Mana Morimoto's paper embroidery

Mana Morimoto's self-portrait. 

Mana Morimoto is a Japanese artist who combines black and white photographs with colourful thread embroideries. In an interview with Artchipel, Morimoto, who is also known as MNMRMT, spoke about her creative process and how she developed her aesthetic:

"I like the idea of using both digital and analog tool in my work; it can be a vintage photo, an image that I found on Google or a profile picture that I steal from my friend’s Facebook. I used to embroider on colour images at first but realise that the embroidered threads go better on a black and white image. The colour compositions become more three-dimension and vivid. So I decide to systematically change the colour picture into black and white. I print it out on a thick paper and make a bunch of holes using a needle before stitching. I complete the process by scanning and uploading the final work on my Tumblr."

Morimoto also says that the stitching and weaving process is therapeutic for her and always makes her feel better about things in her life.

New album: The Brother Moves On | A New Myth

                                                                                                                                                         PHOTO: Christelle Duvenage

The Brother Moves On have a had a tough time after founder Nkululeko Mthembu passed away last month. Despite this, they released their debut full length album, A New Myth, a compelling concoction of trippy African folk.

Anyone who has seen The Brother Moves On will agree that the real beauty lies in their theatrical live performances which force you to reassess everything you think you know about presenting music to an audience. The band describes it best in an interview with Okay Africa, where they talk about the place they think The Brother Moves On occupies in South African music culture. 

 "Our style changes with the individual characters that we play with, with the influx and movement of people coming in and coming out; and we love that.It’s a weird thing because that’s what the country’s about. We’ve always played the diversity card, however we haven’t in our culture fully accepted diversity. And that’s the big thing we do, we kind of open that up a lot. The character of this collective is based on individuals who all have their influences. The theatrical side is me standing for the fact that I won’t simply play in a band. I want to do something that engages; I want to do something different. So there is that space to bring what you are, wherever you’re from and we all agree to what each other wants to do."

Listen to A New Myth below. It is also available to download on Bandcamp. 
 

New video: Bittereinder ft. Chris Chameleon | Kulkuns

Bittereinder released their music video for "Kulkuns", their track featuring Chris Chameleon and easily one of the best on their album, Die Dinkdansmasjien. The video was shot by Louis Minnaar, who, in an interview with Underground Press, explained how it's different to his previous work.

"The edit is less rhythmical and slower paced than what I normally do. I felt the performances were so strong that I almost wanted to not interrupt any of the main shots with cutaways and so forth. In the end that rarely happens when you enjoy the editing process as I do."

December's mixtape

1. Bye Beneco- Overwhelm


2. Mikhael Paskalev- Jive Babe

3. Shadowclub- Dirt & The Rubble


4. Ebenopsis ft. The Punch Brothers- If The Sea Was Whiskey


5. Vana & The Oh So Serious- The Green Acre Blues


6. Efterklang- Modern Drift


7. Nomadic Orchestra- Movie Tune


8. Julian Redpath- Blackheart Blues
 
9. Daughter- Home


10. Battle Beyond the Stars- Zombie

Living in the hottest place on earth

The Afar people are the perfect example of how human beings have the tremendous ability to adapt to extraordinary circumstances. They live in the Danakil Desert, which extends into Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. The deepest part of the desert lies 100m below sea level in what is known as the Danakil Depression. It is considered the hottest place on earth and receives almost no rain. The Afar people are nomads who raise goats, sheep and sometimes cattle in the desert. For them, the salt deposits that cover large parts of the desert are like a currency. They mine salt slabs and transport them using camels to markets in Ethiopia and the Sudan. 

Virginia Morell, who travelled to the Danakil Desert on an assignment for National Geographic, got the opportunity to join a salt-trading caravan that was making its way through the desert. She says she was able to gain some insight into the Afar way of life.

