So the page has now been updated and there’s a link to the gallery, where you can see the results!

Killing Us Softly 4 Trailer from Media Education Foundation on Vimeo.

In her documentary, Killing Us Softly 4, Jean Kilbourne says, referring to the ideal of absolutely flawless beauty with which we are continually fed by ads:

“She never has any lines or wrinkles, she certainly does not have any scars or blemishes, indeed, she has no pores”.

This series could easily be called “find the same“, if you know what I mean.

“Men and women are told, in a myriad of daily ways, that being masculine is good and feminine bad. It sneaks into our daily language in ways that are so common that we fail to even see it anymore…”

The blog post in question was about gendered slurs at google and even though the concept of internalization of patriarchal structures to the point that it is not even noticed anymore is far from new to me, I have not, until now, actively documented this problem.
Do you walk by a window and see and advertisement that screams “sexism”? I am sure you do. As a matter of fact, this past saturday I was downtown Berlin to run some errands and I walked past THREE consecutive shops that were exploiting women in order to sell. I wish I had a proper camera with me to document this.
I was shocked and in disbelief and I turned around and asked myself (not too quietly): “what is wrong with you people?”. Why is no one saying anything? Why aren’t the others walking beside me as outraged as I am?

Maybe that sentence makes sense now: these images are everywhere and we are so used to them.

With this blog post I want to start a series on these images. Berlin is full of them and I happen to have a camera (multiple ones at that).
Who knows, maybe I will learn to be shocked again.

(This photograph was not taken with a proper camera. Forgive me)

Here are links to the posts:

>>>Series 1
>>>Series 2

Is going to museums a purely educational activity? Purely recreational? Is it about a very subtle form of social interaction, doing what is expected of us? How is this connected with our identity, the way we identify ourselves in terms of class, culture and gender?
There is enough material to write an essay, or a book, and plenty of articles have been written on this subject.
Many studies that delve into subject are deeply connected to marketing, that is, visitors’ reasons for visiting a museum are then used to adjust the way the visits are structured to make the experience more pleasant for “customers”.

For now, in the hope of making this topic into a series, I will leave you with some photographs from two museums I visited which I think offered a rather interactive experience to visitors, though in different degrees: the Sugar museum and the Computer Games museum. In the former, visitors could watch a demonstration of the making of ice (“the ancient Rome way”), while the latter is an interactive museum per se, where visitors can not only play a bit of the games, but get to listen and watch videos related to the different aspects of gaming.

Among the places at the forefront in the crafting community, the one-year-old “La Bastellerie” is well worth a visit.
This crafting lounge in Berlin Kreuzberg is a three-room crafting paradise, offering various workshops – from bookbinding, to embroidery, to restyling old clothing -, hosting the newly opened exhibition “The Wunderkabinett” [Closet of wonders], and a small open studio where, for five euros per hour, you can use a sewing machine and various other tools.
While making pin buttons and drinking tea, Ina Göllmann recounted the beginnings of the crafting lounge. “We started a couple of years ago with crafting parties, an idea that I got while researching on the web. I read about craft events in the Unites States and in London and thought it was a great idea. I wondered why there were no such events in Berlin”.
The parties proved successful, so they decided to take the project one step further and opened La Bastellerie, at first an open workspace only. Activism and community-building are also at the heart of La Bastellerie’s mission. “We observed that people who had never even met before, all of the sudden created something together and sort of got to know each other in a different way. This is a good basis to make ideas circulate and motivate people to do stuff together”.

La Bastellerie

Independent craft and DIY are slowly taking root in Germany, and whereas this is the city where this sort of movements are more likely to emerge, the explanation seems to rest in the historical and cultural tradition of German artisanry. “Germany is the only country where, in order to found a business as a carpenter, you need to have a Master craftsman’s diploma [in German Meisterbrief].
So, the focus has not been on DIY, and even the word “basteln” [the German equivalent of “to tinker”] is not really highly thought of. It mainly refers to activities for children or “aunties” and it is relegated to the hobby area”, said Ina. La Bastellerie wants to help change the perception of craft, which is also why they chose to keep the word “basteln” in the name, “in order to give it a good connotation, to send the message that this is something that adults do as well, also as a hobby, of course, but not only”.

La Bastellerie is also home to the Wunderkabinett, an ever changing exhibition of very unique handmade products. It was founded by Leah Buckareff, a Canadian bookbinder and musician currently living in Berlin – and co-founder of the Torontian City of Craft -, who had dreamt about creating the Wunderkabinett for some time, and wanted to keep herself engaged in the craft scene.
When comparing the local crafting community to its Canadian counterpart, Leah Buckareff also sees the smaller importance of consumer culture in Germany as a factor: “North America’s long history of consumer culture encouraged a lot of us to start making our own stuff and altering our own clothes to make it unique at a very young age. A lot of today’s craft scene is born out of that DIY culture. Consumption wasn’t as big a part of German life so today’s craft scene also feels like they’ve taken or mimicked the already developed craft world (via Etsy) and applied it to the community here”.

The interest in crafting among young adults is undoubtedly growing and the many craft fairs and designer markets offer a great showcase. More and more groups are forming, such as the Stricken Bar, a collective created by some of the members of the “Collectif France Tricot”, who regularly organize very successful knitting events in downtown Berlin’s bars. With places such as La Bastellerie and groups that showcase crafters’ work and bring the know-hows to the masses, crafting is well on its way to becoming an important aspect of this vibrant city’s cultural and artistic reality.

In continuous evolution…
From the series: Visions of humans