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Imagining Africa: El Anatsui brings his metal tapestries to ROM

Three Continents, 2009 by El Anatsui

Ghanaian sculptor Brahim El Anatsui's father was a master weaver who taught the tradition of strip-weaving Kente cloths to his sons. This textile technique has become a staple of El Anatsui's art: he amasses and refashions the debris from his community to create majestic, visual narratives that address his personal history and global issues like environmental sustainability. The North American premiere of his four-decade career retrospective When I Last Wrote to You About Africa is at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, having been extended to Feb. 27.

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Give the gift of solidarity this season: Alternatives to Christmas as consumerism

Change the conversation, support rabble.ca today.

Let's admit it. Christmas shopping can be the worst. Even when you avoid large chains and shopping centres like the plague. 

There's something about the obligation this particular holiday -- that, no, not everyone celebrates --has to demonstrate affection in the act of purchase, that's pretty counter to what the guy this holiday supposedly set out to celebrate supposedly spoke about.

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Michael Stewart

Charity; or why the homeless make bad consumers

| December 7, 2012
Krystalline Kraus

Activist Communique: Black Friday Eaton Center Flashmob Meditation

| November 21, 2012
Columnists

Graffiti artists Os Gêmeos: Fishermen of illusions

Os Gêmeos' mural in Boston's Dewey Square. Photo: charlene mcbride/Flickr

Interviewer: How would you describe your own style?

Os Gemêos: A tiny boat in a huge ocean with all its infinity and surprises.

- Artists Os Gemêos in Art Crimes

Over the past half-century -- since the days of the actual "Madmen" -- advertisers have transformed public space. The former understood that in an age of cutthroat economic competition, every surface of the city needed to become a canvas for publicizing the joys of consumerism. Along with the advertisers, mainstream policy-makers have pushed for the transformation of civic geography across the world into giant shopping malls that would attract public consumption and thus greater corporate investment.

Meghan Murphy

Thirty things that will make you want to kill yourself whether or not you're 30, courtesy of Glamour

| April 27, 2012
The Dispatch

Fair trade and empire: An anti-capitalist critique of the fair-trade movement

March 27, 2012
| While fair trade channels more income into agricultural communities, it ultimately fails to address the colonial capitalist structures that produce the impoverishment of farmers on an ongoing basis.
Length: 13:02

Feeling Canadian: Book Launch & Reading by Marusya Bociurkiw

Date: Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 7:30pm

Location

Aqua Books
274 Garry Street
Winnipeg, MB
Canada
49° 53' 35.9988" N, 97° 8' 25.9728" W

"My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!" How did a beer ad become a
national anthem? When did Olympic opening ceremonies become an
advertisement for national superiority? What do toques and canoes have
to do with nationalism? Canadian couch potatoes need wonder no longer.
This book by award-winning Toronto-based author, media theorist,
filmmaker and professor Marusya Bociurkiw examines how affect
(passionate sites of feeling) and consumerism work together to produce
shows like Canada A Peoples' History, North of 60, and television
coverage of the 2010 Olympics. As Canadian TV expert Michelle Byers
writes, "Providing anecdotes that most readers will be very familiar
with, Bociurkiw's analysis situates us firmly within the context of

Catalytic Conversation: The Story of Stuff

Date: Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Location

OISE
252 Bloor Street West, 7th floor St. George Subway Station
Toronto, ON M5S 1V6
Canada
43° 40' 4.4004" N, 79° 23' 54.1392" W

 

The Story of Stuff takes you on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture -- from resource extraction to iPod incineration. We will begin by watching this 20- minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of production, consumption, and waste. It’ll teach you something, make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all your stuff.

This event is FREE! 


 

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