Fears looted Nazi art still hanging in Belgian and British galleries

Leading art museums are reassessing their works after a Belgian journalist traced how a fascist sympathiser acquired a Jewish dealer’s collection

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

THE OBSERVER

Sat 20 May 2023

In August 1940, Samuel Hartveld and his wife, Clara Meiboom, boarded the SS Exeter ocean liner in Lisbon, bound for New York. Aged 62, Hartveld, a successful Jewish art dealer, left a world behind. The couple had fled their home city of Antwerp not long before the Nazi invasion of Belgium in May 1940, parting with their 23-year-old son, Adelin, who had decided to join the resistance.

Hartveld also said goodbye to a flourishing gallery in a fine art deco building in the Flemish capital, a rich library and more than 60 paintings. The couple survived the war, but Adelin was killed in January 1942. Hartveld was never reunited with his paintings, which were snapped up at a bargain-basement price by a Nazi sympathiser and today are scattered throughout galleries in north-western Europe, including Tate Britain.

The story of Hartveld’s lost paintings is just one episode in the vast catalogue of art that was looted, stolen or forcibly sold after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Nearly 80 years after the end of the second world war, a new book, Kunst voor das Reich, argues that Belgium has yet to reckon with that legacy.

Portrait of Bishop Antonius Triest by Gaspar de Crayer. 

Photograph: Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent / Michel Burez & Hugo Maertens

For the book’s author, Geert Sels, the quest began in 2014 after the sensational discovery of 1,500 modernist masterpieces in the flat of an 80-year old man in Munich, the son of the Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. Sels, the cultural editor of Belgium’s De Standaard newspaper, was intrigued. He wanted to know if any of the works had come from Belgium. But when he went to consult official records, he was disappointed: Belgium had no public database of lost or orphan art works.

According to the Belgian government, that was because everything was in order. A government commission into plundered Jewish assets had completed its work in 2001. “The answer was, everything in Belgium has been researched,” Sels told the Observer. “I thought, well, it’s a lie.”

Sels was convinced Belgium fell far short of the 1998 Washington principles, when 44 countries agreed to establish a central registry of art stolen by the Nazis and publicise confiscated works to help trace the original owners or heirs. “A lot of countries, including Belgium, agreed to do research, to make the information public, to establish databases but Belgium hasn’t done it.”

So he began his own search, which led him to Hartveld’s scattered collection. His library – 29 boxes of art books and auction catalogues – was carted away by the Nazis.

His gallery and paintings were sold to René Van de Broek, a 31-year-old painting restorer and member of DeVlag, a Flemish group that favoured cooperation with Nazi Germany. Van de Broek paid 200,000 francs for the exhibition hall and 66 paintings, later telling postwar investigators he believed it was a fair price. In fact it was a steal – Hartveld had taken out an 800,000 franc mortgage to build the property alone.

In 1948, Van de Broek sold a single painting – the 17th-century baroque work, Portrait of Bishop Antonius Triest – to the city of Ghent for 50,000 francs. Another of Hartveld’s 17th-century works, Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Burning Troy, now hangs in Tate Britain, acquired from a Belgian art dealer in 1994. Once thought to be an Italian painting, the 1654 work bears the signature of Canterbury “gentleman painter” Henry Gibbs and its theme of exile echoes the trauma of the recent English civil war.

Van de Broek, who was questioned after the war for his Nazi sympathies, convinced investigators he had Hartveld’s blessing to dispose of the paintings. A letter dated 5 July 1945, purporting to be from the art dealer, said Van de Broek had done “brilliantly” in saving his stock. As an expression of “sincere gratitude” he proposed that Van de Broek run the gallery and sell the stock if he wanted.

For a man who had lost his son and life’s work in a war that had just ended, the casual tone was jarring. Sels took the letter to a handwriting expert, who found significant discrepancies with Hartveld’s usual style and concluded there was “a strong possibility… the signature was not the hand of Monsieur S Hartveld”.

After researching the book, Sels wants to expand the concept of lost art. Hartveld never knew his works were being sold. Other “sales” or “donations” were acts of desperation.

Homme marchant by Max Liebermann.

 Photograph: Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium


In 1939, a Jewish immigrant to Belgium from Berlin, Benno Seegall, offered the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts 10 drawings from the family collection, after an earlier donation of two works, to secure visas for his sister. Emmy Seegall and her husband, Fritz Gütermann, were frantically trying to flee Germany after the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, but had been turned down for a Belgian visa multiple times.

