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liberatum

Global Multimedia and Multidisciplinary Cultural Organization Empowering and Inspiring Minds to Promote Social Change and Raise Consciousness

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I think that all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being. And a wizard, which is a male version of a witch, is kind of revered, and people respect wizards. But a witch, my god, we have to burn them. It’s the male chauvinistic society that we’re living in for the longest time, 3,000 years or whatever. And so I just wanted to point out the fact that men and women are magical beings. We are very blessed that way, so I’m just bringing that out. Don’t be scared of witches, because we are good witches, and you should appreciate our magical power. - Yoko Ono 📸 @annieleibovitz Yoko Ono with John Lennon

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We are responsible for our children. I am responsible for my children. If they’re going to a school, I’m not putting them on a bus: it’s going to be better where we are. And that’s not new. That’s the way Black people behaved in the country since they set foot here. They have always done that. It may seem as though the world began for Black people in this country since 1964, but it’s not true. There were first-rate Black schools. And if there are first-rate Black schools in Boston, Whites will be banging the doors to get in there. You will have to bus them away. Whenever there’s a first-rate anything.

The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. - Toni Morrison 📸 @fotos.nai

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As I steer Liberatum into new directions and landscapes, I reflect on the last twenty years of building this platform, and also my teenage period, when I had an immense zest for life, and a great enthusiasm to see the world and its many cultures. That curiosity to explore new territories has not decreased. But I must admit, having looked at this photograph in amazement, I still can't quite believe that this Indian boy who did not even have a passport or a single visa to travel abroad, who had dreamt so much every single day of working in a creative environment, who at the time had never set foot outside India, is today able to create cultural endeavors around the world. I suppose what this teaches me profoundly is that one cannot place limits on one's possibilities and abilities. It is vital to push yourself to go beyond what you think is unreachable. Rejections were countless in my twenties. I’m still met with them at every corner. Great artists tell me that they are too. Failure is inevitable. We are told the word ‘no’ time and time again for entirely different reasons. I could have taken no for an answer and not persevered, and I could have not kept pushing myself to keep going. But then I would not be here today with even bigger dreams to follow. You can’t let your ethnicity, the colour of your skin, your hair, weight, accent, nationality or lack of fluency in English get in the way. Your bold steps and determination help create a new narrative according to your own terms. You add your voice to the winds of change and unknowingly enable a paradigm shift. What was once thought as daring would eventually be considered normal. As I like to say, do not leave it to luck. Protect your culture and your heritage. Be curious about the world. It's full of extraordinary people and cultures. Explore to your heart's content! - Pablo Ganguli

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The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. - Thomas Szasz 📸 Matthew Stone

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This body is not me; I am not caught in this body, I am life without boundaries, I have never been born and I have never died. Over there the wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies All manifests from the basis of consciousness. Since beginningless time I have always been free. Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out. Birth and death are only a game of hide-and-seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave good-bye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before. We shall always be meeting again at the true source, Always meeting again on the myriad paths of life. - Thích Nhất Hạnh 📸 HORST LUZ

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Her family called her Twinkle. In the dry desert brush of Rajasthan where her body was found, blood spattering her tiny legs and brown school uniform and a belt fastened around her neck, she lay among scattered toffee wrappers.

Her family could barely utter the words to describe what happened to the six-year-old. “If you saw her body, you will never sleep again,” said her grandfather Mahvir Meena.

Over the past week, a wave of anger and repulsion has enveloped India in response to the gang rape and murder of a 27-year-old vet in Hyderabad as she made her way home from work last Wednesday. The four men who allegedly carried out the attack deliberately deflated her scooter tyres, then waited. After offering her help, they allegedly dragged her to isolated scrubland by the side of the road, raped her, asphyxiated her and then dumped her body in a motorway underpass, before dousing it with kerosene and setting it alight. The four suspects were controversially shot dead by police on Friday.

Yet while the horrific crime has prompted hundreds to take to the streets, and calls for lynching and hanging in parliament, it was far from an isolated incident. According to statistics, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. -
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Rajasthan for The Guardian

A 23-year-old rape victim who was set on fire by a gang of men, which included her alleged rapist, has died in a New Delhi hospital, the doctor treating her said.

The woman was on her way to board a train in Unnao district of northern Uttar Pradesh state to attend a court hearing on Thursday over her rape when she was doused with kerosene and set on fire, according to police.

The attack, the second major case of violence against women in the past two weeks, has sparked public outrage in India.

The woman died on Friday after suffering a cardiac arrest, said Dr Shalabh Kumar, head of the burns and plastic department at New Delhi’s Safdarjung hospital. “She was having 95% burns,” he said, adding that “toxic and hot fumes” had filled her lungs. - Reuters / The Guardian

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One of the biggest problems in the world today is loneliness. It is quite incredible. The planet is teeming with seven billion people, but people are lonely! If someone enjoys being alone, there is no problem at all. But most people are suffering because of it! They are going through serious psychological problems as a consequence. If you are lonely, it is because you have chosen to become an island unto yourself. It doesn’t have to be this way. “I am not responsible” makes you unwilling to get along with anyone—until you can’t even get along with yourself. It often comes to a point when you believe you are not even responsible for what is happening within yourself!
- Sadhguru 📸 @isthisreal

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One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.
- Khalil Gibran

Art by Lord Leighton

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Say to a blind man, you’re free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified, they do not know where to go, the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city, where memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there. - Jose Saramago

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You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates 📸 @brookedidonato

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Liberatum creative director Tomas Auksas meeting the Academy Award winning actor Michael Douglas at the HT India Leadership Summit in India tonight. Liberatum is delighted to be the creative partner of the summit again this year in New Delhi @hindustantimes @auksas @michaelkirkdouglas

