#how to get albania invitation letter
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hajsadhku · 1 year ago
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Get Expedited Albania Visa Tourist & Business Visa Services in San Diego, CA, Phoenix, AZ from Express Travel Services - Apply Now.
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scrollsfromarebornrealm · 1 year ago
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Prompt #26: Last
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Artoiel knew that he should probably protest. Plead. And if all else failed--he could call for his men, he could call for the anti-magic irons. A Dominant of Halone had never left Ishgard, never left Corethas before. When word got out, there would be actual rioting in the city streets...
But after the events of the last week, Artoiel couldn't blame Augustine and Mathye for packing their things. Couldn't blame them for wanting to seek freedom. Even with Nidhogg's shade defeated, and the dragon-broods of Dravania willing to try peace...there were still those in Ishgard who just would not let things be. Peace in his home was not going to be bought by spoken word as was Aymeric's wish, but with blood and painful lessons.
"Where will you go?" He asked. Augustine and Mathye shared a look, with Mathye reaching into a pocket and holding up a folded piece of paper.
"This got delivered via post-moogle last night." He said. "A formal invitation for us to join the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Which we're accepting."
"Ishgard sending her Dominants to aid in the security of the realm will buy the Lord High Commander a great deal of political capital." Augustine continued. "The Archbishop aside...van Baelsar came too close to his goal. The Ultima Weapon would have destroyed the armies of Limsa, U'ldah and Gridania."
"Not to mention that little shite Teledji's scheming would have put all three nations under his thumb faster." Mathye added. "We were next on the list." Artoiel exhaled, nodding.
"War with the Empire, then?" He asked. "Where?"
"Don't know yet. Sebastian and Reinhardt's Eikons are whispering for Gyr Albania to be watched, though." Augustine frowned, remembering the letter Reinhardt had sent.
The Ala Mhigan refugees have been mobilizing. They're gathering around a leader who calls themselves the Silver Griffin. They've even sent out Eikon-hunters after us--but you can guess how well that's been going over.
"Gyr Albania." Artoiel mused. "I heard that the crown prince of Garlemald took Gaius's place as viceroy. Send word of what you find, will you?" At the surprised looks on the Bishop brothers' faces, the new Count of House Fortemps chuckled.
"I'm not above shamelessly using any advantage I can possibly get to help vault the House into a better position to offer you--and the Scions support." He said.
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qocsuing · 10 months ago
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Deciphering the Costs of a Chinese Visa
Deciphering the Costs of a Chinese Visa Embarking on a journey to China is an exhilarating adventure, filled with the allure of its rich history, vibrant culture, and breathtaking landscapes. However, before setting off on this journey, one must navigate the process of obtaining a Chinese visa. This article aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the costs associated with obtaining a Chinese visa.To get more news about cost for chinese visa, you can citynewsservice.cn official website.
Visa Types and Their Costs The cost of a Chinese visa varies depending on several factors, including the applicant’s nationality, the type of visa, and the number of entries required. For instance, for US citizens, the standard cost for all types of visas and single/double/multiple entry visa to China is a certain amount1. For citizens of other countries, the cost can range from a lower to a higher amount2.
It’s important to note that these costs are subject to change and should be verified from official authorities for the most updated fees3. In most countries, the embassy and consulate charge fees according to the number of entries on the issued visa. The more entries you get, the more expensive your visa is. However, for some countries, like the US, UK, and Canada, citizens need to pay a fixed fee no matter how many entries they apply for2.
Additional Costs In addition to the visa fee, there may be additional costs such as service fees and taxes2. These can slightly increase the final cost of the Chinese visa. Moreover, if you require express services, extra money will be required2.
Visa Exemptions Certain countries are exempt from China visa fees. These include Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Maldives, Micronesia, Pakistan, Slovakia, and the Republic of Montenegro. It’s advisable to check the latest visa exemption policies before applying.
Applying through Visa Agents Visa agents operate in China and in some other countries. They can handle your application, which is convenient if you do not live in a city where there is a consulate, or if your situation is more complex. Visa agents can provide supporting documents such as invitation letters. However, they will charge higher fees for their services.
Conclusion Understanding the costs associated with obtaining a Chinese visa is crucial for planning your trip. While the process may seem daunting, being informed about the various factors that influence the cost can help you navigate it with ease. Remember to check the latest information from official sources to ensure you have the most accurate and up-to-date information3.
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Harry Potter and the Disbanded Army
When he came back to teach, Harry immediately tried the Room of Requirement to see if it had fixed itself and possibly if he could eventually get out Crabbe's body to get it buried properly. For years, it stayed sealed, but he still impulsively checked it once a year or so. Around Halloween 8 years after starting his job as a teacher (he started 6 years after the Battle of Hogwarts) after he'd already checked the room that September, he tried checking it on a whim, looking for a place to get away from prying kids for a moment. He asked for somewhere he could be in peace and the trusty door appeared. The door opened to the, albeit now very scorched, DA room, looking like it had caught fire but was otherwise the same as it had been. Closing the door behind him, he made cleaning it up by hand a personal project and worked on that whenever he needed alone time. Two years later, it had been completely restored by him and he called up as many DA people as were left and invited them back to the room for an official last time before closing the room and never returning to it.
Oh when he opened the door, Crabbe's ghost escaped and became one of the many castle ghosts. His body had been burnt to where it couldn't be retrieved. Before his party, Harry, recognizing that no matter how shit Crabbe was, they were all just kids at the time, left a small book which he'd sent first to as many of Crabbe's Slytherin classmates as he could get to respond at the front of the massive pile of ash that used to be centuries of hidden artifacts. When he opened the room to do this, he was surprised to find that the room was clean and all of the ashes had been swept into hundreds of thousands of ceramic urns based on what they'd been and put into boxes. On top of one was an urn that had in silver text on the top, "Vincent Crabbe". It was as though his restoring of the DA room had also restored this room. He put the book next to the urn and whispered an awkward goodbye before hurrying out of the room. After months of talking to McGonagall, he had the hallway permanently blocked off.
Crabbe and Goyle were childhood friends and were dating since at least 4th year when they went to the Yule Ball together. Goyle just kinda disappeared after the Battle of Hogwarts, not like died but ran off to live in a forest in Albania. When Crabbe's ghost was released from the Room of Requirement, Harry sent an owl to Draco to find out where Goyle went, specifying why. Draco told Harry he had no clue but sent Goyle an owl himself saying what Harry had said in his letter and that he could arrange for Goyle to visit the school but Goyle didn't respond and Draco assumed the owl had gotten lost on the way and just gave up. Goyle received the letter but didn't want to go lest Crabbe's ghost ended up being very different from what Goyle remembered, blamed Goyle for making it out, or fully didn't remember him.
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troybeecham · 4 years ago
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The Church remembers Sts. Timothy and Titus, Evangelists, Bishops, and a Martyr
Orate pro nobis.
Timothy
Timothy was a teenager when he met Paul. His family lived in Lystra so he was a Galatian. His father was a Greek man; we know nothing of his faith. But, Timothy’s mom and grandmother were faithful Jewish women who taught the Old Testament scriptures to this boy they loved so much (Acts 16:1; 2 Timothy 1:5).
As the women heard Paul preach, they believed in Jesus, and so did Timothy. Timothy may have seen Paul heal a lame man in his town. That would have been exciting! He may also have watched as an angry mob threw stones at Paul and left him for dead (Acts 14:8-20). Yet, he also knew Paul survived. When Paul came back to Lystra a couple of years later on his second journey, Paul invited Timothy to travel with him.
Timothy helped Paul to establish churches at Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea (Acts 16:1 – 17:14). When Paul left Berea to go to Athens he left Timothy and Silas behind, but later sent word for them to join him (Acts 17:13-15). Timothy was sent to Thessalonica to strengthen the faith of believers there (1 Thessalonians 3:1-2). Timothy was a trustworthy friend who carried money collected by the Philippian church to care for Paul’s needs in Corinth.
During the 3 years Paul was in Ephesus teaching them about the amazing power of God, Timothy was there, too. When Paul was imprisoned in Rome for two years, Timothy was right alongside him much of the time unselfishly taking care of Paul’s needs. By now, Timothy was a young man of about 30 who for at least 13 years had been learning how to teach about Jesus and serve God’s people well as he watched Paul do it. Paul thought of Timothy not only as a very faithful friend but also as his spiritual son.
After Paul’s release from prison in Rome, Timothy and Paul traveled to visit friends in the churches they had founded. When they got to Ephesus, Paul recognized some men in the church were teaching error about Jesus saying that Jesus could not have been a man and God at the same time. Paul wanted to go on to visit his friends in Macedonia, but he didn’t want to leave the Ephesian church in turmoil. So, he left Timothy to teach truth to the church there while Paul went on to Macedonia. As an “apostolic representative, Timothy had the authority to order worship (1 Timothy 2:1-15) and appoint elders and deacons (1 Timothy 3:1-3). Paul thought he’d get back to Ephesus soon, but that didn’t happen. He was concerned about what was going on in Ephesus, so he wrote Timothy the letter called 1st Timothy around AD 64 from Rome or Macedonia.
Six of Paul’s epistles include Timothy in the salutations. The most tender and moving of Paul’s letters was his last one to Timothy. He was a prisoner in a Roman dungeon when he wrote 2 Timothy, approximately AD 67. He knew he had a short time to live, so the letter is his spiritual last will and testament – his “dying wish” – to encourage Timothy and to request that Timothy join him during his final days of imprisonment (2 Timothy 1:4; 4:9, 21).
Timothy remained in Ephesus until AD 97. During a pagan celebration of a feast called “Catagogian,” Timothy severely reproved the people in the procession for their ridiculous idolatry. This antagonized the partygoers who beat him with clubs “in so dreadful a manner that he expired of the bruises two days later.”
Titus
During Paul’s first missionary journey, a young man named Titus heard Paul preach about Jesus. Titus was Greek—he had not grown up worshiping the God of the Bible. As he listened to Paul, Titus’ heart responded to the message, and he believed in Jesus. Paul brought him to Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1-4) to show the apostles and other Jewish believers how a Greek non-Jew could love God just as much as they did. Titus represented all the other non-Jewish people who became Christians and were completely accepted by God through their faith in Jesus Christ—like most of us!
Titus continued to travel with Paul on missionary journeys, helping in the work of sharing the gospel. During the 3 years Paul was in Ephesus teaching them about the amazing power of God (third journey), Titus was there. Then, Paul sent him to Corinth to alleviate tension there (2 Corinthians 7:6, 13-14) and to collect money for the poor (2 Corinthians 8:6, 16, 23). Paul thought of Titus not only as a very faithful friend but also as his spiritual son because he had led him to trust Christ.
After Paul was released from the Roman prison where he had been for two years, he and Titus traveled to the island of Crete. Paul and Titus taught the people, called Cretans, about their need for God and the good news about Jesus (Titus 1:4-5). Soon there were enough believers to start churches in several towns. Paul wanted to go visit the church in Corinth so he left Titus to continue teaching the new Christians and to appoint church leaders for each new church. Someone came to replace him in Crete so Titus met Paul in western Macedonia and continued his missionary work northward into what is now Albania (2 Timothy 4:10). The gospel was really spreading into Europe.
Back in Crete, though, Titus was a busy man as he cared for all the new Cretan believers, especially because the people just didn’t know how to do what is good in God’s eyes. Paul knew Titus needed some encouragement and reminders of what was important to teach the people. Paul wrote to Titus soon after writing 1st Timothy, probably while Paul was in Macedonia, on his way to Nicopolis (Titus 3:12). Paul hoped to join Titus again, but there is no way of knowing whether that meeting ever took place. Tradition has it that Titus later returned to Crete and there served out the rest of his life.
Almighty God, you called Timothy and Titus to be evangelists and teachers, and made them strong to endure hardship: Strengthen us to stand fast in adversity, and to live godly and righteous lives in this present time, that with sure confidence we may look for our blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
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eurosong · 4 years ago
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Undo my ESC
Good evening, folks! If you saw my first instalment of “Undo my ESC”, the annual feature where I make a year’s Eurovision better for me by making alterations in each country, you might have thought that ESC getting cancelled had dulled my edge, since, comparing to usual standards, I hardly changed much at all there. Well, that’s because, once again, we have seriously uneven semis, and Semi #1 would have been killer, whilst Semi #2 would have been dead. Here is what Í would have done to even those semis up! 🇦🇱 Albania: The Albanian delegation had seemingly done all it could to wash its hands of, well, two years of comparatively excellent results with authentic, melancholically poëtic and qualitative tracks, namely Malland Ktheju tokës. They brought in Byuckman, in whose interest it is for the contest to become as generically “radio-friendly” as possible, and the genius who brought us lyrics like “this is love/rain falls from above”. As judges. Of a serious musical festival. The foreign jurors did as expected, and voted for the appointed “bop”, but were foiled, however, by one of the minority Albanian jurors on the panel who put it  low in her ranks. An actual renowned music professor who got called all the names under the sun for doing so. And so, to an ensuing shitstorm, the classical and powerful Shaj prevailed instead. Unfortunately, the battle was won but the war was lost, because the representative herself took the lessons of 2018-9, threw them down the aeroplane toilet on the way to LA, and ripped the spirit out of the song, reverting back to the previous Albanian trend of terrible “revamps” and laboured translations into English. The result, Fall from the sky, is but a husk of the original. In my ESC, I’d probably simply keeping the original version of Shaj, which was my uncontested #1 of all songs, but part of me would opt for Ajër, which I love almost as well but which doesn’t carry the baggage of hanging over my head like the sword of Democles this entire season. 🇦🇲 Armenia: I’ve more often than not loved the entries of Hayastan, from the joyous Jan Jan to the soaring Fly with me and defiant Walking out. To say they took a step back this year is kind – it was more like a powerful jump backwards that landed them in the nearest ocean, where they sank like a stone. It was one of the most singularly unpalatable NFs that I have ever watched in this era. Rather than retraumatise myself by going into detail about it, I’ll just say, I would have sent Srbuk or Artsvik again to get the top 10 that I feel both warranted!
