The Secret Life of Antlered Girls

Justin Mott for the NY Times

Porter’s story of our bike ride across the Mekong comes out in the NY Times travel section this weekend.

The pictures are gorgeous. Read it here.

wow! finally!

So for the last while I’ve been working on this and that for the amazing artist Swoon. This Friday is an opening for a massive piece called A Portrait of Sylvia Elena. Sylvia Elena was a young woman who was killed in Juarez, Mexico. In this piece Swoon collaborates with Tennessee Jane Watson to tell her story and remember her. It’s amazing and the largest Swoon piece I have ever seen. I got to work on it a bit and it was quite an honor.

When I was in college I interned at VDAY for Eve Ensler. We went to Juarez to lead a massive protest against the feminicides in Juarez and bring international attention to the issue. While I was there I met some of the mothers who had lost their daughters. I guess that’s part of why helping with this piece was so amazing. Here’s some info on the situation in Juarez

Here are the details for the opening, please come!

Portrait of Sylvia Elena, a collaborative installation by Swoon & Tennessee Jane Watson at Honey Space, 148 11th Ave, betw 21st & 22nd, 6-8

More info form nonsensenyc.com :

Honey Space presents:

Portrait of Sylvia Elena

Honey Space is honored to present Portrait of Silvia Elena, a collaborative installation by Swoon and Tennessee Jane Watson. The exhibition — a memorial to Silvia Elena, a 17-year old girl who was murdered in Juarez, Mexico, in 1995 — combines text, sound, excavation, shrine elements, and one of Swoon’s most intricate paper cut-out/block prints to date. A different version of the installation is currently on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Portrait of Silvia Elena is a somber, emotional work that, beyond functioning as a powerful memorial, provides a window into the tragic and ongoing issue of femicide. Defined as a pattern of murder targeting women, to which authorities have often systematically turned a blind eye, femicide has haunted communities throughout the Americas. In Juarez, located just across the border from El Paso, the issue became pronounced in the 1990s when, following the passage of NAFTA, maquiladoras sprang up there as they did elsewhere along the Mexican-American border, to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor. Young women who worked long hours in the factories often disappeared as they walked home at night along dark and dangerous roads. To date, over 500 women and girls have been confirmed killed in Juarez, with at least as many more reported disappeared. Human rights organizations put the number of murders much higher- estimating they could surpass 4,000. Most of the victims are young, po
or, and have been sexually assaulted prior to their deaths.

Swoon and Tennessee Jane Watson traveled together to Juarez in 2008 to learn about this issue first-hand. There they met Ramona Morales Huerta, whose daughter was one of those killed. They went with Ramona to visit her daughter Silvia’s grave. They recorded interviews with Ramona, captured the sounds of the desert winds and streets of Juarez, and pored over pictures of Ramona’s lost daughter. From this experience, came this exhibition.

For their installation in Honey Space, Swoon and Tennessee have made use of a long-sealed sub-basement that has been revealed by a hole in the gallery floor. Entering the gallery, visitors encounter a near-empty ground floor space, with a shrine located near the back wall, dedicated to Silvia’s memory. From the hole in the floor, sounds of Ramona speaking about her daughter, clearing dirt from Silvia’s grave, and the desert winds emerge. Viewers are able to enter the hole, and descend rubble to this catacomb-like space, where Swoon’s piece- extending over the back wall, ceiling and floor- is pasted, and candle-lit.

Honey Space
148 11th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd streets, Manhattan
6-8p; $free
honey-space.com

and i like it a lot. this was the first guy to type in it i think and he’s a trustee-looking trustee.

Angela is a talented photographer and filmmaker. Her flickr page is here.

Hey All-

Back in NY from dodging bullets in the DR!

My friends from the awesome wonderful band Dark Dark Dark are living in NYC for the summer and are looking for housing. Please let them know if you hear of anything.

Here’s what Marshall said:

We are 4-5 artists and musicians that would like to sublet a space together for June and July. It seems like something in Bushwick would be ideal, but we are open to other neighborhoods from Gowanus to Greenpoint. A space around $1500 would be fine for our needs.

We will have time to take care of the garden or the cat (probably not the dog), or do small projects around the house. We’re not looking to move into a party space, but next to one is okay. If you know anything respond to marshalllacount@riseup.net ASAP! Thanks!

Thanks!

