companies in the Ohio state want the workers to get involved in the capital and the management of the company, and seek more balanced development patterns with a philosophy of reinvesting profits. This would be one of the hallmarks of MCC: instead of “flowing into the pockets of executives and outside investors, a company’s profits are distributed in a precise, democratic way; set aside as seed money for new cooperatives; distributed to regional nonprofits; or pooled into shared institutions like the university and research center.”

But the Mondragón template goes further and Time quotes a bakery cooperative in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California. Its four partners -soon to be six-, have chosen a particular name for their brand: Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives.

Source

(via commonright)

Lawd.

Dehydrated…

(Source: assartathletics, via afrodesiacworldwide)