Benno, who had lived in Brussels since 1936, secured visas with avant garde works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Max Liebermann. The drawings remain in the museum’s collection today. For Sels, this is a very clear case: “They wouldn’t have given away things if it was not to save their lives and get away from Germany.”

In a statement, Belgium’s state secretary in charge of museums, Thomas Dermine, said the previous government commission had restored a large number of looted works, but subsequent restitutions had been “too sporadic”. He was, the statement said, creating a department that would charge federal museums with considering “a process that allows a more proactive approach to this issue” because “humanity must always end up defeating barbarism”.

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) said further research into the unknown provenance of some of its paintings “must be carried out” and could lead to new restitutions. The museums, which last year returned an expressionist work to the descendants of a German Jewish couple, said it was studying the works from the Seegalls as part of a larger, four-year project into the provenance of its collections acquired since 1933. “The RMFAB strongly hopes that this project will allow it to complete the provenance of art works in its collection… and will ensure greater transparency.”

Professor Dr Manfred Sellink, director of the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, said there had been no claim to recover the portrait of Bishop Antonius Triest. Any decision on restitutions would be taken by the city of Ghent, the owner of the museum’s collection. His museum, he said, had researched works of doubtful provenance and always collaborated in the return of stolen objects, but he acknowledged there could be problematic works in the collection. “I can say without hesitation, the Belgian state has been very late in taking action,” Sellink added.

Tabitha Barber, curator of British art at Tate Britain, said the museum was doing careful work to verify its Aeneas painting has been correctly identified: “We are in the process of doing this and will update our provenance record accordingly.”

Meanwhile, Sels has traced several relatives of the Jewish families who lost art works during the war. He thinks their claims will heighten pressure on the Belgium government to act: “It won’t be enough to say everything has been studied and no irregularities were found.”

Nazis and normality: UK directors unsettle Cannes with films tackling ‘unseen’ evil

Steve McQueen and Jonathan Glazer separately confront the Holocaust with themes prompted by a resurgence of the far right


Vanessa Thorpe

CANNES

THE OBSERVER

Sat 20 May 2023 

STEVE MCQUEEN

Steve McQueen and Jonathan Glazer, two of Britain’s most admired and daring film directors, have disturbed Cannes audiences with a pair of extraordinary films that confront Europe’s murderous fascist past.

The directors, working independently on different projects about Nazi atrocities, both say they were prompted by the growth of political extremism and prejudice.

Glazer, best known as director of the sci-fi dystopia Under the Skin and the admired gangster film Sexy Beast, says he wants The Zone of Interest, which premiered to acclaim on Friday evening, to address “the capacity within each of us for violence”. He believes, he said this weekend, it is too easy to assume such brutal behaviour is a thing of the past.

“The great tragedy is human beings did this to other human beings,” he said. “It is very convenient to think we would never behave in this way, but we should be less certain of that.”

His unflinching look at the proximity to mass genocide in which German domestic life went on is set in the home of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss.

McQueen’s documentary, Occupied City, also turns to historic detail to lay out the unpalatable facts that lie in the landscape of modern Amsterdam.

A scene from the film The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which portrays domestic life alongside the Auschwitz death camp. 

Photograph: AP

Speaking to the Observer in Cannes, McQueen said: “People aren’t stupid. They do realise on one level what happened, but somehow we need to smack ourselves out of this amnesia.”

The Oscar-winning director and his Dutch wife, Bianca Stigter, who wrote the script, were also prompted by the rise of the new right and Europe’s increasing political polarisation.

“The past can’t be on the surface all the time,” said Stigter, “but some things should not be forgotten. In today’s climate, with antisemitism and racism on the rise, it is good to be reminded of that moment of history.”

Both directors have turned to face Nazi horrors partly because witnesses to the Holocaust are no longer so numerous. Speaking to the press on Saturday, Glazer, who is a Jewish Londoner, said he felt it was vital to keep telling the story, despite the advice his own father gave him to just “let it rot”, and leave it to history.

“It is very important we do keep bringing it up and making it familiar; to keep showing it so that a new generation can discover it in film. The Holocaust is not a museum piece that we can have a safe distance from. It needs to be presented with a degree of urgency and alarm,” he said.

The two British films concentrate with forensic intensity on what people are capable of ignoring. While neither film portrays Nazi violence directly, both contain elements that will make difficult viewing for a mainstream audience, and not just because of their bleak focus.

Glazer’s film, made on location near the site of the former death camp in occupied Poland, is made in German. McQueen and Stitger’s documentary lasts four hours and deliberately has no narrative structure.

