Elle cover to feature London Mayor Boris Johnson

LONDON – Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is to appear on the cover of Elle as part of a tie-up with City Hall ahead of London Fashion Weekend.

Mayor Boris Johnson hunts agencies to rebrand London

LONDON – The Mayor of London’s office wants to rebrand London and is inviting agencies to tender to create the new image.

Sonia Sotomayor, Bruno and Harry Potter Walk Into a Bar …


Sonia Sotomayor, Bruno and Harry Potter walk into a bar … and they all pull out their cellphones and start tweeting about Michael Jackson! OK, so a mashup like that could only happen in a dream (or a nightmare), but on Trendrr, a social- and digital-media tracking service I recently wrote about, just about any mashup of mismatched memes is possible.

Mayor Bloomberg to Media Industry: We’re Here to Help


NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to save New York's media industry. Many who toil in publishing, TV and radio have wondered throughout this recession how much of their troubles they can blame on the cyclical downturn — and how they can pin on big structural changes in the business. New York's plans to help its media sector, introduced Tuesday by Mr. Bloomberg after the city consulted with many prominent media executives, seem to represent a vote that something fundamental is happening.

Mayor Bloomberg Wants to Save New York Media

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The City of New York is looking to hire a consultant who can sum up the state of New York media, and offer a plan for renewing the city’s once vibrant media atmosphere. Cuz, apparently they just realized the financial market isn’t the only ailing industry here. We’ll save them some time: traditional is dead or dying; tax breaks for emerging media start-ups!

Of course the city always knew media was hurting. It’s just taken the government this long to remember that this is a media town (though we’re not convinced bringing in a consultant is the best idea, especially since the one they used to study the financial industry (McKinsey & Company) recommended loosening federal restrictions &#151 this was back in early 2007, according to the New York Observer).

But let’s not associate one mistake with Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s well-intentioned plan, which he announced at last week’s Audit Bureau of Circulations’ annual conference. We ask the question again; what do you think should be done to help the industry. This time, focus your answers on what local government can do.

Click continued to see what others had to say about saving the (ad) world.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

Online Love for London Mayor – I Did Not Vote For Boris (VIDEO)

(TrendHunter.com) London has a new mayor, and the story of how he got elected is very interesting. A ton of people thought it would be funny to vote for someone called Boris Johnston (see video); in fact, so many that he actually got in!

The web is alive with sites dedicated to Boris or Bo Jo. The blog roll is real…

Boris Johnson scraps London’s mayoral freesheet

LONDON – The Londoner, the Mayor’s controversial free newspaper, is to be scrapped in a move Boris Johnson’s office claims will save £2.9m.

All change in the capital as Londoners return to a new mayor

The coming months will be the most important for Boris Johnson as he chooses his board members, says Jonny Popper.

MAYORAL ELECTIONS: The teams behind the candidates

As the battle among Ken, Boris and Brian Paddick to be London mayor reaches its climax, no candidate can afford the smallest slip-up. PRWeek brings you a guide to the media teams behind the main players.

Race for mayor hots up as comms teams battle

The comms teams behind mayoral rivals Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are at loggerheads over the media tactics employed by the Johnson camp.

Paddick hires US gurus to steer mayoral drive

Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate Brian Paddick is relying on senior US strategists with close links to the Democrats to boost his popularity with Londoners.

Mayor stripped of office over MySpace pics

Mayorpic Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, the mayor of Arlington, Ore., has been removed from office following a 142-139 recall vote after a risqué pic on her personal (and non-public) MySpace page peeved some townsfolk. A fire truck and black lingerie were involved. The image is about as racy as your average Sears catalog ad. But imagine those poor city councilors trying to focus on the hottest issues—I mean, the hot-button issues—in the Pacific Northwest these days. Such as the bare problem—I mean, bear problem. “That’s my personal life. It has nothing to do with my mayor’s position,” says Kontur-Gronquist. In Boston, we have an always fully clothed mayor, Tom Menino, who to the best of my knowledge has never posed in racy underwear on a fire truck. (And let’s keep it that way—OK, Mr. Mayor?)

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Grayling to lure voters in London Mayor elections

Grayling is to spearhead a PR drive to increase turnout in the forthcoming London mayoral elections.

