Last September, threegirls travelled to Egypt. Some sweet Egyptian friends guided them around Cairo, which is a disaster of a city. Too many cars, too much hassling, and not a single (green) space to give your bottom a rest. After four days, threegirls had to sweat out Cairoan stress far far away from the smog and the hooting. So they went to the Sinai desert, where the stars are plenty and the camels smirk. Sho-kran Sinai!
The North-Korean leader Kim Jong-il is one of the most mysterious leaders in the world. Not much is known about his life, and what is known is often highly disputed. Yet the Guardian found some photo albums of this highly feared fluorescent leader. My favorite is the one where Kim Jong is not inspecting his nuclear warheads, but some idyllic wheatfields together with his doggy crew. O dictatorial leaders can be so funny in their dictatorialness!
This reminds me of the really really must-have dvd ‘Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin‘, released last year by the ex-president himself (in the same series: Putin fishing bare chested, Putin killing bears and Putin saving tv-crews from giant Siberian tigers).
Source: The Guardian.
Photographs: KCNA/Corbis
And some more recent poses
Last week, I visited the city which once was the terminus of the infamous Orient-Express. Historically seen, Istanbul is one of the most intriguing cities in the world. Its first name was Byzantium, named after king Byzas who settled his troops “where the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn meet and flow into the Sea of Marmara”, by order of the Oracle. Yes it was that simple at that time. In 330, emperor Constantine relocated the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium, which became Constantinople. The city blossomed sumptuously in the cultural, economic and religious field (while our regions were shaded by the dark Middle Ages). As a consequence, Constantinople got attacked many times by jealous neighbours, until in 1453 the Ottoman sultans came off best and conquered the city. They plopped down minarets everywhere, turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and built the luxurious Topkapi Palace with its huge harem and treasuries full of jewelry. The city became the world centre of the Islam, until Mustafa Kemal aka Atatürk chased the Ottoman Sultans (and the Allies) off after World War I. In 1923 Atatürk formed (and reformed) Turkey. As an admirer of the Age of Enlightenment, Atatürk wanted to transform the ruins of the Ottoman Empire into a modern, democratic, secular, nation-state. The principles of his reforms continue to form the political foundation of modern Turkey. Due to its dazzling history, Istanbul became a blend of Turkish, Anatolian, Ottoman (in itself a mix of Greco-Roman and Islamic cultures) and Western culture and traditions. And this seems to do a human good, because Turkish people are incredibly friendly & welcoming to foreigners. Warmly recommended.
Below already some views, more photos here.
Worryingly Snowless Finland at Christmas Time, Ritta Ikonen
Source: The Royal College of Art, London
I took these images in 2005 while doing the research for a documentary on the demolition of an old cokes factory in Seabruges. Although heavily polluted, the site was very beautiful. It seemed as if the rigid industrial installations finally had admitted that nature, after all, has got the last word. Seeing the wheat and sea-gulls overtaking the site with the old buildings silently giving in to it, ‘Carcoke Zeebrugge’ turned into a darling grandpa with darkbrown teeth and polluted lungs. Heavily polluted lungs, that is. This is also the reason why the whole site had to be demolished urgently (the heavy metals and petrochemicals were contaminating the surrounding water aquifers), and cautiously (in order not to release even more soot and asbestos into the surrounding atmosphere). A great documentary topic..
I also visited Sidmar, a working cokes factory in the industrial zone of Ghent, Belgium. Pretty impressive. And don’t start phoning the greenies now, the heavy clouds are just water vapour. Also, soot filters (on some installations) are compulsory nowadays. We needed a couple of decades to become aware of that, but hey.
More images here.
About the documentary..
During the first half of the 20th century, Carcoke Zeebrugge used to be the nerve centre of the Belgian steel industry. Tons of coal were imported to produce cokes, the ideal fuel for the production of steel. At that time, nobody worried. Business went fine, workers got good wages, neighbours didn’t complain.
But in the eighties, environmentalists raised the alarm. Sootfilters didn’t work properly anymore, neighbours had to stay in because of the black smoke and the factory site’s soil got heavily polluted. The cokes glory faded. Carcoke Zeebrugge closed its fences in 1996.
