Homeless Hotel in Gothenburg

Despite having a highly developed economy, the world’s eighth highest per capita income, ranking 7th in the United Nation’s Human Develoment Index and being the second most competitive country according to the World Economic Forum, homeless figures are increasing across Sweden. It is not only drug addicts who end up in the streets, now there are also people who lost their homes when their businesses collapsed during the economic crisis. Nationally, the figure is estimated to be approximately 34,000. It’s a problem no one really likes to aknowledge, especially in cities like Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, where there are more than 3,000 homeless. In Malmö, more than half of the people without a home are women and children.

Faktum Hotels offers a unique experience. Guests get to be homeless for a night to get an idea of what it is to sleep with fear, out in the open and in the cold. The options include sleeping on a filthy mattress under a bridge by the junction of the Säve and Göta rivers, a sleeping bag in the park, or simply lying down on some cardboard boxes and newspapers at an abandoned paper mill. Each site, or “room”, has been chosen by a member of the homeless population that collaborates with Faktum, but of course there is no way to guarantee the availability of the rooms. They could actually disappear with no prior notice.

Many people have tried the idea, 1000 rooms so far have already been booked, but most can only stand a few hours.You can also book for a friend. The concept, which is part social commentary and part installation, helps fund Faktum’s non-profit organization and has the objective of raising awareness of the plight and situation of homeless people.

It is always difficult for non-profits to get people to donate money to causes, so they have to be increasingly creative to get the message across to a population desensitised, accustomed to watching the news as entertainment. Faktum has found a way of provoking thought using a format not too different from an artist’s. Below, a picture of an exhibition on Faktum in Gothemburg.

Faktum started as a street newspaper, it was founded in 2001 and is sold by people who are homeless in Gothemburg.

To visit the sites, environmental sound included, go to their website Faktum Hotels.

VICE Series on HBO

VICE is today a media agency that started in Canada, as a magazine called Voice of Montreal. It became VICE when it moved to New York City in 1996. The magazine, which has a presence in 22 countries, was originally about pop culture and the arts, but evolved and now covers more serious and controversial issues, including the war on drugs, mental disorders, economics or the environment. They tell stories from a deeply personal perspective, trying to understand the real reasons and people behind the news that they cover. VICE also produces videos and documentaries which are available, for free, online for their global audience. They now have their very own HBO series. This is the trailer.

Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative

Rolex is a world-renowned watchmaker. The company was founded in England as Wilsdorf and Davis, in 1905. Its headquarters, since 1919 have been in Geneva. It is considered one of the most valuable global brands, numer 71 according to Forbes magazine.

In the year 2002, the company -always true to its tradition of supporting individual excellence- set up the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a philanthropic program that brings together internationally recognized masters  and promising young artists, with the objective of contributing to global culture. The program, which runs every two years, has mentors and protégés spending a year in a one-to-one mentorship relationship. The company wanted to do for artists something similar to what it was doing with the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, created in 1976, which support scientists, conservationists and explorers. It came up with the idea of a mentorship, which seemed more appropriate for the arts.

The program has paired some of today’s most important artists and rising young talents; in literature, film, dance, music, theater, visual arts and architecture, and has established a new global community of artists in less than a decade.  Artists like Jessye Norman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mira Nair, Martin Scorsese, Peter Sellars, Zhang Yimou, Brian Eno or Anish Kapoor have been some of the mentors, which are chosen by a special advisory board which suggests and endorses the potential mentors. When the mentors agree to take part, they work with Rolex to define a profile of protégé they would like to work with. It is therefore a carefully matched relationship. An expert panel identifies suitable potential protégés, who are invited to submit applications. The winner is chosen by the mentor after personal interviews. So far, there have been protégés from 20 countries.

Mentors and protégés spend a considerable amount of time together, interacting in many different ways, sometimes even collaborating on a work. Protégés receive a 25,000 Swiss-franc grant during the year and travel and other expenses are also covered. An additional 25,000 Swiss francs is available for each protégé after the year ends to fund a work, a publication, a performance or an event. Mentors are awarded 50,000 Swiss francs. Protégés also obtain international publicity for their work and time to develop their art, free from daily worries.

Protégés can become mentors themselves in future editions of the program. Some have changed disciplines and others have created new works.

(In the photos: Ben Frost & Brian Eno, Annemarie Jacir & Zhang Yimou/ Peter Sellars  & Maya Zbib, Anish Kapoor & Nicholas Hlobo/Hans Magnus Enzensberger & Tracy K. Smith)

TPB AFK – The Pirate Bay documentary

The Berlinale is a truly cultural event and one of the most important dates in the film industry. The Berlin International Film Festival, as it is officially called, is known for giving the same importance to edgy, low-budget movies as to big-studio productions. It shows some 400 movies per year, most of them international or European premieres. Around 300,000 tickets are sold, and is attended by almost 20,000 professional visitors from 130 countries. Every genre, length and format is featured at the Berlinale. Whether its films for young audiences or the avant-garde and unfamiliar, the festival is famous for its unique approach, allowing works that are sometimes hard to classify, at the intersection between film and other creative disciplines. It also likes to feature the work of women and minorities.