🇦🇹 Austria: What a journey for Österreich. From Conchita to this guy, a perky homophobe who explicitly said he wished his kids would not turn out to be gay. He comes up with a third-rate impersonator of a third-rate Benjamin Ingrosso impersonator’s third-rate impersonation of a Timberlake b-side. I would throw that in the bin and invite Pænda back from last year for a shot at redemption after her gorgeous Limits got slept on in 2019.
🇧🇬 Bulgaria: Some people had the neck to say to me “who needs Hungary when Bulgaria is coming back?” Well, I do. Hungary were constantly in the top of my rankings, and just quietly and consistently brought quality. Bulgaria has brought me one good thing – Poli Genova’s œuvre – and a tonne of hype. Their song this year was one of the favourites, and I still can’t wrap my head around how other than the force of PR. It’s a bizarre, unsettling combination of passive-aggressive “look how much you’re making me hurt myself” lyrics with Disneyish saccharine accompaniment, topped off with a key change?! For want yet again of a national final, I would bring Poli back – third time even luckier? 🇨🇿 Czechia: The Bohemians (and Moravians) keep it contemporary but superficial for a third year running, although, thankfully, for the first time since they began doing national finals, we finally have a song without a dubious attitude towards women in the lyrics. Not that there is much to analyse in those lyrics. It’s a merely ok song for me, no better, no worse: a superior alternative would have been Barbara Mochowa’s lush and contemplative second effort, White and black holes, or the glorious 90s British indie-influenced All the blood. 🇩🇰 Denmark: Did Denmark confound international monitors into calling it the world’s happiest country by exposing them to the relentlessly cheery songs that they pick for Eurovision lately? And yet – I really do say yes to Yes, To a certain extent, to a limited amount of exposure, and despite the fact that it leans a little too hard into the territory of sounding like a second Little talks. It was one of the few good songs from DMGP – I also liked the 80s shoegaze-ish Den eneste goth– and I feel so mad at DR that they won’t give Ben and Tan a guaranteed second shot to represent their country after they won in front of an empty crowd. 🇪🇪 Estonia: The days of Eesti being Beesti seem like from a distant memory to me, but there was some quality and quirkiness in Eesti Laul, buried under mountains of beigedom, like the rich-voiced Egert Miller’s soulful Georgia, the jazzy Write about me, or the feisty earworm that was Ping pong. Instead, we got a dreary dirge with sub-Hallmark lines about wot luv is, which would have sounded dated in a contest 30 years ago, sung by a repugnant guy who tried to get people to vote for him last year by leaning on the idea that he was the “only true Estonian.” I’d have Egert get his rightful place as Jüri Pootsmann’s spiritual successor. 🇫🇮 Finland: I was one of the few to be jubilant when a bizarre ode to an Italian porn star with a backing track sounding like a violated version of Eläköön elämä came second in the polls to its spiritual opposite: a shy and rather awkward guy singing a quietly moving song about the passing of time. I love Looking back and wouldn’t change a thing. 🇬🇪 Georgia: You never know what to expect from Georgia, except the unexpected, and yet even I was surprised by what they came up with: a close-shaven guy with veins popping in his head screaming “why don’t you love meeeee?” to a rocky, electronic backdrop. Me being me, I actually do like it a lot. “Take me as I am” sounds like a veiled potshot at the big 5 and a vindication of Georgia’s “keep it weird, send what we want” philosophy. I could suggest that the lyrics, that sound like those of a spurned angsty teen, change a bit, but that would be defeating the purpose of Georgia: one takes them as they are. 🇬🇪 Greece: So, somehow, despite S!STERS coming dead last with 0 pts in the televote last year, using exclamation marks to substitute the letter I is now a thing in Eurovision with the advent of Superg!rl. I spent an hour watching folk waffle on in Greek in its reveal show only for them to reveal the song literally at the very end, so after that, it was a little underwhelming, and nowhere near as good as Better love in 2019. I don’t hate it – and the music video’s concept of her being an amazing superhero who can change the world, but instead she’s stopping people slipping over bananas and rescuing cats from trees is weirdly endearing, so it can stay, but I’d improve the lyrics, particularly in the chorus. “I’m a supergirl, supergirl, in a crazy world, crazy world” is not much higher than “this is love, rain falls from above” in historically bad Greek lyrics at ESC. 🇮🇸 Iceland: Daði Freyr came back from near-victory with the delightful Is this love, added a lovely inspiration in his newborn daughter to a similarly funky and playful track, and came out with Think about things. Unlike what usually happens with songs that are a little bit odd, I was positively surprised to see it walk the NF, and become a phenomenon even outside the ESC fandom. This was perfect and joyous from beginning to end. I hope Iceland will not be like the other Nordics, and will invite Daði directly back .🇱🇻 Latvia: I have come to enjoy the bizarre chaötic energy of Still breathing, It’s a hot mess, but I take weird over dull any day. It wasn’t my favourite in Supernova – that would be the effortlessly cool Polyester, an earworm with a social conscience, written about the cost of fast fashion but dismissed by many people as “she luvs t-shirts song lol”. Given that Samanta Tina tried over half a dozen times to go to ESC, finally won and then had the chance ripped out of her hands by the cancellation, I don’t have the heart to remove her from my ideal ESC 2020 though. She stays, but maybe the staging changes? It’s odd to have what you believe is a feminist anthem but then relegate your backing singers to in the distance, their faces shielded away. 🇲🇩 Moldova: Life is too short to follow Moldovan national finals, especially when you know, lately, that whoever is backed by the hilariously inaptly named Dream team will win there. They are like a parasite, sucking out the colour and fun out of a country that once had plenty of both – cross-reference Hora din Moldova or Lăutar to name just two examples. I guess out of an uninspiring lineüp, I’d go for Moldoviţa for having at least a hint of the brassy folk that used to be their calling card. 🇵🇱 Poland: Speaking of calling cards, after a one year hiatus with an arresting combo of white voice and rocky instrumentation, Poland has returned to what it has most often done in recent years – presented us with an absolute dirge, Empires, which seems like it was written by an unenthusiastic English student whose homework assignment (for which they received a generous C-) was to write a poëm with a bunch of metaphors “we’re moths to a flame, birds to a pane of glass, gasoline and a match”. Despite having a big music industry from which to choose many gems, Poland offers me little alternative choice given that there were only three songs in their grand final – one by the Czech representative last year who, as you might guess from what I said literally a sentence up, isn’t even Polish!Horny Elf, who’s contractually obliged to write only creepy lyrics for songs, tried to represent Polska with a song inspired by a true-life situation where he went around Tel Aviv with a cardboard cutout of one of the hostesses of the show. It’s a love song inspired by gallivanting around with a piece of cardboard. Addressed to that actual hostess. And it’s an almighty earworm that hasn’t escaped my mind since. Amazingly, his Lucy would be my Polish representative. 🇵🇹 Portugal: Portugal is another country beloved by me by for dancing to the beat of its own drummer, or perhaps, rather shedding tears to the strumming of its own fado guitar. They struggled being different, they won being different, and for the last few years they’ve struggled again, despite having a lot of support for both O jardim and Telemóveis amongst fans. This year, the televote went for one interesting song, the charmingly Gallic, accordion-drenched Passe-partout, a song about a cultured girl shaking off her boorish ex who could “never even get into Piaf”, whilst the jury got behind another interesting song, Gerbera, an entrancing, arresting and poëtic song laden with metaphor about the idea of music competing itself. This let Medo de sentir,second in both polls, turn silver into gold. It’s a lovely, heart-felt track, but rather unexceptional - I would have had one of the other more singular songs win. 🇸🇲 San Marino: The weird boil on the face of ESC that somehow never pops, SM is back after its bewildering qualification with a tone-deaf dentist wailing to a microwaved disco song… with something actually palatable, sort of. The aptly named Freaky is dated, odd, overly busy, but Senhit has a lot of charisma, and the idea of “break[ing] all the rules, mak[ing] up some new [ones] and destroy[ing] all of them too” and “life goes by too quickly not to be freaking it up”, well, maybe we do get on board. 🇷🇸 Serbia: Serbia is usually a byword for quality at the contest – they won with one of the best 21st century winners hands down in Molitva, and also sent some of the most beautiful compositions in the contest’s history at the hands of Željko. This year, they decided to join in the leitmotif of reliable countries sucking by sending a group that sound like a third-rate mid-2000s girl band from Transnistria when beautiful songs like Cvet sa Prokletija were right there. 🇨🇭 Switzerland: Fair play to the Swiss for not doing a Cyprus and leaning in on their success with their male Fuego, She gat me, and instead going in a completely different direction with this moody effort. I’m not entirely convinced by the teenage emo-ish lyrics or the unnecessary falsetto, but Répondez-moi is a refreshing effort, and has the bonus of being in French too! And the automatic qualifiers: 🇫🇷 France: You’ve heard of France, right? You know, that wee country south of Belgium, north of Andorra, not much of a music industry… or so you’d think, given that the troolee jeenyuss new delegation, who abandoned their brilliant national final which showcased how diverse and qualitative their music scene is despite it being a huge success in the fandom, and instead reached out to the writer of last year’s last place song for the UK and a few other rentaswedes and they produced something that sounds like a b-side that not even Westlife would have recorded, replete with a stock key change. About as French as IKEA köttbullar. A real shame for one of Europe’s most highly esteemed cultural hotbeds. If they wanted to pick Tom Leeb, who seems like a nice guy and has written some lovely music, he could have made his own song and it would have indubitably been scores better than this. 🇪🇸 Spain: I’m going to apply this to all the automatic qualifiers voting on this semi-final: they scrapped a national final for this? OT was not an ideal format as last year demonstrated with its shit show of contestants sabotaging themselves so as not to get picked for ESC – but still. There’s not much I can say about this other than I don’t like it much and I’d rather Spain return to a proper NF. You don’t spend time trapped on a bus where this song with its torturous falsetto was on replay and emerge with fond feelings. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Usually, in this space, I can point to a song that the UK should have sent and that I fell in love with – like I wish I loved you more or You. Once again, though, another big 6 nation scrapped their NF after tanking it with a bizarre format last year. The BBC said nothing for months, then were unwilling to spend tv time on ESC this year so just blurted out an announcement of an announcement in  about 40 seconds after some dance show. And then they dropped this song. It’s… passable at best, with an annoying chorus (especially that beat in “my last… breath”) and a staggering amount of repetition in a song that clocks in at only around 80% of the standard Eurovision song length. James Newman surely could have come up with something better. It’s a baby step in the right direction, but one taken at the shore where you need to start running to avoid getting pulled away in a rip.
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playhub · 6 years ago
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flauntpage · 7 years ago
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Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art
Interview and visual essay by Lise McKean
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is an associate professor of Art and Art History. We began our conversation in the Papermaker’s Garden on a late afternoon in June, just after a sudden shower made the soil fragrant.
Mel Potter in the Papermaker’s Garden at 620 S. Wabash in Chicago
Lise: Since we’re starting out in the Papermaker’s Garden, let’s begin with hearing about what you are growing this year in your raised bed garden here in the Loop?
Mel: I’m focusing on a perennial bed dedicated to the idea of pleasure for women. Last year’s Papermaker Garden included the Roe v. Wade and Bosnian Magic beds. After much focus on women’s biology, I decided that the most feminist investigation I could do this year would be to investigate pleasure.
The plants I’ve selected are for pleasing the nose and eyes—and for psychotropic recreation. For example, I’m growing absinthe and burdock in my Plants of Pleasure bed. My partner in the Papermaker’s Garden, Maggie Puckett, has a bed for growing plants she discovered while investigating witches, some of whom were her ancestors. She calls it Witchcraft and Colonial Warfare.
Poster for 2017 Plants of Pleasure Garden
Lise: I’m curious about the psychotropic plants—what brings them to your garden?