Marshall

4/26- NEW YORK CITY- more acts TBA- Space Space- 390 Seneca Ave -(L train to dekalb ave exit front of train at stanhope st walk against traffic on stanhope 3 blocks last door on left before seneca ave)-Ridgewood! - 8 pm

Details here!

Come on up to MassMoCA if you’re free. It’s Miss Rockaway’s first art project in a museum!

Here are some pictures Tod Seelie took of the build going on there

It feels funny to say it, but it’s true, I’m really glad to come home after traveling for so long. I can’t wait to help build the massmoca show and I’m excited not to be scared for my safety. In the DR it’s impossible to walk down the street or be in public anywhere for that matter without someone mean-mugging you like crazy. you get an exorbitant number of nasty looks from local men. i hear this is called “guapa” which actually means handsome but refers to an angry girl here. i dunno. this may be something that happens to everyone, or specifically to us as tourists/foreigners. also women are fair game for sexual harassment and cat-calling and people are totally shocked if you get mad about it. there are lots of things about latino machismo which i find hard to stomach, though i find machismo repulsive in all its locations. of course getting shot at and robbed while already struggling with money, with impunity, has a way of disrupting one’s sense of safety as well.

this photo has nothing to do with street art except that i took it during the ‘05 wooster street art walking tour. i think that was the year they let me help them tell people about street art history. they’re pretty great.

last week my laptop was stolen. at gunpoint.

i’m not sure how appropriate it is to dig right into all the details. here are some.

my boyfriend and i had rented a house in the dominican republic and after three days there two men came into the house and robbed us of our laptops, my ring, my camera, cell phone, and a few other things. we ran out of the house as the gunman was fumbling with the clip in his gun and they fired at us as we ran. barefoot, we ran out of the yard to the neighbor’s, scaled a fence and ran through a briar field to get away. they shot 8 times as we ran, some in our direction and some when were already out of the yard.

i believe the gunman were haitian, though i don’t know for sure. [note: the following paragraph was added to help explain why i believe the attackers were haitian. it is the result of countless conversations and interviews with both poor and rich locals, police, expats etc. i only know one haitian man here but he is wealthier than the migrant workers of this town] i believe this because the situation has been explained to me as the following: haitians, the most oppressed and impoverished rung of society here, are hired by higher-up dominican crime bosses who pay off the police, if they’re not hired by the police themselves. night guardsman are paid very poorly ($500/month is the higher end) and often tip off the thieves to the victims’ whereabouts. entry-level police are paid very very poorly here, worse than armed guards in fact, and make about $120/month. With so little to survive on, is it any wonder that they are corrupt? furthermore, the haitian border has been opened up fairly recently, and an influx of oppressed and starved people has left migrants seeking work and ways to survive, beyond the horrendous conditions of the sugar cane fields where they work for less than $1/day and are paid in (overpriced) company food store coupons. A movie called the price of sugar came out about this recently. further, a good deal of crimes have been committed in this wealthy tourist town over the years by haitian assialiants, likely being used as henchman for a much wealthier crime ring. lastly, they had very dark skin (unlike the mixed race appearance of many but certainly not all dominicans). in any case, they were driven to this by some kind of need.

it’s tough to not feel hopeless in the face of people risking their lives and trying to take yours for some stuff. most of the haitian people you see here are digging ditches for $2/day, which is not enough to live on even by local DR standards. on that salary it would take ten years to make the amount of money equal to the value of the stuff they stole from us, probably longer. the other day I saw a couple of the haitian boys who walk around trying to shine your shoes for cheap on the beach. they were looking in a storm drain pipe for change or anything of value that could have washed out of the sewer. i can’t for a moment pretend to forgive the robbers for shooting at us and for doing what they did, but clearly the circumstances that created the reasons to do such a thing are pretty brutal. the going price for our laptops on the street is like $600 or less. who knows what they were getting paid, but it reflects the value of their lives and ours in this situation, which really isn’t much.

what to do? wringing my hands and feeling sad at the moment, but i’ll learn more about the situation as time passes and try to understand how people can help. for now i’m just trying to eat, sleep through the night, work and proceed with caution.

this experience was nowhere near as bad as I could imagine it being, and I’m grateful for that.

we’re very safe now, despite being shaken.

i landed in the DR, my little warm winter work vacation spot. here’s where i’m currently working from:

In Hue, Vietnam this cyclo guy was following us, so I asked if I could give him a ride instead. He thought this was hlarious and my friend Lisa snapped this photo.

