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Author Archives: Gelene Celis
- Haas & Hahn: How Painting Can Transform Communities
  
  Posted at 6:56 pm by Gelene Celis, on September 11, 2019
  What do we do about social perception towards marginalized communities?
  
  To quote the original video that you can find here: “…although these communities cover nearly every hillside of the city, this somehow did not seem to be considered a legitimate part of it. They were feared, endured constant negative portrayal in the media, and suffered under heavy conflicts between drug gangs and police. Self-built and self-organized, to us the favela seemed to be full of creativity and hope. This made us think, then suddenly we had a crazy idea. What if we could paint all these houses in the communities into unifying designs. It could make the neighbourhood look more beautiful and as for attention: in a positive way. You could make people stop and look…and show the outside world what proud and vibrant communities favelas really are.”
  
  Haas & Hahn – img courtesy of Utne.com
  
  Rio de Janeiro favela after Haas & Hahn’s favela art project . Image courtesy of Maria Muñoz via Pinterest
  
  Rio de Janeiro favela after Haas & Hahn’s favela art project . Image courtesy of RDJ4U
  
  Here’s a good talk about that.
  
  https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/haas_hahn_how_painting_can_transform_communities.html
  
  ======================
  
  Check out Haas & Hahn’s page here
  And their Twitter here
  And their Instagram here
  
  Check out the Ted page here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 1 Comment | Tagged art, brazil, europe, favela, holland, painting, rio de janeiro, slum, south america, talk, ted
- Elefante Blanco
  
  Posted at 11:12 am by Gelene Celis, on September 11, 2019
  …directed by Pablo Trapero (Argentina)
  
  “While working alongside his long-time friend and colleague in building a hospital for the residents of a Buenos Aries shantytown, a troubled priest finds solace in a young, atheist social worker.”
  – IMDB
  
  ============
  
  Check out the IMDB page here
  
  The trailer doesn’t really do it any justice but it was insightful in as much as it was difficult to watch, for me.
  
  Discovered at TIFF
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged argentina, art, buenos aires, culture, favela, film
- The Attic Dark Dolls
  
  Posted at 4:11 pm by Gelene Celis, on July 9, 2019
  by Luci Kaye (Windsor, Ontario Canada)
  
  ====================
  
  I discovered it from one of those craft shows that’s held around Queen/Dufferin area.
  They looked so creepy it felt like they would start walking at any point.
  It was awesome.
  
  I hope she doesn’t stop ’cause her horrific dolls are quite lovely.
  Check out her Etsy here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged art, canada, culture, dolls, horror, north america, recycled, windsor
- Schitz – The Summit
  
  Posted at 3:55 pm by Gelene Celis, on May 30, 2019
  I was on vacation in Mexico some months ago. While I was in Puebla I met someone who stayed in the same hostel as we did.
  
  It turns out he was from Toronto too (Mississauga). He told me about his trip to Vancouver last year, which got him started climbing.
  While I was there with intentions of diving, he was there to climb (La Malinche)
  
  Despite heading towards, literally, opposite ends of the earth, evidently, he and I have found common ground.
  I guess people ask him a lot about why he climbs and he answered with a quote from a book that I loved…
  
  “On ne peut pas toujours rester sur les sommets. Il faut redescendre… Aquoi bon alors ? Voici : le haut connaît le bas, le bas ne connaît pas le haut. En montant, note bien toutes les difficultés de ton chemin ; tant que tu montes, tu peux les voir. A la descente, tu ne les verras plus, mais tu sauras qu’elles sont là, si tu les as bien observées.
  Il y a un art de se diriger dans les basses régions, par le souvenir de ce qu’on a vu lorsqu’on était plus haut. Quand on ne peut plus voir, on peut du moins encore savoir.”
  
  “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees, one descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”
  – René Daumal
  
  @ La Malinche Summit
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  Posted in Schitz, Travel | 0 Comments | Tagged mexico, mountain, mountain climbing, Schitz
- Real Stories from Toronto #4,123,833 – Pick Tea Leaves
  
  Posted at 2:46 pm by Gelene Celis, on May 20, 2019
  “I’ve been living here 3 years. This is my third year.”
  
  Yeah. How do you like the winter?
  
  “Oh it’s bad. I don’t like it. Where I’m from, I worked at a tea shop in India. It’s not like here, like big and crazy tea and coffee shop, but it was small…”
  
  Probably really quaint.
  
  “Yeah. It was not crazy like here, but it was nice. It was peaceful. Back there, I would be in my shirt and shorts to go pick tea leaves outside. I have family and friends and I miss them sometimes, but that is the sacrifice we make. We come here because of what we earn. Because of what we earn, we have peace (don’t need to struggle for food, housing etc). There’s good and there’s bad. Both are options. You can opt for good or opt for bad. Either way, it’s up to you.”
  
