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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

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Eva Bartlett's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/evabartlett
Bio: Canadian human rights advocate volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza.  Eva was in Gaza before and during the 23 days of Israeli air, land, and sea attacks which kille... (More)

All Bartlett Blogs

port art: on the siege, on the massacre, on yearning for life

By Eva Bartlett at Oct 11, 2009


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In a small studio on a back lane in Gaza City, Salman Nawati hosts his first solo exhibition of paintings, accompanied by an art video installation.

The works centre around life in the Gaza port, encompassing at the same time feelings from life under siege and from the Israeli massacre of Gaza. The colours are vivid, as are the images and ideas.

By far the most intriguing piece is a tactile painting of a simple Palestinian hassaka (a small rowboat sized fishing boat), overturned and strewn amidst the clutter of a destroyed and decaying harbour. The artist uses fishing net in the painting; the frustrations of Gaza’s over 3500 fishermen jump off the canvas [the fishing industry used to thrive in Gaza, prior to the Israeli-imposed siege, prior to the Israeli arbitrary downsizing of fishing limits, from the Oslo-accorded 20 miles to the current less than 3 miles. Heavily armed Israeli soldiers in gunboats enforce this limitation, whatever limitation they feel, by shooting and shelling Palestinian fishermen, destroying boats, small hassakas and fishing equipment. Israeli soldiers routinely abduct Palestinian fishermen from Palestinian fishing waters.]

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Other works include a team of hassakas, dragged far up on the beach, unused, awaiting the end of the siege and the renewal of life.

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*saber, cacti, have grown between and over the disused fishing boats.

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The bombed out cityscape of Gaza beyond the sad port.

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Fishermen mend their nets. [under the siege, new materials for net are impossible to find. Those that make their way into Gaza come via the tunnels and are more expensive than the fishermen, barely surviving as it is, can afford.]

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Reminiscent of Ghassan Kanafani…and Van Gogh

And some are eye candy for the untrained artist…

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* a video-art collaboration with Muhammad al-Halabi.

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