In Yangon/Rangoon

I’m in Saigon again now after going on a crazy motorbike ride through Laos, meeting an amazing organization in Cambodia called HCC hcc-cambodia.org and a million other crazy things to blog about soon.

Now to get on a 22hr flight and then up to Maine to cut ice out of a lake.

(to read about sex workers in Phnom Penh, scroll down)

So, last night we arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia after riding bikes across the mekong delta in Vietnam, taking a boat to an island called Phu Quoc which was a gorgeous tropical paradise, spending a week having fun in the fun, then boat back to Rach Gia on the west coast of Vietnam, getting scammed trying to get a bus to Chau Doc at the Cambodia border and left at a bus depot, bribing a minibus to take us to Chau Doc, getting the slow boat and bus to Cambodia where I got scammed again (wouldn’t give me my change) and finally arriving in Phnom Penh.

VIETNAM:

In Vietnam it began to feel like the entire country was conspiring to screw me out of my money, scowl at me and treat me like a Vietnamese prostitute (because I’m on this tour with Porter, my white male American partner) despite the fact that I’m Chinese/Irish, not Vietnamese, don’t speak a lick of any Asian language and am a fucking western tourist like everyone else. Sadly, this is the primary interaction travelers have with people when traveling in Vietnam and it gives you a skewed perspective on what people are really like, which is not generally mean, but totally varied just like ay other place. In any case I was realy on the defensive for our travels through Vietnam. Still, our bike ride through the delta was pretty amazing, riding down little red dirt goat paths with rice paddies on either side, across a zillion little rivers, taking ferries and boat rides, nearly getting mowed down by mopeds everywhere–including inside the tiny covered markets! We even got super lost (the map was basically hand drawn and completely awful) but luckily had a compass, and when night fell we were totally screwed and asked a Vietnamese family if we could sleep in their outdoor family restaurant at their house, which they graciously allowed us. We fell asleep with the entire 3 generations of the family staring at us and children’s videos blaring on the television in their elevated thatched roof house.

CAMBODIA:

After a super rough trip here getting scammed a couple times (for like $3 each time-not such a big deal), we’ve arrived by boat, bus and bike to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It’s super touristy here and this is the height of high season (whoops). Anyway, last night we went to dinner on the main strip by the river. Each business has security guards out front because they say street crime is bad here–though I don’t really get that sense–just the sense that people are very very poor here. Lots of people are begging and hawking with babies sprawled out on the sidewalk and people with missing limbs begging. Tours to the killing fields are advertised widely and people hawk photocopied books all over.

Last night we went into a restaurant after barely eating all day and have a great meal. Across from us were two tables of two pairs of ugly white men. Cambodian women came and sat down with them every fifteen minutes while the ’security guard’kept saddling up young Cambodian girls (maybe 14 yers old) with old vile white men (maybe 65 years old) and sending them off on mopeds to brothels. One of the Cambodian women sitting with the men was pregnant, another was grabbed by the wrist and then groped and dragged over to another table by a disgusting man who sat with her while she patiently sat, back pin straight looking freaked out. I don’t know how to adequately express how upsettin it is to see the sex work here in your face. Nearby, sex workers have a 58% HIV infection rate and are often in posiions of slavery and indentured servitude. The horrendous dehumanization happening right in front of me is just fucking astounding and visceral and has really shaken me to the core. I couldn’t hold back my disgust at these men and broke down in tears at the dinner table. When we got up I couldn’t hold my tongue, though I probably ought to for my own safety, and called them vile and disgusting and gave them the finger walking away. The fact that these men can go on these sexual slavery tours with impunity is beyond upsetting. I feel so furious and helpless at the same time. So, this morning Porter and I started dreaming up some ways we can help and I’ve been researching work being done to fight trafficking and sexual slavery here and what we can do. There’s so much more to know, but one place I’ve begun is with these organizations I’m going to try to connect with while in Phnom Penh:

http://www.onlinewomeninpolitics.org/cambo/cmborgs.htm

Herés a group, discussed below doing awesome direct service work: Mith Samlanh

Here’s a quick excerpt of the situation from a USAID site:

In Cambodia, women, men and children are trafficked for sexual exploitation or forced labor. Often Cambodians who cross over into Thailand, frequently as illegal migrants, are forced into labor or prostitution. Cambodian children are trafficked into Vietnam and forced to work as street beggars, and Vietnamese women and girls are trafficked into Cambodia for prostitution, as are Cambodian women and girls internally.

