AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

I saw a BBC documentary recently on the horrific build-up to what is now unbelievable a 5 year long war.

Economists lately in the US have been painting the bleak economic truth - "For this amount of money, we could have provided health insurance for the uninsured of this country. We could have made social security solvent for the next three generations, and implemented all the 9/11 Commission's recommendations [to tighten domestic security]."

That kind of list goes on: the annual cost of treating all heart disease and diabetes in the United States would amount to a quarter of what the Iraq war is costing. Pre-school for every child in America would take just $35bn a year. In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with an even more intriguing possibility: "We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds."

See article - http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120024

It got me wondering about Iraqi art - how are artists surviving? So I googled some and found out there's an Iraqi Art Gallery in Chicago - it's pretty active and prolific and opened in June 2005 just over two years into the war - iraqi-art.com.

Here in Amsterdam an exhibit at the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) is going on until April about Afghanistan's Hidden Art Treasures.

Studying Lynne Twist and her Hunger Project I learned that it doesn't take as much as we might think economically to make a huge difference in the world. I discovered a brilliant video underlining this with Sarah McLachlan - Worldonfire.ca (check it out!!)

Share your art and social change ideas with me and others at the Bar Struik in Amsterdam - Sunday 30 March - hope to see you there! :) 11:30 - 1:30 Rozengracht 160

Peace out,
Federico