Austrian-born photographer Mario Marino has spent the last few months in the South Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley taking what he calls “photographic psychograms” of its inhabitants. Each gorgeously spare portrait represents a different micro-culture of the region, which Marino chose for its incredible density of distinct ethnic minorities.
      “Faces of Africa” is a race against time of sorts. Marino searches the smallest, furthest villages for people whose heritage is under assault by the potent forces of tourism, technological advancement, and social globalization. His chosen method of preservation is to record a culture’s mark upon the body: white chalk used as face paint, intricate patterns shaved into hair, and throughout the portraits, ornaments made from the matchless leaves and shells of the South Ethiopian terrain. The sitters literally wear their homeland, supporting the claim of couturiers and choreographers everywhere that the body is simply one more medium for communication.

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Fresh on the heels of civil unrest and hard-won liberation in places like Egypt, Libya, and the Ivory Coast, Ostalgia, a new show featuring more than 50 artists from 20 different countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics is opening at the New Museum. The three-floor exhibit takes its name from the German ostalgie, a word that was on everyone’s tongue in the 1990s, nostalgic and morose for the golden era prior to the disintegration of the Communist Bloc. The show explores the full spectrum of emotional deviances that arose when the Soviet Union fell and Communism was permanently hobbled —a time before, during and after nations were forced to change their names, currency, constitutions and to a certain extent, their identities. Borders blurred, people felt the tumultuous aftershakes of their fallen ideologies and were forced to recommit themselves to a new history, a fresh place — despite the inexpressible trauma of losing one’s entire foundation.

“When the apocalypse comes, you can race up to Canada,” muses Torquil Campbell. “It will be delayed by a week in Canada. You get an extra week.” Along with his fellow band-mate, Chris Dumont, Campbell is traveling through upstate New York while the two (and their touring band of friends) play shows as Memphis, promoting their third album, Here Comes A City, along the eastern seaboard. “Is that an esoteric question or a literal one?” Campbells replies when asked how long before Memphis reaches its destination. This roundabout way of looking at things, be it the apocalypse or a road trip, has guided Campbell throughout his musical career. As an active member of Montreal’s Stars, in addition to Memphis, the half-American half-British resident of Vancouver, Canada, makes band decisions as an excuse to hang out with friends.
     “To be in a band with someone is a way of keeping current in their life,” Campbell states. “If you stop doing things with your friends, it turns into getting together and recounting the past twice a year over coffee. Your friendships turn into a series of memories and brief meetings and it gets increasingly distant. Every project I’m involved with is initiated by my relationship with the people in it.”

Just as New Yorkers are scrutinizing the development of the World Trade Center site, Berliners are scrutinizing the development of the Palast der Republik site. The Palast, an immense, East German government building completed in 1976, was condemned for asbestos in 1992 and demolished from 2006 to 2010. Located along the River Spree, amid stately nineteenth century buildings, at the very heart of Berlin’s cultural and tourist district, it had become, after the wall fell in 1989, a very visible symbol of all the wrong things: communism, oppression, censorship, and very, very bad style. A long, low concrete slab covered with gold mirrored glass, it looked like a flashy high security prison. Inside, it housed administration spaces for the city’s communist government and public spaces (lounges, bars, cafes, a bowling alley) where citizens could socialize in state-sanctioned splendor. The interiors were finished in the style of the time, with shag carpets, colored wallpaper, and chrome chandeliers studded with globe lights.
      To replace the Palast the city chose to reconstruct the shell of the eighteenth century castle that previously occupied the site, which was damaged during World War II and demolished in 1950. This new castle will house a museum, a library, and shopping mall. It’s a brazen act of historical amnesia, one that looks past an unattractive chapter in history to one that’s more palatable. The project, which was suspended for financial reasons, is slated for completion in the next decade. Just last month a temporary structure, with exhibition space and a lookout point for tourists, opened at the site.

For his previous documentary, 2009’s “Man on Wire,” James Marsh won an Oscar. That film told the story of Philippe Petit’s death-defying walk across a tightrope stretched between the towers of the World Trade Center. Now comes the director’s new release, “Project Nim,” which revisits the 1970s animal cognition experiment headed by Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace that attempted to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. That chimp, whose name was Nim, happened to be born the same year as the opening of the Trade Center, and as Marsh’s engaging and ultimately poignant film makes clear, the emotional life of one of our fellow primates can be as delicate as a high-wire balancing act.