Cover of U.S. State Department’s report, Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. The report is available on the State Department’s web site.

In the capital of Phnom Penh, the USAID-supported Hagar Shelter gives training to women who could be at-risk for trafficking. The shelter has space for 40 walk-in residents and 80 non-residents from the poorer areas of the city. The training in catering, industrial sewing, hairdressing and small businesses gives women supporting their families the skills they need to get jobs with decent wages or start their own businesses. In addition, the shelter teaches them about their legal rights and HIV/AIDS and provides counseling. The results speak for themselves. Six months after participating in the program, 62 percent of the women were living independently. They were maintaining a steady job, and their kids were in school.

Phnom Penh is a magnet for young women and girls from the provinces. The long years of war and chaos in Cambodia destroyed many of the traditional networks of family and communities that used to take care of orphaned children or those in abusive situations. With nowhere else to turn, many girls flee to Phnom Penh in hopes of a better life. When they arrive in bus and taxi stations, would-be traffickers prey on them. Mith Samlanh/Friends, another USAID supported project in Cambodia, meets as many new arrivals as possible before the traffickers reach them. Mith Samlanh gives them information on short-term housing, employment and training opportunities. They also provide literacy and math skills training, so girls can go back to school if they wish.

In addition, USAID has provided legal assistance to 126 survivors of trafficking in Cambodia, including women rescued from brothels. In a recent development, two traffickers received ten-year prison sentences and had to pay financial compensation to their victims. It is the first time in Cambodia that traffickers were found guilty and forced to compensate their victims. That trend has continued. Even more recently, in October 2003, six defendants were convicted and sentenced from 5 to 15 years in jail for trafficking related activities. Various USAID grantees helped in the stages of this trial.

from: http://www.usaid.gov/locations/asia_near_east/features/trafficking11_03b.html

We’re in Vietnam after a crazy time in Burma. Here are some pics!

So I’m in Bagan in Northwest Myanmar/Burma and have just ridden up the east coast of the country through the mountains in the Shan State and then taking a ferry from Mandalay to the scary town of Pakkoku where everyone is a starvng monk or M.I. It’s the town were the demos started. The country is crazy safe, unlike other places in Southeast Asia where you’d be ard-pressed to get robbed. People ride oxcarts ad farm without any mechanical tools. Pretty wild. Right now I’m staying in a place that overlooks the Irrawaddy River, which I took at 13 hour ferry to get to and then a short 16 mile bike ride. Tonight we fly back to Yangon/Rangoon in the South where I wil get a new pair of glasses made for $20. On our way north we stayed one night in a monastery where we communicated with a monk using only hand signals. The internet is extremely slow here and this is the first access I’ve had by proxy server in a couple weeks.

Also being half asian and half white here is really weird. Everyone thinks i’m a total Burmese freak riding around with foreigners on a flashy bike. People come up like a foot from my face and stare at me all the time and when we rdie by everyone’s jaw drops and they scream ‘hey you!’ really aggressively.

anyway, someone needs to use this computer so off i go.

much love from burma.

Not sure who did this, but you’re awesome.

new hair:

This bike was fixed up by the ghostbike kids as a fundraiser for the ghostbike project.

It’s totally sweet AND reasonably priced AND for a good cause:

Reply to: sale-489807390@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-11-26, 11:39AM EST

1980s Bianchi road bike in good shape. Bike has seen some wear but is in perfect riding condition, well-built with quality components, and has been fixed up. Frame size is 56cm (22″), good for someone 5′7″ - 6′1″

* Black 1980s lugged steel Bianchi Frame, 56cm
* Shimano 105 shifters & deraillers (10 speed)
* Shimano 105 front hub
* Quando rear hub
* Sunrims 700cc wheels
* Shimano 600 brakes
* Generic saddle & post
* Drop bars with black faux-leather wraps (can’t remember the headset or bar manufacturer)
* Generic tires in good condition, only light wear

Everything is in working order. Ready to ride home.

This bike was fixed up by volunteers with the Ghost Bike project and is being sold to raise money for the project. More info: http://ghostbikes.org or http://streetmemorials.org

Ok so I’m going to Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia on Dec 6 for a while. Has anyone been there? Can you offer any advice on where to go and what to do?

I’m going to ride my bike around Burma and then around Vietnam. I’ll prolly leave the bike behind for Cambodia. Thoughts?