Each day, staff and volunteers work with survivors of torture in centres in Birmingham, Glasgow, London, Manchester and Newcastle (and via a capacity-building presence in Yorkshire and Humberside) to help them begin to rebuild their lives. Sharing this expertise with partner organisations in the UK and internationally, Freedom from Torture operates as a centre of learning and knowledge in the care, treatment and protection of torture survivors.

Freedom from Torture’s vision

To be a highly effective agency counteracting the inhuman practice of torture and its effects through:

• healing and empowering survivors
• learning from and teaching others
• speaking and acting for human rights and dignity.

Freedom from Torture’s Strategic aims for 2011-2013

Aim 1: To ensure that survivors of torture and organised violence in the UK have access to the means of rehabilitation and receive quality services that meet their needs.Aim 2: To ensure that the human rights of survivors of torture and organised violence are fully complied with and to contribute to worldwide efforts to stop torture. Aim 3: To ensure that all our activities are informed by the experiences and voices of survivors of torture and organised violence and carried out in collaboration with them. Aim 4: To be a highly effective organisation, one that learns and develops through the contributions of our clients, supporters, volunteers, trustees, staff and partners. Freedom from Torture will deliver these aims through a combination of:

• direct rehabilitation service provision
• helping to build the capacity of other service providers where possible
• advocacy for survivors’ rights
• acting as an expert witness to survivors’ testimony
• providing data and analysis to support the campaign for torture prevention

http://www.freedomfromtorture.org/

Interference Archive explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements. This work manifests in public exhibitions, a study and social center, talks, screenings, publications, workshops, and an online presence. The archive consists of many kinds of objects that are created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, photographs, books, T-shirts and buttons, moving images, audio recordings, and other materials. Through our programming, we use this cultural ephemera to animate histories of people mobilizing for social transformation. As an archive from below, we are a collectively run space that stresses the use of our collection over its preservation, offers open stacks and accessibility for all, works in collaboration with like-minded projects, and encourages critical as well as creative engagements with our own histories.

The archive is all volunteer and relies on the help of many people. We welcome you to get involved.

http://interferencearchive.org/

It asks whether diplomacy can be employed for the marginalised rather than the powerful? Representation for the misrepresented?

It is a conceptual investigation into how architecture and design mediates relations between people and places.  The project aims to catalyse new dialogues between different, normally divergent groups and organizations. It also questions whether diplomatic engagement of a social issue is possible through design. In summary, The Embassy for Refugees is a theoretical proposition, at once an investigation, a reflection and a provocation of the status quo. 

The first stage of the project can be seen below, as an architectural proposal in Mayfair, London’s embassy quarter. The Embassy is currently being developed as a pavilion which will claim part of the South Bank as a territory for refugees, during the Celebrating Sanctuary London Festival in June 2013. 

The Embassy for Refugees is initiated by Natasha Reid

To download the booklet follow this link:

http://www.natashareid.co.uk/resources/Embassy%20for%20Refugees_Summary%20booklet.pdf

http://open-charter.net/

a workshop with Silent University Students.

FORMER WEST: DOCUMENTS, CONSTELLATIONS, PROSPECTS

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

18-24 March 2013

Silent University’s first meetings has started  in Stockholm, hosted by Tensta Konsthall.

Our current Stockholm Lecturers are;

Sherko Jahani, Ahmad Alharahsheh, Fahima Alnablsi, Mohammad Sowaity and Abdullah Al Soud.

Our current Stockholm Consultants are;

Baharan Khazemi and Babak Parham.

ICORN Guest Writers

The International Cities of Refuge Network is an association of cities around the world dedicated to the value of Freedom of Expression. Writers have consistently been targets of politically motivated threats and persecution, and the network believes it is necessary for the international community to formulate and implement an appropriate response.

Each ICORN city focuses on one writer at a time, each writer representing the countless others in hiding, in prison or silenced forever. By providing a Guest Writer with a safe place to stay and economic security for a standard term of two years, ICORN cities make an important, practical contribution to the promotion of Freedom of Expression.

The Administration Centre:

The International Cities of Refuge Network is both decentralized and coordinated. The Administration Centre in Stavanger, Norway serves as the communication hub for independently managed ICORN cities. The Administration Centre facilitates contact and cooperation between member cities, city coordinators, festival directors and guest writers.

