Works That Work Issue 5

The Edges of Legality

The Mona Lisa (or La Gioconda) by Leonardo da Vinci is probably the best-known, most visited, most writtenabout and most parodied work of art in the world. The painting is said to be ‘priceless’, but based on its insurance value some estimate it to be worth over €2 billion.

The Mona Lisa is also the most reproduced painting in the Chinese village of Dafen, which produces copies of iconic art for consumers across the world. German photographer Michael Wolf photographed Dafen art workers for his project Real Fake Art. A book of his photos was published in 2011. The Mona Lisa in the photo sells for €49 (US$53).

The Real Fake Art book retails for €40.20 (US$42.20).

We commissioned art workers at the Dafen Oil Painting Village to paint Michael Wolf’s photo via the website dafenvillage.cn. The 41 × 51 cm (16 × 20 in) oil painting cost €452 (US$474), including UPS shipping from China to the Netherlands.

We exchanged eight emails with an administrator named Henry who sent photos of the painting during the process for approval. Despite our enquiries, the art worker remained anonymous.

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Creativity often challenges generally accepted assumptions and standards. New ideas, after all, are new because they deviate from the norm, flout convention and break rules. But are there rules that shouldn’t be broken, and if so, who decides which ones? In olden times explorers set out to discover new worlds, new possibilities and new resources. Today we debate whether they were heroes and pioneers or opportunistic invaders who despoiled virgin territories, subjugated native civilisations and destroyed historic cultures. This issue of Works That Work explores creativity on the edge of legality and beyond. Faced with complex challenges, people worldwide try to change their fortunes by innovations that are judged differently in different places and different periods. We look at how international borders are enforced and also broken, what defines the idea of original or fake, how our lives are shaped by our belief in the authenticity of official documents, how prisoners make their lives more bearable by making imaginative inventions from contraband, and how creating your own currency can be a rewarding way to protect local areas.

As always, these ideas were collected, researched and documented so that they can help us to improve our lives or the lives of others. — Peter BiĞak

Works That Work, Issue 5, Spring 2015 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Printing: Ando Den Haag Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in Lava and Neutral from Typotheque Special thanks to Johanna Biľak and Anne Miltenburg Printed on certified, environ­ mentally friendly papers: MultiDesign Original 100 g/m2, Magno Star 115 g/m2 and MultiDesign Original 240 g/m2 (cover).

Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online at worksthatwork.com/subscribe Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it.

Contributors this issue: Ahmed Al Majid, journalist, Riyadh; Renoir Amba, dental surgeon, Manila; Tanya Busse, artist, Tromsø; Nicoló Degiorgis, photographer, Bolzano; Fernando Del Berro, photographer, Barcelona; Oľga Džupinková, radio presenter, Bratislava; Barbara Eldredge, writer, New York; Jonah Goodman, writer, Berlin; Peter Guest, journalist, London; Peter Gugerell, photographer, Vienna; Tomáš Halász, photographer, Bratislava; Vanessa Harden, designer, London; IOCOSE, art collective; Ivan Krupchik, photographer, Moscow; Joar Nango, artist, Tromsø; Anne Quito, writer, New York; Temporary Services, art collective; Luca Zanetti, photographer, Zurich.

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Become a patron, and in return get copies of the magazine, a small magazine-­related present, your name printed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank-you note.

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In this issue:

Artefacts

by Jonah Goodman 4

Bending Borders

8

Text by Oľga Džupinková, photography by Tomáš Halász

The following people helped to make Issue 5: Jo De Baerdemaeker Brian Scott/Boon Jason Dilworth Konrad Glogowski Wooseok Jang Frith Kerr, Studio Frith Jay Rutherford Clodagh Twomey Typefounding Typeheaven Dana Wooley Made and printed in the Netherlands

Cultivating Clandestine Design

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by Barbara Eldredge

Copyright © Typotheque 2015 All rights reserved.

If you’d like to reproduce anything from this magazine, please ask first.

This publication includes descriptions of activities that may be illegal, and in no way intends to condone or encourage such activities.

Still, some of them are great ideas, especially the toy anti-governmental protests on page 7. Not to mention stories which didn't fit this issue, such as using pumpkins as motorcycle helmets. Sharing of this magazine is definitely condoned and encouraged.

Front cover: Photo by Michael Wolf taken in the Dafen Oil Painting Village, oil­-painted by an anonymous Dafen Village art worker.

Makeshift Wineries in Norway

by Joar Nango & Tanya Busse

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The Reality of the Fake 26

Italy’s Hidden Mosques 52

by Anne Quito

Photography by Nicoló Degiorgis, text by Jonah Goodman

The Forgery Market

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Text by Anne Quito, photography by Renoir Amba

A Pound for a Pound

62

by Peter Guest

Underwater Underworld

68

by Luca Zanetti

Innovation Behind Bars

42

by Jonah Goodman

Underground Art in Saudi Arabia

by Ahmed Al Majid

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4

Artefacts Ideas given shape in ingenious ways by people across the world in order to solve problems big and small.

Collected by Jonah Goodman

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National Eagle Repository USA The natural habitat of the bald eagle stretches from Alaska to Mexico, but any bald eagle that dies anywhere in the USA ends up just outside Denver, Colorado. Killing a bald eagle, the national animal of the USA, was made illegal by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which also outlawed possession of dead eagles or eagle parts. This had unintended consequences for Native Americans, making some of their traditional practices illegal and violating their constitutional right to religious freedom. Not until the early 1970s was a solution found. Based at a former chemical weapons facility, the National Eagle Repository receives around 2,000 dead eagles every year, most of them victims of electrocution by power lines or collisions with cars. Federal conservation agents double-bag, freeze, then FedEx the corpses to Colorado, where they’re sorted and stored so that members of the 566 recognised Native American tribes can apply for parts in writing, joining over 6,000 applicants on a two-year waiting list.

Photo by Craig F. Walker / The Denver Post

Artefacts

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Mule Women Morocco

Seat Belt Hacks China

The border crossing from Beni Enzar, Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Melilla opens at 7am, four days a week. When it does, hundreds of elderly women flood across, rushing towards parked vans. Each will take a single bale of cloth or toiletries and carry it 400 m back into Morocco. At this border, duty fees do not apply to personal, hand-carried luggage, so traders pay people €3 to €10 (US$2.60–8.80) per bale to carry goods across, and pack as much as they physically can into each 60 kg to 90 kg (132–198 lb) load. The job, however, can only be done by local residents, who don’t need visas to cross over and back. Most of these porteadoras or ‘mule women’ are widows or divorcees, unskilled and uneducated, with no other source of income. About €265 million (US$300 million) in goods crosses the border duty-free every year, according to the New York Times. Spanish officials told the paper in 2014 that they would close this loophole if it wasn’t the only means of subsistence for these women. Photo: Fernando del Berro

Seat belts have been mandatory in Chinese cars since 2004, but over a decade later, many drivers and most passengers in the world’s biggest auto market still refuse to wear them, despite point penalties and 50 yuan (€7 or US$8) fines.

Drivers say that seat belts can get sweaty in a car without air conditioning, and according to a 2010 study in Nanjing and Zhoushan, people dislike the inconvenience of fastening and unfastening the strap. Whatever their reasons, drivers go to ingenious lengths to avoid the regulation. A clip that went viral in July 2013 showed a man stopped by police for wearing a black satchel with a wide strap resembling a belt while sitting on top of the real seat belt, which was fastened to keep the car’s safety buzzers quiet. T-shirts with seat belts printed on them can be bought online, but more widespread are beltless buckles which trick the car into thinking the occupants are safe. They come in designs ranging from Disney characters to sports cars, the beer-opener buckle perhaps the most unnerving of them. Photo: Peter Biľak

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WTW #5

Fake Pharaoh Egypt

Modesty Wigs USA

English art restorer, former cavalry officer and prolific smuggler Jonathan Tokeley-Parry was responsible for the theft of more than 3,000 antiquities from Egypt in the early 1990s.

His most audacious consignment was a 3,400-year-old stone head of Amenhotep III, bought from graverobbers near Cairo.

Returning to his hotel room, Tokeley-Parry rigged up his ensuite bathroom as a workshop, filling in missing sections of the statue with paste, then dipping it in liquid plastic. Once it was dry, he painted it in bright colours with crude, broad brushstrokes so that it looked like a cheap souvenir version of itself.

With a fake receipt for its purchase, he took the head through Cairo airport to Zurich, then on to the UK, where he removed its mask with acetone and used tea bags and an oven to forge papers testifying to its provenance. It eventually sold in the USA for $1.2 million (€1.05 million) in 1993. Tokeley-Parry went to prison in 1997, and the head went back to Egypt in 2008.

Photo: Press Association Archive

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish modesty laws require that married women keep all of their hair covered whenever they leave the home. Paradoxically, many of them choose to do it with a sheitel or wig. In New York a decent sheitel costs between $1,300 and $4,000 (€1,150–3,530), but is mostly worn for special occasions, so ultra-Orthodox Jewish women also keep an array of scarves, bag-like snoods, and convenient ‘band falls’, hairband-wig composites that are easily slipped on. Jewish wives have been covering their hair for over 1,750 years, but the apparent contradictions of wearing beautiful wigs to appear modest have provoked debate since at least the 16th century. Today, some rabbis rule that both a wig and a hat are necessary, while others argue that a wig made from the wearer’s own hair is perfectly acceptable. One of the more convincing justifications for wearing just a wig comes from the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who said that a woman wearing a hat might be tempted to remove it, but nobody would take off a wig in public. Photo courtesy of fridmanhair.com

Artefacts

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Toy Protest Russia

The Kugelmugel Austria

In January 2012, disgruntled citizens of Barnaul, Siberia took to the streets to demonstrate against disputed elections and the continued hegemony of President Vladimir Putin. Public meetings in Russia are illegal without official permission, however, and Barnaul’s protestors had been repeatedly denied permission for their rally. Pushing the law to its limits, they copied a tactic that had been used one month earlier, 3,000 km (1,860 mi) away in the town of Apatity, Murmansk. Forbidden to demonstrate themselves, they placed their placards in the hands of toys. Arrayed in the snow outside the town hall, little plastic dinosaurs stood with Kinder Surprise figurines, Lego men, and a cuddly plush badger, all carrying messages like ‘A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin’. To the amusement of onlookers, police with clipboards took notes on each tiny dissident. Less amusingly, prosecutors ruled in February that the toys were not allowed to hold public meetings. ‘Toys,’ according to the official statement, ‘especially imported toys, are not only not citizens of Russia, they are not even people.’

Photo: Ivan Krupchik

Under a roller coaster in the middle of a Viennese public park, surrounded by barbed wire, scaffolding, and signposts, stands the Kugelmugel Republic, a spherical, orange autonomous state, eight metres across. Originally built in 1971 in the Austrian countryside near Katzelsdorf, Edwin Lipburger’s Kugelmugel (or ‘ball bump’) was built without a construction permit, Lipburger claiming it to be a ‘constant curve in twodimensional space, not covered by the Lower Austrian Building Code’. The government disagreed, sent Lipburger to prison for ten days in 1979, and relocated the Kugelmugel to Vienna’s Prater Park. There in 1984 among the amusement rides and behind the planetarium, Lipburger declared himself president of the new Kugelmugel Republic and began illegally printing his own stamps. Though he was sentenced to prison yet again, public sympathy won him a pardon from Austrian president Rudolf Kirchschläger. Now the only address in Kugelmugel, 1 Anti-Fascism Square, stands empty, although Lipburger, 87, remains president-in-exile over more than 600 self-declared, non-resident citizens. Photo: Peter Gugerell

BENDING

The oldest residents of the village VeÄžkĂŠ Slemence have lived in four different countries without ever leaving their homes.