Mel: I’ve been doing research on women shamans because a lot of the psychotropic vision work in traditional societies is very male-centric. I’m interested in the intersection of psychotropic recreation, visionary quests and experiences, and consciousness-raising. I’m going to explore how these plants can be turned into psychotropic materials. I’m also looking at some of them for their calming and anti-anxiety effects. Some of these plants can be recreational as well.
Lise: Being around plants is intensely sensual, engaging our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and even hearing. Culture shapes the experience and use of plants, too. How do the plants in the Papermaker’s Garden mesh with your work as an artist?
Mel: All my work is about female culture. It ranges from contemporary feminist practice to female ethnobotanical and intangible heritage, which is made up of traditional craft practices. I explore how these are distinct languages and forms of communication and history-making. They parallel recorded history, but are completely different ways to interpret the world. I’m always on a quest to search for practices with the potential to reveal something that could be transformative. We’re unaware of them because they’re not included in dominant narratives.
The craft practices I explore range from bio-culinary traditions and handmade felt rugs to women’s tattoo cults and hand papermaking. These are tremendously under-recorded practices that reveal fascinating narratives.
2015 Food, Sex, and Death dinner party in the Papermaker’s Garden celebrating the Hull House Wage Worker research on brothels located at garden’s site at the turn of the 20th Century
Lise: Mention of tattoo cults appear here and there in ethnography. Tell me more about the one that interests you and how you came across it.
Mel: When I was in the Republic of Georgia I saw a pagan ritual taking place on the street that I identified as similar to a film I had done in South Serbia. My colleague Clifton Meador bought the book, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan in preparation for our work in Georgia. I wrote to Robert Chenciner, one of the book’s authors, asking him whether the designs I saw in the pagan ritual were the same as those in the women’s tattoo cult in the same region. He wrote back a long email and so began our friendship.
Women use similar symbols from the “book of life” for her children, her parents, her illnesses. It’s an old tradition. There are still many tattoo practices. All the symbols come down to a few basic things. Don’t mess with my crops. Don’t mess with my family. Protect me from evil and the evil eye. A lot of the designs are plant based and burdock is one of them. Some ethnobotanical designs are used over and over. A traditional woman has repertoire of images. Through color and image she can tell a specific story, just as a rug can tell a story about its family.
Ethnographer Robert Chenciner holding a rare hand-felted rug from Daghestan
Lise: These tattoo cults give women a way to record on their own bodies events in their lives that are important to them. Tattooed Mountain Women must be fascinating. Traveling back to your garden here in downtown Chicago, what happens to all the plants at the end of the growing season?
Mel: We’ve learned that a perennial garden is a year-round phenomenon. We let some of the plants go to seed because it’s good for pollinator bugs. Many of the crops are cut and cooked and made into paper to use for artwork. During the winter months, I work on making the paper at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Lise: How do you run the garden as a collaborative project?
Mel: We invite people as guest gardeners and community guests. The South Loop Alliance has a bed with us. We invite graduate students at Columbia. We help out each other with watering, weeding, and events here at the garden. Running a ten-bed garden would be impossible without a group of collaborators. My project with Maggie Puckett, Seeds InService is the garden’s other main project.
Flax handmade paper laminates, pulp painting, and electroluminescent (EL) wire embeds by Melissa Potter
Lise: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Did you start out that way?
Mel: I’m the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Columbia. Interdisciplinarity is naturally collaborative. My personal interdisciplinary practice is ethnographic. I don’t consider myself a botanical expert.
I started in print and paper because it’s a family legacy. My grandmother was a printer and painter. My aunt was a letter press printer. My mother is a quilter, knitter, and crafter. It started there. My high school yearbook said I wanted go into anthropology. Everything I’ve done since then goes into that direction.
Lise: As an anthropologist, I’ve known some who knew from childhood that’s what they wanted to do. Where did your interest come from at such a young age?
Mel: My grandmother, aunt, and I aunt studied a lot of pre-Christian goddess cults. Women scholars were starting to write female-centered ethnography. My grandmother and I went to Crete and drew at goddess sites. She called her journal, “Melissa, the Minoans, and Me.”
Lise: How did you find your way to merging art and ethnography? Were you doing that in art school, or did it come later?
Mel: I have to credit Columbia primarily. After finishing grad school, I spent 12 years in New York City leading a traditional art life showing in alternative galleries and collaborative spaces. When Columbia hired me in the Interdisciplinary program, I was given free rein to explore curatorially, artistically, and critically the interdisciplinary space. It’s a distinctive program. It’s no accident that my strongest work comes out of my time here when I was institutionally supported to do these off the grid things like tattoo cults and paper cultures. I’ve been here now for 10 years.
Lise: From the wide world of peoples and cultures, where did your interest in Bosnia and Serbia come from? Is that your ethnic background?
Mel: My grandmother and I sponsored a Bosnian refugee in the 1990s. She was in Croatia as a refugee. Her village was ethnically cleansed and then the Serbian militia turned it into a rape camp. I was reunited with her in 2015. By then I had spent 20 years exploring the arts, culture, and ethnography of the larger Balkan region. I didn’t work in Bosnia until recently.
Poster for the 2016 Bosnian Magic Garden, dedicated to Potter’s grandmother and Zejna. View is from Zejna’s front window.
Lise: That’s an intense commitment.
Mel: It was obsessively captivating to me. I used to go two or three times a year. I’ve been there 35 times, staying up to six months at a time.
Lise: I haven’t yet had a chance to see your film, Like Other Girls Do. Congratulations on all the attention it’s been getting since it came out in 2015. You’ve told me it grew out of your interest in the custom of sworn virgins in Montenegro and Albania.
Mel: The film is a collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. It’s 30 minutes and explores another female-centric traditional cultural practice. When there are no boys born in a family, a girl is raised as a boy to inherit the father’s property. I interviewed Stana Cerovic, the self-proclaimed last sworn virgin of Montenegro. I was exploring Stana’s legacy. She died in October 2016. The film also includes my interviews with five women in the Balkans under the age of 40, and their thoughts about personal identity and gender expression.
I’m working on a second part of the project about how to create a legacy in an environment that doesn’t record us. Stana isn’t in her family tree, even though she made the sacrifice to be a boy. In all likelihood, she was not buried as a man even though she wanted to (I am waiting for confirmation from my ethnographer colleagues in the region). I find it heart breaking that they’re not only forgotten, but if they’re remembered, it’s falsified. There’s no reward for the sacrifice.
vimeo
  Lise: What does the role of virginity play in this tradition?
Mel: They’re called sworn virgins because they take an oath of virginity. They don’t marry. They usually live with their families or alone. They can’t have a heteronormative relationship.
Lise: How does the film contextualize this tradition within contemporary culture?
Mel:  Like Other Girls Do is about Stana’s village and about death. The story shows her visit to the cemetery where her family members are buried and explores the issue of how she will be remembered. I asked a graffiti artist to make a tag for Stana. The film ends with her making Stana’s tag on the streets of Belgrade. I wanted the women I interviewed to connect with Stana in a two-way conversation.
Stana Cerovic with photograph of herself dressed as a man. Photo by Melissa Potter
Lise: Did they make the connection? What happened between the women?
Mel: I think they reflected on Stana’s story. They asked themselves about their own willingness to engage in traditional Balkan society and the sacrifices they’re already making. I included the queer narrative—and the way society restricts full development of an identity. This was true for Stana and the five women. The queer activist was the most liberated in some ways. To live as a queer-identified person in the Balkans is a radical act of self-assertion.
Lise: The film has been widely screened. What are some highlights of its travels over the past couple years?
Mel: It’s had a nice life. Last year it was shown in Paris at Cineffable, the world’s largest feminist film festival. It’s also traveled to around the U.S. and the Balkans and to Denmark, India, China and Slovenia. It’s been featured in some exhibitions too, including Becoming Male, a show featuring artists like Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin at Albright College.
Making a film is a huge project. I loved every minute. My collaborator was Saša Sreckovic at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. My editor, Jelena Jovcic is my better half. Editors don’t get the credit they deserve. Composer Aleksandra Dokic created the music for the film.
Lise: We’ve talked about your work as an interdisciplinary artist in terms of ethnography and ethnobotany, paper making and film making. What else are you working on?
Mel: I pray it’s not going to be another film. I’m going do something on my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian woman refugee. I recently obtained my grandmother’s O.S.S. file. The O.S.S. was the US office of intelligence during World War II. She was an O.S.S. operative. I’m curious to see where that goes. I met with Zejna twice. I started a four-part narrative, with my grandmother, Zejna, myself, and a fictional version of Zejna’s daughter. It will be a study of women and war and how women experience war in a gendered and particular way.
Lise: Am I hearing that you have another film on your hands?
Mel: Do you want to take me and shoot me right now! I’ve been doing some prints of my grandmother and Zejna and writing annotations. I’m building a visual archive. It probably has to be a film. It could be a book. I like working in film, but it’s a hard medium. I’m not wealthy enough to play in it. If you don’t have money, you have to wait for it.
Equal Pay 4 Equal Work, designed by Melissa Potter in handmade felt
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Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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snsmissionaries · 7 years ago
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12/11/17 -- Elder Dalton Hall, Kansas, Wichita Mission
Dalton’s third letter home:
Hello everyone!!! This week has been so good!! There have been some highlights, but mostly the same schedule! So we have been teaching Sofia and I can't remember if I talked about her in my last email, but she teaches Spanish at UVU and she is from Mexico. We have had 5 lessons with her so far and we've had 3 with her since my last email! She is so cool and corrects us all the time because our Spanish is rough, plus she teaches college kids Spanish all day so it's pretty fun. Our last two lessons were so awesome!
I have been trying to do better at getting up exactly at 6:30 and going to bed exactly at 10:30 and I've just been trying to be obedient because the quote that we hear all the time here is "obedience brings blessings, but exact obedience brings miracles". So in my prayers I have been like Heavenly Father if I get up and got to bed on time, please bless me with the gift of tongues and with the spirit, and I have been doing really well, and let me just tell you, I have been blessed this week especially in our lessons with Sofia. We have been talking with Sofia about reading the Book of Mormon, praying, and obeying the commandments. In our last two lessons, the spirit has been so strong and Elder Carter and I have been feeling the spirit, and for me, I felt like my sentences flowed so much better and I remembered so many more words that I learned. We asked her to get baptized and she said that she wanted to but that she wanted to learn more about the church first, so that's so exciting! Our third lesson was also great because we had a missionary that is back from his mission and speaks really good Spanish and he helped bring the spirit in that lesson as well! It's so cool to teach Sofia!
Sunday was awesome!! This week was my last week as DL (they switch DL's every 3 weeks) so I got to conduct my last district meeting and go to my last meetings on Sunday. Elder Carter and I taught the lesson about the Apostasy and Restoration and it went really well! It was fast Sunday so we were hungry all day but our meetings went really well and we had a great devotional! Our devotional was by the choir director and he is honestly so chill!! His name is Brother Ryan Egget and he shared so many funny experiences about his kids and he also shared really cool experiences about his mission in Brazil. His talk was on music and he shared stories about the lives of many composers and he shared the background of some of the hymns and it was so cool. He shared the story of W.W. Phelps (a composer that wrote a ton of the church hymns) and about how he wanted to prove the church wrong. Phelps tried to read the Book of Mormon with the Bible to prove it wrong but eventually he read the whole Book of Mormon and wanted to be baptized! Anyway, long story short, he joined the church and stole some money from the church when he went to buy land in Far West Missouri, I believe. So then, he was excommunicated and he talked bad about Joseph Smith. Years later he apologized to Joseph in a letter, talked to the missionaries, then was reactivated from the approval of the church and Joseph Smith. After he received a heart-felt letter from Joseph Smith he wrote Praise to the Man. We sang the hymn and I was very emotional because I know that this church is true and that Joseph Smith is and was a prophet of God! Before the devotional earlier in the day, we also got to hear from the Mission President and his wife as well as some other speakers who all talked about the Restoration of the Gospel through Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. So Sunday was awesome and we got to break our fast with turkey, mashed potatoes, cookies, soda, and ice cream, which was great! (We are way too spoiled here, and yes I know that Ecuador is going to be way different lol). It was so cool to have the opportunity to be a DL. I loved being the DL because I got to talk and interview the senior companions, go to meetings, check the mail, and talk with the branch presidency and all the other leaders. I am very grateful for that opportunity to serve.
We have been studying a lot this week because we have 7 lessons with investigators and we also found out that we are going to teach Stefanie (Sister Christianson) again!! We have a bunch of lessons but it's really good practice to help us get ready!!
Okay, so Tuesday nights are so great because we have devotionals! Almost our whole district went to choir and it was great because Brother Egget was there and shared more personal stories about his mission. That helped inspire us to sing with our hearts as missionaries. We sang the "Missionary Medley" which was arranged by Brother Egget, and it was a combination of "Called to Serve", "I Hope They Call Me on a Mission," and "We'll Bring the World His Truth." It was really powerful! So for our speaker last night we got to hear from President Russell M. Nelson! It was so amazing to be in his presence! President Nelson is the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and he will be the next prophet of the church. He shared a great talk about how we have to keep up with the Lord's pace, stay faithful knowing that the Lord will help us with everything, and repent daily. The whole talk I just pictured the Lord speaking to us because ultimately President Nelson was speaking on the inspiration he received from the Lord. It was such an honor to be there with him. I received a ton of inspiration and motivation from his talk.