"Already, following our week in Hamed Ela, a dust-and-fly-stricken hamlet, I'd formed some opinions. One was that people can and will live anywhere—even in the Danakil, a place of dry sands and even drier gravel beds, rocky lava flows, active volcanoes, burning salt flats, temperatures that often top 120°F, winds that choke you with dust, and suffocating days of no wind at all. Even worse, this place where rain falls sparingly at the best of times was now in the grip of a bad drought, and the half-mummified carcasses of camels and goats lay strewn across the sands." 

Italian photographer Anthony Pappone specialises in festival, ceremony and tribe photography. He travelled to the Danakil Desert where he took photos of the Afar people. His photos capture the harshness of the region spectacularly.

Whoever controls water, controls life

Mark Twain once said: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” In Karen Jayes’s debut novel, For the Mercy of Water, she constructs a world that does exactly that. Set in the midst of a fierce battle over the world’s most precious natural resource, water has become a commodity that is controlled by what is only known as “the company”.

The cities don’t bear the brunt of the water shortages but far away from the urban areas, in the isolated towns and villages, it is a different story. All the towns’ inhabitants have fled to the city in search of water that will quench their thirst. Those who stay behind are “the grandmothers” who are left in the towns to look after the young girls.

A rare rainfall leads the company to one such town where an old woman named Mother is found with a classroom of girls she has been looking after. A brutal confrontation occurs between the company guards and the girls, which leads a doctor, two aid workers, a journalist and a writer to the town to find out the truth about what really happened.

On the face of it, it may seem that Jayes has written an environmental story sermonising about the consequences of humans not looking after water. It may also seem that Jayes has penned a sci-fi novel that imagines an alternate reality while imitating our own. The truth is that For the Mercy of Water fits into neither of these categories. What makes it so chilling is that the use of water as a political tool is something that is not entirely out of the realm of possibility because water wars have already occurred. In Botswana, for instance, the government sought to remove the Khoisan people from the Kalahari Desert by destroying their bore holes in an effort to cut their water supply. In 2000, in the Bolivian city of Cochobamba, a series of protests occurred after the government sold the municipal water supply to private company Semapa. This lead to uprisings that saw masses of people protesting against water prices which were set to increase by as much as 50%.

Ignacio Saiz, the executive director of the Centre for Economic and Social Rights told Al Jazeera that unequal power relations will be the greatest source of social tensions rising from deprivation:

“Water too often is treated as an instrument with which one population group can suppress another.”  

More than that, though, For the Mercy of Water is a novel that explores gender-based violence, a topic that hits a sore spot for South Africans following the brutal rape and murder of Anene Booysen in February this year. Using striking descriptions that border on being tenderly poetic, Jayes uses the destruction of the environment to reflect on the destruction and suppression of the female body. It is Mother who explains this strong feminist metaphor:

“It is hard to explain what I am thinking, but I am thinking that the human body, it is mostly water. And I am seeing in this blood and water and the way that he is lying blind, that we are busy down there fighting a war over our bodies. We are fighting a war over every piece of life in all of us. It is down to this last thing, and it will consume us. We will consume us.”

Jayes seeks to recognise the victims of sexual violence in the book by naming each of them and referring to the remaining characters by their occupation only. In this way, Eve, Noni, Annette, Isalida, all the victims who will come before them, and all those who will come after them, are acknowledged meaningfully.

At first I found it difficult to connect with the nameless characters because I wanted to know more about them. I formed a picture of them in my mind while I was reading but I couldn’t look to the text for any clues that could confirm that the picture I was painting in my imagination the correct.  This was a genius stroke on the part of Jayes who, by making the characters anonymous, forces the reader to confront any stereotypes they may have about race and class.

In the same way that the characters are mysteriously unnamed, so is the place in which the plot unfolds. Jayes shows us that this projection of reality could take place anywhere and at any time. For the Mercy of Water is debilitating as it reflects the sickening way in which violence against women is perpetuated. But it is also exhilarating as it offers refreshingly strong yet intricate female characters that triumph despite this.