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Oľga Džupinková is a Slovak radio presenter born close to the Slovak–Ukrainian border.

Tomáš Halász is a Slovak photojournalist specialising in public awareness campaigns for NGOs.

BORDERS

Historically, both Slovakia and Ukraine belonged to the same larger states, and family, business and historical ties naturally spanned the border between them. But when Czechoslovakia ceded the Subcarpathian Rus to the Soviet Union in 1946, these ties were disrupted by the new path of the strictly controlled Soviet–Czechoslovak border.

Now that Slovakia is part of the European Union’s Schengen Area, the border is even more tightly controlled.

At the beginning of 1945 Slemence was a tiny, largely Hungarian-speaking village in the Subcarpathia region of Czechoslovakia. Originally part of Hungary, it had been ceded to Czecho­ slovakia, then to Hungary, then back to Czechoslovakia (the present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia). And once again in faraway Moscow, in the aftermath of the Second World War, politicians with pencils were redrawing the borders between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, and the new border cut straight through Slemence. At first it ran through the village cemetery. Then it was redrawn through a street on what is today the Ukrainian side. When it was redrawn for the third and final time, locals say, a young girl engaged to be married was on the west side of the village showing her wedding

dress to her parents. When she went to go home she found herself separated from her fiancé by a pencil stroke, unable to return without a visa.

Whether or not that legend is true, it is certain that the new 6 m (20 ft) wall that separated Veľké Slemence (Greater Slemence), Slovakia on the west from Mali Selmentsi (Lesser Selmentsi), Ukraine on the east also separated people from their friends, relatives, fields and workplaces.

Families, however, are not as easy to divide with the stroke of a pencil, and people on both sides of the line found ways to stay in contact, shifting the border, as it were, to suit their own needs.

Jozef from the Slovak side remembers: ‘We didn’t have walkie-talkies or mobile phones in those days, so we used to go up to the wall and yell messages to each other.’ His neighbour Eva

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The pedestrian border crossing between Veľké Slemence (Slovakia) and Mali Selmentsi (Ukraine). The traffic consists almost exclusively of Slovaks in search of cheap cigarettes, alcohol and clothes.

WTW #5

Unlike Slovaks, Ukrainians cannot cross the border without going through the costly and time-consuming process of obtaining a visa.

agrees. ‘If someone went up to the wall and wanted to talk with someone on the other side, they’d be reported and taken to jail. But when the soldiers left, people could yell to each other.

And when we couldn’t speak there, we sang songs,’ she adds. ‘Most often when somebody died, but also when there was going to be a wedding.’ Judita from the Ukrainian side tells a similar story. ‘We couldn’t go up to the wall. The police would have taken us away to the station.

They took my son once. He was there with some friends on his motorcycle and the police took them away.’

Beyond Slemence the 97 km (60 mi) border runs through wooded and mountainous areas where building a wall was impractical and main­ taining a constant patrol was more difficult.

‘People there came up with a lot of things’, says Jozef. ‘For example, they would write a note and tuck it under a chicken’s wing. The chicken would cross the border and return afterwards.’

Dogs and cats also crossed the border on a

regular basis, sometimes returning and sometimes not.

Animals, however, were not the only ones who managed to pass into the Soviet Union and back. ‘When they transported bales of hay across the border, the guards had a 2 m (6 ft) pole with a sharp, pointed end,’ says Jozef. ‘They would poke through the bales to see if there were people inside trying to visit their relatives.

And young people used to cross over illegally on holidays, or even for parties.’ Eva recalls her own experiences. ‘The other girls and I used to go up and shout to the soldiers in Russian. They were all Russians, and we learned Russian in school,’ she says. ‘They wanted cigarettes, so we used to take them cigarettes every Sunday. They would do anything for beer and cigarettes. We used to go to parties on the other side, and the soldiers would let us pass. Illegally. If anyone had found out, they’d have been in big trouble, but we weren’t afraid because the father of one of the girls was a policeman.’

Bending Borders

Petrol is nearly twice as expensive in Slovakia as in Ukraine, making Ukrainian prices attractive. Less attractive are the lines at the border, which are long in spite of the fact that Slovaks can fill up only once a week without paying import taxes. Drivers come up with ingenious

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ways to make the most of each trip, including tilting the car to get every last drop into the tank.

Overleaf: The Slovak–Ukrainian border is just 97 km (60 mi) long, but now that Slovakia is an EU member state, border

A breakthrough came in 2005 when visa requirements were relaxed (a state that lasted until 2007 when Slovakia joined the EU). In Slemence, pedestrians and cyclists could finally cross over to visit friends and family, and in nearby Ubľa, Slovak motorists could cross over to Malyi Bereznyi to buy cheap cigarettes, alcohol and petrol. ‘I said I wasn’t going to come here,’ says Peter, a 27-year-old Slovak filling his tank just across the border, ‘but petrol is really expensive on our side. I work in Bratislava, and I save 20 or 30 euros (US$23–34) by filling up here.’ Demand was so high that cars waited in line at the border as long as 11 hours, and limits had to be imposed: four tanks of petrol per month, and one litre of alcohol and two packs of cigarettes per person. Not all border traffic is legal, however, and the ever-widening economic disparity between the wealth of the EU and the relative poverty of the former Soviet bloc make black-market activity attractive to the lords of organised crime on both sides, as well as to

security is more than just a national concern, so the border control uses high-tech gear including georadar units and thermal cameras to prevent intrusion, while smugglers and human traffickers continuously seek exploitable holes in the system.

those desperate to earn a living wage at any cost.

The smugglers of today are just as ingenious as the villagers of days past at bypassing border controls, so the police and border guards strive to be even more ingenious, locked in a game of technical cat-and-mouse with criminals who stand to reap enormous profits by moving goods and refugees, especially now that the border between Ukraine and Slovakia is also the border between Ukraine and the European Union’s Schengen Area.

In the year 2013 alone, police and customs officials seized 4,355,500 black-market cigarettes with a total value of over €540,000 (US$613,000) just in this area. In many cases the goods were transported using common, low-tech methods, hidden in cars (inside doors, air filters or spare tyres), in trains, or under the clothing of smugglers walking through the woods. ‘They even used the rivers,’ says Jozef.

‘They flow our direction from Ukraine, so they used to put the cigarettes in plastic bags so they

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Scanning a cargo truck at the Slovak– Ukrainian border crossing in Výšné Nemecké. Last year the Slovak customs authority confiscated more than 4.5

WTW #5

million illegal cigarettes that had made it past its Ukrainian counterpart.

Impounded goods included Jin Ling cigarettes; despite its Chinese name, the

wouldn’t get wet, and someone was waiting for the packages on our side.’ Those arrangements were probably made with higher-tech help from the mobile phones that didn’t exist in Jozef’s youth: the ready availability of cheap SIM cards that can be used for a day or an hour and then thrown away keeps the smugglers’ calls virtually immune from police monitoring.

The police, determined to stay a step ahead, follow the latest developments in security technology, adapting techniques from around the globe to the unique conditions of this border territory. The 900 police officers, 350 customs officials and 80 dogs who patrol the territory in all-terrain vehicles, scooters, three-wheelers, special belt vehicles and snowmobiles are complemented by a team that monitors the area remotely using a network of high-tech sensors. This system, originally developed to protect oil and gas pipelines, utilises highly sensitive pressure detectors, motion detectors and microphones to identify any areas where

brand is produced in Kaliningrad, Russia exclusively for illegal export and sales.

Photo: Archive of Border Police

unusual activity is taking place. The remote team can then monitor that area using the chain of CCTV cameras that provides both visible-light and infrared surveillance of the entire length of the border.

The smugglers’ efforts are not limited to operations above ground, however, and one of their greatest technical triumphs to date took place deep underground some 20 km (12 mi) to the northeast where they built a tunnel 1 m (3 ft) in diameter that stretched 700 m (2,290 ft) from the basement of a house in Uzhhorod, Ukraine to an industrial building near Výšné Nemecké, Slovakia. A 16-car train capable of transporting anything from cartons of cigarettes to illegal immigrants travelled 6 m (20 ft) below the surface through this modern, professionally constructed tunnel complete with reinforced walls and electrical power. When Slovak and Ukrainian customs officials carried out simultaneous raids at both ends of the tunnel, the Slovak force found 13,100 cartons of cigarettes

Bending Borders

Six metres (20 ft) underground, a 700 m (2,290 ft) secret tunnel was dug under the Slovak–Ukrainian border

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to smuggle goods and possibly also people. The sophisticated tunnel was built using mining techniques and had

representing €350,000 (US$397,000) in evaded taxes alone. The Ukrainian force found… …nothing. Knowing, however, that the tunnel had to lead to the Uzhhorod house, they continued their search until they finally uncovered the switch that rolled back the false wall that masked the entrance.

Police officials estimate that the tunnel operated undetected for at least a year, costing the EU as much as €50 million (US$57 million) in unpaid import taxes. Small wonder then, that the budget allocated to patrolling this tiny strip of land has room for state-of-the-art technology.

When ordinary ground-penetrating radar (GPR) systems proved to be ineffective at penetrating the moist, clayey loess that makes up much of the region’s soil, the search for technology that would detect underground intrusion led farther afield: to Mars. The GPR systems developed in the 1990s for the Mars rovers, which have a range of up to 200 m (656 ft), have been adapted for use along the border, where even in the

a train consisting of 16 wagons and a battery-powered engine. Photo: Archive of Border Police

unfavourable conditions of the Subcarpathian soil, they can peer 50 m (164 ft) into the ground.

The system has been so effective that the Slovak border patrol was invited to demonstrate the technology at the US–Mexico border near El Paso, Texas. In a test to see whether they could locate three tunnels already known to authorities, they actually located a fourth which hadn’t yet been discovered.

The battle between maintaining the integrity of the border and breaching it is far from over, and who will win, and how, is impossible to predict. All that can be said with certainty is that as long as there are political, financial, cultural or personal reasons to make the attempt, people on both sides will continue to find innovative ways to use whatever means are available to reach their goals. ☐

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CULTIVATING CLANDESTINE DESIGN Barbara Eldredge is a design writer and researcher based in New York.

She tends a garden of small lemon trees in the cabinet beneath her kitchen sink.

Photos courtesy of Vanessa Harden.

6111 does not look like a secret agent. She looks like a perfectly normal 30-something, other than the labret piercing marking her as a member of the creative caste. But soon after moving to London several years ago, this young designer found herself drawn into the city’s seedy nightlife. Within weeks, she’d been recruited into a gang of trowel-wielding guerrilla gardeners, and if they are the James Bonds of horticulture, she is their gadget-making Q. It’s technically illegal to grow plants on property that doesn’t belong to you, but in the 1970s activists in New York began to reshape the urban landscape without permission, turning abandoned lots into gardens and lobbing ‘seed bombs’ over neglected fences. Thirty years later the movement found a London champion in

the person of Richard Reynolds, an outspoken advertising consultant with a passion for planting and growing the ranks.

Vanessa Harden joined Reynolds’ group in 2008, receiving the guerrilla troop number 6111.

‘I’d garden on my way to school,’ she recalled recently. ‘I found myself going to university carrying a shovel and dirt with me. And I thought, “there’s got to be a way to disguise these things, to make them chic.”’ At the time, the Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibition about Cold War design, and her idea for covert gardening tools began to take root. Her collection The Subversive Gardener is a series of high-tech gardening gadgets concealed inside elegant everyday objects.

One cloudy London day, Reynolds carried a sleek leather briefcase up onto a grassy bit of park across the river from Parliament. He put the bag down on a patch of exposed dirt, opened it, and appeared to root around inside it. When he closed the bag and moved on, a 10 cm (4 in) round hole had been bored into the earth. Moments later, Harden set a fashionable red

handbag on top of the hole, pressed a silver button near the strap, and picked up the bag to reveal a newly planted pansy.