This week we've been playing soccer and it has been so nice!! It has been in like the 50's and it has been windy and overcast all day!! I've been tearing it up, scoring goals, and working on my soccer skills for Ecuador. It also snowed for a couple hours the other day, the first time this year! It has been beautiful weather!! I also got to play some ball this morning and there was some decent competition. I got to meet an Elder from Australia and a bunch of Elders going to Albania and Germany. Elder Carter and I have also been talking to these 2 British Elders that are super chill! They all have their own lingo and accents and it is so sick! It is so cool to see the diversity here and all the different cultures and missionaries that all love the gospel! The MTC is so great! I've been talking to other missionaries in my Zone as well and I got to talk to a bunch that are going to Tucson! I love my district and zone; they are amazing!
I love you all and I would like to invite anyone that is having a hard time in their life or anyone that needs help with anything, to read the Book of Mormon and pray to the Lord for his help and guidance.
Brothers and Sisters... I know that this church is the true church on this earth. I know that if you are doing what is right and if you have faith, then the Lord HAS to bless you and he WILL bless you. I have seen the Lords hand in my life for just these past three weeks! I know that you can receive answers in the scriptures and that God communicates to us through the scriptures, especially the Book of Mormon. If you are worthy and keeping the commandments, then the Lord will bless you! Joseph Smith IS a prophet of God and the Book of Mormon is true and he translated it with the help of the spirit of the Lord. Prayer is very important. Prayer can strengthen your connection with God. I know that you can pray to God about anything and that he will help you in your trials. I have been praying to God all day and all night and he has blessed my life and I know that he will bless all of your lives as well. The Lord knows each of us individually and he wants to help and bless us ! I love this church. In the the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Yo testifico que la iglesia es verdad y el don de lenguas es real. El Espirtu Santo puede ayudanos cada dia con todos problemas en nuestras vivas. Yo se que el libro mormon es autentico y el profeta Joese Smith restaurado el evangelio de Jesucristo en la tierra. Yo amo la iglesia de Jesucristo de los santos de los ultimos dias y yo se que la iglesia puede bendicenos en nuestras vivas. En el nombre de Jesucristo. Amen.
--  Elder Hall
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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago
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Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art
Interview and visual essay by Lise McKean
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is an associate professor of Art and Art History. We began our conversation in the Papermaker’s Garden on a late afternoon in June, just after a sudden shower made the soil fragrant.
Mel Potter in the Papermaker’s Garden at 620 S. Wabash in Chicago
Lise: Since we’re starting out in the Papermaker’s Garden, let’s begin with hearing about what you are growing this year in your raised bed garden here in the Loop?
Mel: I’m focusing on a perennial bed dedicated to the idea of pleasure for women. Last year’s Papermaker Garden included the Roe v. Wade and Bosnian Magic beds. After much focus on women’s biology, I decided that the most feminist investigation I could do this year would be to investigate pleasure.
The plants I’ve selected are for pleasing the nose and eyes—and for psychotropic recreation. For example, I’m growing absinthe and burdock in my Plants of Pleasure bed. My partner in the Papermaker’s Garden, Maggie Puckett, has a bed for growing plants she discovered while investigating witches, some of whom were her ancestors. She calls it Witchcraft and Colonial Warfare.
Poster for 2017 Plants of Pleasure Garden
Lise: I’m curious about the psychotropic plants—what brings them to your garden?
Mel: I’ve been doing research on women shamans because a lot of the psychotropic vision work in traditional societies is very male-centric. I’m interested in the intersection of psychotropic recreation, visionary quests and experiences, and consciousness-raising. I’m going to explore how these plants can be turned into psychotropic materials. I’m also looking at some of them for their calming and anti-anxiety effects. Some of these plants can be recreational as well.
Lise: Being around plants is intensely sensual, engaging our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and even hearing. Culture shapes the experience and use of plants, too. How do the plants in the Papermaker’s Garden mesh with your work as an artist?
Mel: All my work is about female culture. It ranges from contemporary feminist practice to female ethnobotanical and intangible heritage, which is made up of traditional craft practices. I explore how these are distinct languages and forms of communication and history-making. They parallel recorded history, but are completely different ways to interpret the world. I’m always on a quest to search for practices with the potential to reveal something that could be transformative. We’re unaware of them because they’re not included in dominant narratives.
The craft practices I explore range from bio-culinary traditions and handmade felt rugs to women’s tattoo cults and hand papermaking. These are tremendously under-recorded practices that reveal fascinating narratives.
2015 Food, Sex, and Death dinner party in the Papermaker’s Garden celebrating the Hull House Wage Worker research on brothels located at garden’s site at the turn of the 20th Century
Lise: Mention of tattoo cults appear here and there in ethnography. Tell me more about the one that interests you and how you came across it.
Mel: When I was in the Republic of Georgia I saw a pagan ritual taking place on the street that I identified as similar to a film I had done in South Serbia. My colleague Clifton Meador bought the book, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan in preparation for our work in Georgia. I wrote to Robert Chenciner, one of the book’s authors, asking him whether the designs I saw in the pagan ritual were the same as those in the women’s tattoo cult in the same region. He wrote back a long email and so began our friendship.
Women use similar symbols from the “book of life” for her children, her parents, her illnesses. It’s an old tradition. There are still many tattoo practices. All the symbols come down to a few basic things. Don’t mess with my crops. Don’t mess with my family. Protect me from evil and the evil eye. A lot of the designs are plant based and burdock is one of them. Some ethnobotanical designs are used over and over. A traditional woman has repertoire of images. Through color and image she can tell a specific story, just as a rug can tell a story about its family.
Ethnographer Robert Chenciner holding a rare hand-felted rug from Daghestan
Lise: These tattoo cults give women a way to record on their own bodies events in their lives that are important to them. Tattooed Mountain Women must be fascinating. Traveling back to your garden here in downtown Chicago, what happens to all the plants at the end of the growing season?
Mel: We’ve learned that a perennial garden is a year-round phenomenon. We let some of the plants go to seed because it’s good for pollinator bugs. Many of the crops are cut and cooked and made into paper to use for artwork. During the winter months, I work on making the paper at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Lise: How do you run the garden as a collaborative project?
Mel: We invite people as guest gardeners and community guests. The South Loop Alliance has a bed with us. We invite graduate students at Columbia. We help out each other with watering, weeding, and events here at the garden. Running a ten-bed garden would be impossible without a group of collaborators. My project with Maggie Puckett, Seeds InService is the garden’s other main project.
Flax handmade paper laminates, pulp painting, and electroluminescent (EL) wire embeds by Melissa Potter
Lise: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Did you start out that way?
Mel: I’m the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Columbia. Interdisciplinarity is naturally collaborative. My personal interdisciplinary practice is ethnographic. I don’t consider myself a botanical expert.
I started in print and paper because it’s a family legacy. My grandmother was a printer and painter. My aunt was a letter press printer. My mother is a quilter, knitter, and crafter. It started there. My high school yearbook said I wanted go into anthropology. Everything I’ve done since then goes into that direction.
Lise: As an anthropologist, I’ve known some who knew from childhood that’s what they wanted to do. Where did your interest come from at such a young age?
Mel: My grandmother, aunt, and I aunt studied a lot of pre-Christian goddess cults. Women scholars were starting to write female-centered ethnography. My grandmother and I went to Crete and drew at goddess sites. She called her journal, “Melissa, the Minoans, and Me.”
Lise: How did you find your way to merging art and ethnography? Were you doing that in art school, or did it come later?
Mel: I have to credit Columbia primarily. After finishing grad school, I spent 12 years in New York City leading a traditional art life showing in alternative galleries and collaborative spaces. When Columbia hired me in the Interdisciplinary program, I was given free rein to explore curatorially, artistically, and critically the interdisciplinary space. It’s a distinctive program. It’s no accident that my strongest work comes out of my time here when I was institutionally supported to do these off the grid things like tattoo cults and paper cultures. I’ve been here now for 10 years.
Lise: From the wide world of peoples and cultures, where did your interest in Bosnia and Serbia come from? Is that your ethnic background?
Mel: My grandmother and I sponsored a Bosnian refugee in the 1990s. She was in Croatia as a refugee. Her village was ethnically cleansed and then the Serbian militia turned it into a rape camp. I was reunited with her in 2015. By then I had spent 20 years exploring the arts, culture, and ethnography of the larger Balkan region. I didn’t work in Bosnia until recently.
Poster for the 2016 Bosnian Magic Garden, dedicated to Potter’s grandmother and Zejna. View is from Zejna’s front window.
Lise: That’s an intense commitment.
Mel: It was obsessively captivating to me. I used to go two or three times a year. I’ve been there 35 times, staying up to six months at a time.
Lise: I haven’t yet had a chance to see your film, Like Other Girls Do. Congratulations on all the attention it’s been getting since it came out in 2015. You’ve told me it grew out of your interest in the custom of sworn virgins in Montenegro and Albania.
Mel: The film is a collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. It’s 30 minutes and explores another female-centric traditional cultural practice. When there are no boys born in a family, a girl is raised as a boy to inherit the father’s property. I interviewed Stana Cerovic, the self-proclaimed last sworn virgin of Montenegro. I was exploring Stana’s legacy. She died in October 2016. The film also includes my interviews with five women in the Balkans under the age of 40, and their thoughts about personal identity and gender expression.
I’m working on a second part of the project about how to create a legacy in an environment that doesn’t record us. Stana isn’t in her family tree, even though she made the sacrifice to be a boy. In all likelihood, she was not buried as a man even though she wanted to (I am waiting for confirmation from my ethnographer colleagues in the region). I find it heart breaking that they’re not only forgotten, but if they’re remembered, it’s falsified. There’s no reward for the sacrifice.
vimeo
  Lise: What does the role of virginity play in this tradition?
Mel: They’re called sworn virgins because they take an oath of virginity. They don’t marry. They usually live with their families or alone. They can’t have a heteronormative relationship.
Lise: How does the film contextualize this tradition within contemporary culture?
Mel:  Like Other Girls Do is about Stana’s village and about death. The story shows her visit to the cemetery where her family members are buried and explores the issue of how she will be remembered. I asked a graffiti artist to make a tag for Stana. The film ends with her making Stana’s tag on the streets of Belgrade. I wanted the women I interviewed to connect with Stana in a two-way conversation.
Stana Cerovic with photograph of herself dressed as a man. Photo by Melissa Potter
Lise: Did they make the connection? What happened between the women?
Mel: I think they reflected on Stana’s story. They asked themselves about their own willingness to engage in traditional Balkan society and the sacrifices they’re already making. I included the queer narrative—and the way society restricts full development of an identity. This was true for Stana and the five women. The queer activist was the most liberated in some ways. To live as a queer-identified person in the Balkans is a radical act of self-assertion.
Lise: The film has been widely screened. What are some highlights of its travels over the past couple years?
Mel: It’s had a nice life. Last year it was shown in Paris at Cineffable, the world’s largest feminist film festival. It’s also traveled to around the U.S. and the Balkans and to Denmark, India, China and Slovenia. It’s been featured in some exhibitions too, including Becoming Male, a show featuring artists like Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin at Albright College.
Making a film is a huge project. I loved every minute. My collaborator was Saša Sreckovic at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. My editor, Jelena Jovcic is my better half. Editors don’t get the credit they deserve. Composer Aleksandra Dokic created the music for the film.
Lise: We’ve talked about your work as an interdisciplinary artist in terms of ethnography and ethnobotany, paper making and film making. What else are you working on?
Mel: I pray it’s not going to be another film. I’m going do something on my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian woman refugee. I recently obtained my grandmother’s O.S.S. file. The O.S.S. was the US office of intelligence during World War II. She was an O.S.S. operative. I’m curious to see where that goes. I met with Zejna twice. I started a four-part narrative, with my grandmother, Zejna, myself, and a fictional version of Zejna’s daughter. It will be a study of women and war and how women experience war in a gendered and particular way.
Lise: Am I hearing that you have another film on your hands?
Mel: Do you want to take me and shoot me right now! I’ve been doing some prints of my grandmother and Zejna and writing annotations. I’m building a visual archive. It probably has to be a film. It could be a book. I like working in film, but it’s a hard medium. I’m not wealthy enough to play in it. If you don’t have money, you have to wait for it.
Equal Pay 4 Equal Work, designed by Melissa Potter in handmade felt
Episode 328: Buzz Spector
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The State of Nature: Recent Work by Tom Denlinger and Victoria Fuller
from Bad at Sports http://ift.tt/2sRcb5n via IFTTT
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troybeecham · 5 years ago
Text
The Church remembers Sts. Timothy and Titus, Evangelists, Bishops, and a Martyr
Orate pro nobis.