This year one of the movies that has premiered at the Berlinale has been “TPB AFK”, a documentary about Swedish filesharing site The Pirate Bay, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at how a handful of very clever internet pioneers found themselves fighting a battle over access to information and creative content against the powerful movie and media companies who relentlessly hounded them. The documentary, by Swedish filmmaker Simon Klose, includes footage shot over four years and one of the central storylines of the film is the trial of Pirate Bay’s four founders. Although the men (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström) were charged with facilitating illegal downloading of copyrighted material and sentenced to a year and hit with a 2.7 million euros fine, the website is still working. Not only that, the website claims to have today more than 25 million active users. It has been blocked by several governments, but access to it is relatively easy because censorship can be circumvented in many countries.

Klose, who does not hide his sympathy for the founders of The Pirate Bay and the ideas they defend, has released the film online under a Creative Commons license, which allows viewers to watch and copy the film for free. Watch the whole movie here:

Big Cities on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Cool interactive map by the Financial Times today, showing how overpopulation in some megacities is reaching critical levels. Central Paris‘ population today has 2 million, having lost 1 million since the 1920s, however its metropolitan area comprises around 11 million, many of these inhabitants outside the central core have not even been born in France. This imbalance -which is also economic- between the center and the periphery, is a time bomb.

 

Lagos, in Nigeria (photo), is a city suffering overpopulation. Mexico DF is home to more than 24 million souls. LA‘s almost 16 million are mostly dependent on cars for mobility. The world’s largest conurbation is still greater Tokyo (photo), a city that sits on one of the most active seismic faults on the planet is also very vulnerable to tsunamis. Cities continue to evolve and some of them continue to grow out of control, making them very difficult to manage and causing an almost unbearable strain.

 

Fed Up with Abusive Bank Commissions in International Transfers?

TransferWise, a startup based in London and founded by Taavet Hinrikus (left) and Kristo Käärmann (right) in 2011. For Hinrikus this is not his first adventure, he was the first employee at that other very successful startup, Skype.

 

TransferWise offers a peer-to-peer money transfer service that can save you up to 85% of the fees that banks charge you for overseas transfers. It uses real exchange rates when transferring money and it is aimed especially at expats, foreign students and businesses with branches in other countries who lose a lot of money to banks that charge hefty commissions. The company only charges a £1 fee for transactions below £300 and a small percentage of any transaction above that. In its first year of operations TransferWise handled 10 million euros in transactions.

 

The proprietary algorithm they developed connects people wanting to wire money to another country. Imagine you want to transfer money from Britain to Spain, for example. You put your money in TransferWise’s British account, the algorithm then finds someone wanting to do the same from Spain to Britain and who has deposited the money in the company’s Spanish account. The exchange is done at the mid-market rate. To make sure there is someone at the other end, and to ensure liquidity, TransferWise works with The Currency Cloud.

 

The service now converts from euro to GBP and GBP to euro. It also converts from euros and GBO to US Dollars (USD), Polish zloty (PLN), Swiss francs (CHF), Danish krone (DKK), Swedish krona (SEK) and Norwegian krone (NOK). It is working on transfers in the other direction as well, but this is not available yet.

Hinrikus and Käärman believe that money, like water should flow freely, but this, of course, is not easy. Their new platform is a close as we can get.

Skateboarding Amid the Ruins of War

Skateistan is an unconventional school in an unconventional place. What began in 2007 as informal skateboarding lessons by Australian Oliver Percovich in an empty fountain in Kabul is now, thanks to international donors and skateboard industry partners, an international non-profit which offers skateboarding and more traditional education to children in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Pakistan.

The staff is international and they work mostly with children aged 5-18, over 50% of them streetworking kids. Skateboarding is what gets them hooked into the program. Then, once in, they learn many other things. Apart from skating, the teachers also focus on leadership skills, civic responsibility, multimedia, creative arts and they also explore culture, traditions, natural resources and peace. The students decide what they want to learn.

This skateboarding school, which now has more than 400 students and a 5,400m2 skatepark and educational facility,  is open to all ethnicities, religions and social classes. Streetworking children share classroom with sons of government ministers. The school has Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek or Tajik children who, united by their love of skateboarding, create bonds here that trascend social barriers and learn that they are not that different from one another. Many of these kids come from extremely poor backgrounds, and this program provides these marginalized youths with opportunities, not only to meet other children from other cultures, but also empowers them to overcome adversity, teaching them self confidence. In a country devastated by several wars, having this common bond also brightens up their lives, gives them hope of a better future and gives them a voice. Here, kids can be kids.

The school operates six days a week and provides all the skateboards and the safety equipment.  Most of its operating costs have been funded by the embassies of Denmark and Norway which also funded the construction of the Kabul facility, together with the embassies of Germany and Canada.  The German Federal Foreign Office constructed a second facility in Mazar-e-Sharif. Skateistan has numerous sponsors and partners from the skateboarding industry. They also receive donations and support from a network of international groups and volunteers.

Nancy Dupree, the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, explains that children who have grown up in war, surrounded by negative attitudes towards compatriots of different ethnic and secular groups can now meet children from other backgrounds, compete and learn to play with one another, respectfully, “setting patterns for future harmonious interactions through life”.

But this is a country still very much still grappling with violence. On September 8th, a suicide attack in Kabul resulted in the deaths of several children, four of which were students of the academy. The bomb was detonated outside the International Security Assistance Force headquarters, where many of the streetworking children of Kabul sell trinkets, scarves and chewing gum

One of the most remarkable aspects of Skateistan is that 40% of students are girls, many of them having to go against the wishes of members of their families, who don’t approve this kind of activity for girls. The school promotes gender equality in one of the most gender-biased societies in the world. But amid the ruins of war…they skate on.

This is a short documentary on Skateistan:

To donate to Skateistan to their website.