Ms Informed Newsletter | Gentrification, Cultural Capital, and English in Berlin
Listen to our discussion about two great books we read this week!
Shownotes
English in Berlin
Gentrification is inevitable and other lies
This week’s distraction
This week’s distraction is the the jailed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah who has stopped drinking water as he steps up his hunger strike to coincide with the start of the COP27 summit, his sister has said.
Calls for his release escalated after the climate summit opened in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt on Sunday.
The 40 year old has consumed just 100 calories for more than 200 days to push Egypt to allow him UK consular access.
Abdel Fattah, a key activist in the 2011 uprising, is currently serving a five-year sentence for spreading false news.
His sister, Sanaa Seif, has warned that her brother's hunger and water strike may mean he could die before the end of the summit. She urged the British government to be "responsible for getting us proof of life".
Read more in on the BBC here.
This week Madhvi wrote
This week Madhvi wrote about some things she saw and experienced concerning the stories we tell, and how we tell them. Read her blog post here.
This week Rina visited
This week Rina visited the Naturkunde Museum (Natural History Museum) in Berlin. Did you know on the first Sunday of every month all public museums are free? This museum is a great one to check out if you like dinosaur bones. We did an entire episode on dinosaurs here, if that’s your thing.
This week’s inspiration
This week’s inspiration is Moshtari Hilal. She is a visual artist, researcher and curator working from Hamburg and Berlin.
She is the co-founder of the online collective AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts and History) and Berlin-based research project CCC (Curating Through Conflict with Care)
With a special focus on analogue drawing, Moshtari considers her overall practice to be interdisciplinary and process-oriented. Moshtari describes her artistic practice as reconciliation with shame and negated beauty, seeking to understand and critically subvert power and colonial continuities in the visual arts.
Her current artistic practice is shaped by the (self)portrait and family archive, both approached in an eclectic manner in her search for a visual language. Her portraits deal with recurring motifs, such as the black-haired body, distinctive nose, prominent hands, the figure of the mother, distorted floral ornaments and textile patterns.
She studied Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science in Hamburg, Berlin and London, she has a focus on Gender-, Decolonial- and Cultural Studies.
Follow her on Instagram Visit her website here.
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