In each case there are few concessions to the world of popular entertainment. Glazer’s film has a lurid, deadpan mood, while McQueen’s relies on the build-up of appalling crimes recounted over footage of modern Amsterdammers going about their lives during the pandemic lockdown.

The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer with cast members Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel at Cannes 2023. Photograph: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters

“It is about evidence of things unseen,” said McQueen. “Meandering through one of the most beautiful cities to ramble in, so there is the perversity of the fact all these things happened in such a beautiful city.

“Our film is not a history lesson, it is an experience.”

In The Zone of Interest Glazer portrays domestic life alongside the Auschwitz death camp. It has an almost surreal tone as it juxtaposes the quotidian concerns of the Höss family with the mass torture, starvation and killing going on next door. Glazer loosely based his film on the Martin Amis book and developed it after spending time at Auschwitz.

The audacity of looking at Nazi atrocities afresh has been applauded by one of Germany’s great directors, Wim Wenders.

Before watching either film, Wenders, in Cannes for the premiere of his film Perfect Days this week, told the Observer that tackling the Holocaust in film is risky, but it remains important to try.

“We should be capable of looking back at war. If we can stand the ugliness of staring it in the face and if we can then stand doing it with actors … then we can learn for the present and for the future. But it is a painful process and it can also go damn wrong.”

Occupied City review – Steve McQueen’s moving meditation on wartime Amsterdam

The monumental film which tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule asks hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present


Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 17 May 2023 

Steve McQueen’s monumental film is a vast survey-meditation on the wartime history and psychogeography of his adopted city: Amsterdam, based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s Dutch-language book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.

With a calm and undemonstrative narrative voiceover from Melanie Hyams, the film tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule. It spans the invasion in 1940; the establishment of the NSB, the collaborationist Dutch Nazi party; the increasingly brutal repression and deportation of Jewish populations to the death camps; and then the “hunger winter” of 1944 to 1945 as food and fuel became scarce in the city and the Nazis displayed a gruesome mix of panic and fanaticism as the allies closed in.

What McQueen does is effectively represent the maps and figure legends of the book on screen: the camera shows us the modern-day indoor and outdoor scenes on individual streets, canals, squares, buildings and jetties where the barbarity unfolded – but shows them as they are now, with 21st-century people going about their business while Hyams’ narration coolly summarises what happened in each particular spot, sometimes adding that the original building has been “demolished”. A prison yard where Jews were forced to parade around chanting: “I am a Jew, beat me to death, it’s my own fault” is now an open space overlooked by the Hard Rock Cafe. The headquarters of the secret police was on the site of what is now a school.

Occupied City lasts a little more than four hours, with an intermission, and the effect is something like an huge cinematic frieze or tapestry, or perhaps an installation. But it is also like an old fashioned “city symphony” movie, and, in its approach, perhaps bears the influence of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. It asks hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present. When we think about Nazi rule in Amsterdam, we think of … what? Flickering black-and-white newsreel footage, semi-familiar landmarks in monochrome, images of swastikas, an alien display of history, vacuum-sealed in the past. But McQueen shows us the modern world, in 4K resolution and there is a gradual realisation that for those involved in 1940, the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam happened just like this: in living colour in the here-and-now, with modern hairstyles and clothes.

Sometimes there is a disconnect between past and present. The site of a bygone horror might in 2023 be a scene of happiness: people ice-skating on a frozen canal and having innocent fun. At some other place we see a commemorative event: the laying of wreaths. At other times, there will be a parallel: in Dam Square the Nazi occupiers erected a bandstand; now we see a stage for outdoor performance. And then there are other, serious engagements with history and politics. We see an official statement of apology for colonialism and slavery; we see a huge and boisterous “climate strike” by young people and an event for the murdered Dutch investigative journalist Peter R de Vries. The effect is to show us that the past and present are not clear, with distinct layers of old/significant and new/insignificant: it is more fluid than that.

Occasionally, there is a weird frisson. Some of McQueen’s footage was shot during the Covid lockdown and the juxtaposition of this with Nazi oppression takes us – unintentionally – perhaps a little close to GB News territory. And audiences might be surprised at how little emphasis is placed on Anne Frank: it could well be that McQueen wanted to take us away from well-trodden arguments, and certainly to move away from the modern tourist cliches of coffee shops and sex worker windows. Although on that last point there is another eerie historical echo in the way in which sexual activity between occupier and occupied was variously policed, tolerated and punished.

In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.

Occupied City screened at the Cannes film festival.

