All posts filed under: social justice/interconnections

Staring at humans: Les Zoos Humains, exhibition in Liège

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The exhibition  Zoo Humains. L’invention du sauvage  (Human Zoos. The invention of the savage) ran from September 2016 til the end of February 2017. We visited a week before it closed. It was in La Cité Miroir in Liège, a nicely renovated building, that used to house a swimming pool. Before our visit to the exhibition, we had lunch at Como en Casa, a nice vegetarian restaurant, and we also visited the GoVeg Vegan shop. The website of the exhibition Zoos Humains, gave this introduction (my translation from French): “One isn’t born racist, one becomes racist  For more than five centuries, the industry of human exhibitions fascinated more than 1 billion 400 million visitors and put on display between 30.000 en 35.000 figurantes in spectacle shows, all around the world. These spectacles, being the first visual contact between cultures, have drawn a divide and a hierarchy between the so called “civilised” and the “savages” in the minds of westerners. At Zoos Humains, visitors learn how racist prejudices became installed during the times of the great …

Inspired by the Intersectionality Conference at VegFest, London

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A couple of weeks ago, at the end of October 2016, we went to VegFest in London. This was a two day event at the Olympia Conference center, on Hammersmith Road (east London). It is not a free festival: we bought tickets in advance which were only £9 per person (buy one, get one half price). Tickets at the door were £15. We were especially interested in the Intersectionality Conference on Sunday. Arriving at the opening time of 11AM on Saturday, it became immediately clear that this is huge event! We found a long queue going round the block to get to the entrance at the west side of Olympia. We made good progress though, and after about only 10 minutes of queuing, scanning of our tickets and a security check, we could enter the venue. There were two large halls on the first floor, with dozens of stalls. The lectures were in the auditorium and conference rooms on the second floor, where there were also stalls from several NGO’s. The Olympia is a really well known venue, where …