Green Party’s mayoral bid secures agency help

The Green Party has called in a PR agency to aid its London mayoral candidate Sian Berry in her bid to achieve a strong showing in this year’s election.

Shamans. Communicating the Invisible

Interest in shamanism is expanding faster than any other spiritual practices in the Western world. In England and Wales alone, the number of people saying they practice has risen from 650 in 2011 to 8,000 in 2021.

Perhaps these numbers shouldn’t surprise me as much as they did. While techno-sciences are expanding the physical and intellectual limits of the human body, more and more people are wondering what it means to be human. Why COVID has claimed so many victims. Why there seems to be so little we can do to control the catastrophic effects of climate breakdown. Or why those same innovations do not guarantee the everlasting survival of the human species on planet Earth. If they are losing faith in a bright future, perhaps it is only natural that many people look for deeper connections with spirits and the earth.


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano

As the exhibition Shamans. Communicating the Invisible demonstrates, the art world didn’t wait for my two-cent analysis of the rise of shamanism to immerse itself in the world of shamanism and other spiritual practices. The show, which opened a couple of weeks ago at the rather beautiful Renaissance?villa-fortress Palazzo delle Albere in Trento (Italy), examines shamanism under the lenses of anthropology, psychology, archaeology and contemporary art.

The first floor of the museum is occupied by the anthropological section of the exhibition. It takes visitors through the shamanic histories, places, rituals, languages and objects from Mongolia, Siberia and China. The works and short video interviews of scholars approach questions such as: What is shamanism? Who are the shamans and what roles do they traditionally fulfil in their communities? Can they still play a role in today’s society? Can we consider these figures to be the oldest mediators between humanity and nature? What is the meaning of their rituals and attire? How do they reach altered states of consciousness? What type of contact do they establish with the animal world?

One section of the exhibit even investigates the connections between shamanism and the anthropocene, explaining how environmental and climate disasters can be attributed to the unbalance between humankind and the environment. This unbalance often has its origins in inappropriate human behaviour towards the entities that populate non-human realms. That is where shamans come in with rituals designed to appease the spiritual beings and restore balance.


David Aaron Angeli. Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Joseph Beuys, with Buby Durini, Difesa della natura/Grassello. Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano

Although the anthropological chapter of the exhibition deserves far more detailed coverage, I’m going to jump right up to the second floor because it hosts works by modern and contemporary artists. The artworks on display look at ways to enter into a deeper connection with the unknowable and uncontrollable. Many do not explicitly allude to shamanism, but they use art and spirituality to look at the environment and ecology or to share southern perspectives on what technology may be.

Let’s start with Louis Henderson’s Lettres du Voyant, the most interesting video work i’ve seen in recent months…


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013


Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant, 2013

Louis Henderson, Lettres du Voyant (trailer), 2013

In May 1871, aged 16, Arthur Rimbaud wrote what is now commonly called the Lettres du voyant (Letters of the Seer), two letters explaining his poetic philosophy.

The Lettres du Voyant is now also a film exploring the connections between spiritism, post-colonialism and technology in contemporary Ghana. Mixing documentary, fiction and poetry, Louis Henderson’s work introduces us to sakawa, a type of scam that combines Western African voodoo types of rituals and Internet-based fraud. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of resistance against neocolonial practices under the motto “Recover the gold that was stolen from us.”

The narrator of the film is a modern-day poet. He takes the viewer on a trip through a network of 3D mine shafts that lead the viewer to various locations: an artisan gold mine, a series of monuments that date back to the colonial era, an e-waste dump (the Agbogbloshie scrapyard which has since been bulldozed), a voodoo ritual that helps e-scammers gain super powers to travel through the internet, a nightclub, etc.

Throughout the journey, the character speaks about the colonial history of Ghana, of gold, of technology.

In a country stripped of its precious metals and used as a dumping ground for e-waste by Western countries, a new form of mining has emerged. Young workers strip down antiquated digital hardware not only for metal but also for credit card numbers or pictures of friends and families that can be used to make internet scams more efficient. The crafty hacking is “augmented” by Sakawa and constitutes a possibility for political resistance to new forms of Western colonialism.


Karrabing Film Collective, The Family, 2021


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano

The Karrabing Film Collective is an indigenous group that uses film and other media to articulate a network of practices and relationships with Earth, geology, ancestors, more-than-human life and visual culture.