Timothy
Timothy was a teenager when he met Paul. His family lived in Lystra so he was a Galatian. His father was a Greek man; we know nothing of his faith. But, Timothy’s mom and grandmother were faithful Jewish women who taught the Old Testament scriptures to this boy they loved so much (Acts 16:1; 2 Timothy 1:5).
As the women heard Paul preach, they believed in Jesus, and so did Timothy. Timothy may have seen Paul heal a lame man in his town. That would have been exciting! He may also have watched as an angry mob threw stones at Paul and left him for dead (Acts 14:8-20). Yet, he also knew Paul survived. When Paul came back to Lystra a couple of years later on his second journey, Paul invited Timothy to travel with him.
Timothy helped Paul to establish churches at Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea (Acts 16:1 – 17:14). When Paul left Berea to go to Athens he left Timothy and Silas behind, but later sent word for them to join him (Acts 17:13-15). Timothy was sent to Thessalonica to strengthen the faith of believers there (1 Thessalonians 3:1-2). Timothy was a trustworthy friend who carried money collected by the Philippian church to care for Paul’s needs in Corinth.
During the 3 years Paul was in Ephesus teaching them about the amazing power of God, Timothy was there, too. When Paul was imprisoned in Rome for two years, Timothy was right alongside him much of the time unselfishly taking care of Paul’s needs. By now, Timothy was a young man of about 30 who for at least 13 years had been learning how to teach about Jesus and serve God’s people well as he watched Paul do it. Paul thought of Timothy not only as a very faithful friend but also as his spiritual son.
After Paul’s release from prison in Rome, Timothy and Paul traveled to visit friends in the churches they had founded. When they got to Ephesus, Paul recognized some men in the church were teaching error about Jesus saying that Jesus could not have been a man and God at the same time. Paul wanted to go on to visit his friends in Macedonia, but he didn’t want to leave the Ephesian church in turmoil. So, he left Timothy to teach truth to the church there while Paul went on to Macedonia. As an “apostolic representative, Timothy had the authority to order worship (1 Timothy 2:1-15) and appoint elders and deacons (1 Timothy 3:1-3). Paul thought he’d get back to Ephesus soon, but that didn’t happen. He was concerned about what was going on in Ephesus, so he wrote Timothy the letter called 1st Timothy around AD 64 from Rome or Macedonia.
Six of Paul’s epistles include Timothy in the salutations. The most tender and moving of Paul’s letters was his last one to Timothy. He was a prisoner in a Roman dungeon when he wrote 2 Timothy, approximately AD 67. He knew he had a short time to live, so the letter is his spiritual last will and testament – his “dying wish” – to encourage Timothy and to request that Timothy join him during his final days of imprisonment (2 Timothy 1:4; 4:9, 21).
Timothy remained in Ephesus until AD 97. During a pagan celebration of a feast called “Catagogian,” Timothy severely reproved the people in the procession for their ridiculous idolatry. This antagonized the partygoers who beat him with clubs “in so dreadful a manner that he expired of the bruises two days later.”
Titus
During Paul’s first missionary journey, a young man named Titus heard Paul preach about Jesus. Titus was Greek—he had not grown up worshiping the God of the Bible. As he listened to Paul, Titus’ heart responded to the message, and he believed in Jesus. Paul brought him to Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1-4) to show the apostles and other Jewish believers how a Greek non-Jew could love God just as much as they did. Titus represented all the other non-Jewish people who became Christians and were completely accepted by God through their faith in Jesus Christ—like most of us!
Titus continued to travel with Paul on missionary journeys, helping in the work of sharing the gospel. During the 3 years Paul was in Ephesus teaching them about the amazing power of God (third journey), Titus was there. Then, Paul sent him to Corinth to alleviate tension there (2 Corinthians 7:6, 13-14) and to collect money for the poor (2 Corinthians 8:6, 16, 23). Paul thought of Titus not only as a very faithful friend but also as his spiritual son because he had led him to trust Christ.
After Paul was released from the Roman prison where he had been for two years, he and Titus traveled to the island of Crete. Paul and Titus taught the people, called Cretans, about their need for God and the good news about Jesus (Titus 1:4-5). Soon there were enough believers to start churches in several towns. Paul wanted to go visit the church in Corinth so he left Titus to continue teaching the new Christians and to appoint church leaders for each new church. Someone came to replace him in Crete so Titus met Paul in western Macedonia and continued his missionary work northward into what is now Albania (2 Timothy 4:10). The gospel was really spreading into Europe.
Back in Crete, though, Titus was a busy man as he cared for all the new Cretan believers, especially because the people just didn’t know how to do what is good in God’s eyes. Paul knew Titus needed some encouragement and reminders of what was important to teach the people. Paul wrote to Titus soon after writing 1st Timothy, probably while Paul was in Macedonia, on his way to Nicopolis (Titus 3:12). Paul hoped to join Titus again, but there is no way of knowing whether that meeting ever took place. Tradition has it that Titus later returned to Crete and there served out the rest of his life.
Almighty God, you called Timothy and Titus to be evangelists and teachers, and made them strong to endure hardship: Strengthen us to stand fast in adversity, and to live godly and righteous lives in this present time, that with sure confidence we may look for our blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
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troybeecham · 6 years ago
Text
Sts. Timothy and Titus
The Church remembers Sts. Timothy and Titus.
Orate pro nobis.
Timothy
Timothy was a teenager when he met Paul. His family lived in Lystra so he was a Galatian. His father was a Greek man; we know nothing of his faith. But, Timothy’s mom and grandmother were faithful Jewish women who taught the Old Testament scriptures to this boy they loved so much (Acts 16:1; 2 Timothy 1:5).
As the women heard Paul preach, they believed in Jesus, and so did Timothy. Timothy may have seen Paul heal a lame man in his town. That would have been exciting! He may also have watched as an angry mob threw stones at Paul and left him for dead (Acts 14:8-20). Yet, he also knew Paul survived. When Paul came back to Lystra a couple of years later on his second journey, Paul invited Timothy to travel with him.
Timothy helped Paul to establish churches at Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea (Acts 16:1 – 17:14). When Paul left Berea to go to Athens he left Timothy and Silas behind, but later sent word for them to join him (Acts 17:13-15). Timothy was sent to Thessalonica to strengthen the faith of believers there (1 Thessalonians 3:1-2).
Timothy was a trustworthy friend who carried money collected by the Philippian church to care for Paul’s needs in Corinth.
During the 3 years Paul was in Ephesus teaching them about the amazing power of God, Timothy was there, too. When Paul was imprisoned in Rome for two years, Timothy was right alongside him much of the time unselfishly taking care of Paul’s needs. By now, Timothy was a young man of about 30 who for at least 13 years had been learning how to teach about Jesus and serve God’s people well as he watched Paul do it. Paul thought of Timothy not only as a very faithful friend but also as his spiritual son.
After Paul’s release from prison in Rome, Timothy and Paul traveled to visit friends in the churches they had founded. When they got to Ephesus, Paul recognized some men in the church were teaching error about Jesus saying that Jesus could not have been a man and God at the same time. Paul wanted to go on to visit his friends in Macedonia, but he didn’t want to leave the Ephesian church in turmoil. So, he left Timothy to teach truth to the church there while Paul went on to Macedonia. As an “apostolic representative, Timothy had the authority to order worship (1 Timothy 2:1-15) and appoint elders and deacons (1 Timothy 3:1-3). Paul thought he’d get back to Ephesus soon, but that didn’t happen. He was concerned about what was going on in Ephesus, so he wrote Timothy the letter called 1st Timothy around AD 64 from Rome or Macedonia.
Six of Paul’s epistles include Timothy in the salutations. The most tender and moving of Paul’s letters was his last one to Timothy. He was a prisoner in a Roman dungeon when he wrote 2 Timothy, approximately AD 67. He knew he had a short time to live, so the letter is his spiritual last will and testament – his “dying wish” – to encourage Timothy and to request that Timothy join him during his final days of imprisonment (2 Timothy 1:4; 4:9, 21).
Timothy remained in Ephesus until AD 97. During a pagan celebration of a feast called “Catagogian,” Timothy severely reproved the people in the procession for their ridiculous idolatry. This antagonized the partygoers who beat him with clubs “in so dreadful a manner that he expired of the bruises two days later.”
Titus
During Paul’s first missionary journey, a young man named Titus heard Paul preach about Jesus. Titus was Greek—he had not grown up worshiping the God of the Bible. As he listened to Paul, Titus’ heart responded to the message, and he believed in Jesus. Paul brought him to Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1-4) to show the apostles and other Jewish believers how a Greek non-Jew could love God just as much as they did. Titus represented all the other non-Jewish people who became Christians and were completely accepted by God through their faith in Jesus Christ—like most of us!
Titus continued to travel with Paul on missionary journeys, helping in the work of sharing the gospel. During the 3 years Paul was in Ephesus teaching them about the amazing power of God (third journey), Titus was there. Then, Paul sent him to Corinth to alleviate tension there (2 Corinthians 7:6, 13-14) and to collect money for the poor (2 Corinthians 8:6, 16, 23). Paul thought of Titus not only as a very faithful friend but also as his spiritual son because he had led him to trust Christ.
After Paul was released from the Roman prison where he had been for two years, he and Titus traveled to the island of Crete. Paul and Titus taught the people, called Cretans, about their need for God and the good news about Jesus (Titus 1:4-5). Soon there were enough believers to start churches in several towns. Paul wanted to go visit the church in Corinth so he left Titus to continue teaching the new Christians and to appoint church leaders for each new church. Someone came to replace him in Crete so Titus met Paul in western Macedonia and continued his missionary work northward into what is now Albania (2 Timothy 4:10). The gospel was really spreading into Europe.
Back in Crete, though, Titus was a busy man as he cared for all the new Cretan believers, especially because the people just didn’t know how to do what is good in God’s eyes. Paul knew Titus needed some encouragement and reminders of what was important to teach the people. Paul wrote to Titus soon after writing 1st Timothy, probably while Paul was in Macedonia, on his way to Nicopolis (Titus 3:12). Paul hoped to join Titus again, but there is no way of knowing whether that meeting ever took place. Tradition has it that Titus later returned to Crete and there served out the rest of his life.
Almighty God, you called Timothy and Titus to be evangelists and teachers, and made them strong to endure hardship: Strengthen us to stand fast in adversity, and to live godly and righteous lives in this present time, that with sure confidence we may look for our blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
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0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years ago
Text
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art
Interview and visual essay by Lise McKean
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is an associate professor of Art and Art History. We began our conversation in the Papermaker’s Garden on a late afternoon in June, just after a sudden shower made the soil fragrant.
Mel Potter in the Papermaker’s Garden at 620 S. Wabash in Chicago
Lise: Since we’re starting out in the Papermaker’s Garden, let’s begin with hearing about what you are growing this year in your raised bed garden here in the Loop?
Mel: I’m focusing on a perennial bed dedicated to the idea of pleasure for women. Last year’s Papermaker Garden included the Roe v. Wade and Bosnian Magic beds. After much focus on women’s biology, I decided that the most feminist investigation I could do this year would be to investigate pleasure.
The plants I’ve selected are for pleasing the nose and eyes—and for psychotropic recreation. For example, I’m growing absinthe and burdock in my Plants of Pleasure bed. My partner in the Papermaker’s Garden, Maggie Puckett, has a bed for growing plants she discovered while investigating witches, some of whom were her ancestors. She calls it Witchcraft and Colonial Warfare.
Poster for 2017 Plants of Pleasure Garden
Lise: I’m curious about the psychotropic plants—what brings them to your garden?
Mel: I’ve been doing research on women shamans because a lot of the psychotropic vision work in traditional societies is very male-centric. I’m interested in the intersection of psychotropic recreation, visionary quests and experiences, and consciousness-raising. I’m going to explore how these plants can be turned into psychotropic materials. I’m also looking at some of them for their calming and anti-anxiety effects. Some of these plants can be recreational as well.
Lise: Being around plants is intensely sensual, engaging our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and even hearing. Culture shapes the experience and use of plants, too. How do the plants in the Papermaker’s Garden mesh with your work as an artist?
Mel: All my work is about female culture. It ranges from contemporary feminist practice to female ethnobotanical and intangible heritage, which is made up of traditional craft practices. I explore how these are distinct languages and forms of communication and history-making. They parallel recorded history, but are completely different ways to interpret the world. I’m always on a quest to search for practices with the potential to reveal something that could be transformative. We’re unaware of them because they’re not included in dominant narratives.
The craft practices I explore range from bio-culinary traditions and handmade felt rugs to women’s tattoo cults and hand papermaking. These are tremendously under-recorded practices that reveal fascinating narratives.
2015 Food, Sex, and Death dinner party in the Papermaker’s Garden celebrating the Hull House Wage Worker research on brothels located at garden’s site at the turn of the 20th Century
Lise: Mention of tattoo cults appear here and there in ethnography. Tell me more about the one that interests you and how you came across it.