Closer inspection of both bags would reveal Harden’s ingenious gadgetry. She’d retrofitted the briefcase with a strong internal frame, a hidden hand auger, and a hole in the bottom covered by a retractable flap. Turning the auger’s

wooden handle causes its screw-like blade to drill down and make a perfectly sized hole. The red bag contains a small conveyor belt capable of holding three or four seedlings in plantable paper pots. Pressing the button activates its motor, depositing a plant through a hole in the bottom of the bag.

Harden’s gardening arsenal includes a variety of seed pills, seed-filled gel capsules that can be dropped discreetly wherever they might have a chance to germinate. It also includes a walking stick that not only doubles as a dibble, but also dispenses seed pills through its tip.

Another of Harden’s augmented objects is a men’s Oxford shoe that dispenses a ‘seed bullet’ with every step. A small bullet reservoir is strapped to the user’s leg just above the calf, feeding the seeds into a clear tube extending down to the dispenser at the shoe’s heel. When the heel makes contact with the ground a lever advances a ratcheted feed system that releases a bullet.

The last of Harden’s initial series looks like a rather nice camera with a zoom lens, but this ‘Precision Bombing Device’ was created entirely from scratch using rapid prototyping and a lathe. The device’s gun mechanism can shoot seed bullets up to 15 m (49 ft), enough to clear a fence or set of train tracks. The camera even has a spirit level to help users aim at precisely the right angle to hit their targets.

Viewed together, the objects conjure up an imaginative world of secret agents with cleverly disguised gear carrying out clandestine horticultural operations. In Harden’s work, however, nothing is quite what it seems.

Rather than conceal covert gardening, these tools were made to have the exact opposite effect. At the highest level, the objects from The Subversive Gardener are storytelling devices, meant to bring attention to the guerrilla movement and attract the interest of a wider range of people.

Harden admits, ‘I realised that my project is really about the interaction between objects and people, the way that you instantly relate to something that you know how to use. Like the camera. It’s using the design language of one thing for an entirely different purpose.’

By creating a tangible, humorous parallel between illegal gardening and James Bond-style espionage, Harden opens up average individuals to the idea of guerrilla gardening in their own communities. The Subversive Gardener makes it appealing to imagine oneself in the role of the gardener spy.

In the years since she first unveiled the objects, Harden has received an enthusiastic reaction. ‘It’s gotten so many people wanting to participate that I had to evolve the project and develop things that people could make themselves,’ she explained.

Harden created ‘seed pills’, vegetable capsules filled with compost and seed. They’re something that a kid could easily make and plant around the neighbourhood, all while feeling like a very cool secret agent.

Today, Harden gives talks and runs workshops on subversive gardening, working with diverse groups to create new tools that cheekily incorporate current trends.

She’s currently collaborating with a group in Brixton on a new series of subversive objects that incorporate the design vernacular of hip-hop. Harden conceded, ‘James Bond is cool to me, but a 19-year-old is like, really?’ ☐

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WTW #5

Underground in more than one sense of the word, DIY wine making has a long tradition in Norwegian culture. Tanya Busse and Joar Nango’s Vestavin documents how improvised equip­ ment turns a multitude of locally available produce into unique wines in basements, bus stations and other unlikely places.

Norway is not a place typically associated with wine production. This is not due to the climate, as the Gulf Stream keeps much of Norway’s fertile western coast free of ice and snow throughout the year. Rather, decades of government efforts to control alcohol consumption through strict regulation and extremely high taxation have driven domestic alcohol production underground and made DIY home wineries an intrinsic part of Norwegian life.

The products of these improvised operations are unique. Naturally, Norwegian grapes are influenced by the climate, soil and short growing season.

More importantly, however, Norwegian wines are made not only from grapes, but from all sorts of fruits, berries, saps, leaves, seaweeds and even flowers. This variegated small-scale production is part of the local tradition, and the wines are generally not intended for sale, but for home consumption.

MAKESHIFT WINERIES IN NORWAY

Joar Nango is a Sami-Norwegian artist and architect. He explores native identity issues through contradictions in contemporary architecture and the built environment. Tanya Busse is a Canadian artist currently living in Tromsø, Norway. Her projects are influenced by research-based art as well as visual anthropology.

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25 This tradition of making DIY wine from local resources is the subject of Vestavin (Wine of the West), a project of artists Tanya Busse and Joar Nango. It includes photos, essays, recipes and descriptions of production methods, as well as ideas for managing distribution and organising public tastings.

The government-owned Vinmonopolet (Wine Monopoly) stores are the only places to buy wines and spirits legally in Norway. Excise taxes levied on alcohol, containers and packaging combined with 25% VAT can quadruple the retail price of a bottle of wine.

Busse and Nango, aware that not every­ one has a cellar to work in, sought out other places that provided the necessary conditions for successful fermentation: darkness, a temperature appropriate to the type of wine, and low oxygen levels. Surprisingly, a local library, an underground parking garage and the

back of a bus station were among the places ideally suited to the task, although the improvised fermentation stations needed to be cleverly camouflaged so that the yeast could do its job undisturbed.

Vestavin culminated in a public tasting, and people who gathered or

donated raw products were invited to a degustation featuring flavourful wines made from rowan berries, plums, blueberries, lingonberries, oak leaf and birch sap. Besides documenting an important part of Norwegian culture, the project serves as a symbol of folk ingenuity and a celebration of the DIY spirit. �

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In this tiny quiet suburb of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, an estimated 6,000 artists used to produce up to 60% of the total global volume of reproduction artworks until the 2012 economic

crisis changed the market, and workshops began to focus on creating original works for Chinese customers.

Photo: Antonio Pisacreta

THE REALITY OF THE FAKE Text by Anne Quito

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Modern technology and the commercialisation of art raise difficult questions. If someone takes a professional picture of a painting, who is the artist and whose is the art? And what if someone makes a professional painting of a photograph?

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‘A single painting is art. If you produce it in large quantities, it’s an industry,’ says 36-yearold artist-cum-factory-chief Wu Ruiqiu.

Six small paintings in Udine, Italy were intended to raise some big questions. Inspired in part by the way that typical stock photos grossly misrepresent artists and the artistic process, IOCOSE searched the archive of the well-known licensing agency Getty Images for pictures matching the keyword ‘artist’, and downloaded six thumbnails, complete with their serial numbers and watermarks. The group then sought painters to recreate the thumbnails as oil paintings.

They turned to Dafen Artist Village, a suburb of the coastal city of Shenzhen, China, widely known as the largest supplier of hand-painted canvases in the world, where a freshly painted Van Gogh can be had for as little as €26.50 (US$30). ‘The choice was made based on the price/speed/quality ratio. As you can see, it’s not that different from buying any other product or service,’ explains IOCOSE member Paolo Ruffino.

‘We found them via Google.’

The result, titled ‘A Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artist’, is a set of IOCOSE-commissioned oil painting copies of digital thumbnails of stock photos of assorted models posing as stereotypical painters. It is a convoluted collaboration of artists made thinkable only by this era of global electronic

communication, one which challenges the idea of authorship as we commonly understand it.

When each of the contributors had a critical role to play, but all are unknown to each other and most have never even met, who is the author, and whose is the image? Is it the photographer’s, the art director’s, the licensing agency’s, the painter’s or IOCOSE’s?

‘The responsibility for assembling the chain of workers and collaborators was ours from the beginning, but the question of whether we are the authors of the project is precisely the point here. We are the artists collecting the work of others and “moving it around”, if you like,’ says Ruffino. ‘We don’t even know the names of the models or of the painters involved.’

Those anonymous artists collaborating with IOCOSE from the other side of the world belong to the legion of painters that constitutes the world’s largest concentration of artists per capita. The more than 6,000 workers in the 4 sq. km (1.5 sq. mi) gated community supply 60% of the world’s oil paintings, according to China Daily. During the village’s founding years in the early 1990s, the American megastore Walmart placed an order for 55,000 reproductions in 45 days.

The Reality of the Fake

To create ‘A Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artist’, the art collective IOCOSE searched Getty Images, supplier of 80 million digital pictures, and selected six photos tagged with

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the keyword ‘artist’. They downloaded watermarked thumbnails of pictures that retail for €42–659 (US$45–699), then contacted Chinese art reproduction websites to negotiate prices and

To meet the high demand, studios had to streamline procedures fast. Some employ a factory-style assembly line where painters work on a section of a painting, then pass the canvas down to the next artist in the chain. Some studios specialise in a particular artist’s oeuvre or in a specific style. Techniques and best practices are codified and passed on to the new workers coming from one of the village’s art academies.

In her book, Van Gogh on Demand, art historian Winnie Wong distils the recipe for a Vincent Van Gogh classic after weeks of apprenticeship in Dafen with Zhao Xiaoyong, a painter who specialises in the works of the 19th-century Dutch artist:

delivery dates. The final oil paintings are for sale for €1,000 each (US$1,061), or €5,000 (US$5,304) for the whole series.

How to Paint Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (F. 457) Tack a blank canvas of the required size onto the drawing board.

Tape down a one-inch border around the canvas with masking tape. This leaves the necessary space to stretch the canvas onto wooden strainers later.

Tack up another Sunflowers painting from the shop for reference.

Mix quick-dry medium into the titanium white.

Prepare the palette with large amounts of lemon yellow, medium yellow, cadmium red orange and titanium white, smaller amounts of rose madder, burnt sienna, forest green, and cerulean blue.

Using leftover dirty paint anywhere in the yellow-to-red spectrum, sketch out the overall composition. Start with assigning

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the location of the vase’s opening, the edge of the table, and then outline the shape of the vase. Draw six ovals with smaller inner circles where the six round sunflower blossoms should be. Mark out the ovals of the other flower blossoms, and the dried leaves near the vase.

Paint the first layer of the background: using a ¼ in (0.6 cm) brush, lightly combine two dabs titanium white and one dab lemon yellow. Make sure not to mix the two pigments together too much, and to leave traces of pure pigment in the mixture.

Load this onto the brush. In a ‘井’-character pattern (that is, two horizontal lines followed by two vertical lines), fill in the background. Work lightly. Do not pull too hard or the effect of each thick brushstroke will be lost. Be sure that each brushstroke is visible. Be light and at ease. Do not grip the brush tightly. Remember to keep loading pure pigment onto the brush.

After the whole background is painted, use a ⅛ in (0.3 cm) brush to paint over the whole background again with the same two pigments and the ‘井’-character pattern, this time loading more paint onto the brush with every stroke. Make it brighter in the centre, darker at the edges of the painting.

Repeat the same two-layer process with the table, using long horizontal strokes. This time use equal amounts of lemon yellow and medium yellow on the ¼ in brush. Add in a few green strokes for depth.

Paint the upper part of the vase using medium yellow and cadmium red orange, mixing in some burnt sienna and rose where needed. Paint the lower part with lemon yellow, medium yellow, and white. Remember to paint the vase as a rounded volume.

With the same brush, pick up amounts of light yellow and medium yellow, fill in the large blossoms in very short strokes, turning each stroke towards the centre of the blossom.

Add darker yellows as necessary to round out the volume of the blossoms.

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Taking a palette knife, pick up equal amounts of two yellow pigments with the back tip of the knife. Dab or dot the paint in a circular pattern with light strokes pulling outward from the centre of each blossom. Progressively add darker yellows, orange, and sienna in order to round out each blossom. Work lightly and don’t scrape into the wet paint.

With the ⅛ in brush, paint in the blossom petals in profile.

Using a third ⅛ in brush, load with dark green pigment and freehand draw each leaf. Make it look natural, like a leaf.

