 of sea water piped to crop raisers, as a way to help address California's mounting water supply deficits? If astronauts can technologically turn urine into drinking water, isn't their dependable technology able to turn sea water into water fit for human, animal and plant consumption?
It's not particularly boneheaded, but not terribly practical either, I'm afraid. There are very serious issues having to do with determining the best method of desalinating sea water here in California. First is where would we get the additional power necessary to remove the salt from the seawater? Our renewable sources are currently insufficient and additional electricity generated via petroleum would probably increase air pollution. Second is, how to put the salt we remove back into the ocean? The residue of the desalination process is many times saltier than the ocean it is returning to and may create some ecological dead zones. For now we need to concentrate on conservation and efficiency, but your prayers are essential, too!
If the editors or anyone else finds the best solution, or an excellent one, among the many solutions that might work, please send them along with an appropriate business or strategic plan to: the governor and legislators of California. In the meantime, I will also pray to God for more rain.** CUBA. RHC observations Sunday Feb 5: at 1420, 9540 is very poor as usual after being blocked by WHRI before 1400; 9850 is in open carrier; by 1455 it`s off and 13750 is on with RHC programming, something that happens only on Sundays in preparation for `Alo, Presidente` later. 1510 `Mundo de la Filatelia`, and more regular RHC shows until 1600:45* so no A,P today.
but showing 11910 instead of 15190, apparently outdated info, “last updated on: WED 14 DEC 2011 13:30:07“.
** NETHERLANDS [non]. Normally when tuning up the 9.8-9.9 MHz area after 0600, I hear RNW in Dutch on 9865 via BONAIRE, and then the same words repeated 2 or 3 sex later on 9895 via PRIDNESTROVYE, but not Feb 5 at 0618 discussing malaria: at first seems non-//, but I finally time the delay as close to 15 seconds. The playouts must be independent and subject to variation. 9830 via Wertachtal not audible if it is still on.
** SPAIN. 17595, Sunday Feb 5 at 1340, REE `Amigos de la Onda Corta` with heavily produced history of RNE thru the ages, numerous clips mixed in from the Franco era, narrated by YL. Outro by Buitrago at 1354 did not refer to it.
** U S A [and non]. 9955, WRMI: Sat Feb 4 at 2302 in Spanish, presumably scheduled `Frecuencia al Día`. No jamming, but fast SAH, from? Aoki shows RFI in Chinese via Tainan, TAIWAN during this hour, and so does the WRTH Update.
Previous Trasmissione test di Pirate F.M.
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If a volunteer opportunity is not available for you at this time, can we contact you at a later date?The title of Athi-Patra Ruga’s recent solo exhibition, ‘The Future White Women of Azania Saga’, composed of mostly large-scale embroidered canvases and portrait photographs concretizing the mythology surrounding a series of performances the artist initiated in 2010, took me back to a day at my all-white pre-democracy high school. Politics was on the agenda: a left-leaning gay wit in class remarked that he couldn’t understand all the fuss about South Africa transforming to a black majority state named Azania, as some black nationalists were mooting. ‘At least we’ll be seated at the front of the United Nations,’ he remarked. As things transpired, South Africa remained South Africa, seated nearer the back. And Azania, that imprecisely defined utopia first pinpointed in Roman times? Well, it never materialized.
Ruga, an out gay man living in Cape Town who studied fashion illustration in Johannesburg, is not the first South African artist to immerse himself in an imaginary republic reflecting a perfectly distilled fictional state replete with the symbolic trappings of nationhood. Walter Battiss, possibly the country’s first indigene avant-gardist, came up with the cartoonish, nonsense universe of Fook Island – an ‘island of the imagination’ – in 1971. ‘You will seek in vain on maps for the location of the island, for it eludes conventional cartography,’ offered Battiss, a gifted teacher, art historian and closeted homosexual living in a state where sodomy was a criminal offence.
Like Ruga in his 2013 work The Lands of Azania (2014–2094), an embroidered map depicting the Horn of Africa (homophobic Uganda is christened ‘New Sodom’), Battiss also created maps; he even issued stamps and passports for Fook Island. There was, as there still is, though with different inflections nowadays, a serious correlative to this artistic tomfoolery. During Battiss’s time, a number of legally constituted, albeit fake, black democracies were dotted across South Africa’s political territory; Ruga was born in Umtata, formerly the capital of one of them, Transkei. Like Battiss, Ruga is no less motivated by the social context in which he operates.
In the past, Ruga’s performance work – which has the gaudy splendour of Leigh Bowery’s, even though it was decisively influenced by Tracey Rose and Sharon Bone, a notorious Johannesburg drag performance artist who starred in Stanimir Stoykov’s
gay underground films – has deployed camp pageantry to tactically comment on Swiss and South African xenophobia, as well as escalating homophobia across Africa. But these performances, and the fragmentary photographic evidence they produced, often seemed random; by comparison, ‘The Future White Women of Azania Saga’ presented an imaginative and cohesive statement, one in which humour, colour, fashion and a vivid pop sensibility have as much agency as anger, outrage and the right to say, ‘Fuck this!’
Formally, the exhibition was composed of 11 embroideries portraying Azanian dignitaries, five photographic portraits of a figure wearing a balloon dress (Ruga performed in such a garment outside the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari at the opening of the Venice Biennale last year), a sculptural tableau featuring the same balloon-clad persona standing next to a prone figure composed of artificial flowers, and a video work commissioned by Puma for the sportswear brand’s films4peace project. Ruga’s sculpture bears traces of the same formal and conceptual poverty as that of his contemporary Mary Sibande. Both seem to be rehearsing Yinka Shonibare’s sculptural practice. The plasticity and gloss of photography, in which sheen and flatness tend to iron out formal kinks, is better suited to Ruga’s and Sibande’s rich imaginative visions.
Ruga’s tapestries, however, are where he comes into his own. Incorporating cheeky riffs on expressionist painter Irma Stern, they depict a zany fictional world that purposefully reflects on the artist’s home country. Azania, as Ruga imagines it, is a sunshine state of desert landscapes ruled by a ‘pantheon of ladies’. One ruler stands out: Versatile Queen Ivy, founder of the Azanian state. Ivy, portrayed in three tapestries, has green matted hair and rides a sabre-toothed zebra; Ruga describes her as a mash-up of Lady Godiva and Rihanna. The exhibition also included an ambiguously gendered self-portrait, Uzukile the Elder (2013). Achieved in dark and sombre tones, the person it portrays is ‘not the future white woman of Azania, but a dude with a moustache, porky, not really leotard-friendly’, according to Ruga. But, as recompense, he is