Mel: When I was in the Republic of Georgia I saw a pagan ritual taking place on the street that I identified as similar to a film I had done in South Serbia. My colleague Clifton Meador bought the book, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan in preparation for our work in Georgia. I wrote to Robert Chenciner, one of the book’s authors, asking him whether the designs I saw in the pagan ritual were the same as those in the women’s tattoo cult in the same region. He wrote back a long email and so began our friendship.
Women use similar symbols from the “book of life” for her children, her parents, her illnesses. It’s an old tradition. There are still many tattoo practices. All the symbols come down to a few basic things. Don’t mess with my crops. Don’t mess with my family. Protect me from evil and the evil eye. A lot of the designs are plant based and burdock is one of them. Some ethnobotanical designs are used over and over. A traditional woman has repertoire of images. Through color and image she can tell a specific story, just as a rug can tell a story about its family.
Ethnographer Robert Chenciner holding a rare hand-felted rug from Daghestan
Lise: These tattoo cults give women a way to record on their own bodies events in their lives that are important to them. Tattooed Mountain Women must be fascinating. Traveling back to your garden here in downtown Chicago, what happens to all the plants at the end of the growing season?
Mel: We’ve learned that a perennial garden is a year-round phenomenon. We let some of the plants go to seed because it’s good for pollinator bugs. Many of the crops are cut and cooked and made into paper to use for artwork. During the winter months, I work on making the paper at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Lise: How do you run the garden as a collaborative project?
Mel: We invite people as guest gardeners and community guests. The South Loop Alliance has a bed with us. We invite graduate students at Columbia. We help out each other with watering, weeding, and events here at the garden. Running a ten-bed garden would be impossible without a group of collaborators. My project with Maggie Puckett, Seeds InService is the garden’s other main project.
Flax handmade paper laminates, pulp painting, and electroluminescent (EL) wire embeds by Melissa Potter
Lise: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Did you start out that way?
Mel: I’m the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Columbia. Interdisciplinarity is naturally collaborative. My personal interdisciplinary practice is ethnographic. I don’t consider myself a botanical expert.
I started in print and paper because it’s a family legacy. My grandmother was a printer and painter. My aunt was a letter press printer. My mother is a quilter, knitter, and crafter. It started there. My high school yearbook said I wanted go into anthropology. Everything I’ve done since then goes into that direction.
Lise: As an anthropologist, I’ve known some who knew from childhood that’s what they wanted to do. Where did your interest come from at such a young age?
Mel: My grandmother, aunt, and I aunt studied a lot of pre-Christian goddess cults. Women scholars were starting to write female-centered ethnography. My grandmother and I went to Crete and drew at goddess sites. She called her journal, “Melissa, the Minoans, and Me.”
Lise: How did you find your way to merging art and ethnography? Were you doing that in art school, or did it come later?
Mel: I have to credit Columbia primarily. After finishing grad school, I spent 12 years in New York City leading a traditional art life showing in alternative galleries and collaborative spaces. When Columbia hired me in the Interdisciplinary program, I was given free rein to explore curatorially, artistically, and critically the interdisciplinary space. It’s a distinctive program. It’s no accident that my strongest work comes out of my time here when I was institutionally supported to do these off the grid things like tattoo cults and paper cultures. I’ve been here now for 10 years.
Lise: From the wide world of peoples and cultures, where did your interest in Bosnia and Serbia come from? Is that your ethnic background?
Mel: My grandmother and I sponsored a Bosnian refugee in the 1990s. She was in Croatia as a refugee. Her village was ethnically cleansed and then the Serbian militia turned it into a rape camp. I was reunited with her in 2015. By then I had spent 20 years exploring the arts, culture, and ethnography of the larger Balkan region. I didn’t work in Bosnia until recently.
Poster for the 2016 Bosnian Magic Garden, dedicated to Potter’s grandmother and Zejna. View is from Zejna’s front window.
Lise: That’s an intense commitment.
Mel: It was obsessively captivating to me. I used to go two or three times a year. I’ve been there 35 times, staying up to six months at a time.
Lise: I haven’t yet had a chance to see your film, Like Other Girls Do. Congratulations on all the attention it’s been getting since it came out in 2015. You’ve told me it grew out of your interest in the custom of sworn virgins in Montenegro and Albania.
Mel: The film is a collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. It’s 30 minutes and explores another female-centric traditional cultural practice. When there are no boys born in a family, a girl is raised as a boy to inherit the father’s property. I interviewed Stana Cerovic, the self-proclaimed last sworn virgin of Montenegro. I was exploring Stana’s legacy. She died in October 2016. The film also includes my interviews with five women in the Balkans under the age of 40, and their thoughts about personal identity and gender expression.
I’m working on a second part of the project about how to create a legacy in an environment that doesn’t record us. Stana isn’t in her family tree, even though she made the sacrifice to be a boy. In all likelihood, she was not buried as a man even though she wanted to (I am waiting for confirmation from my ethnographer colleagues in the region). I find it heart breaking that they’re not only forgotten, but if they’re remembered, it’s falsified. There’s no reward for the sacrifice.
vimeo
  Lise: What does the role of virginity play in this tradition?
Mel: They’re called sworn virgins because they take an oath of virginity. They don’t marry. They usually live with their families or alone. They can’t have a heteronormative relationship.
Lise: How does the film contextualize this tradition within contemporary culture?
Mel:  Like Other Girls Do is about Stana’s village and about death. The story shows her visit to the cemetery where her family members are buried and explores the issue of how she will be remembered. I asked a graffiti artist to make a tag for Stana. The film ends with her making Stana’s tag on the streets of Belgrade. I wanted the women I interviewed to connect with Stana in a two-way conversation.
Stana Cerovic with photograph of herself dressed as a man. Photo by Melissa Potter
Lise: Did they make the connection? What happened between the women?
Mel: I think they reflected on Stana’s story. They asked themselves about their own willingness to engage in traditional Balkan society and the sacrifices they’re already making. I included the queer narrative—and the way society restricts full development of an identity. This was true for Stana and the five women. The queer activist was the most liberated in some ways. To live as a queer-identified person in the Balkans is a radical act of self-assertion.
Lise: The film has been widely screened. What are some highlights of its travels over the past couple years?
Mel: It’s had a nice life. Last year it was shown in Paris at Cineffable, the world’s largest feminist film festival. It’s also traveled to around the U.S. and the Balkans and to Denmark, India, China and Slovenia. It’s been featured in some exhibitions too, including Becoming Male, a show featuring artists like Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin at Albright College.
Making a film is a huge project. I loved every minute. My collaborator was Saša Sreckovic at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. My editor, Jelena Jovcic is my better half. Editors don’t get the credit they deserve. Composer Aleksandra Dokic created the music for the film.
Lise: We’ve talked about your work as an interdisciplinary artist in terms of ethnography and ethnobotany, paper making and film making. What else are you working on?
Mel: I pray it’s not going to be another film. I’m going do something on my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian woman refugee. I recently obtained my grandmother’s O.S.S. file. The O.S.S. was the US office of intelligence during World War II. She was an O.S.S. operative. I’m curious to see where that goes. I met with Zejna twice. I started a four-part narrative, with my grandmother, Zejna, myself, and a fictional version of Zejna’s daughter. It will be a study of women and war and how women experience war in a gendered and particular way.
Lise: Am I hearing that you have another film on your hands?
Mel: Do you want to take me and shoot me right now! I’ve been doing some prints of my grandmother and Zejna and writing annotations. I’m building a visual archive. It probably has to be a film. It could be a book. I like working in film, but it’s a hard medium. I’m not wealthy enough to play in it. If you don’t have money, you have to wait for it.
Equal Pay 4 Equal Work, designed by Melissa Potter in handmade felt
Tuesday’s Video Pick
Episode 476: Sylvie Fortin
Episode 429: Michael Velliquette and Oliver Warden
Digital Luminance: The Paintings of Jason E. Carter
Yale Art Student Uses Abortion as an Art Medium
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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flauntpage · 7 years ago
Text
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art
Interview and visual essay by Lise McKean
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is an associate professor of Art and Art History. We began our conversation in the Papermaker’s Garden on a late afternoon in June, just after a sudden shower made the soil fragrant.
Mel Potter in the Papermaker’s Garden at 620 S. Wabash in Chicago
Lise: Since we’re starting out in the Papermaker’s Garden, let’s begin with hearing about what you are growing this year in your raised bed garden here in the Loop?
Mel: I’m focusing on a perennial bed dedicated to the idea of pleasure for women. Last year’s Papermaker Garden included the Roe v. Wade and Bosnian Magic beds. After much focus on women’s biology, I decided that the most feminist investigation I could do this year would be to investigate pleasure.
The plants I’ve selected are for pleasing the nose and eyes—and for psychotropic recreation. For example, I’m growing absinthe and burdock in my Plants of Pleasure bed. My partner in the Papermaker’s Garden, Maggie Puckett, has a bed for growing plants she discovered while investigating witches, some of whom were her ancestors. She calls it Witchcraft and Colonial Warfare.
Poster for 2017 Plants of Pleasure Garden
Lise: I’m curious about the psychotropic plants—what brings them to your garden?
Mel: I’ve been doing research on women shamans because a lot of the psychotropic vision work in traditional societies is very male-centric. I’m interested in the intersection of psychotropic recreation, visionary quests and experiences, and consciousness-raising. I’m going to explore how these plants can be turned into psychotropic materials. I’m also looking at some of them for their calming and anti-anxiety effects. Some of these plants can be recreational as well.
Lise: Being around plants is intensely sensual, engaging our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and even hearing. Culture shapes the experience and use of plants, too. How do the plants in the Papermaker’s Garden mesh with your work as an artist?
Mel: All my work is about female culture. It ranges from contemporary feminist practice to female ethnobotanical and intangible heritage, which is made up of traditional craft practices. I explore how these are distinct languages and forms of communication and history-making. They parallel recorded history, but are completely different ways to interpret the world. I’m always on a quest to search for practices with the potential to reveal something that could be transformative. We’re unaware of them because they’re not included in dominant narratives.
The craft practices I explore range from bio-culinary traditions and handmade felt rugs to women’s tattoo cults and hand papermaking. These are tremendously under-recorded practices that reveal fascinating narratives.
2015 Food, Sex, and Death dinner party in the Papermaker’s Garden celebrating the Hull House Wage Worker research on brothels located at garden’s site at the turn of the 20th Century
Lise: Mention of tattoo cults appear here and there in ethnography. Tell me more about the one that interests you and how you came across it.
Mel: When I was in the Republic of Georgia I saw a pagan ritual taking place on the street that I identified as similar to a film I had done in South Serbia. My colleague Clifton Meador bought the book, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan in preparation for our work in Georgia. I wrote to Robert Chenciner, one of the book’s authors, asking him whether the designs I saw in the pagan ritual were the same as those in the women’s tattoo cult in the same region. He wrote back a long email and so began our friendship.
Women use similar symbols from the “book of life” for her children, her parents, her illnesses. It’s an old tradition. There are still many tattoo practices. All the symbols come down to a few basic things. Don’t mess with my crops. Don’t mess with my family. Protect me from evil and the evil eye. A lot of the designs are plant based and burdock is one of them. Some ethnobotanical designs are used over and over. A traditional woman has repertoire of images. Through color and image she can tell a specific story, just as a rug can tell a story about its family.
Ethnographer Robert Chenciner holding a rare hand-felted rug from Daghestan
Lise: These tattoo cults give women a way to record on their own bodies events in their lives that are important to them. Tattooed Mountain Women must be fascinating. Traveling back to your garden here in downtown Chicago, what happens to all the plants at the end of the growing season?
Mel: We’ve learned that a perennial garden is a year-round phenomenon. We let some of the plants go to seed because it’s good for pollinator bugs. Many of the crops are cut and cooked and made into paper to use for artwork. During the winter months, I work on making the paper at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Lise: How do you run the garden as a collaborative project?
Mel: We invite people as guest gardeners and community guests. The South Loop Alliance has a bed with us. We invite graduate students at Columbia. We help out each other with watering, weeding, and events here at the garden. Running a ten-bed garden would be impossible without a group of collaborators. My project with Maggie Puckett, Seeds InService is the garden’s other main project.
Flax handmade paper laminates, pulp painting, and electroluminescent (EL) wire embeds by Melissa Potter
Lise: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Did you start out that way?
Mel: I’m the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Columbia. Interdisciplinarity is naturally collaborative. My personal interdisciplinary practice is ethnographic. I don’t consider myself a botanical expert.
I started in print and paper because it’s a family legacy. My grandmother was a printer and painter. My aunt was a letter press printer. My mother is a quilter, knitter, and crafter. It started there. My high school yearbook said I wanted go into anthropology. Everything I’ve done since then goes into that direction.
Lise: As an anthropologist, I’ve known some who knew from childhood that’s what they wanted to do. Where did your interest come from at such a young age?
Mel: My grandmother, aunt, and I aunt studied a lot of pre-Christian goddess cults. Women scholars were starting to write female-centered ethnography. My grandmother and I went to Crete and drew at goddess sites. She called her journal, “Melissa, the Minoans, and Me.”
Lise: How did you find your way to merging art and ethnography? Were you doing that in art school, or did it come later?