Using the same brush, fill in the centre of each flower with strokes of green, sienna, and a dab of cerulean blue.

Using the same brush, but adding a trace of lemon yellow, paint in the stems.

Using the palette knife, dab white highlights on the vase, drag yellow highlights onto the green leaves, dab white highlights on buds. Using the ⅛ in brush with dark dirty paint on it, use the dirty paint on the palette and mix in dark green to get an off-black, then outline some of the vase, table, some leaves, and some blossoms.

Sign ‘Vincent’.

Hang to dry.

Repeat.

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According to Chinese copyright law, reproductions such as those produced in Dafen Artist Village are legal only if the original artist has been dead for more than 50 years. Authorities inves­ tigate and punish violations, but admit that illegal counter­ feits continue to abound.

The ability of Wong’s teacher, Zhao Xiaoyong, to replicate a Van Gogh in 30 minutes has been well documented. He claims to have sold 70,000 copies of Van Gogh’s paintings over his career, at prices ranging from 200 to 1,500 yuan (€28–211 or US$32–240).

Some scholars, including Wong, would like to divert the world’s attention from the copyist trade to a broader appreciation of the artists in the village who create original works of art.

But events such as the annual Dafen Copying Contest where hundreds of painters compete to create the best replica of a masterpiece only strengthen its position as the world’s copycat capital. The creation of the Dafen Intellectual Property Working Station and the practice of at least ostensible gallery inspections also attest to the problem of copyright violations.

Questions of copyright and ownership aside, however, Dafen poses deeper questions: what is art, and what is it worth? For a Van Gogh lover who can’t afford an original, is it better to own a good copy than nothing at all? Is it absurd to pay millions of dollars for a painting, and who decides which paintings are worth millions?

How much of a painting’s worth is in the image itself, and how much is branding? Particularly

in the case of Sunflowers, what is an original and what is a copy, when Van Gogh himself painted a number of versions using different colours (and Paul Gaugin painted Van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers)? If a darker background matches the living room better (all in a day’s work in Dafen), is it still a Van Gogh? What about a purple background? Is a photograph of a painting a truer copy than a painting? And since Dafen’s ‘painter workers’ are not working from actual originals, what about a painting of a photograph of a painting?

One thing is clear: as the IOCOSE exhibition demonstrates, an efficient production model—art made mechanical—results in low prices: downloading the original images from Getty, had they paid for the licences, would have cost more than the hand-painted portraits they commissioned. The same is true of the Van Gogh. Comparing the original work valued at millions of dollars at auction, the licensed digital photograph of the painting, and the replica from Dafen, the handmade oil painting from China is clearly the cheapest alternative. What you hang in your living room is up to you. ☐

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NYC-based design writer and researcher Anne Quito wrote a story on branding of South Sudan for the previous issue of WTW. For this issue she returned to her native Philippines to report on the widespread use of forged documents. Renoir Amba accompanied Anne on her visit to Recto and took these photographs. He runs one of the Philippines’ top dental clinics, and reads WTW in his spare time.

THE FORGERY MARKET In Manila there is a place where you can custom order forge­ries of nearly any official document you desire. You can get an Oxford diploma, a Canadian driving licence or an American MD and a prescription pad. It’s cheap and fast, although somewhat dangerous and, of course, illegal.

Her furtive voice is nearly lost in the cacophony of the nearby traffic. ‘Do you want it to say magna or summa cum laude?’ asks the short, stocky woman with the buzz cut. ‘Are you sure this is all you want? We can do anything.’ She gestures at a thin 3 × 2 ft (1 × 0.6 m) wooden placard that has been plastered edge-to-edge with an impressive assortment of official-looking papers. Though diplomas are the stock-in-trade here, transcripts, licences, passports, letters of endorsement, court papers, affidavits, seals, stamps, receipts, cheques, awards, badges, bank documents and identification cards of all sorts are also available on short order, the possibilities limited only by one’s imagination.

The prospects are as astounding as the array of papers. Who could I be? What could I be? For a moment, I consider a liquor permit, a pilot’s licence, or a Reuters press badge, and in an age of biometric scanners and genetic testing, it’s alluring to consider that one might still be able to design (or redesign) a functional identity with a Forged diplomas produced in the streets of Manila, Philippines. The author paid 400 Philippine pesos (€8.60 or US$9.00) for the ‘Hardvard’ diploma, and 300

few scraps of parchment and plastic.

In the end I settle on a diploma from Harvard University, a New York state driver’s licence, a Philippine birth certificate and a Pulitzer Prize.

‘Write the name you want printed here,’ she mutters, her words almost inaudible under the jeepney and pedestrian noise. As we finalise the deal, a small group of bystanders gathers around her like gadflies. She tries to shoo them off while dashing off a brief text on a battered mo­bile phone. ‘Meet me back here tomorrow, but you can pay me half now,’ she says, before taking the money and disappearing into the crowd.

I am in Manila, the Philippines, in a dubious and sometimes ominous district called Recto where one can order virtually any type of official document to spec. Named after Claro M. Recto, esteemed Philippine statesman and poet, the district commonly referred to as ‘Recto U’ sprang up adjacent to the capital city’s university belt in the 1960s, filling the demand for blackmarket term papers and fake report cards. The

pesos (€6.45 or US$6.80) for the Pulitzer Prize, plus 150 pesos (€3.25 or US$3.40) for the research fee, since no original was supplied. The documents were

shipped to the Netherlands, where they were framed at the local art store for €192 (US$200).

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Claro M. Recto Avenue is one of the principal commercial roads in north central Manila. Here document counterfeiters

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openly offer to create fake documents of all kinds. Among the most popular are IDs, birth certificates, marriage licences,

operation, reportedly run by a local syndicate, has expanded to specialise in a whole spectrum of spurious credentials, both local and foreign.

There are numerous forgery vendors along Recto and on the adjoining streets, nameless pop-up document stations wedged between street vendors that peddle pirated movies, replica ArmaLite guns, and brightly coloured dildos. For illegal enterprises, these stalls are remarkably easy to spot, each with a stool, a small desk and a brazen wooden sign advertising counterfeit goods in broad daylight. The stalls are really dispatch centres where customers place orders with the street agents or ‘faces’, as they are sometimes called. Upon receiving an order, agents call a central number to obtain price quotes that they can mark up to boost their cuts. Afterwards they negotiate final terms with

medical certifications, fake receipts, university diplomas, driving licences and boating licences.

customers, then hand-deliver the slip of paper containing the specifications to a runner.

The counterfeits are crafted in a factory-cumworkshop nearby, produced by a stable of ‘master forgers’, computer graphics operators who research the documents and then scan, retouch, and print them using Corel Draw and Photoshop.

There are also ‘golden hands’, the trained calligraphers and signature forgers whose skilful work with pen and ink is no less vital. With its suite of printers, scanners, laminators and drawing tools, Recto’s forgery workshop is much like any other graphic design studio, except perhaps for the heavy security that keeps its illegal activities safe from prying eyes in a less-than-reputable part of town. (Not even the street agents know exactly where it is. ‘It’s probably better that way,’ one of them says.)

The Forgery Market

Why then do people venture into a bad neighbourhood to do illegal business with an organised crime syndicate? One reason is that despite the risks, it makes economic sense. For instance, obtaining a sedula (a community tax certificate that also serves as a legal form of identification) involves declaring one’s gross annual income, from which the government levies one Philippine peso (₱) for every thousand earned. But for as little as ₱5, one can buy a forgery printed on an actual official form stolen from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. With the Philippine average annual income hovering around ₱140,000 (€2,800 or US$3,160), every peso saved counts, and the money saved by opting for the counterfeit document is equivalent to at least a hearty lunch or a tall Starbucks latte.

Obtaining a marriage annulment certificate here, in the last country in the world where divorce is illegal, can cost up to a quarter of a million pesos (€4,980 or US$5,640), even without factoring in the cost of missing work to attend months (sometimes years) of hearings and legal procedures. In Recto, it costs ₱225 (€4.50 or US$5.00).

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Time is also a consideration, and state agencies would do well to learn from Recto’s customer-focused operation and fine-tuned efficiency. It generally takes about a week to obtain a copy of one’s diploma for employment purposes, up to two weeks to get a birth certificate from the National Statistics Office, and a full day of queues, forms, a mandatory medical examination and road test to get a driving licence from the Land Transportation Office. In Recto, all this can be ready in an hour or less.

Sometimes, however, it’s a matter of desperation. For a contingent of prospective but underqualified foreign migrant workers, buying a spurious seaman’s book or a falsified school transcript from Recto is like buying a lottery ticket with higher earnings as the prize. The Über driver taking me back to Recto to pick up my documents is another case in point. He had copies of his driving licence made so that if a policeman confiscates it (a fairly common occurrence) he can still have the real one safely stowed away, as well as several backups. ‘I can’t afford to miss work,’ he says. ‘My family depends on the cash I bring in every day.’

The runners who move orders and forged papers to and from the factory sometimes work in chains like a relay team passing a baton of neatly rolled-up documents from one to the next.

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Even in this age of electronic documents, our lives are shaped by coloured bits of paper at nearly every step: banknotes, product labels, pre­ scriptions, ID cards, contracts, certificates, warranty cards, traffic tickets. Recto confronts us with the question: how much can a piece of paper document reality? How much can we afford to trust it?

Recto’s customers are surprisingly diverse, however, and not all of them are attempting to evade the law. There is, for example, the young professional who ordered a duplicate of her original college diploma for her mother to frame.

‘It’s just for her wall, I figured it would be okay.

It’s cheaper than getting it through my university. The craftsmanship here is really good,’ she explains, inspecting the dry-embossed seal.

I meet my agent, and we repair to a nearby noodle shop with two other agents while we wait for my documents to arrive. Her colleagues appear sceptical, warily picking at the skins of their pork buns and keeping their distance.

‘Thank you for inviting us to lunch, but I hope you’re not an undercover police spy. It always starts so innocently like this, but you never know where it’s going to lead,’ says one of them,

looking me up and down, then straight in the eye.

The agents have ample reason to fear. The mayor of Manila, Joseph Estrada (who incidentally served a term as president of the Philippines before being impeached and imprisoned for embezzlement) has launched a massive crackdown on the illegal document trade. Not only does the black market cheat the state of the taxes generated by legitimate transactions, it also besmirches the city’s reputation. In diplomatic circles, Recto’s reputation as a global mecca for fake papers is pervasive and pernicious. It’s not uncommon to hear of consuls in American embassies rejecting visa applications from Filipinos without even glancing at their paperwork. Does this bother the agents?

‘This is just business,’ barks the woman (‘Just

call me Tess’) sitting next to me. She is the most veteran agent around the table, having been running orders steadily for nearly eight years now.

‘We have children, debts, many bills to pay,’ she says defensively. When probed about the stress of being a woman in a male-dominated trade, and a perilous one at that, she softens a little and finally loses her scowl. She shares that over the years, a certain camaraderie has been forged around Recto, a symbiotic circle that includes the police they bribe with a cut from daily transactions in exchange for their tolerance.

Before computers and Internet access became affordable, Recto-made documents were priced much higher because documents had to be made completely by hand. Business efficiency tools such as Google Image Search or a robust database of diploma templates were not available

then. A simple diploma could run up to ₱10,000 (€205 or US$225) and could take days to make correctly. ‘The lettering, seals and watermarks, it was really an art back then,’ Tess recalls. ‘When it’s not busy now, I practise my calligraphy. I have a book in Gothic-style lettering,’ she says, referring to the Old English typefaces commonly used on diplomas. ‘Some jobs are easy enough that when the customer is in a hurry, I can just do it myself and earn a bit more from a deal.’