In 2005, the factory still exists. Looking peaceful and idyllic, with flowers and sea gulls taking over the site. But the buildings, machines and soil are dangerous sources of toxic chemicals like cyanide, benzene and asbestos. The pollution seeps through the soil and threatens water supplies of neighbouring villages. The factory urgently needs to be killed.
Gently though. Brutely using powerful cranes and angry caterpillars isn’t really the way to demolish a chemical factory. Every single component needs to be isolated with care to avoid extra pollution of surrounding air, soil and water. And a lot can go wrong, like the demolition of the Brussels Marly factory showed in 2003. The heavily polluted towers caught fire and burnt for days, polluting the air hundreds of kilometers away. So a lot of engineering skills and a big plan (A and B) are needed to kill a factory gently, and with success.
This documentary shows the story of the demolition of Carcoke Zeebrugge, from the start till the very end.
(‘Giftige sloop’ OverLeven CANVAS – 2005) (40min.)
More documentaries here.
In 2004/5 Gini Rose travelled through Argentina.
She took these pictures in Buenos Aires, a city she’d always go back to.
More views here.
Hello, we are threegirls and this is our mission statement! Over.
First of all, we would like to welcome you with a lot of appetizers, bubbles, festoons and one of our favorite pictures: ‘Agar and Sandy, Big Sur’ (1961). The American iconoclast Hunter S. Thompson is the man behind the camera. Why favorite? First of all, therefore. Secondly: summer, loyalty, witticism, freedom, honeyed love, and a lot of views.
Hunter S. Thumpson is mostly known for his novel ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ (a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream), and for his sharp Rolling Stone magazine articles. He was a bit too anger-driven, paranoid and acerbic to be our hero, but nevertheless a very intriguing nutcase.
H.S.T. is the godfather of Gonzo journalism, ‘a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories’. To be clear, this is not the main aim of threegirls. We will try not to focus on ourselves too much, but rather on the world around us. We like to go outside (mostly with sunglasses, that is).
Nevertheless, there are some similarities between H.S.T. and threegirls’s mission. The visceral honesty, the blend of fact and fantasy, the self-styled mixture of news, opinion and personal experiences. You certainly may regard Hunter S. Thompson as the forerunner of modern day ‘ogging (vlog blog whatever). We also admire his tireless battle against hypocrisy and his contempt for authority, but we don’t want to shoot every convention cantankerously like he did. That’s too hippie.
We are also a bit smarter than H.S.T.! His great thirst for all the world’s whiskey, drug use and everlasting love for firearms turned the sharp-tongued smoking social critic with aviator glasses into a cartoon character – literally and figurative. We, threegirls, are already cartoon characters before we even started! Ha! If that isn’t the ultimate anticipation in history of humankind, we don’t know what is.
Anyway.
From now on we’ll post drawings, photos, video and text every now and then, when we feel like it. We don’t plan to become a victim of the web. This is not a blog, or a vlog, or a trough, but a wedon’tknowyethowoften-monthly kinda thing tings.
Dutch is our mother tongue, but we’ll often write in English. Yes, we admit, this is a rather impure language habit, but it is not our fault (determinism has saved us many times before). We mix up languages because we were raised like that, going from place to place. We also like languages too much, so we want to use them all, so maybe we are a bit greedy too. Voila.
And on a bright sunny day, we will get rid of that ennoying catholic sense of guilt reflex as well.
To conclude, why are we doing this?
We don’t have a clue.
Talk to you soon.
Gini, Julia, Suzy
We are Gini Rose, Julia and Suzy. We draw, take pictures, film, and write (in English or Dutch) about everything we are intrigued by. We are never bored. Our hobby is to search for that kind of reality which may be elusive until the right kind of imagination falls upon it. We like to go outside. We also like to party. Want to know more? About is your button. Or click here to read our mighty mission statement. This page is our magazine, or a cabinet of views, viewpoints and new work. Here you'll find the RSS feed to stay updated. For an overview of our portfolio, take a dive into the deepsea..
