Mediaseurantaa Osa 8: Ethnic Cool

Photos: Samuli Roininen, Copyrights: Moomin Characters Ltd


Moi taas. Kaksikielisesti.

Hallo there.

Schema Magazine. Sanooko mitään? Heard of it?

Kyseessä on kanadalainen verkkojulkaisu, joka näkee itsensä uuden globaalin valtavirtakulttuurin ilmiöiden esiintuojana, eräänlaisena kulttuurinavigaattorina, jonka johtoajatuksena on monikulttuurisuuden vahvistaminen.

"Like you, we belong to no one tribe. You're naan, adobo and bubble tea. You are comfortable in your skin and comfortable with other skins marching to the beats of their own drums. Or tablas. Or djembes. Constantly moving, your life is about bursting through ceilings and taking diversity with you."

(http://www.schemamag.ca/about/)

Let's read some more:

"Over the past six years we've tried really hard to describe what Schema Magazine is all about. We've used various descriptions—even had to create new terms like ethnic cool.

To be honest, we've never been satisfied.

The thing is, the identity we are trying to express, is new. We know intuitively what we mean, but we don't yet have the popular language or the concepts to really describe it. In fact, that's why Schema Magazine is so necessary: we've been stuck using 1970's language and ideas to talk about our fluid and complexly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and sometimes transnational identities.

We're not "caught between cultures", but moving through them. We're not hybrids or simply bi-racial. We're more complicated than that. If anything we're "blended." So here's another attempt.

Schema Magazine is a blend of pop-culture and identity, from the perspective of being 1.5-, 2nd-generation and beyond."


*****

Schema Magazinesta löytyi myös hauska juttu (Tags: Books , Design , Ethnic Cool , Europe , Urban) muumeista otsikolla:

Moomin Valley Mania: Live in a Fairy Tale
By Joy Inae Kim

Hän aloittaa näin:

"In 1945, in the midst of World War II, Swedish-speaking minority Tove Jansson, of Finland began to write and illustrate the cheerful Moomin Valley series. The story features white trolls (in actuality, they're hippopotamuses) that reside in a beautiful Finnish forest."

Hän jatkaa ja kertoo venäläisestä interiöörisuunnittelijasta, Maria Yaskosta, joka on suunnitellut Muumilaaksosta inspriroituneen huoneen. - Mielestäni aika kitschin tosin(...)hallitusti sitä tietenkin.

"(...)created by Russian interior designer, Maria Yasko who felt the desire to honour and depict the whimsical fantasies of a wonderful Finnish artist/writer named Tove Jansson. But Yasko wasn't the first to honour the Moomin Valley tales."

Mitä muuta?

"What else? Her (Tove Jansson) book has been adapted into television and film and has even inspired a museum known as The Moominvalley of the Tampere Art Museum. The Moomin characters were placed on airplanes: Finnair MD-11, a Russian rock group named themselves after them: Mumiy Troll, and to put the cherry on top of a long list, Moomin has its own Moomin World. That's right, it's an entire island- it's a WORLD!"

*****

"If anything we're "blended." - Vaikuttavaa.

I got interested.

One thing, though(...) Moomins are NOT, I repeat, they're NOT any hippopotamuses.



Samuli Roininen, Dancer-choreographer, Dance Theatre MD, Finland