Today, pricing for documents is a fuzzy science. The same Harvard diploma can cost ₱500 (€10 or US$11.20) in one stall and three times that at the next. According to the agents, pricing depends on several factors: the kind of document, its physical complexity, the turnaround time, their perception of the customer’s ability to pay (dress down and forgo jewellery to get

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Some fake-document vendors have other, legitimate businesses, while others hide their forgeries behind dummy

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business cards and stamps. Documents that can be purchased for bargain prices include fake vendor permits.

the best deals) and the element of risk involved.

‘Birth certificates and sedulas are easy to make and the most popular items,’ says my agent who never revealed her name (not even a provisional one like ‘Tess’). ‘Gun permits and clearances from the National Bureau of Investigation are the trickiest and can run up to ₱5,000 (€100 or US$113) because that’s what the police are most concerned about,’ she says in an even lower voice. ‘A certificate of marriage annulment can also be quite expensive because that’s a ten-page document,’ adds Tess, citing the onerous paperwork involved. ‘Oh, there’s also the reputation of the school to consider. Of course, a Harvard diploma will be more expensive than a University of the East certificate,’ adds my agent with a sheepish grin, as if to defend the fickle pricing structure.

Most vendors bribe police to stay out of trouble.

My agent gets a text that a runner has arrived with my documents. She disappears for a minute. When she returns, she drops a small brown envelope and tightly rolled scroll rather unceremoniously on my lap. First, I inspect the birth certificate under the table. It is a fine piece of work, perhaps the best of the lot. The background guilloché pattern, the trademark yellowgreen gradient, the blue seal of the National Statistics Office, a clear bar code and a stamped signature have all been perfectly reproduced to the last detail. There’s even a notation at the top right, ‘Page 1 of 1, 1 Copy’. ‘They have templates, stamps and blank forms back there,’ beams the agent in response to my compliments.

Next, I take out the driving licence. At first glance, the substantial plastic card looks impressively authentic, with the correct layout,

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In many ways, documents are like tickets—a paper stub that admits one to a chance of a better job, a better life, even a better life partner.

The sellers on Recto Avenue don’t do the forgeries themselves, but are connected via runners to the forgers who do the counterfeiting behind closed doors at an undisclosed location nearby. A university diploma costs = P 400 (€8.60 or US$9.00), a driving licence about = P 1,000 (€21.50 or US$22.60), and turnaround is about two hours.

typographic scheme and accurate personal information just as I specified. Upon closer inspec­tion, however, I realise that it says ‘Identification Card’ instead of ‘Driver License’, the hologram is flat, and the bar code on the reverse is smeared and misaligned.

I slip out the Harvard diploma. I quickly notice that the letter-sized parchment sheet has obviously been printed with a colour inkjet and that the signatures at the bottom are missing. ‘I can sign it,’ offers Tess. The major is also wrong; I wanted a degree in theology, but got a B.A. in journalism instead, and for some reason I graduated on March 31, when Harvard Law School’s spring semester was still in progress.

And worst of all I seem to have got my degree from ‘Hardvard’, as my diploma declares in large capital letters.

With great anticipation, I take out the last item in my Recto sampler, my Pulitzer Prize.

I’m imagining an ornate, gilded certificate with multiple seals, ribbons, maybe even large embossed lettering. After all, they did charge an extra ₱175 (€3.50 or US$4.00) research fee. But when I unfurl the parchment, what confronts me is a woefully generic letter-sized template form that anyone with Microsoft Office could output.

And it seems that during our hasty exchange, there had been some misunderstanding about the nature of the prize.

‘As I said, Pulitzer is not a school. It’s a very prestigious award. I thought you researched this.’ I begin to explain my overall dissatisfaction with my documents. My agent hurriedly scrawls all over the dud certificate, crossing out the word ‘University’, while simultaneously typing a text

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The thriving illegal trade in counterfeit documents forces government agencies

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to create official documents with ever more advanced security features, which

message. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it fixed immediately. It will only take a few minutes. So do you want that to be a bachelor’s or a master’s degree?

What do you want to do about these signatures?’

She points to the Filipino names at the bottom of the sheet. ‘Should we take them off altogether?

But then it won’t look balanced.’

The two other agents are watching quietly.

Then Tess offers, ‘It would have been much better if you brought a sample for them to copy. The artists can do anything as long as you provide a picture.’

The veteran agent is right. Graphic artists can reproduce and doctor any credential as long as there is something to work from. On the web, vendors such as BackAlleyPress.com, Cheaperthan-tuition.com, and PhonyDiplomas.com offer higher-quality documents with greater attention to the graphic details, better-quality

in turn forces forgers to use ever more advanced technology to keep up.

paper, sharper printing and correct spelling, not to mention live customer support and moneyback guarantees. Marketed as novelty items, the exceptional verisimilitude of diplomas, transcripts and certificates challenges our perceptions of what is authentic and original. I think about the array of diplomas on my doctor’s wall or the impressive collection of certifications displayed by the dentist who once botched my root canal.

What differs between these websites and the stalls in Recto is the fact that these companies, many based in the USA, will refuse to print documents that permit one to prescribe drugs (like an MD), or that may compromise public security, (like a pilot’s licence). Monitored by Homeland Security, these companies will not do business with customers from places like Cuba, Syria or North Korea (or, curiously, from Connecticut

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The mayor of Manila, himself a convicted embezzler, has sent swarms of undercover policemen into Recto, and ironically it is now the counterfeiters who have to discern not only true customers from officers posing as customers, but also hard-line officers posing as customers from bribable officers posing as customers. or Oregon either). In bold (albeit tiny) letters, Phony Diploma’s ‘We Don’t Print’ policy states, ‘If we have any notion that you intend to use our products against the public interest or public safety, we will refuse your order.’

Meanwhile, in the side streets of Recto, rows of etchers are making rubber stamps, engravers are crafting identification badges, and pressmen are rolling out pads of blank receipts, ready for any commission and agnostic to the buyer’s intent.

Inside the mall where I got my photo taken for the fake driving licence there is a legal quick-print shop specialising in rubber stamps, duplicate keys, laminated IDs, branded lanyards, and name badges, an array of identification and credentialing paraphernalia curiously similar to what the street agents were hawking. There is

even an album of company logos such as Dunlop, Quiksilver and DHL that you can use to decorate your custom lanyard or stamp. One wonders where the border between legitimate goods and forgeries actually lies.

In this tiny shop, there are two graphic operators toiling at PCs, scrolling through layouts in Corel. I ask what they think of the fake document stalls in the area. One of them responds without looking up from the monitor. ‘I can do that too, no problem,’ she retorts. Inspecting her work displayed in gleaming glass cases, I ask where she got her design training. She stops, looks up and motions across the street with a knowing grin. ‘I got a degree from Recto U.’ She laughs, then turns back to focus on the screen and hits ‘print’ on a sheet of ID cards. ☐

INNOVATION BEHIND BARS Jonah Goodman is a British writer based in Berlin. A former editor of COLORS magazine, he looks for signs of shared humanity, wherever they can be found.

Behind bars, where resources are scarce but time is plentiful, inmates have to make what they need from the materials on hand; toilet paper, toothbrushes and headphone wires can be put to new and sometimes dangerous purposes.

Stateville Correctional Center is a maximum-security state prison for men in Greater Chicago. This part of the prison was opened in 1925 based on Jeremy Bentham's 1787 design for the panopticon prison house. It is used for

segregating inmates from the general prison population and for holding inmates who are awaiting trial or transfer. Stateville’s 1,300 employees guard 1,506 inmates. Photo: Doug Dubois & Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photos

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Chess set by Temporary Services following Angelo’s instructions. ‘I owe my knowledge of the inventions and tricks

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presented here to my many cellies,’ writes Angelo. ‘Victor, one of my first cellies, introduced me to the concept of

Roscoe Jones spent 11 years in solitary confinement in Angola, Louisiana, the biggest maximum-security prison in the United States.

When he finally emerged, he took with him the ideas for two inventions. One was a board game that he created, produced and even sold to visitors at prison fairs. The brightly coloured, hand-drawn Serving Time on the River: The Harsh Realities of Prison Life casts players as inmates in Angola, forced to run an unending gauntlet of ‘Unavoidable Circumstances’ brought on by rolls of the dice. The harsh realities, as players quickly discover, include sexual assault, scalding, hurled faeces and a bludgeoning with a sock full of batteries. Gamers must serve their sentences, but even as they plough through fighting, theft, punishments, gangs and self-mutilation, the game may end, apropos of nothing, with ‘Killed in Prison’ or ‘Suicide’. Attending self-help programmes, informing on other inmates or contracting a severe chronic disease can earn early release, but the odds are stacked well

making chess pieces from toilet paper mache.’ Photo courtesy of Temporary Services.

against it. What’s more, some characters, like Jones himself, are in for life. They have to play the game, but can almost never win.

Jones created the game to give others a taste of what it was like to live behind bars. His other invention was born from pure boredom. After years alone with nothing to do but smoke, Jones became obsessed with the idea of a self-extinguishing cigarette. Using a small disk of metal from a coke can, a nail from his prison locker and a piece of thread, he invented a device that would put out a cigarette as it burned down. He had the idea patented and spent four years trying to sell it to tobacco companies from behind bars. His product was rejected.

Inmate ingenuity has been a phenomenon since at least 1780, when William Addis, an inmate in Newgate, London, stuck bundles of horse hair into a bone to create a prototype for the first mass-produced toothbrush. Had Jones found himself in a Chinese prison, things might have worked out differently. An investigation

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Rolled magazine pages, hardened with soap and salt, can be sharpened into a makeshift knife or ‘shiv’.

In the event of an inspection the weapon can be disposed of by unrolling it and flushing it down the toilet.

by the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper revealed in January 2015 that Chinese prisoners can have their sentences reduced in exchange for patents that ‘provide great contributions to the state and society’. Nan Yong, for example, the former head of China’s national football league, now jailed for corruption, has filed patents for four innovations in one year. A former health bureau secretary has been awarded 11 during his incarceration.

This spurt of creativity may not be all it seems: investigators also uncovered a whole industry of unscrupulous patent agencies offering to rewrite existing patents under prisoners’ names for fees from US$1,000 to 10,000 (€880 to 8,800).

But even if its policies are flawed, surely China is onto something. Even without the incentive of freedom, inmates are driven to create out of necessity, boredom, self-preservation, defiance of the system or the need to assert their identities. If Jones’ cigarette invention was a way to make his life fractionally more comfortable, his board game told his story.

In 2003, a Californian inmate known only as Angelo published a book with the Chicago art collective Temporary Services. Without revealing his name, location, or the crime for which he was incarcerated, Prisoners’ Inventions paints an extraordinary picture of life inside, told through the improvisations Angelo and his cellmates used to improve their situation. With detailed pen sketches, Angelo shows how inmates cool drinks by putting the can in a wet sock and setting it in front of the ventilator, how they make coat hangers out of pieces of ripped sheet and rolled newspapers, how they wash in a toilet, drink from a toilet, brew in a toilet and cook in a toilet. Not all the inventions are born out of dire necessity. Angelo details the manufacture of carefully designed and proudly kept salt and pepper dispensers made from Bic lighters or ice cream sticks. One of his cellmates tiled their entire two-man, 6 × 9 ft (2 × 3 m) cell with playing cards held under a thick layer of high-gloss floor wax. Another built a working mini-lathe.

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Even an act as simple as trading candy can mask payment for protection services. In the New Mexico Department of Corrections, however, some candy is itself illegal: chewing gum is contraband, because it can be used to make a mould of a key.

On hot days they practise ‘pooling’, blocking all drainage points and turning the taps on to flood their cells. Angelo’s accompanying drawing shows a man floating on his back by a bunk bed, reading a newspaper.