Alternating between contemporary times in which Karrabing members struggle to maintain their physical, ethical and ceremonial connections to their remote ancestral lands and a future populated by ancestral beings living in the aftermath of extractive capitalism, The Family features Indigenous ancestral children defeating a white zombie with cheap, mass-produced dolls. The Family invites viewers to observe the colliding worlds of humans and their more-than-human ancestors in order to probe into the excesses of extractivism and other forms of settler colonisation still plaguing indigenous lands.


Anna Perach, Alkonost, 2019. Photo Paul Chapellier


Anna Perach. Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano

Anna Perach’s sculptures are neither humans nor beasts. Made of soft, plush fabrics, they are eerie and potentially evil. Their ambiguity only increases when you realise that many of Perach’s sculptures are designed to become alive when they worn during performances.

The Alkonost sculpture, for example, is inspired by a legendary woman-headed bird from Slavic folklore. She was a young woman about to get married. Her future husband runs away, and she drowns herself in the river out of sadness. She comes back as a half-bird, half-woman creature. She sits on trees and sings beautiful songs that lure men, making them forget everything else.


Maria Sojob, Bankilal (El hermano mayor), 2014


Maria Sojob, Bankilal (El hermano mayor), 2014

Maria Sojob, Bankilal (El hermano mayor), 2014

María Sojob’s documentary Bankilal (El hermano mayor) is set in Chenalhó, Chiapas. Bankilal is Manuel Jiménez, the most respected elder in his Tsotsil community. A gifted poet, his role is to provide spiritual guidance to the community, to intervene, on behalf of his community, with the forces that protect the universe and to pass on the ancestral customs and practices of the original Tsotsil forefathers and foremothers. His eloquence, however, does not convince younger generations. Many of them have little consideration for protective spirit animals, sacred mountains and other expressions of ancestral symbolism.

Bankilal (El hermano mayor) shows how elders have adapted to syncretic forms of worship since the introduction of Catholicism and how contemporary lifestyle is making their task an increasingly difficult balancing act.


Marina Abramovi?, Balkan Baroque, 1997 XLVII Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Attilio Maranzano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano

Marina Abramovi?, aka the shaman of late capitalism, uses art as a ritualistic healing exercise akin to spiritual practices.

The performance she presented at the 1997 Art Biennial in Venice was a sort of shamanic ritual inspired by the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in the Balkans during the 1990s. Abramovi? vigorously scrubbed thousands of bloody cow bones over a period of four days. She later remembered the horrible smell rising in the hot Venice Spring and the impossibility of thoroughly cleaning all the blood from the bones. Blood can’t be washed from bones and hands, just as the war can’t be cleansed of shame. The images from the performance speak for the fratricidal war in Bosnia, but they also transcend it. They can be applied to any scene of violence in the world.

More images from the exhibition:


Bracha L. Ettinger, 7 Notebooks, 2017-2023. Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


David Aaron Angeli, Offerta della coppa piumata, 2023. Cellar Contemporary, Trento


Suzanne Lacy, Anatomy Lesson #1: Chickens Coming Home to Roost (for Rose Mountain and Pauline), 1976-2005. Galleria Enrico Astun


Suzanne Lacy, Anatomy Lesson #1: Chickens Coming Home to Roost (for Rose Mountain and Pauline), 1976-2005. Galleria Enrico Astun


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano


Shamans. Communicating the invisible. Exhibition view?at Palazzo delle Albere, Trento. Photo: Matteo De Stefano

The exhibition Shamans. Communicating the Invisible remains open at until 30 June 2024 at Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, Italy. Curated by MUSE – Science Museum of Trento as part of a wider cultural programme that brings together MUSE, MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto and METS – Trentino Ethnographic Museum in San Michele all’Adige.

Previously: Dead White Men’s Clothes, Using art to study endangered indigenous rituals and music, The Occult, Witchcraft & Magic. An Illustrated History, Persona. Or how objects become human, etc.