The Administration Centre also works closely, through a formal agreement, with International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. When applications are received and screened by the Administration Centre, they are sent on to the Writers in Prison Committee for a full evaluation. When appropriate, the Administration Centre will contact other organizations working for persecuted writers for referrals or evaluations.

The Administration Centre keeps in contact with approved candidates and presents them to each city when a guest writer position available. The decision to invite a specific writer is made solely by each ICORN city. For this reason, the Administration Centre cannot guarantee that all approved applicants will be invited to a city of refuge.
It is important to note that ICORN is not a refugee organization.
Neither the network nor its individual cities have authority over the laws and regulations of any country. Therefore, the Administration Centre strongly discourages all applicants and candidates from relying on ICORN as their only option for refuge.

http://www.icorn.org/

paper-film in nine acts.

Book by Sezgin Boynik and Minna Henriksson.

Labyrint Press 2012

Experience

We were invited in the Fittja community to make an artwork. 20 years ago there weren’t any public artworks in Fittja. Now just looking at the proliferated parabols, scenery-paintings at the staircases, red stars on the rooftops… soon we can talk of a Fittja-museum, open 24 hours. This book is largely a product of our two months’ stay in Fittja as artists-in-residents. Most of the moral, aesthetical, political, everyday, philosophical and other issues dealt with here are concern of this stay. But as it is usually practiced, and largely appreciated, art in these instances, in these cases, is expected to have certain effectuality, to mobilize strict democratic sentiments, to be engaged in experience of long term residents of the place, to give some colour to that experience, and if posssible, to open a window to the other realities that will be possible as a new form of their never-changing realities. During our residency stay we did not produce such an artwork. Our work—that is this book, a kind of paper-film—is based on Fittja experience, which we want to translate only through the language of concepts that in the last instance will be anything but an experience. This artwork is not a window to Fittja-experience, to understanding of difference or uniqueness or specificity of a misery, segregation, racialization and oppression in that place. The truths of this artwork, that is mass-produced and accessible, could be arrived at in anyplace and at anytime, even between the most uneventful sterile walls of a library or a working desk of a studio. No need to catalogue the places in the world in which Fittja-experience could be renewed.

LEBENSWELT

The Lebenswelt (those trivial truths, the fact that I live in a community of people, that I have a body, …etc.) is usually passed over and forgotten or else regarded as a source of inaccuracies/imperfections in our language. The sentiment becomes ‘The sooner overcome, the better’. (Art & Language, Annotation 217, ‘Blurting in New York’)

EXPERIENCE

Experience in the generalized sense is meaningless, but when used in connection with pointing to past actions and rules and conventions derived from them, it has some sense, depending on its specificity. This means that demands like Kozloff’s that art ‘say something significant about experience’ are nonsensical.

(Art & Language, Annotation 129, ‘Blurting in New York’)

We will do everything to avoid any verbal definition, intellectually or emotionally, of what the Fittja-experience is about. We will try not to mention in any part of this artwork, even as a slip of the tongue, that this experience took place. Our aim here is to show that the privilege of being there (as artist-in-residents) is not the necessary pre-condition to opposing the negativity of that space. What is at stake here is not a phenomenon but a construction. Opposing being a window to the experience, we will instead propose an intellectual and conceptual exercise on this state of segregation (exclusion, racism… negativity). We claim that experience of being in Fittja has conditioned our artwork, which we want to be silent about. But, at the same time, the experience, which we would like to be silent about, is made apparent through intellectual exercise. This does not mean that this lack, absence and vacuousness is what makes this intellectual exercise an artwork. In the last instance this is a work of theory. Fittja and contradictions of this segregation that take place in this artwork, have to be seen as models, which are theoretical in a way that they are constructed.

The object, reduced to silence, does not enter the poem, even though its evocation grounds the poetic consistency. It is the absent cause. But the effect of its lack lies in affecting each written term, forced to be ‘allusive’, ‘never direct’, in such a way so as to become equal on the Whole to the silence by which the object was only initially affected.

(Alain Badiou, ‘Theory of the Subject’, p72)

Apart from having the chance to express this model in the form of an artwork, that is to specify in the form of an art theoryconstruction, also there was another delicate situation in the Fittja-cosmos; the existence of an institution the main practice of which being intellectual work of translating this experience to a language which the state and its ideological apparatuses can communicate with.

Sezgin Boynik & Minna L. Henriksson

pdf: La Fontaine

http://minnahenriksson.com/publications/counter-constructivist-model-la-fontaine-stories-for-immigrants-paper-film-in-nine-acts/