Angelo first connected with Marc Fisher at Temporary Services in 1990, responding to a fanzine Marc had published called Primary Concern. Over time, explains Temporary Services, ‘Angelo casually mentioned inventions in his letters without really thinking much of them’, once sending Marc ‘a set of hard, sugarinfused toilet-paper mache dominoes’. They suggested the idea of making a booklet together, and months later received ‘a mind-blowing package of illustrations’, many of which are among the nearly 80 images in the final book. Thirty of the inventions were reproduced by Temporary Services for an exhibition which included an actual-size replica of Angelo’s cell, constructed according to his blueprints.

‘Everything in the book is considered

contraband,’ says Temporary Services.

‘Everything was done through the mail.’ There were also ‘an enormous number of drawings that [Angelo] wanted to send, but that were taken away from him […] Property in prison is generally unstable and susceptible to theft by both guards and fellow prisoners.’ In Angelo’s introduction to his book, he writes, ‘If some of what’s presented here seems unimpressive, keep in mind that deprivation is a way of life in prison.

Even the simplest of innovations presents unusual challenges, not just to make an object but in some instances to create the tools to make it and find the materials to make it from. The prison environment is designed and administered for the purpose of suppressing such inventiveness.’

As dramatic as this sounds, his claims are borne out by the prison guards themselves. On correctionsone.com, a website for correctional officers, Joe Bouchard, a member of the Board of Experts for The Corrections Professional, lists some examples in an article titled ‘What is

Innovation Behind Bars

In prison, any item found to be altered is contraband and can be confiscated.

Angelo’s cellmate Earl ‘acquired a radio that had no case or speakers but worked

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very well using the earphone jack,’ writes Angelo. Using the backings from writing tablets, white glue, and a lot of black magic marker, he constructed

Contraband?’: ‘Homemade weapons, gambling paraphernalia, excessively metered envelopes, weapons, drugs, food and whatnot’ are contraband. ‘An altered item, such as a hollowed out law book’ is contraband. ‘Excessive amounts of allowable property’ (such as postage stamps) are contraband. Even information can be contraband. In short, ‘In a prison, almost anything can be contraband.’

‘Contraband is power for prisoners,’ Bouchard continues. ‘It allows them to gain power over others. For enterprising prisoners, trade in illicit goods and the performance of prohibited services are the building blocks of power. With planning and work, the smallest gambling enterprise has the potential to develop into a large trading empire inside the walls. With such an empire, inmates can procure weapons, narcotics, loyalty and outside help, all of which can destabilise the security of any institution.’

Accordingly, anything a prisoner owns or makes is subject to confiscation at any time, though

what looked like a complete case. ‘Most important, it survived cell searches.’

Photo courtesy of Temporary Services.

prison guards may practise a judicious amount of tolerance.

‘It’s an unspoken rule,’ Angelo agrees, ‘that as long as inmates don’t flaunt what they’re doing, many of the staff will turn a blind eye.’ As a basis for daily life, however, this offers scant protection or comfort. In a world where personal property is never secure, inventions become a way for prisoners to salvage their dignity and sense of individual agency. Angelo’s cellmate ‘Ron’, who Angelo taught to make paper mache chess pieces, ‘turned out exquisite sets just as fast as the cops could confiscate them,’ writes Angelo, ‘with each succeeding set becoming more elaborate and beautiful—his reasoning being, it’s the cops’ job to keep us down, and ours to show them that they can’t.’ Naturally, all of the devices in Prisoners’ Inventions are considered contraband ‘subject to confiscation in routine cell searches.

But inmates are resilient if nothing else—what’s taken today will be remade by tomorrow, and the cycle goes on and on’.

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It’s in everyone’s interest that guards confiscate improvised knives, which can be made from ventilator grills, toothbrushes, pieces of bunk bed, or even plastic bags, melted down and rolled to form a sharp point.

The complexities of life in the American correctional system can make that cycle particularly absurd. Every cell, for example, needs a washing line in order to dry towels after showering, and every prison explicitly forbids them because of their multiple potentially dangerous uses. In Angelo’s experience, string was always impossible to get hold of, so inmates ripped up their sheets to make clothes lines, which would, in turn, be ripped down by guards. Under US law, sheets, along with shelter, clothing, food, hygiene supplies and stationery, must be provided to every prisoner, so more sheets would be delivered, which would immediately be ripped up to make new lines.

Most prisoners pass the time working out, smoking, eating, drinking and masturbating,

This is a replica of Angelo’s cell, built by Temporary Services according to measurements that he posted to them. The two-man unit is 6 × 9 ft (2 × 3 m), and is

and Angelo describes improvised objects for all of these activities. He explains how plastic refuse bags filled with water, tied shut and wrapped with shirts are used as weights, and how rolled blankets, wastebasket liners, warm water and baby oil are used to build sex dolls. A wide range of cigarette lighters are described in depth as well, the two most extraordinary of which both use a wall socket. With an improvised plug made from paperclips or razor blades, one model runs electricity simultaneously through a coiled wire serving as a heating filament, and a glass of salt water serving as a resistor. The other model uses the graphite rod from a pencil to complete a circuit against a paperclip plug, creating a bright spark. Both methods come with Angelo’s recommendation, as they are less likely than others to

where prisoners spend almost all of their time. Everything a prisoner owns must be kept in one of the two open storage lockers on the wall. Modifications to the

cell are forbidden, including putting up a curtain between toilet and bunk. Photo courtesy of Temporary Services.

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An electric cigarette lighter, reconstructed by Temporary Services according to plans provided by Angelo. When the circuit is completed, two D-cell

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batteries heat the exposed filament.

Improvised lighters became common in the Californian prison system after 1995, when the government banned smoking

blow the fuse on the whole cell block, cutting off power to neighbouring convicts’ TVs. A universal problem for all prisoners, according to Angelo, is the airflow from the air conditioning duct, which is ‘invariably […] too strong, too weak, too hot, too cold, or some combination of the four’. He lists a number of remedies, including packing wet toilet paper onto the vent, plugging up each of its holes with tiny paper plugs, or stitching a piece of cardboard or chipboard onto the front of it, with a window cut out so that a separate flap of material can be used to adjust the flow. Angelo also explains how to shade a cell’s light, and stresses that it must never be entirely covered, ‘as a small concession to the rules’, and, as his onetime cellmate ‘Randy’ expressed, ‘to provide the sense of control and authority that staff likes to feel’.

In her 2015 project Prison Gourmet, Californian artist and activist Karla Diaz confronts the subject of prison food in unsettling depth, collecting prisoners’ own recipes for

in state buildings. Photo courtesy of Temporary Services.

dishes made using the limited ingredients available from the jail commissary and the vending machine. Denied pots, pans, or even the most basic kitchen implements, prisoners use plastic bags, clothes and towels to prepare meals. One recipe for ‘orange chicken’, Diaz notes, uses strawberry jam, sugar, water and powdered Kool-Aid to make a sauce to pour over pork rinds. The prisoner who invented it told Diaz that he didn’t eat it for the taste, but to invoke the memory of the real orange chicken that he used to eat with his daughter.

The ability to make a hot drink is also important. Immersion heaters known as ‘stingers’ are crucial prison equipment, and though they’re sold in some prison canteens, in other facilities they have to be made from scratch. One of Angelo’s cellmates, ‘Little John’, was new to prison when Angelo met him, and was thrilled by the improvised technology created behind bars. He became an expert in producing stingers that used a jury-rigged electrical plug (made of

Innovation Behind Bars

This replica of Angelo’s paper mache cup made by Temporary Services was formed from an entire toilet roll, wetted,

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moulded, dried and then waterproofed with cling film. Angelo hid it from guards by drawing a large black spot on the

safety-razor blades bound to a piece of eraser by a melted strip of plastic) to power a heating element (also made of razor blades and plastic) via earphone wires. Little John would make a stinger for whoever wanted one, according to Angelo, and ‘could assemble one in about an hour’, given access to the right materials.

For a wide variety of projects, toilet paper is one of those ‘right materials’. Alongside its obvious uses, the paper mache that can be made from toilet paper is a prime resource for creating contraband. One of Angelo’s most extraordinary inventions was a cup made from an entire roll.

After wetting the paper and moulding it around his fist, Angelo waterproofed the interior with cling film and allowed it to dry. This large, ungainly cup, still the shape and size of a roll of toilet paper, needed to be hidden from the guards, so he drew a large black circle on the bottom of it, explaining, ‘I took to keeping [it] in the recessed toilet paper holder in the sink, a deception that worked so well that for all I know

bottom and placing it in the toilet paper holder under the sink. Photo courtesy of Temporary Services.

the cup could still be in that cell, as I accidentally left it behind when I moved on.’

Angelo finally left prison for good in late 2013 and settled in the Los Angeles area. By then, Temporary Services had already taken their exhibition of replicas of his work on tour to Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Berlin, New York, Leipzig and Athens, and wherever it went, current and former inmates recognised echoes of what have become universal designs, passed from facility to facility by word of mouth.

Brett Bloom from Temporary Services taught for two and a half years at a prison in Danville, Illinois. He would present Angelo’s book to students, who ‘would often critique our craft’ and ‘offer better solutions based on the things they had made’. Inmate invention is inevitable. ‘If a person likes to cook, make things, repair things, or otherwise solve problems by working with their hands and imagination,’ say Bloom and Fisher, ‘those impulses aren’t going to disappear if that person is sent to prison.’ ☐

Final prayer at Ramadan at an industrial park near Treviso, Italy, 2009.

ITALY’S HIDDEN MOSQUES

Italy’s 1.5 million Muslims have only three mosques.

Forbidden by law from building more, they improvise. w-t-w.co/8r1

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Nicoló Degiorgis is an Italian documentary photographer, teaching photography inside Bolzano prison and at the Free University of Bolzano. His primary motivation is observing how marginalised communities carve out a sustainable environment for themselves.

Text by Jonah Goodman.

In only two decades, Islam has become Italy’s second-largest religion. Ten times as many Muslims live in the country now as compared to the 1990s, and their numbers are set to double again by 2030, boosted by immigration from North and SubSaharan Africa, the Balkans, South Asia and the Middle East.

Italian Islam is growing fast, but officially, it does not exist. Due to a lack of will from successive governments and divisions within the religious community itself, Islam has never been formally recognised by the Italian state. As a consequence, Muslims may pray, but they may not build mosques. They worship instead at improvised ‘Islamic Cultural Centres’ in warehouses, shops, supermarkets, apartments, stadiums, gyms, garages and discos. Italian photographer Nicoló Degiorgis documented them in a five-year project that resulted in Hidden Islam (2014), a book that maps these secret sanctuaries across his native north Italy. This mosque, a converted supermarket, was photographed in Trentino in 2010. The gate-like structure in the corner is a mihrab, indicating the direction toward Mecca.

Usually the mihrab is a niche cut into a wall of the sanctuary, but this one is mobile. Since this picture was taken, the mihrab and the community have moved on. The site is now a gym.

The enormous side door of this former facility for cleaning public buses in Udine has been opened for ventilation on a hot summer night during Ramadan, August 2010. More than half of Italy’s Muslims live in the prosperous north of the country, where they fill an economic demand for migrant labour on farms and in factories. They also encounter the divisive politics of the far-right political party Lega Nord (Northern League). In Veneto’s 2010 regional elections, Lega Nord emerged with the largest share of the vote, a ringing endorsement of their antiimmigration platform, which they openly describe as fighting

an ‘Islamic invasion’. This empty conflation of immigration and Islam (around half of Italy’s immigrants are Christian) has fed into an atmosphere of xenophobia and hostility so pronounced that Degiorgis chose to redact precise locations of the mosques in Hidden Islam. The degree of hostility faced

by Muslims varies from place to place, depending on the local authorities. Some communities are given free rein to gather and worship, while others endure a police presence outside the door at every prayer meeting.