  ====================
  
  “Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become.”
  – Paramahasa Yogananda
  
  From Gods in the Global Village
  “Cultural diffusion, driven in part by economic developments, has resulted in a global greed for consumer goods among those people who can afford to participate in the system (and often a hope for participating among those people who cannot afford to do so).
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments
- Schitz – Scarification
  
  Posted at 9:03 pm by Gelene Celis, on January 24, 2019
  “Where I come from (Nigeria) we don’t call it ‘Scarification.’ That’s a Western terminology”
  
  So what do you call them?
  
  “Nothing. We don’t call it anything. It’s marks of identity within indigenous cultures”
  
  Yeah but you must have a term for it? How do you communicate when you discuss it?
  
  “We normally don’t discuss it. It’s nothing wrong nor a taboo or anything. To us, it’s a very common, everyday thing to see. We come across it everyday and everybody knows it’s marks of identity. It just is.”
  
  =============
  
  “Scarifying (also scarification modification) involves scratching, etching, burning / branding, or superficially cutting designs, pictures, or words into the skin as a permanent body modification.^[1] In the process of body scarification, scars are formed by cutting or branding the skin by varying methods (sometimes using further sequential aggravating wound healing methods at timed intervals, like irritation.), to purposely influence wound healing to scar more and not scar less. Scarification is sometimes called cicatrization (from the French equivalent)…Within anthropology, the study of the body as a boundary has been long debated.^[1] In 1909, Van Gennep described bodily transformations, including tattooing, scarification, and painting, as rites of passage.^[3] In 1963, Levi-Strauss described the body as a surface waiting for the imprintation of culture. Turner (1980) first used the term “social skin” in his detailed discussion of how Kayapo culture was constructed and expressed through individual bodies. Inscribed skin highlights an issue that has been central to anthropology since its inception: the question of boundaries between the individual and society, between societies, and between representation and experiences.“
  – Wikipedia
  
  Images courtesy of the internet.
  
  Read more about Scarification here
  And Body Modification here
  
  And if you’re in TO and you’re looking to get scarified, DM @kalebatak, one of the few that does it out here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged ancient, art, body, culture, indigenous, scarification, toronto, tribal
- The Thomas Beale Cipher
  
  Posted at 5:35 pm by Gelene Celis, on January 13, 2019
  …directed by Andrew S Allen (Seattle, Washington)
  
  “The cipher, concocted by the human mind to conceal, to puzzle, hold the truth. It was that which I sought.”
  
  =============
  
  Discovered via the Toronto After Dark Film Festival
  
  Check out the website here
  And Andrew S Allen’s site here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged animation, film, north america, stop-motion, toronto
- DJ/Rupture
  
  Posted at 4:14 pm by Gelene Celis, on December 22, 2018
  …is the pseudonym of Jace Clayton, a New York-based American DJ, writer and interdisciplinary artist. In addition to his music, Clayton has established a blog identity with musical and non-musical posts on his website, “negrophonic: mudd up!”
  – Wiki
  
  Cumbia is a folkloric rhythm and dance from Colombia. It began as a courtship dance practiced among the Indigenous population on the Caribbean coasts of Colombia. It later mixed with African and European instruments, steps and musical characteristics.
  – Wikipedia
  
  Hip hop also called hip-hop or rap music, is a music genre developed in the United States by inner-city African Americans in the late 1970s which consists of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted.
  – Wikipedia
  
  ==================================
  
  DJ/Rupture is also part of Dutty Artz, associated with a Toronto arts-based arts community, Uma Nota
  
  And they rarely make music videos but when they do…
  
  Check out his site here
  And his blog here
  And his Soundcloud here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged africa, cumbia, folk, hip hop, new york, NYC, usa
- Hazem El Etre
  
  Posted at 3:07 pm by Gelene Celis, on December 21, 2018
  …is a Cinematographer / Director of Photography / Director from Cairo, Egypt
  
  =================
  
  Check out his Youtube here
  And his Vimeo here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged art, cairo, documentary, egypt, film, middle east, photography
- Holy Motors by Leos Carax
  
  Posted at 1:53 pm by Gelene Celis, on December 21, 2018
  …is a french fantasy film directed by Leos Carax (Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine, France)
  
  =============
  
  A lot of people walked out midway and ridiculed the film. In fairness, I can see why.
  It is pretty ridiculous if we’re looking at the standard story arc but, to me, it broke plenty of rules in all the right ways.
  The cinematography is amazing. I feel like you can literally take each frame from the movie and slap it on a couture and/or art magazine.
  
  Everything and everyone we encounter in our entire lives become an integral part of who we are. We live different paradigms of life everyday.
  This was about a man whose job is to literally live different paradigms of life each day (9 in this movie, to be exact)… and given the different kinds of headspaces we all get into in a day, sometimes within an hour, or a minute, even seconds – I’d say there’s nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of the premise, at all.
  
  I discovered this at the Toronto International Film Festival several years back.
  
  Check out Leos Carax’s IMDB here
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  Posted in Arts & Culture | 0 Comments | Tagged avant-garde, europe, film, france
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