The director spoke to PLANET about communication, evolution, and other monkey business ahead of “Project Nim’s” release:

Esperanza Rosales is a curator. In the traditional sense of collecting and explicating artists’ work under one venue auspice, but also in her own medium, wherein she mounts, rearranges, and deconstructs text on a page. In life we almost accept words as metaphors, but in writing they become even clumsier frameworks.
     “Like the languages that we speak, there will always be slips, inaccuracies, inadequacies, misunderstanding, certain lacks—precisely because they’re invested in ciphering and deciphering, coding and decoding, scripting and unscripting—that veer towards the creation of something new and obscure.”
     These thoughts of Esperanza I can almost feel wafting through her recent exhibition, ‘Nobody Can Tell the Why of It,’ an assimilation of film, drawing, even endless steps. Accidentally (or not) pinpointing a link in Esperanza’s own “scrapbook” process, the show’s title itself is a wink at intertextuality. Presenting works by Nicholas Byrne, Timothy Furey, Ken Okiishi, Nick Mauss, and Josef Strau, ‘Nobody Can Tell the Why of It’ incorporates ideas of mysticism and male hysteria. Not for the faint of heart, but I think I’ll keep this one bookmarked.

Listen to For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon’s breakthrough début as Bon Iver, before you listen to this, his self-titled second album. Those already familiar with For Emma and Vernon’s wounded falsetto, sung over sparse acoustic guitar, might be perplexed to learn Bon Iver takes a different approach. And yet, the two albums are not as drastically different as they seem. For Emma is so successful because of how it totally envelops its listener in Vernon’s sense of loneliness, experienced (as the legend goes) recording his songs in a secluded cabin, during the winter, while sick and getting over a breakup. Bon Iver communicates its feelings just as well, but things are more hopeful, here, like the thaw spring brings after winter. A rising drum-roll boldly proclaims itself on the Bon Iver’s opening track, “Perth”, making it immediately clear Vernon is venturing into new musical territory. The drums are soon fleshed out by horns and electric guitar, and create a rousing climax.

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Not all summer blockbuster sequels are created equally. One of the most anticipated popcorn films this season happens to be a low-budget documentary. It has no special effects, unless you count driving to work without a drop of gasoline, and the only superheroes to be found are the ones tinkering in garages or design labs. Thankfully, nothing explodes in “Revenge of the Electric Car” though the movie arrives in theaters just as an electric-powered boom may at long last be upon us.
     The film’s director, Chris Paine tells PLANET that six years after revealing the story of General Motors’s decision to recall the EV1 in the whodunit “Who Killed the Electric Car?” he welcomed the chance to chronicle the auto industry’s redemptive change of heart regarding the electric vehicle.
     “I saw this as a rare opportunity as a storyteller to chart a big reversal in an industry where they went from actively trying to kill it to reviving it and even championing it,” the director says, speaking of the variety of cars that are charged overnight through a wall outlet. The long-term prognosis for these electrics looks a lot better now than it did in 2005 at the time of the first film’s release. That’s thanks largely to the changing conditions that drivers are facing, all of which point to the need for an alternative to the gas-powered vehicle.

Earlier this summer, at a city council meeting in Cupertino, California, Steve Jobs unveiled a surprisingly static rendering for the new Apple corporate headquarters. It showed an big, glass donut-shaped building set down in a lush, edenic garden. (Perhaps some of the company’s gifted product designers can be brought on board to assist.) It was a textbook example of old-school utopian architecture, a gleaming, geometric structure sheltering a privileged, self-sustaining community. And it was strangely backward-looking, reminiscent of happy utopian visions from the 1960’s, like Buckminster Fuller’s domes, that expressed an unquestioning faith in the power of technology.
     The new book “Utopia Forever,” which collects contemporary designs, both buildable and far-from-buildable, for future cities and landscapes, offers a far more ominous view. These are visions of a world where nature and technology are locked in continual battle, with nature more likely to come out on top. Now that we’re experiencing the first rattlings of global warming, troubled by extreme weather and dwindling natural resources, we’re more aware of the brute power embodied in earth, air and water. So the new utopias don’t offer blueprints for ideal communities so much as fundamental propositions for survival. Some are vessels floating above or sunk beneath rising oceans.

It can be hard, sometimes, to wrap our heads around the injustice faced by people overseas. We know that countries like Iran, Afghanistan and Burma are repressive places, but news stories about them can seem a little abstract and faraway. Without personal stories, we’re left with just a vague sense of what the injustice means.
     That’s where an event like the Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes in. Now in its 22nd year, the festival (which takes place from June 16-30 in New York) shows how individuals are affected by repression and injustice. Powerful and personal, these films take us beyond the surface, looking into the lives of ordinary people with insight, sensitivity and humor.
     You might get a chill, for example, when you watch the story of Naty, a Peruvian maid working in Spain to support her family–then realize that plenty of Natys have cleaned your room and brought you food. Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herskovits’ film Familia shows Naty’s intense loneliness and the price paid by her family in Peru, especially her young son. It’s a story that’s heartbreakingly familiar, yet intensely individual too.