Mel: I have to credit Columbia primarily. After finishing grad school, I spent 12 years in New York City leading a traditional art life showing in alternative galleries and collaborative spaces. When Columbia hired me in the Interdisciplinary program, I was given free rein to explore curatorially, artistically, and critically the interdisciplinary space. It’s a distinctive program. It’s no accident that my strongest work comes out of my time here when I was institutionally supported to do these off the grid things like tattoo cults and paper cultures. I’ve been here now for 10 years.
Lise: From the wide world of peoples and cultures, where did your interest in Bosnia and Serbia come from? Is that your ethnic background?
Mel: My grandmother and I sponsored a Bosnian refugee in the 1990s. She was in Croatia as a refugee. Her village was ethnically cleansed and then the Serbian militia turned it into a rape camp. I was reunited with her in 2015. By then I had spent 20 years exploring the arts, culture, and ethnography of the larger Balkan region. I didn’t work in Bosnia until recently.
Poster for the 2016 Bosnian Magic Garden, dedicated to Potter’s grandmother and Zejna. View is from Zejna’s front window.
Lise: That’s an intense commitment.
Mel: It was obsessively captivating to me. I used to go two or three times a year. I’ve been there 35 times, staying up to six months at a time.
Lise: I haven’t yet had a chance to see your film, Like Other Girls Do. Congratulations on all the attention it’s been getting since it came out in 2015. You’ve told me it grew out of your interest in the custom of sworn virgins in Montenegro and Albania.
Mel: The film is a collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. It’s 30 minutes and explores another female-centric traditional cultural practice. When there are no boys born in a family, a girl is raised as a boy to inherit the father’s property. I interviewed Stana Cerovic, the self-proclaimed last sworn virgin of Montenegro. I was exploring Stana’s legacy. She died in October 2016. The film also includes my interviews with five women in the Balkans under the age of 40, and their thoughts about personal identity and gender expression.
I’m working on a second part of the project about how to create a legacy in an environment that doesn’t record us. Stana isn’t in her family tree, even though she made the sacrifice to be a boy. In all likelihood, she was not buried as a man even though she wanted to (I am waiting for confirmation from my ethnographer colleagues in the region). I find it heart breaking that they’re not only forgotten, but if they’re remembered, it’s falsified. There’s no reward for the sacrifice.
vimeo
  Lise: What does the role of virginity play in this tradition?
Mel: They’re called sworn virgins because they take an oath of virginity. They don’t marry. They usually live with their families or alone. They can’t have a heteronormative relationship.
Lise: How does the film contextualize this tradition within contemporary culture?
Mel:  Like Other Girls Do is about Stana’s village and about death. The story shows her visit to the cemetery where her family members are buried and explores the issue of how she will be remembered. I asked a graffiti artist to make a tag for Stana. The film ends with her making Stana’s tag on the streets of Belgrade. I wanted the women I interviewed to connect with Stana in a two-way conversation.
Stana Cerovic with photograph of herself dressed as a man. Photo by Melissa Potter
Lise: Did they make the connection? What happened between the women?
Mel: I think they reflected on Stana’s story. They asked themselves about their own willingness to engage in traditional Balkan society and the sacrifices they’re already making. I included the queer narrative—and the way society restricts full development of an identity. This was true for Stana and the five women. The queer activist was the most liberated in some ways. To live as a queer-identified person in the Balkans is a radical act of self-assertion.
Lise: The film has been widely screened. What are some highlights of its travels over the past couple years?
Mel: It’s had a nice life. Last year it was shown in Paris at Cineffable, the world’s largest feminist film festival. It’s also traveled to around the U.S. and the Balkans and to Denmark, India, China and Slovenia. It’s been featured in some exhibitions too, including Becoming Male, a show featuring artists like Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin at Albright College.
Making a film is a huge project. I loved every minute. My collaborator was Saša Sreckovic at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. My editor, Jelena Jovcic is my better half. Editors don’t get the credit they deserve. Composer Aleksandra Dokic created the music for the film.
Lise: We’ve talked about your work as an interdisciplinary artist in terms of ethnography and ethnobotany, paper making and film making. What else are you working on?
Mel: I pray it’s not going to be another film. I’m going do something on my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian woman refugee. I recently obtained my grandmother’s O.S.S. file. The O.S.S. was the US office of intelligence during World War II. She was an O.S.S. operative. I’m curious to see where that goes. I met with Zejna twice. I started a four-part narrative, with my grandmother, Zejna, myself, and a fictional version of Zejna’s daughter. It will be a study of women and war and how women experience war in a gendered and particular way.
Lise: Am I hearing that you have another film on your hands?
Mel: Do you want to take me and shoot me right now! I’ve been doing some prints of my grandmother and Zejna and writing annotations. I’m building a visual archive. It probably has to be a film. It could be a book. I like working in film, but it’s a hard medium. I’m not wealthy enough to play in it. If you don’t have money, you have to wait for it.
Equal Pay 4 Equal Work, designed by Melissa Potter in handmade felt
Zine Workshop at ThreeWalls this Saturday
The Object Within
Repost via Mother Jones: A Fantastic Journey Into the Mind of Collage Artist Wangechi Mutu
Holland Cotter Wins Pulitzer Prize
Video | Surprise Attack
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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flauntpage · 7 years ago
Text
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art
Interview and visual essay by Lise McKean
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is an associate professor of Art and Art History. We began our conversation in the Papermaker’s Garden on a late afternoon in June, just after a sudden shower made the soil fragrant.
Mel Potter in the Papermaker’s Garden at 620 S. Wabash in Chicago
Lise: Since we’re starting out in the Papermaker’s Garden, let’s begin with hearing about what you are growing this year in your raised bed garden here in the Loop?
Mel: I’m focusing on a perennial bed dedicated to the idea of pleasure for women. Last year’s Papermaker Garden included the Roe v. Wade and Bosnian Magic beds. After much focus on women’s biology, I decided that the most feminist investigation I could do this year would be to investigate pleasure.
The plants I’ve selected are for pleasing the nose and eyes—and for psychotropic recreation. For example, I’m growing absinthe and burdock in my Plants of Pleasure bed. My partner in the Papermaker’s Garden, Maggie Puckett, has a bed for growing plants she discovered while investigating witches, some of whom were her ancestors. She calls it Witchcraft and Colonial Warfare.
Poster for 2017 Plants of Pleasure Garden
Lise: I’m curious about the psychotropic plants—what brings them to your garden?
Mel: I’ve been doing research on women shamans because a lot of the psychotropic vision work in traditional societies is very male-centric. I’m interested in the intersection of psychotropic recreation, visionary quests and experiences, and consciousness-raising. I’m going to explore how these plants can be turned into psychotropic materials. I’m also looking at some of them for their calming and anti-anxiety effects. Some of these plants can be recreational as well.
Lise: Being around plants is intensely sensual, engaging our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and even hearing. Culture shapes the experience and use of plants, too. How do the plants in the Papermaker’s Garden mesh with your work as an artist?
Mel: All my work is about female culture. It ranges from contemporary feminist practice to female ethnobotanical and intangible heritage, which is made up of traditional craft practices. I explore how these are distinct languages and forms of communication and history-making. They parallel recorded history, but are completely different ways to interpret the world. I’m always on a quest to search for practices with the potential to reveal something that could be transformative. We’re unaware of them because they’re not included in dominant narratives.
The craft practices I explore range from bio-culinary traditions and handmade felt rugs to women’s tattoo cults and hand papermaking. These are tremendously under-recorded practices that reveal fascinating narratives.
2015 Food, Sex, and Death dinner party in the Papermaker’s Garden celebrating the Hull House Wage Worker research on brothels located at garden’s site at the turn of the 20th Century
Lise: Mention of tattoo cults appear here and there in ethnography. Tell me more about the one that interests you and how you came across it.
Mel: When I was in the Republic of Georgia I saw a pagan ritual taking place on the street that I identified as similar to a film I had done in South Serbia. My colleague Clifton Meador bought the book, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan in preparation for our work in Georgia. I wrote to Robert Chenciner, one of the book’s authors, asking him whether the designs I saw in the pagan ritual were the same as those in the women’s tattoo cult in the same region. He wrote back a long email and so began our friendship.
Women use similar symbols from the “book of life” for her children, her parents, her illnesses. It’s an old tradition. There are still many tattoo practices. All the symbols come down to a few basic things. Don’t mess with my crops. Don’t mess with my family. Protect me from evil and the evil eye. A lot of the designs are plant based and burdock is one of them. Some ethnobotanical designs are used over and over. A traditional woman has repertoire of images. Through color and image she can tell a specific story, just as a rug can tell a story about its family.
Ethnographer Robert Chenciner holding a rare hand-felted rug from Daghestan
Lise: These tattoo cults give women a way to record on their own bodies events in their lives that are important to them. Tattooed Mountain Women must be fascinating. Traveling back to your garden here in downtown Chicago, what happens to all the plants at the end of the growing season?
Mel: We’ve learned that a perennial garden is a year-round phenomenon. We let some of the plants go to seed because it’s good for pollinator bugs. Many of the crops are cut and cooked and made into paper to use for artwork. During the winter months, I work on making the paper at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Lise: How do you run the garden as a collaborative project?
Mel: We invite people as guest gardeners and community guests. The South Loop Alliance has a bed with us. We invite graduate students at Columbia. We help out each other with watering, weeding, and events here at the garden. Running a ten-bed garden would be impossible without a group of collaborators. My project with Maggie Puckett, Seeds InService is the garden’s other main project.
Flax handmade paper laminates, pulp painting, and electroluminescent (EL) wire embeds by Melissa Potter
Lise: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Did you start out that way?
Mel: I’m the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Columbia. Interdisciplinarity is naturally collaborative. My personal interdisciplinary practice is ethnographic. I don’t consider myself a botanical expert.
I started in print and paper because it’s a family legacy. My grandmother was a printer and painter. My aunt was a letter press printer. My mother is a quilter, knitter, and crafter. It started there. My high school yearbook said I wanted go into anthropology. Everything I’ve done since then goes into that direction.
Lise: As an anthropologist, I’ve known some who knew from childhood that’s what they wanted to do. Where did your interest come from at such a young age?
Mel: My grandmother, aunt, and I aunt studied a lot of pre-Christian goddess cults. Women scholars were starting to write female-centered ethnography. My grandmother and I went to Crete and drew at goddess sites. She called her journal, “Melissa, the Minoans, and Me.”
Lise: How did you find your way to merging art and ethnography? Were you doing that in art school, or did it come later?
Mel: I have to credit Columbia primarily. After finishing grad school, I spent 12 years in New York City leading a traditional art life showing in alternative galleries and collaborative spaces. When Columbia hired me in the Interdisciplinary program, I was given free rein to explore curatorially, artistically, and critically the interdisciplinary space. It’s a distinctive program. It’s no accident that my strongest work comes out of my time here when I was institutionally supported to do these off the grid things like tattoo cults and paper cultures. I’ve been here now for 10 years.
Lise: From the wide world of peoples and cultures, where did your interest in Bosnia and Serbia come from? Is that your ethnic background?
Mel: My grandmother and I sponsored a Bosnian refugee in the 1990s. She was in Croatia as a refugee. Her village was ethnically cleansed and then the Serbian militia turned it into a rape camp. I was reunited with her in 2015. By then I had spent 20 years exploring the arts, culture, and ethnography of the larger Balkan region. I didn’t work in Bosnia until recently.
Poster for the 2016 Bosnian Magic Garden, dedicated to Potter’s grandmother and Zejna. View is from Zejna’s front window.
Lise: That’s an intense commitment.
Mel: It was obsessively captivating to me. I used to go two or three times a year. I’ve been there 35 times, staying up to six months at a time.
Lise: I haven’t yet had a chance to see your film, Like Other Girls Do. Congratulations on all the attention it’s been getting since it came out in 2015. You’ve told me it grew out of your interest in the custom of sworn virgins in Montenegro and Albania.
Mel: The film is a collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. It’s 30 minutes and explores another female-centric traditional cultural practice. When there are no boys born in a family, a girl is raised as a boy to inherit the father’s property. I interviewed Stana Cerovic, the self-proclaimed last sworn virgin of Montenegro. I was exploring Stana’s legacy. She died in October 2016. The film also includes my interviews with five women in the Balkans under the age of 40, and their thoughts about personal identity and gender expression.
I’m working on a second part of the project about how to create a legacy in an environment that doesn’t record us. Stana isn’t in her family tree, even though she made the sacrifice to be a boy. In all likelihood, she was not buried as a man even though she wanted to (I am waiting for confirmation from my ethnographer colleagues in the region). I find it heart breaking that they’re not only forgotten, but if they’re remembered, it’s falsified. There’s no reward for the sacrifice.
vimeo
  Lise: What does the role of virginity play in this tradition?
Mel: They’re called sworn virgins because they take an oath of virginity. They don’t marry. They usually live with their families or alone. They can’t have a heteronormative relationship.
Lise: How does the film contextualize this tradition within contemporary culture?
