Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Studio 75, a London-based “100% independent, not part of any school, trend, fashion or directive” artist space is hosting ‘The Orientophobia Sessions’ this weekend. In the program of the Out Of The Deep East, Bulgarian artists Krum and Desi engage into an ink duel with Egyptian artist Naz:

A screenshot of Studio75′s blog

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On the day of the verdict in the Pussy Riot trial, Russian embassies worldwide are seeing demonstrations in support of the incriminated punk band members. The Red Army Monument in the capital of Bulgaria, Sofia, has joined in: a picture of it with some of the soldiers wearing Pussy Riot-styled hats has spread on social networks this morning. The Macedonian outlet think.mk publishes a short post [mk] comparing this political art expression with the previous one, when the soldiers were painted as comics characters.

Egyptian political activist and graffiti artist Ganzeer writes [en] about the Pussy Riot case: “[...] the consequences of freeing Pussy Riot may be mistaken for a fair and liberal Russian judiciary system, which is clearly not the case. [...] Pussy Riot's actions are all about exposing the reality of Russia's corrupt regime. By demanding the freedom of Pussy Riot, the band's supporters are harming the very integrity of their mission. [...] Asking for Pussy Riot's freedom is easy, but taking Putin out is where it's at.”

The GUC Insider is the independent student-led media outlet of the German University in Cairo (GUC). In a short article [ar], it announces that the son of the Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has failed one of the admission tests and will not be accepted as a regular student in this university.

Bulgarian blog “Работнически глас” (Worker's Voice) publishes [bg] a few photographs of a protest on Sofia's Central Railway Station. Held on August 9, this flashmob gathered around 100 people who chained a “human train” by standing one behind another. This “train” travelled inside the station while the protesters were calling for the end of the privatization procedure that the National Train Services is engaged in. As the protesters explained [bg], “the National Train Services belong to the people. Nobody has asked us whether we agree with them being privatized, so we want this process to stop now.”

The Bulgarian section of the Open Knowledge Foundation announced [bg] the release of 580,049 court decisions and 607,656 additional documents, including motives. Although all those are already publicly accessible in the courts and some of them are browsable in a digital format on the Ministry of Justice website, there was a serious need of improving the organization and accessibility of this paper glut. Thus, the data are divided into two parts: raw materials and metadata. All of it [bg] is in turn ready for data mining and more complete analysis.

The blog Chtodelat publishes an English translation of the closing statements of one of the defendants in the Pussy Riot trial. Three of the punk group members are charged with “hooliganism” after performing an anti-Putin prayer in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow earlier this year. The prosecutors asked for a 3-year jail sentence, while a large palette of human rights NGOs and artists have taken a stance in defense of the three women.

In her blog post about the very first humanitarian customer calling center, Anahi Ayala Iacucci describes “a quick and convenient way for Somali beneficiaries to give feedback about projects funded or services provided by the Danish Refugee Council using an SMS feedback system”: “This project has started in September 2011 and since then, “beneficiary SMS feedback has been implemented in 31 towns and villages in the North and East of Somalia…You can discover more about this project on the dedicated blog.”

Artists based in Sweden have launched a crowd-funding campaign to support and sustain their film project “Hackitat”. The documentary aims to highlight hackers, “the people building a nation on the Internet”, and searches for answers to: “What compels some people to spend a lot of time and energy on setting up servers, creating programs and even committing crimes to help people in a dictatorship in another country to communicate freely?”

The Egyptian non-profit media collective Mosireen [en, ar] is “born out of the explosion of citizen journalism and cultural activism in Egypt during the revolution”. The group of filmmakers and citizen journalists collects footage and video testimonies from protests in Egypt. Their YouTube channel was the most viewed non-profit channel worldwide for January 2012. The Mosireen collective continues its precious work with a series of films about social justice. The newest of those now have subtitles in English.