One of the treats at the Vis Green Academy in Croatia last week was seeing an exhibit of photographs by Marina Kelava, of Bjelovar, Croatia, who works as a journalist and photojournalist for Croatian Internet magazine H-Alter.org, which focuses mainly on environmental issues. The exhibit included a number of photos documenting various enclosures of the commons in Croatia as well as photos taken while covering large international events, from the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the World Social Forum to the beginning of Radovan Karadzic’s trial at the International Criminal Tribunal.
Kelava graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb, with a degree in journalism. A larger collection of her photos can be seen on Facebook at Marina Kelava Photography.
I met Marina when she interviewed me for H-Alter.org. Then I saw her photos on the wall and was impressed by their power in depicting the personal, social and emotional dimensions of commoning, the social practices of defending and celebrating a community's shared wealth. The photos are simultaneously political and human, which is not always an easy thing to combine in rich, subtle ways. Kelava's photos do.
View from the untouched hill of Srdj above Dubrovnik, Croatia, where a huge golf project is planned and the civil initiative "Srdj is Ours" is fighting against it.
Activists of the Forum for Space expressed their opposition to building three new golf projects in Šibenik, Croatia, surroundings with thirty meter banner saying "Apartmanization – What has golf to do with it?", March, 2.
During July 2010 more than 150 citizens of Zagreb, Croatia, were arrested during peaceful demonstrations opposing the construction of a private underground garage in the pedestrian zone in Varšavska street in Zagreb.
During February 2010, activists of the Green Action and the Right to the City initiative camped 24 hours a day in two large containers in Varšavska street in Zagreb trying to protect the pedestrian zone from the planned construction of an underground garage.
"Greetings to the Sun" is a solar powered installation made by the architect Nikola Bašić in Zadar, Croatia.
Kelava has many other photos from political struggles around the world that are worth seeing. Here's one:
The indigeneous people whose existence is endangared with the construction of a huge hydropowerplant Belo Monte in the Brazilian Amazon protested during the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in January 2009.
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