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On this little island, made of open flesh and honest soil, we aim to provide nothing but truth: the anti-news of our age.

19/01/2025

WHERE THE CLYDE FLOWS
Poem by E.R.D.
Artwork by Emir Elisa

We begin this new year considering the maps that make us, the landscapes that cross us ploughing through our being as a river. This poem is the prelude to a mythology of the river Clyde, that cuts through Glasgow as a wound of tears and blood it has collected throughout its history from workers, mothers, lovers, outcasts and idealists… And as it persistently runs, the Clyde connects us to all of those people whom we share the eternally fleeting comfort of watching water flow, as time. Long live the Clyde!

19/11/2024

THE COOKBOOK OF CAPITALISM | Avocados: The Other Face of Capitalism

Rich in vitamins and good fats, the avocado has entered the category of “superfood” for its nutritional properties and health benefits, as well as its popular association to an ethical diet. Although the cultivation of this fruit is expanding to include Mediterranean countries such as Spain and Italy, México grows almost half of the world’s avocado production, generating more money from this industry than it does from petroleum.

areas of Morelos, Nayarit, Puebla and Michoacán. This last region in particular accounts for 80% of all Mexican output and is prey to difficult cultivation due to the existence of drug cartels that extort protection fees from farmers in the area. These were reported to take around 2,000 pesos per hectare from avocado producers, and around 1 to 3 pesos/kg of fruit.

As demand for avocado is high, this has often been a driving force in the illegal deforestation of Mexican forests to create space for this monoculture. Local populations living by existing plantations have reported health and breathing issues due to pesticides and chemicals. As well as this, the systems of production created to meet such demands have had devastating environmental impacts beyond deforestation, including biodiversity loss, water scarcity, pollution, and correlated social injustices such as food insecurity, displacement of indigenous peoples, cartel violence, exploitation and human rights abuses.

The increasing demand for this and other commodities such as cocoa, almonds, coffee, tropical fruits such as bananas and pineapples, which are expected to be found in supermarkets at all times despite the season, are the drivers of important social and environmental impacts in places that are often distant from the demand site. As avocados are often associated with “healthy” and “ethical” diets, they are often seen as a nutritious and beneficial foods. To contribute to the burning down of a forest for the sake of an avocado monoculture, however, does not seem to be much more ethical than slaughtering an animal for a stake.

16/11/2024

THE COOKBOOK OF CAPITALISM | Burgers: Fast Food, Slow Costs

The glory of a cheap cut of meat held in the soft embrace of a bread bun is one of the most iconic symbols of a new food culture began in the US: fast food. The burger however is also symbolic of a much larger phenomenon, namely globalisation, which has popularised this dish across the world.

As the working classes began working at more considerable distances from home, and industrialisation led many factories to operate at night, people had less time to go home for lunch and dinner, and had limited access to food during the night. This offered an opportunity for food carts and wagons to sell food to workers, including the cheap and much questioned sausages in buns that led some to suggest they were made from dog meat (hence the name “hot dogs”). Along with this, the use of grills to serve hot food allowed for these wagons to sell Hamburg steaks which were placed in a bun as many customers ate while standing. These wagons were selling around 400 burgers a day, with the Evening Gazette in Reno, Nevada reporting that these “celebrated Hamburger steak sandwiches are always on hand to replenish an empty stomach and even fortify Satan himself”.

Soon after, the joint venture White Castle was created by J. Walter Anderson and Edgar Waldo Ingram in 1921, serving only hamburgers, soft drinks and coffee: by 1940, White Castle was selling around 40 million burgers a year. Amongst the many burger chains to emerge thereafter, McDonald’s was soon born from the McDonald brothers.

According to the sociologist George Ritzer, the same organisational force that structured the fast food restaurants in the last part of the XX century has become extended as a process of rationalisation governing people’s everyday life, their social interactions and identities. As the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss acknowledged, “in any particular society, cooking is a language through which that society unconsciously reveals its structure”.

Then what do the practices surrounding the burger, or any other ‘fast food’ for that matter, tell us about the language and structure of the society we live in, and where this is heading?

14/11/2024

THE COOKBOOK OF CAPITALISM | Oysters: A Contended History Of Wealth And Poverty

When food systems become systems of domination, what we eat defines who we are but also the change we wish to enact. The global food supply chain are stretched out enough to create hierarchies of injustice, exploitation and violence. These are all essential ingredients in the cookbook of capitalism: what we buy and consume has contributed to a long history of capitalist reinforcement which is slowly eating away at the planet and feasting on the labour of its people. We here explore three foods that can help us understand the multidimensional effects of capitalist food systems, while remaining entangled with other contemporary challenges and realities such as poverty, environmental degradation, corruption and precarious well-being.

