International News Digest
POMPIDOU CURATORS SIDE WITH STRIKING WORKERS
Curators at the Pompidou Center wrote an open letter to French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand last week to explain the impact of government plans on the national museum. As Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre reports, the twenty-one signatories did not include four curators who have “hierarchical” roles in the museum. The Révision générale des politiques publiques (General Revision of Public Policies) will have a particularly devastating impact on the Pompidou, due to the age of the majority of its employees who are heading for retirement. The plan, which comes into effect on January 1 and will see only every second retiring employee replaced, will eliminate twenty-six jobs in 2010 alone. By 2020, the Pompidou will lose 44 percent of its staff, or two hundred positions. One unnamed curator explained to Fabre how the plan was unveiled. “When Frédéric Mitterrand’s financial adviser came to see us, he told us, ‘The RGPP will apply to the Pompidou, that’s the decision of the state, the main shareholder’—as if we were a business!” Fabre notes that the strike could expand further. The Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration—a center dedicated to the history of immigration—has given a strike notice for December 14, while Syndeac, a union representing live performances, has also made a call to action.
CULTURAL FIGURES PROTEST SWISS REFERENDUM
The Swiss vote to ban the future construction of minarets across the country is already having a negative impact on the arts and international cultural exchanges. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, the German film director Fatih Akin will not be appearing at the premiere of his new film, Soul Kitchen ,in Zurich on December 16 as an act of protest against the results of Swiss referendum. “I feel personally affected by the referendum because I am the child of Muslim parents who see not political Islam in the minarets but rather the complete architecture of their house of worship.”
While reporting on Akin, Le Monde adds a note of protest from the visual arts. According to the report, the Swiss photographer Michael von Graffenried has another plan to protest the results of the referendum. If the vote does indeed lead to a change in the Swiss constitution—as planned—the photographer will no longer exhibit his works in Switzerland, “with the exception of Swiss mosques.”
Von Graffenried’s plan recalls the promise of another Swiss artist. Between 2003 and 2008, Thomas Hirschhorn barred exhibitions of his work in his native Switzerland, due to the election of the controversial right-wing politician Christoph Blocher to the national parliament. When Blocher was voted out, Hirschhorn gave the green light to Swiss exhibitions. But in light of the latest political maneuvers at home, Hirschhorn may well have a change of mind.
LATVIAN CULTURAL MINISTER UNDER FIRE
Mitterand is not the only minister of culture using silence to deal with spreading unrest. Eurotopics cites an article by the Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze’s Baiba Lulle, who describes how demonstrating students in Riga have called for the resignation of Latvia’s minister of culture, Tatjana Koķe. The students are protesting the Latvian government’s plans to make cuts on university funding. Koķe, while agreeing to talk with individual students representatives, refused to talk with “the mass” of students. For Lulle, Koķe could not have picked a poorer word to describe the students. “In psychology, the term mass indicates a crowd that is easily manipulated, has no opinion of its own, and doesn’t think logically and whose participants are incapable of independent action,” writes Lulle. “It only shows the arrogance of those in power that they suggest such a division between the ‘mass’ on the one hand and the ‘elite’ on the other.” Recalling the unrest of last January 13 in Riga, Lulle argues that the students’ protest was not a collective act of “nocturnal rioting.” “On the contrary,” writes Lulle, “the protest brought forward well-formulated demands, and the students looked like anything but an agitated, amorphous mass.”