Video Premiere: Unity Skate Club
“I love skating so much, I sleep with my skate boots like they are my girlfriend. -Mensah” Today we are proud to share the story of Unity Skate Club. For the members of Unity Skate Club, skating is a space of freedom. An opportunity to test limits. Feel the wind. Be with friends. And forget their problems and worries. For the members of Unity Skate Club- skating is their life. Skating is still a small sport in Ghana, but its popularity is booming. Unity Skate Club has grown from a more »
New Release- Artist Portrait: RAAM
RAAM made a promise. He had finished art school in Accra, Ghana and was facing an uncertain future. He chose to take a path with no guarantee of success and promised himself that he would do everything he could to make a career as an artist. He began painting shirts and taught himself to sew, convincing local fashion shops to give him their extra scraps of cloth. He experimented with combining collage, paint and dying techniques- all from his parent’s home and began running his own business. He promoted his more »
Better Days are Coming: Boyu’s Story
The journey to Buduburam refugee camp is supposed to take 45 minutes. It took us five hours. After taking a tro tro from Labadi to Circle, the main transportation hub of Accra, Boyu and I waited in a snaking line for two hours, during which not a single bus came. The mood of the line went from open and joyful to exhausted and impatient. We finally gave up and split a four seated cab, with three friends of hers that we ran into in line. We drove for two hours, more »
Street Jam
The Of Rags Street Jam was an extended surreal moment in which my brain was in Mantra Mode repeating over and over— I Love What I do. The Street Jam was the culmination of all that we had done in Ghana. Three intense weeks of dreaming big, planning to make it happen and then seeing it all come true. We ran a weekend workshop in which students in the Passion Squad designed their own circle shirts, which are being given to their counterparts in the project in New York. A more »
No Boundaries
You know something is powerful when all of your dreams revolve around it. Last night we attended a tribute to Tim Hetherington titled No Boundaries at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. We watched Diary, his reflection on his experience as a war photographer (watch it on vimeo). It an incredibly inspiring and evocative piece which affected me deeply. It surreally explores the nature of memory and experience as he spent time in life threatening circumstances and then returned to everyday life. Although we do not do war photography, the more »
I am brave and I am not a coward.
From across the courtyard I saw ten or so students huddled around in a circle. Curious, I approached them to get a glimpse of what they were looking at and saw them all gravitating towards the small screen on one of the flip cams that they had been shooting with. It was the end of a phenomenal afternoon of creative activism with the members of the West Africa AIDS Foundation Passion Squad (peer educators)- RAAM worked with half the students on creating t-shirt designs and storybooks while Ethan, Branson and more »
Labadi Scenes
Our favorite part of being here is walking around Labadi, meeting people, talking to them and sharing in the photographic process. At the end of our time here we will have a street party in front of the Of Rags shop. We are screening the skits about HIV/AIDS that we are making with youth tomorrow, but after we will have a massive projected slideshow of all the community photos we have taken around Labadi. Here is a sneak peak of some of our favorites (note all the fierce fashion…): Tweet
Circle Connection- The Power of Multiple Narratives
“Isn’t there a lot of poverty in Africa?” asked a girl on the first day of our Circle Connection workshop in New York. We had asked them if they knew where Ghana is located. Most of the kids gave blank stares but one girl raised her hand and asked if it is in Africa. Although it wasn’t surprising to me that the only reflection we got about Ghana was that Africa = Poverty, it convinced me that the work we are doing is very important. To read the rest of more »
Resources of New York, Resourcefulness of Ghana
“A hungry mind is always creative.” said Timothy a taxi driver we met yesterday. Incredibly, we have already been here in Accra for a week. My mind is so hungry and alive every moment of being here. This first week has really been about orientation– meeting people in Labadi and finding a sense of direction. Read the rest of this post here. Tweet
It Gives Us Freedom- Unity Skate Club
Unity Skate Club Preview from Of Rags on Vimeo. This past weekend we had the privilege of shooting and interviewing members of the club including Joshua, Of Rags’ longest standing employee, who is one of three co-founders of the club. He helped form the club two years ago when he saw that he could bring together his friends who were into skating and two (of the only) professional skaters in Ghana. Joshua gathered youth in Labadi, helped them find roller blades (imported and mostly second hand), and organized them to more »