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What is most characteristically human is not guaranteed to us by our species or by our culture but given only in potential. A spiritual master once expressed it this way: A person must work to become human. What is most distinctly human in us is something more than the role we play in society and more than the conditioning, whether for good or bad, of our culture. It is our essential Self, which is our point of contact with Infinite Spirit. This Spirit is not to be understood as a metaphysical assertion requiring belief, but as something we can experience for ourselves. What if you, as a human being, represent the final result of a process in which this Spirit has evolved better and better reflectors of itself? If the human being is the most evolved carrier of the Creative Spirit – possessing conscious love, will, and creativity – then our humanity is the degree to which this physical and spiritual vehicle, and particularly our nervous system, can reflect or manifest Spirit. That which is most sacred in us, that which is deeper than our individual personality, is our connection to this Spirit, this Creative Power.
Whereas conventional religious belief has the tendency to anthropomorphize God/Spirit, this process consists of the human being becoming qualified by the attributes of God. It could be called the „sanctification“ of the human being. Our human nature is realized through the understanding and awareness that the essential human Self is a reflection of Spirit. To become truly human is to attain a tangible awareness of Spirit, to realize oneself as a reflection of Spirit, or God. The education of the Soul is the Great Work. The beginning of this Work consists of awakening a transcending awareness...
― Kabir Edmund Helminski 📸 @gleesonpaulino

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Why are young people today so obsessed with famous people? Especially those who are famous for no reason whatsoever. What they wear, how they live, who they date, where they eat. Why can't we use our valuable time being curious about extraordinary people who are living seemingly ordinary lives because they are not surrounded by photographers and media? And more importantly, why aren't we compelled to help them? So many incredible and good people out there who need your help. Enough spending time looking at fashion magazines, photos of the super rich having gorgeous holidays and Instagram accounts of famous people to get a glimpse of their private life. It doesn't matter. All this admiration for people with millions of followers. Ludicrous really. But helping someone even in a small way can change his entire life. Peaceful Culture. Let's become proactive and productive. Not hide behind Twitter and Facebook commenting on politics but let's go out and change this world by helping those who really really really need help. Even a dollar is helpful to them. Even a book. A bottle of water. There are such incredible photographers around the world and there is an abundance of beauty to marvel at. Be curious about people out there. Celebrate differences and diversity because all these different colours make the world more joyous. And far more interesting. - LIBERATUM 📸 @viniciusterranova

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One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent? “When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions,” says Bogre Udell. “Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?” Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.

Many of the world's most remote languages are in danger of disappearing. - NINA STROCHLIC @natgeo 📸 @jimmy.nelson.official

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It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent. - Madeleine Albright 📸 The Hand. Canosa di Puglia, Procession of the Desolate, choir of 360 women. © Rocco Scattino. Single Image Finalist, LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2018.

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Meet Neetu. A beautiful and intelligent 27 year lady from India. After surviving a gruesome acid attack, she runs a cafeteria today. It is located in Agra with a rather uplifting name. The ‘Sheroes Hangout’. She works there with other survivors and together they raise awareness of crimes of this nature. They consider themselves as survivors, not victims. 📸 @silvia.txs

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There is so much talk of peace and love everywhere. Yet we have racism thriving in every corner of society. Classism is not uncommon either in large communities. Women still don't receive equal pay in most industries. Gay people get continuously harassed and bullied by heterosexuals. Transgender people are ridiculed and in some cases burnt alive. Homeless children, millions of them, with nobody to love them. Yet the majority of newly married couples prefer to have their own babies instead of adopting them. Couples fighting everyday over little things and soon after divorcing because their dream of a paradise did not manifest in their marriage. People of color facing discrimination and feeling unappreciated. Those in high echelons of society still choosing people they know and incompetent friends over merit and people with ability. The media gives preferential treatment to rich, powerful and famous people over ordinary men and women. So ask yourself: are we willing to change? - LIBERATUM 📸 @mersonee

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But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. - Ta-Nehisi Coates 📸 Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher

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The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time. - Thích Nhất Hạnh 📸 Saukhiang Chau

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SEXUAL RACISM

For me, Robert Mapplethorpe's racism was the toughest aspect of his personality. Where did it come from? Certainly growing up in the US in the 50s would have given him plenty of exposure to it. He found the n word sexually stimulating, and used it liberally in relation to his lovers and models. It was as if he didn’t see them as people but as objects – something that’s obvious in his photographs. I can’t look at the pictures without reflecting on the backstory, which is not a pretty one. Milton Moore (Man in Polyester Suit) was perhaps the great love of his life, but he considered him a “primitive.” Moore once said, “I think he saw me like a monkey in a zoo.” - Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe biographer .

The perfection sought by Mapplethorpe was inherently a sadistic enterprise. This motivation mixed with the race of his models culminated in an almost anthropological obsession with black male genitals. Elevating beauty is less the goal than displaying the sexual differences between races. Scientific racism is never far from sexual racism, and photography has at times been a dark art in service to both. .

No image speaks to this point about objectification better than one of Mapplethorpe’s most famous and certainly most infamous images: Man in Polyester Suit. The model was Milton Moore, wearing a tight suit with his long black uncircumcised penis dangling out the zipper like an elephant’s trunk. His face is not in the frame, so we only see his body in fragments. .

Writer Edmund White, in defense of Mapplethorpe, argues that many of his models, including Moore, were in fact his lovers, and Moore in particular requested that his face and penis not appear in the same image. However, having sex with black men does not exclude a white man from racism, and in the case of Mapplethorpe, black men were not only a fetish but racism itself. - Charles Stephens

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