The material is then collated and screened on a monthly basis in public space in Mathare. Thus it functions like a ‘newsreel’ and affords the slum dwellers with a form of local news. Having been screened locally, the content is then uploaded onto the website, which functions both as an archive of this oral history and a means to access a secondary, international audience.

The slum features in the mainstream media almost specifically within the context of violence. SLUM-TV strives to provide slum dwellers with a form of self-representation so that they can begin to tell their own stories and offer a more nuanced, multi-faceted and accurate portrait of slum life.

At the core of this project is the aim to develop an audiovisual format that covers important cultural, social and political issues in Kenya and later within the African region. Whilst at the moment we are screening in public space, the distribution strategy for 2008 is to begin to use the existing ‘pirate cinema’ network that covers the whole region. SLUM-TV will then be distributed on VCD format throughout these existing channels.

Anticipating the future when slum dwellers will have cheaper and better access to the Internet, we will also make it possible for SLUM-TV locally to build a Website to serve as a kind of “YouTube”, linking different SLUM-TV Units worldwide, and producing a digital space for communication and exchange of experience.

SLUM-TV maintains connections with a network of New Media activists. Concurrent with our monthly production of ‘newsreels’, we host six-monthly workshops, offering specialist training in a variety of new media strategies, ranging from media hacking to open source editing.

For more information see www.slum-tv.info

www.culturalvideo.org
www.youtube.com/culturalvideo

CVF Maskani project

“What is the street culture? And what is the relation between street culture and public space?
How Ukoo Flani hip hop music group can introduce us the public space and the urban culture of Mombasa ?
Mombasa is the city where they grow up, they meet and they started to rap………
What can happen in two weeks if the Ukoo Flani group would started to really think about public space as a new important topic to speak about trough their songs and their performances?
The output of our project is something between a live performance and a film documentary: discover in two weeks the public space dimension of Mombasa city trough the eyes of Ukoo Flani.

This is the link to the video trailer CVF produced with the hip hop group of Ukoo Flani during the Urban Wasanii International Workshop 2008 http://www.youtube.com/user/mascaniCVF

While the music video will released in occasion of african maximalism, the Maskani project is still going on and CVF is looking for founders to edit the final version of the whole documentary.