Such persecution is especially acute in the area around Treviso, where in 2007 Lega Nord politician Giorgio Bettio endorsed the use of ‘the same methods against immigrants as the SS’ to ‘make them understand how to behave’. In Veneto, this image of hundreds of Muslims in a loading bay behind a major Treviso supermarket could either be an image of persecution or proof of Lega Nord’s ‘secret invasion’.

The green and cream building in the background actually belongs to these worshippers, bought with donations from their wages at local clothing factories, but they are not allowed

to pray in it. When they bought it, they had it registered as a cultural association. Treviso’s municipal government then declared it illegal to pray inside a cultural association. The community took their services outside, putting up a canopy to create shelter from the sun. Soon the police removed that too, exposing the congregation to the fierce summer heat. Despite this, in observance of Ramadan in August 2009, the men in this picture would keep coming daily during the month-long fast. They had drunk nothing since dawn and would wait until sunset before quenching their thirst.

Previous spread: Much like Christmas for Christians, the last day of Ramadan is the annual event that sees the largest turnout of Muslims. Some Italian Muslims will go to one of Italy’s only three mosques, including the one in Rome (which is also the largest in Europe). The rest may find themselves in a sports centre. Rented by the hour, sports centres like this one, photographed in Trento in 2010, can handle the large

crowds. Outside of Rome, neither of Italy’s other mosques are fully operational religious institutions. A Council for Italian Islam was set up in 2005, but coordination of the country’s disparate Islamic communities proved to be a task beyond its abilities. Italy’s Muslims may have to wait a generation before the next mosque is built.

Because Italy’s improvised mosques are unmarked, many can only be identified by the number of cars parked outside on a Friday, and when Degiorgis arrived to photograph this mosque in November 2013, he had already set up and taken several exterior shots of another building before he realised he had the wrong nondescript warehouse in Spinea. Though their building looks the same as any other in its industrial neighbourhood,

worshippers at the Centro Islamico di Spinea have taken literal steps to put their mosque on the map, paying for a position on Google Maps with accompanying images of the interior of the mosque. According to Degiorgis, their unusual action shows ‘that they have nothing to hide’. ☐

Peter Guest is a journalist and editor writing about the environment, human rights and economic development. He wrote about Mars exploration in the previous issue of WTW. For this piece he reports from his native London.

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Brixton activists decided to fight the gentrifying influence of Big Money by creating their own local currency. Their struggle, however, pits them not just against the dollar, euro or yen, but against the global economic system and the whole concept of money itself.

A POUND FOR A POUND

In Brixton, life is lived at high volume. Evan­ gelical preachers swap shifts with busking drummers and rock bands on the loudspeakers outside the Underground station, and music blares from nearly every shop and kiosk in the curving streets around the market, a heady mix of reggae, afrobeat and gospel.

Since the 1940s this area of southwest London has been the heart of the city’s Caribbean community, but its latter-day reputation was forged in the 1970s and 80s, when unemployment and social exclusion led to rising crime rates. Its closely packed residential streets and high-rise tower blocks became the backdrop to two infamous riots, and the area became known as a centre for gang violence and drug abuse.

If any place could have resisted the gradual creep of gentrification, it was Brixton. Today though, property prices are soaring. Around Brixton’s markets—a decade ago referred to as ‘crack superstores’—the stalls selling salt fish and plantains are flanked by hipster cafés selling single-origin coffee and sourdough flatbreads.

‘A lot of the reasons that people were talking negatively about Brixton are now positives,’ says

long-time resident Tom Shakhli. ‘It’s creative, it’s vibrant. It’s got a lot of counter-cultural ideas.’

The area is undergoing the traditional starving-artist-to-start-ups progression at hyperspeed, and it is pricing long-term residents out of the market. Shop rents are rising as owners cash in on the rising tide, and while the newfound affluence has washed away some of the stains on Brixton’s character, old-timers fear that it will also leach out the vibrancy and sense of community. Shops along the railway line that cuts Brixton in half are feeling this squeeze. Vendors in the railway arches have been campaigning since the start of February to stop Network Rail’s plan to evict them, renovate the spaces and then triple their rents (if it lets them return at all).

Shakhli belongs to a small band of economic activists trying to slow the flood of money and the homogenisation of the area with a radical approach: printing their own cash. Their Brixton pound (B£) notes, which feature local heroes such as basketball player Luol Deng and musician David Bowie, are accepted at approximately

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The Brixton pound, a local currency—paper and electronic—that launched in 2009, is now accepted by hundreds of shops, bars and cafés in this multicultural area of southwest London.

250 shops, bars and cafés around the area, keeping money circulating locally, out of the hands of global chains. The project includes an electronic currency system that lets users pay using a smartphone app linked to a bank account, credit card or PayPal. Around 2,000 people have registered for the e-currency system, transacting a total of £200,000–250,000 (€269,000–336,300 or US$307,000–383,800) per year.

A straw poll of shops in the area turned up mixed support for the Brixton pound; most support the idea, but have yet to see the e-currency generate much new trade. The local council has also given the scheme its support, becoming the

first in the country to allow companies to pay their property taxes in Brixton pounds, and has since estimated that the press coverage of the scheme has paid off by generating £500,000 (€672,600 or US$767,700) in positive media exposure.

The project is bigger than just a neighbourhood effort, however. Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, the Brixton pound is, Shakhli says, a way to rethink how money is created and circulated.

‘This is absolutely not a response to gentrification. It’s about tackling something that causes gentrification, which is the money system,’ he says. ‘We’re asking these big questions, like

A Pound for a Pound

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“What is money?” We take money for granted; we think it’s neutral, it’s like air. But it’s quite a poisonous air. There are a few people who have good gas masks who are able to survive in this system, but […] for most people it doesn’t work.

It creates high house prices.’

The direct link between the monetary system and house prices in Brixton is, on one level, fairly straightforward. The financial value of London property has soared in direct response to global financial uncertainty. Turmoil in the eurozone and the devaluation of global currencies through money printing has driven investors worldwide to look for stores of value, and London real estate has proven a popular one.

The price of the average London property rose past £520,000 (€703,800 or US$799,500)

The Brixton pound (B£) was launched in September 2009 as a physical, paper-based currency, and expanded in September 2011 to an electronic pay-bytext platform. Around 250 businesses

in 2014. Wages have stagnated and for many Londoners, home ownership is now a distant aspiration. Once down-at-heel areas are being redeveloped with an eye on the international market, made over with concrete and glass edifices that are gazetted to portfolio buyers in the Middle East and Asia before they go onto the local market.

There is a deeper link, however, that runs to the core of how money and monetary systems function. The vast majority of money is created not by governments and central banks, but by the private sector, in the form of loans to investors, businesses and consumers.

‘They lend for speculative house buying, which increases demand, which pushes prices up. People think of property prices as a supply

currently accept B£ notes and over 160 have pay-by-text accounts. Each denomination of the paper banknotes commemorates a local hero (selected by popular vote by the people of Brixton),

celebrating their history, art, politics and culture. The B£10 notes show David Bowie, who lived in Brixton from 1947 to 1953.

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‘We are trying to make people aware that money is something that we can actually try to take control of ourselves, we don’t have to leave it to the state.’

—Josh Ryan-Collins, researcher on monetary reform for the New Economics Foundation

issue, that you need to build more houses, but actually there’s a massive problem of pumping the markets with demand,’ Shakhli says, adding, ‘This is not a crackpot theory.’

The Brixton pound is just one of many attempts to offer an alternative to the predominant monetary systems. In the UK the city of Bristol and smaller towns such as Totnes and Lewes operate their own currencies. In Germany there are more than 50 such projects. Each has its own purpose, from building marketing networks for local small businesses to building in carbon credits and supporting environmental projects. Each is empowered by the sense that money itself can have an objective.

In the words of Leander Bindewald, a researcher in complementary currencies at the New Economics Foundation, ‘Money is not neutral. When you ask an economist or consult a textbook, they just give you these three functions: store of value, means of exchange, unit of account, but never go further to ask what would be the most convincing way to do all three?

Can you do all three at once? Are there inherent conflicts in achieving one or the other better?’

These are questions that are rarely asked, but which have huge relevance in a global economy that is increasingly defined by inequalities between those who own assets and those who do not. Indeed, in a financial system inextricably

A Pound for a Pound

linked with the environmentally unsustainable use of resources, answering these questions correctly may be a matter of life and death.

‘The money you use predetermines the out­comes in an economy or a society. Finding the right kind of money for the objective is what community currencies are trying from the bottom up. But there’s also a top-down argument in monetary reform saying we have to tackle money as a question, as a thing in itself,’ Bindewald says.

Shakhli knows that small-scale approaches like the Brixton pound are not going to paper over the cracks of a system that is failing many.

They are, however, raising awareness that

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there are alternatives and fixing some of the symptoms.

‘It’s an experiment, as much as anything else. It’s not something that we see as being the answer, as such, but it gives people the idea that money can be plural,’ he says. ‘Exchanging using Brixton pounds can create a social connection in a way that using a pound sterling doesn’t. The pound sterling is a very passive connection; I just chuck some money at you. When you use the Brixton pound you’re much more likely to make a connection with the business owner. You are actively doing something different. You’re expressing your values.’ ☐

UNDERWATER UNDERWORLD

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A single cocaine shipment can have a street value of hundreds of millions of dollars, a fact that drives an ever more sophis­ ticated cat-and-mouse game between drug cartels and law enforcement agencies. Illegal drugs travel not only by truck, plane and boat, but even by submarine and semi-submersible.

Colombian drug cartels employ ever more sophisticated arsenals and tactics in their efforts to better each other as well as domestic and international efforts to shut down their operations. Cocaine has been carried by human ‘mules’, hidden inside car tyres, concealed in truckloads of other goods, and dropped from aircraft as law enforcement agencies fight to intercept as much of the dangerous cargo as they can.

Land and air are not the only export routes, however, and both high-tech fibreglass powerboats and ordinary fishing

trawlers have also been used to transport cocaine and other drugs. During the 1990s, however, as police increased surveillance of surface vessels, cartels turned to semi-submersibles, sealed boats that travel just below the ocean’s surface. Only a small window or periscope protrudes, breaking the surface but not rising higher than the surrounding waves, trailing a wake so small as to be practically invisible. The window is too small to be easily detected by surface radar, and the sea water disperses the heat of the engine, hiding the vessel from infrared

Swiss photographer Luca Zanetti discovered Latin America as a teenager, and has returned there numerous times, most recently to report on stories from El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru.

scanning. Semi-submersibles are also designed to be rapidly scuttled in case of interception, sending the incriminating cargo to the ocean floor.

Each semi-sub’s estimated construction cost of US$1 million (€920,410) is dwarfed by its ability to transport as much as 8 tons of cocaine with a street value of US$300 (€277) million, and experts estimate that in 2009 they carried as much as 70% of the cocaine leaving Colombia’s Pacific coast.

Semi-submersibles and go-fast boats seized in raids by the Colombian navy are exhibited like trophies at the Bahia Malaga Naval Base.

This submarine was found by the Colombian Navy on February 12, 2011 near Timbuiqui in the mangrove swamps of the Colombian Pacific coast. Built from 3 cm (1.2 in) fibreglass, the submarine has a 346-horsepower engine capable of transporting a four-man crew and an 8-ton payload up to 1,450 km (900 mi) at a depth of 9 m (30 ft).

The submarine periscope utilises two cameras, one for daylight and one for night vision, to monitor the sea surface from below.

Above: The 31 m (100 ft) submarine captured in February 2011 is a fascinating hybrid of high and low technology. The boat was equipped with GPS, electronic charts and two types of radios.