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London Sphere Proposal Withdrawn by Madison Square Garden Entertainment

A potential advertising innovation proposed for London in the style of the Las Vegas Sphere will not move forward after Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSG) withdrew its proposal. MSG had hoped to build a 21,000-capacity venue in the Stratford area of the city, but that was rejected by Mayor Sadiq Khan late last year. Despite…

Netflix busca dominar el entretenimiento mundial con K-dramas

Los contenidos populares producidos en Asia y en todo el mundo han cobrado mayor importancia debido a la huelga que ahora afecta a gran parte de Hollywood.

The Art of Protest: Political Art and Activism

The Art of Protest: Political Art and Activism. Published by Gestalten. Edited by Alain Bieber & Francesca Gavin. Bieber is the artistic director of the cultural institution NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. He used to run rebel:art which was one of my favourite art blogs. Gavin is contributing editor at a number of magazines. She has curated exhibitions across Europe. The one titled Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi was a particularly exciting one.

Finally! A book with lots of photos. A book I can lend to friends who have very very little patience for art. A book that makes art and activism digestible to all and that is full of great artistic discoveries for me.

The Art of Protest: Political Art and Activism adopts a very broad approach on activism and art. I think that to be efficient, engaging and truly political, art has to exit museums and galleries, to meet people wherever they are. Unless of course artists live in countries where politically-motivated practices might land them in jail. The authors of the book, however, have selected not only artists who take their work to the streets but also painters, photographers and practitioners whose work seldom moves outside of exhibition spaces. It makes for an energetic collection of politically engaged artworks that look at rising inequality and its corollary rising nationalism, at environmental degradation, discriminations of all kinds, authoritarian regimes, digital disinformation and the historic legacy of colonialism on culture and society.


Halil Altindere, Ballerinas and Police, 2017


Vincent Valdez, The City I, 2015–16 (detail)

The thematic chapters, on subjects as diverse as digital activism and intersectionality, sum up the questions explored by artists in a clear and efficient way. Overall, I found that the book defends with brio the role that art can play in shaping new imaginaries, articulating incoming crises and giving a sense of hope.

The geographical distribution of the artists selected deserves one last comment. I applaud the effort to present artists from Africa (albeit mostly from South Africa) and Latin America. There is an overwhelming presence of artists from North America. Fortunately, many of them are from very diverse backgrounds. Germany and Switzerland are disproportionately represented compared to other European countries like Italy, Poland, Romania or Belarus. There aren’t many artists from the Middle East or Asia either. Still, compared to most art books, the diversity representation is far from being disgraceful.


Yael Bartana, Two Minutes to Midnight, 2021

Yael Bartana, Two Minutes to Midnight, 2021


Elena Tejada-Herrera, The Girls Train to Fight, 2019


Miao Ying, Blind Spot – Words censored by google.cn, 2007. Photo by Alex Lau


Center for Political Beauty, Eating Refugees, 2016


Rael San Fratello and Colectivo Chopeke, Teeter-totter wall, 2019


Paula Baeza Pailamilla, Mi cuerpo es un museo, 2019. Photo: Lorna Remmele


Böhler & Orendt, Give us, Dear, 2013


Andrea Bowers, My Name Means Future (still), 2020


Dillon Marsh, For What It’s Worth, 2014-2016

Critics Company, Timothee (Sci-fi Short Film), 2021


Dineo Seshee Bopape, +/-1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791), 2017

Marianna Simnett, The Needle & The Larynx, 2016


Eko Nugroho, Negeri Kaya Fatwa, 2013 and Mayoritas Dihalalkan Minoritas Diharamkan (The Majority Becomes Halal The Minority Becomes Illegitimate), 2013


Claudius Schulze, TQ1066 RP5013.18, 2018

Book spreads:

Previously: Michael Rakowitz. The invisible enemy should not exist, Art and Climate Change, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, Caps Lock – How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and how to Escape from it, etc.

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Dana Walden Shakes Up Disney Leadership, John Landgraf and Simran Sethi Expand Roles

In a game of executive musical chairs, Dana Walden made her first big moves as head of the company’s TV networks since CEO Bob Iger’s return. Earlier this month, Walden was upped to co-head of the entertainment group alongside Alan Bergman, and she’s wasted no time executing her leadership vision. Firstly, the Mayor of TV…

Tony Isidore, Galvanizing Adman, Is Dead at 89

With arresting ad campaigns, he helped promote the New York Urban Coalition (“Give a Damn”) and the re-election of Mayor John V. Lindsay (“I Made Mistakes”).