At a point in history, someone was the first human being to find a coarse shell at low tide, the origins of which dated back to the time of dinosaurs. Out of the sheer drive of human curiosity, they attempted to crack open this hollow-sounding, bone-like case with a rock to find a surprise: a pearly white inside where a tender, fleshy bivalve was lying peacefully within a rim of black.

From a peasant food to an expensive luxury, the destiny of oysters was followed by many other staples in the working class people’s diets, such as caviar or lobster. The capitalist food system relies on overexploitation, such as overfishing, as well as what can be defined as the “privatisation” of certain products or industries through unaffordable prices, that is an economic “prohibition” for the working class.

Many argue that “if a fraction of the effort, science and capital that goes into agriculture went into oysters, in a few years’ time, instead of chicken nuggets, kids would be asking for deep-fried oysters. The oyster could feed Africa. There are no ecological arguments against it”. Instead of making food a symbol of class, and wealth, their production and consumption should incorporate the whole of society to understand how poverty and malnutrition may be extirpated in the re-democratisation of food systems.

Oysters for the people!

25/10/2024

ADRIATICO DIVORA, Earth Poem by E.R.D.
Artwork by Emir Elisa

Some studies predict that by the end of this century, the area of Venice and the Euganean hills will disappear, devoured by the sea. This poem paints a scenario where the Adriatic sea’s rage is personified, wounded by the unhinged practices of humankind and hungry for peace. In this story, residing within the imaginarium of a future lagoon in 2075, wishes to convey a sense of imminence, urgency and action to change the trajectory of our places which will otherwise soon become invisible.

12/10/2024

Speculum of the Other Place

Sculpture, stained glass, painting, sound participatory installation.

This summer Emir finished her fine art degree at the University of Dundee with her degree show. The central theme of this installation took inspiration from the Venetian lagoon, through painting and interactive elements, such as the platform and the rocking chair, which require the viewers’ participation to be fully functional, inviting the viewers to think about environmental issues and asking them to approach the topic with hopefulness. Through the chair design, based on the ‘gondola’ shape, the water cut-out in the platform and elements in the painting, Emir made direct references to symbols representing the city of Venice.
‘Speculum of the Other Place’ is a reflection on how, as humans we belong to places, but places don’t belong to us.

Using the ‘Sinking City’ as an example, this project serves as a beacon of hope amidst climate change’s encroachment, and as an invitation for the viewer to listen to people’s hope for the environment’s future and to contemplate our collective responsibility for nature.
Emphasising the necessary connection between body and nature through this participatory installation, as well as taking inspiration from the feminist works of Luce Irigaray, here the viewer becomes a participative part of the whole, finding meaning and space in the Otherness of place.

05/10/2024

Venice, the eternal city, becomes the background to our next explorations. Though how eternal is this place? According to some studies, by the end of this century Venice is destined to disappear, along with the euganean area, devoured by the hunger of the Adriatic sea. We step upon places we view as permanent, as opposed to the impermanence of our small bodies, without actually realising how vulnerable and transforming our surrounding geographies truly are. Drawing from Emir’s creative and feminist work exhibited during the summer at the University of Dundee’s Degree Show , we turn our gaze to Venice, as a ‘speculum’ to an alternative future. Here we wish to explore the interrelations of culture, place and care in hope of radical transformation, understanding that we belong to places but places do not belong to us.

Paintings by Emir Elisa

11/09/2024

ENERGOPOEIA: MANIFESTO FOR A NEW ENERGY AESTHETIC

As claims to a “just transition” are sweeping over the everchanging world of energy, particularly regarding renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave power, it is important to turn to aesthetics: how we see energy is not only a matter of political, ecological or economic concern, but it also requires a deep change in how we look at the material representations of energy and how we appreciate their beauty. Though many view energy architecture as structures that create scars, leaving landscapes wretched and derelict, these can rather become symbols of a renewed vision of one’s surrounding ecology, reminding us that we are intertwined with the environment. For this reason, the term “energopoeia” is here coined to express the way in which we build our world around energy and “make” energy within ourselves, in a creative, pragmatic, poetic way.

https://carnamag.weebly.com/anti-news/energopoeia-manifesto-for-a-new-energy-aesthetic

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