Below: One of the many innovations by a Colombian drug cartel. This submersible unmanned craft, 6 m (19.5 ft) in length and 1.5 m (5 ft) in diameter, was designed to be towed behind a ship. It has a cargo capacity of about 2 tons.

The shift from semi-submersibles to submarines represents ‘a quantum-leap in technology’, says Jay Bergman, who heads the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Andean division. ‘It’s the difference between building a motor-scooter and building a car.’ ☐

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Ahmed Al Majid is a Saudi-based writer currently working with Al Jazeera Media Network.

UNDERGROUND ART IN SAUDI ARABIA In a country dominated by ultra-conservative Islam, espousing unorthodox opinions or behaviour can be dangerous and even fatal. In spite of this, Saudi underground artists are finding each other, making connections and even emerging from the shadows.

Photo: Fedor Selivanov

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While music and dance have always been part of Saudi life, ‘loud music and inappropriate dancing’ can lead to an

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arrest. This has given rise to an underground music and party culture where men freely mingle with women, hidden

For most people Saudi Arabia is a land synonymous with oil wealth, the Al-Saud monarchy and the ultra-conservative Wahhabist branch of Islam. They know that women are forbidden to drive, bloggers are flogged for criticising the government, and that the morality police (officially, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice or CPVPV) arrest people for dancing at birthday parties.

What is less well-known, however, is that Saudi leads in both the production and consumption of original web content in the Middle East and North Africa region, and that it has produced some of the area’s most critically acclaimed and profitable works of contemporary art. It is a country where street artists organise exhibitions and DJs spin fresh beats at raves. How is such diversity and creativity possible in a country where movie theatres are banned and public concerts and art displays are subject to stringent regulation?

Part of the answer is that the average Saudi is extremely young and adept at digital

away from the eyes of the morality police. Photo: Mohammed Al-Kindy

communication. More than 30% of the population is under the age of 14, and the median age is barely 26. And, as elsewhere in the developed world, these young people spend much of their time online: broadband penetration is currently at 60%, and smartphone penetration is at an impressive 68%, higher even than South Korea, a country known for its smartphones. Social media and content services have taken the place of cinemas, bars and music halls: Saudi is among the top ten countries that contribute to Twitter’s 400 million daily tweets, and it logs the highest per capita share of YouTube’s one billion daily views.

In this online world, Saudis can explore a rich variety of arts and expressions in relative safety. And while the Internet keeps them up to date with such world-renowned artists as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, it also brings them domestically produced content on a par with global standards. For example, the Saudi video production house Telfaz11 creates humorous videos and web series that tackle such highly

Underground Art in Saudi Arabia

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One of Saudi’s most prominent clerics has called Twitter a threat to national unity, and the head of the CPVPV has stated that anyone using social media ‘has lost this world and his afterlife’, and yet Twitter remains the predominant place for both liberal and conservative voices to debate public issues.

controversial topics as corrupt land monopolies, the destruction of Islamic heritage sites in the Hejaz, ultra-conservative religious propaganda, women’s rights and the poor treatment of migrant workers. It has established a strong bond with young viewers for whom these shows are not only entertainment, but also a creative reflection of their voices, views, concerns and challenges. ‘They tell my story, but in a funny context and in a nice six-minute video,’ says Sami, a 24-year-old machine operator. ‘It’s true, the videos are funny, but they also address what we’re going through. Saudi is not an easy place to live. It’s so corrupt, houses are expensive, and we are always arguing about social controversies.

Television stations don’t talk about these things, but YouTubers do,’ he adds.

But the Internet is more than just a source of content for Saudis. It plays a critical role in providing venues for public discourse and collaboration that have been lacking for so long, serving as a place to meet, share ideas, discuss events and find kindred spirits. While the CPVPV patrols

the pavements to ensure that men and women do not walk together unless they are related, young Saudis use WhatsApp groups, Facebook messaging threads, and private social networks such as Path to plan their outings, Halloween parties, mixed weddings, belly-dancing classes, fundraisers, and bike rallies. In the last year alone the underground Saudi social calendar has included numerous events such as a desert rave hosted by two female DJs in Riyadh, a monthly book club meeting in Dammam, a Saudi-themed secret Santa dinner in Dhahran, and even a film screening of all of the movies featured at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Such events don’t happen every day, but frequently enough to allow Saudis to live semi-normal lives within the borders of their ultra-conservative homeland.

They just need to know the right people.

Not that knowing the right people is simple or without risks. The lack of unmonitored public spaces in Saudi Arabia coupled with the justifiable wariness of members of these communities means that it is harder to make connections here

Underground Art in Saudi Arabia

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‘If you think about the Arab Spring and all the changes that happened that year, you’ll find that we, as Arabs, have changed the way the world sees us, but not only that: we’ve also changed the way we see ourselves.’

— Alaa Yousif, managing director, Telfaz11

than in other countries. Twitter, where both liberal and conservative Saudis go to debate headlines and current events, has been a great facilitator of connections that might otherwise never have been made: discussions of popular topics can lead to digital relationships in which people follow each other, share thoughts and links, and, eventually, arrange to get together.

The personal meeting of two Twitter friends is often followed by a merging or overlapping between their social circles, a simple and seemingly obvious phenomenon that has been essential to the formation and growth of underground social groups in Saudi Arabia. The process is haphazard, uncertain and often slow; however, it also leads to the creation of strong, long-lasting connections.

Street art by Saudi artist Ali Al Melhem from Dhahran during the Jeddah Street Art Exhibition. The caption underneath

When those connections form between artists it becomes easier for creative ventures to move from virtual space into the real world.

A primary example is the annual LoudArt exhibition, an initiative by gallery manager Raneen Bukhari. In Ms Bukhari’s words, ‘LoudArt is a way for emerging artists to showcase their talent on a regional platform, as well as a place for established artists to present experimental work.’ Each year, organisers announce a broad theme, choose pieces from among the artist submissions, and exhibit the selected works at the main event in Khobar before taking them on tour around Saudi and the Gulf region. What started as an experimental concept in 2012 has quickly grown into an established art platform with more than 8,000 followers, and in the process,

the image reads: ‘Beware when fighting monsters, lest you become one of them.’

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The average young Saudi today could be listening to top-40 hits from the United States, then reblogging the works of a French graphic artist on his Tumblr page, before going home to watch a dubbed South Korean television show and read a translated Japanese manga magazine.

it has introduced remarkable young artists such as the graphic artist/calligrapher Ali Cha’aba and the graphic artist/photographer Mohammed Chindy.

Another growing movement in Saudi Arabia is street art, and many Saudis who have been exposed to it online or when abroad have taken to the streets to express their thoughts and feelings using stencil graffiti and wheat-pasted poster art. What began as scattered works in hidden corners quickly led to the emergence of collectives such as the Instagram-based @SAUDISTREETART and the recent Inner Voices exhibition in Jeddah, where dozens of street artists came together to convert an abandoned hangar in the historic district of Al-Balad into an open-air exhibition space. Indeed, the trend is flourishing to the point that there are already young Saudi scholars such as Rana Al-Jarbou who are building an academic career based on studying and analysing the works and messages of Saudi street artists.

These art initiatives have faced their fair share

of opposition. The country is almost evenly divided between conservative followers of Wahhabism and more liberal voices, and works of art, especially contemporary art, are often the subject of intense controversy. Furthermore, the 140-character limit on individual tweets can exacerbate the conflict by reducing arguments to soundbite-length quips and taunts. In 2013 when LoudArt featured a collection of pop art works that showed famous cartoon characters engaged in Islamic activities such as prayer it sparked a heated debate on LoudArt’s Instagram page; some viewers deemed the works offensive to Islam, while others saw them as trying to bridge the gap between modern children and centuries-old Islamic traditions by using familiar characters. Fortunately, although the matter could have had serious consequences for the artist and organisers, it did not escalate beyond the cybersphere, an achievement that was in no small part due to the organisers’ diplomacy.

Indeed, in a kingdom where there is a fine line between unorthodox opinions and fatal heresy,

Underground Art in Saudi Arabia

Instead of using a confrontational directness that could lead to a clash with the morality police (CPVPV ) Saudi

81

artists turn to a poetic ambiguity open to a broader interpretation as in this example by Ali Al Melhem: ‘Do you

artists and curators have to choose their words carefully, as the smallest error of judgement could mean the difference between explaining a controversial work of art and admitting to blasphemy.

Islam has played such a fundamental role in the country’s narrative that it is hardly surprising that religion and art are inextricably intertwined, or that many Saudi artists have chosen Islam to be the subject of their works or the inspiration behind it. Basmah Felemban, a 21-year-old Saudi graphic artist whose pieces have been featured in the British Museum, often features elements of Islam or Islamic art in her creations. In her words, ‘I found my middle ground through reading religion and philosophy, especially through reading poetry and the Quran independently. This path has been essential for my work, as I believe it added depth that I don’t think I could have achieved without going through this spiritual journey.’ Contrary to what many might assume about the limiting effect of a conservative environment, Felemban finds it

think that your suffering will be less worthy because you loved kindness and justice?’

to be an impetus towards better art. ‘Making art in a conservative community actually pushes the artist to go much deeper in his work than if he had the freedom to be direct with his message.

You have to go around it and use symbols and be smart about it, and I think that takes the artwork to another level. So far, I think the art that comes from these communities is some of the most intelligent on the scene because we have that challenge to overcome.’

At times that challenge is considerable to say the least; the CPVPV as the embodiment of Wahhabist Islam gives the conservative faction a united, officially sanctioned voice that the liberals lack. Though a growing percentage of the population is supportive of openness, dialogue and creativity, there remains a significant number of people who condemn such creative works as immoral acts, acts seeking to copy Western ways, and in extreme cases, acts of heresy. To this day it is not uncommon to hear about a book fair or gallery opening that was shut down by the CPVPV on such grounds as the

82

Hass Dennaoui, better known under his artistic name Big Hass, is a music activist and the host of the first Saudi hiphop FM radio programme. Through his

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persistence Big Hass has been able to broadcast both Arab and global hip hop artists. Like all programmes, his show is monitored and not all songs can be

prevention of gender mixing or protection of the public from an act promoting blasphemy.

Nonetheless, many analysts of Saudi internal affairs are suggesting that recent government shuffles in the leadership of the CPVPV represent a move towards a more lenient and open era.

This analysis is further supported by recent government-backed projects such as the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, an upcoming billion-dollar facility for art, education and culture.

Scheduled to open in early 2016, the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture is a multipurpose complex that aims to foster creativity, inspire innovation, and promote cross-cultural education in the kingdom. With plans to host a library, museum, children’s discovery zone, galleries, cafés, idea translation lab, and a worldclass theatre space, it promises to bring new, unprecedented public places to Saudi Arabia: beyond the segregated restrooms and prayer rooms, the centre’s current plans create a public space for Saudi men and women to interact and

played, but Big Hass has given exposure to hip hop in the Middle East, dispelling stereotypes and shedding light on an underappreciated art form.

work in mixed company. This announcement was greeted with some outrage by the country’s Wahhabi core, but the controversy was quickly overshadowed by overwhelming calls of support and enthusiasm for this much-needed cultural centre.

With the completion of the tenth year of the King Abdullah Higher Education Scholarship programmes, another batch of educated young Saudis will return from their studies abroad to integrate themselves into the workforce, balance their newly acquired world views with their country’s conservative traditions, and seek ways to express their thoughts, apply their talents, and contribute to their society. It is not yet clear where Saudi creative culture is headed. It might remain a domestic reality, hidden from the rest of the world, or it might cross the country’s boundaries into the international scene. One thing, however, is sure: Saudis will continue to produce creative works and share them for everyone to see. ☐

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