Mel:  Like Other Girls Do is about Stana’s village and about death. The story shows her visit to the cemetery where her family members are buried and explores the issue of how she will be remembered. I asked a graffiti artist to make a tag for Stana. The film ends with her making Stana’s tag on the streets of Belgrade. I wanted the women I interviewed to connect with Stana in a two-way conversation.
Stana Cerovic with photograph of herself dressed as a man. Photo by Melissa Potter
Lise: Did they make the connection? What happened between the women?
Mel: I think they reflected on Stana’s story. They asked themselves about their own willingness to engage in traditional Balkan society and the sacrifices they’re already making. I included the queer narrative—and the way society restricts full development of an identity. This was true for Stana and the five women. The queer activist was the most liberated in some ways. To live as a queer-identified person in the Balkans is a radical act of self-assertion.
Lise: The film has been widely screened. What are some highlights of its travels over the past couple years?
Mel: It’s had a nice life. Last year it was shown in Paris at Cineffable, the world’s largest feminist film festival. It’s also traveled to around the U.S. and the Balkans and to Denmark, India, China and Slovenia. It’s been featured in some exhibitions too, including Becoming Male, a show featuring artists like Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin at Albright College.
Making a film is a huge project. I loved every minute. My collaborator was Saša Sreckovic at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. My editor, Jelena Jovcic is my better half. Editors don’t get the credit they deserve. Composer Aleksandra Dokic created the music for the film.
Lise: We’ve talked about your work as an interdisciplinary artist in terms of ethnography and ethnobotany, paper making and film making. What else are you working on?
Mel: I pray it’s not going to be another film. I’m going do something on my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian woman refugee. I recently obtained my grandmother’s O.S.S. file. The O.S.S. was the US office of intelligence during World War II. She was an O.S.S. operative. I’m curious to see where that goes. I met with Zejna twice. I started a four-part narrative, with my grandmother, Zejna, myself, and a fictional version of Zejna’s daughter. It will be a study of women and war and how women experience war in a gendered and particular way.
Lise: Am I hearing that you have another film on your hands?
Mel: Do you want to take me and shoot me right now! I’ve been doing some prints of my grandmother and Zejna and writing annotations. I’m building a visual archive. It probably has to be a film. It could be a book. I like working in film, but it’s a hard medium. I’m not wealthy enough to play in it. If you don’t have money, you have to wait for it.
Equal Pay 4 Equal Work, designed by Melissa Potter in handmade felt
How We Work: An Interview with Nick Jirasek
“Strange Weather, Vague Suspicions”: Karsten Lund at Peregrine Projects
Amanda Ross Ho Speaking Tonight at DePaul
Some More Thoughts About Asco, The Foreigner, Kitsch
Thursday, September 19th Edition of The EXPO Register
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years ago
Text
Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art
Interview and visual essay by Lise McKean
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is an associate professor of Art and Art History. We began our conversation in the Papermaker’s Garden on a late afternoon in June, just after a sudden shower made the soil fragrant.
Mel Potter in the Papermaker’s Garden at 620 S. Wabash in Chicago
Lise: Since we’re starting out in the Papermaker’s Garden, let’s begin with hearing about what you are growing this year in your raised bed garden here in the Loop?
Mel: I’m focusing on a perennial bed dedicated to the idea of pleasure for women. Last year’s Papermaker Garden included the Roe v. Wade and Bosnian Magic beds. After much focus on women’s biology, I decided that the most feminist investigation I could do this year would be to investigate pleasure.
The plants I’ve selected are for pleasing the nose and eyes—and for psychotropic recreation. For example, I’m growing absinthe and burdock in my Plants of Pleasure bed. My partner in the Papermaker’s Garden, Maggie Puckett, has a bed for growing plants she discovered while investigating witches, some of whom were her ancestors. She calls it Witchcraft and Colonial Warfare.
Poster for 2017 Plants of Pleasure Garden
Lise: I’m curious about the psychotropic plants—what brings them to your garden?
Mel: I’ve been doing research on women shamans because a lot of the psychotropic vision work in traditional societies is very male-centric. I’m interested in the intersection of psychotropic recreation, visionary quests and experiences, and consciousness-raising. I’m going to explore how these plants can be turned into psychotropic materials. I’m also looking at some of them for their calming and anti-anxiety effects. Some of these plants can be recreational as well.
Lise: Being around plants is intensely sensual, engaging our senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and even hearing. Culture shapes the experience and use of plants, too. How do the plants in the Papermaker’s Garden mesh with your work as an artist?
Mel: All my work is about female culture. It ranges from contemporary feminist practice to female ethnobotanical and intangible heritage, which is made up of traditional craft practices. I explore how these are distinct languages and forms of communication and history-making. They parallel recorded history, but are completely different ways to interpret the world. I’m always on a quest to search for practices with the potential to reveal something that could be transformative. We’re unaware of them because they’re not included in dominant narratives.
The craft practices I explore range from bio-culinary traditions and handmade felt rugs to women’s tattoo cults and hand papermaking. These are tremendously under-recorded practices that reveal fascinating narratives.
2015 Food, Sex, and Death dinner party in the Papermaker’s Garden celebrating the Hull House Wage Worker research on brothels located at garden’s site at the turn of the 20th Century
Lise: Mention of tattoo cults appear here and there in ethnography. Tell me more about the one that interests you and how you came across it.
Mel: When I was in the Republic of Georgia I saw a pagan ritual taking place on the street that I identified as similar to a film I had done in South Serbia. My colleague Clifton Meador bought the book, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan in preparation for our work in Georgia. I wrote to Robert Chenciner, one of the book’s authors, asking him whether the designs I saw in the pagan ritual were the same as those in the women’s tattoo cult in the same region. He wrote back a long email and so began our friendship.
Women use similar symbols from the “book of life” for her children, her parents, her illnesses. It’s an old tradition. There are still many tattoo practices. All the symbols come down to a few basic things. Don’t mess with my crops. Don’t mess with my family. Protect me from evil and the evil eye. A lot of the designs are plant based and burdock is one of them. Some ethnobotanical designs are used over and over. A traditional woman has repertoire of images. Through color and image she can tell a specific story, just as a rug can tell a story about its family.
Ethnographer Robert Chenciner holding a rare hand-felted rug from Daghestan
Lise: These tattoo cults give women a way to record on their own bodies events in their lives that are important to them. Tattooed Mountain Women must be fascinating. Traveling back to your garden here in downtown Chicago, what happens to all the plants at the end of the growing season?
Mel: We’ve learned that a perennial garden is a year-round phenomenon. We let some of the plants go to seed because it’s good for pollinator bugs. Many of the crops are cut and cooked and made into paper to use for artwork. During the winter months, I work on making the paper at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Lise: How do you run the garden as a collaborative project?
Mel: We invite people as guest gardeners and community guests. The South Loop Alliance has a bed with us. We invite graduate students at Columbia. We help out each other with watering, weeding, and events here at the garden. Running a ten-bed garden would be impossible without a group of collaborators. My project with Maggie Puckett, Seeds InService is the garden’s other main project.
Flax handmade paper laminates, pulp painting, and electroluminescent (EL) wire embeds by Melissa Potter
Lise: You describe yourself as an interdisciplinary artist. Did you start out that way?
Mel: I’m the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Columbia. Interdisciplinarity is naturally collaborative. My personal interdisciplinary practice is ethnographic. I don’t consider myself a botanical expert.
I started in print and paper because it’s a family legacy. My grandmother was a printer and painter. My aunt was a letter press printer. My mother is a quilter, knitter, and crafter. It started there. My high school yearbook said I wanted go into anthropology. Everything I’ve done since then goes into that direction.
Lise: As an anthropologist, I’ve known some who knew from childhood that’s what they wanted to do. Where did your interest come from at such a young age?
Mel: My grandmother, aunt, and I aunt studied a lot of pre-Christian goddess cults. Women scholars were starting to write female-centered ethnography. My grandmother and I went to Crete and drew at goddess sites. She called her journal, “Melissa, the Minoans, and Me.”
Lise: How did you find your way to merging art and ethnography? Were you doing that in art school, or did it come later?
Mel: I have to credit Columbia primarily. After finishing grad school, I spent 12 years in New York City leading a traditional art life showing in alternative galleries and collaborative spaces. When Columbia hired me in the Interdisciplinary program, I was given free rein to explore curatorially, artistically, and critically the interdisciplinary space. It’s a distinctive program. It’s no accident that my strongest work comes out of my time here when I was institutionally supported to do these off the grid things like tattoo cults and paper cultures. I’ve been here now for 10 years.
Lise: From the wide world of peoples and cultures, where did your interest in Bosnia and Serbia come from? Is that your ethnic background?
Mel: My grandmother and I sponsored a Bosnian refugee in the 1990s. She was in Croatia as a refugee. Her village was ethnically cleansed and then the Serbian militia turned it into a rape camp. I was reunited with her in 2015. By then I had spent 20 years exploring the arts, culture, and ethnography of the larger Balkan region. I didn’t work in Bosnia until recently.
Poster for the 2016 Bosnian Magic Garden, dedicated to Potter’s grandmother and Zejna. View is from Zejna’s front window.
Lise: That’s an intense commitment.
Mel: It was obsessively captivating to me. I used to go two or three times a year. I’ve been there 35 times, staying up to six months at a time.
Lise: I haven’t yet had a chance to see your film, Like Other Girls Do. Congratulations on all the attention it’s been getting since it came out in 2015. You’ve told me it grew out of your interest in the custom of sworn virgins in Montenegro and Albania.
Mel: The film is a collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. It’s 30 minutes and explores another female-centric traditional cultural practice. When there are no boys born in a family, a girl is raised as a boy to inherit the father’s property. I interviewed Stana Cerovic, the self-proclaimed last sworn virgin of Montenegro. I was exploring Stana’s legacy. She died in October 2016. The film also includes my interviews with five women in the Balkans under the age of 40, and their thoughts about personal identity and gender expression.
I’m working on a second part of the project about how to create a legacy in an environment that doesn’t record us. Stana isn’t in her family tree, even though she made the sacrifice to be a boy. In all likelihood, she was not buried as a man even though she wanted to (I am waiting for confirmation from my ethnographer colleagues in the region). I find it heart breaking that they’re not only forgotten, but if they’re remembered, it’s falsified. There’s no reward for the sacrifice.
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  Lise: What does the role of virginity play in this tradition?
Mel: They’re called sworn virgins because they take an oath of virginity. They don’t marry. They usually live with their families or alone. They can’t have a heteronormative relationship.
Lise: How does the film contextualize this tradition within contemporary culture?
Mel:  Like Other Girls Do is about Stana’s village and about death. The story shows her visit to the cemetery where her family members are buried and explores the issue of how she will be remembered. I asked a graffiti artist to make a tag for Stana. The film ends with her making Stana’s tag on the streets of Belgrade. I wanted the women I interviewed to connect with Stana in a two-way conversation.
Stana Cerovic with photograph of herself dressed as a man. Photo by Melissa Potter
Lise: Did they make the connection? What happened between the women?
Mel: I think they reflected on Stana’s story. They asked themselves about their own willingness to engage in traditional Balkan society and the sacrifices they’re already making. I included the queer narrative—and the way society restricts full development of an identity. This was true for Stana and the five women. The queer activist was the most liberated in some ways. To live as a queer-identified person in the Balkans is a radical act of self-assertion.
Lise: The film has been widely screened. What are some highlights of its travels over the past couple years?
Mel: It’s had a nice life. Last year it was shown in Paris at Cineffable, the world’s largest feminist film festival. It’s also traveled to around the U.S. and the Balkans and to Denmark, India, China and Slovenia. It’s been featured in some exhibitions too, including Becoming Male, a show featuring artists like Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin at Albright College.
Making a film is a huge project. I loved every minute. My collaborator was Saša Sreckovic at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. My editor, Jelena Jovcic is my better half. Editors don’t get the credit they deserve. Composer Aleksandra Dokic created the music for the film.
Lise: We’ve talked about your work as an interdisciplinary artist in terms of ethnography and ethnobotany, paper making and film making. What else are you working on?
Mel: I pray it’s not going to be another film. I’m going do something on my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian woman refugee. I recently obtained my grandmother’s O.S.S. file. The O.S.S. was the US office of intelligence during World War II. She was an O.S.S. operative. I’m curious to see where that goes. I met with Zejna twice. I started a four-part narrative, with my grandmother, Zejna, myself, and a fictional version of Zejna’s daughter. It will be a study of women and war and how women experience war in a gendered and particular way.
Lise: Am I hearing that you have another film on your hands?
Mel: Do you want to take me and shoot me right now! I’ve been doing some prints of my grandmother and Zejna and writing annotations. I’m building a visual archive. It probably has to be a film. It could be a book. I like working in film, but it’s a hard medium. I’m not wealthy enough to play in it. If you don’t have money, you have to wait for it.
Equal Pay 4 Equal Work, designed by Melissa Potter in handmade felt
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Thinks: Mel Potter on EthnoFeminist Art published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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