A precious resource: how Israel uses water to control the West Bank

In occupied West Bank villages, Israeli-owned farms are flourishing, while Palestinians often do not have enough water to drink

Bethan McKernan 

in the Nablus countryside, West Bank

The Guardian

Wed 17 May 2023

Mahmoud Haj Mohammed stands on the roof of his family’s home in the occupied West Bank village of Jalud and points towards a clump of cypress trees on the opposite side of the valley.

He has just got back from his job at a concrete factory in the nearby city of Nablus, hot and tired in the last week of Ramadan, jeans covered in grey flecks of cement. The 32-year-old began working there two years ago, after the seizure of a key part of his family’s land by Israeli settlers eventually made it unviable to farm it any more.

“It’s easy to see where the settlers are. Look at the olive grove below the cypress,” Haj Mohammed said, as a herd of goats passed by. “That is our land, but we are not farming it. See how close together the trees are? That’s because the settlers have access to the water supply and proper irrigation. Compare it to our trees, the ones that are spaced out more, and not in neat rows.”

Part of the land owned by the family of Mahmoud Haj Mohammed was seized by Israeli settlers. Photograph: Ofir Berman/The Guardian

Water is one of the most precious resources in Israel and the Palestinian territories. This beautiful landscape – the historic fertile crescent – can be harsh and unforgiving. But with enough water, as the Book of Isaiah says, “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.”

Israel is the world leader in water management and technology: last year, a first-of-its-kind project began pumping desalinated seawater from the Mediterranean northwards, to replenish the shrinking Sea of Galilee.


Yet rights groups contend that these successes are to the detriment of Palestinians; Israel controls about 80% of water reserves in the West Bank, but both the West Bank and Gaza Strip face severe water stress and drought.

In theory, no one living or working in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank fully controlled by Israel, can get connected to pipelines belonging to Israel’s national water company without proving ownership of the land or otherwise gaining a permit from the Israeli civil administration in the territories, known as Cogat. But in practice, access to water resources is a potent state-controlled weapon for the settlement movement, allowing Israeli-owned vineyards, olive groves, livestock farms and date plantations to flourish.


New York law aims to stop funding of illegal Israeli settlements in West Bank

Israelis, including those living in settlements, use three times as much water a day as West Bank Palestinians do, according to a new report from the Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem. In many places, it is difficult for Palestinian farmers to cultivate even low yields of crops such as wheat, lentils and chickpeas. Decreasing access to land and water thanks to settlement expansion means farming contributes just 2.6% of the territory’s GDP today.

About 450,000 Israelis have settled in what is now Area C since the occupation began in 1967 and are motivated for different reasons: some see reclaiming the biblical land of Israel as a religious or nationalistic mission, while others are drawn by the cheaper cost of living or business opportunities. Overall, their presence is viewed by the international community as illegal, and a leading obstacle to peace: the phenomenon of settler violence against Palestinians is growing.

Palestinian children show their produce. 

Photograph: Ofir Berman/The Guardian

A handful have become rich by cultivating thousands of acres of disputed land, establishing lucrative boutique wineries and high-grade medjool dates and olive oil brands for export. One of the biggest settlement agricultural businesses today is Meshek Achiya, founded in 2003 near the biblically significant settlement of Shilo, an area particularly notorious for land grabs and settler violence.


Local families say Meshek Achiya grew after seizing swathes of their land during the second intifada (Palestinian uprising) of the 2000s, when access for Palestinians in the area, including the Haj Mohammeds, was blocked by army checkpoints.

The Guardian’s attempts to reach several owners and directors at the company went unanswered. Meshek Achiya has claimed in legal filings that the land it farms was bought from other settlers.

“If we had more water, the village would grow more than beans and za’atar. But sometimes in the summer we don’t even have drinking water,” said Jamal Deeb, a resident of Qaryut, the next village to Jalud, where land claimed by several local families has also been taken over by Meshek Achiya.

“My family is in a good position because we have deeds and can prove we own it, but we are still fighting for decades. Dragging out the court battles is part of the strategy,” the 55-year-old said. “I don’t think I will ever see our trees on that side of the valley again.”

Jamal Deeb, a resident of Qaryut, where land claimed by several local families has been taken over by the agricultural business Meshek Achiya. 

Photograph: Ofir Berman/The Guardian

Meshek Achiya’s success – and that of many other Israeli settlement enterprises – would be impossible without access to increasingly large amounts of water that farmers need in the drought-prone area. Yet even though there are five eviction orders pending on some of the land controlled by the company, upheld by Israel’s supreme court, the entire operation still appears to be connected to the Israeli water agency’s supply.

In 2017, the last year before the water authority stopped publishing detailed data on agricultural water allocations in the West Bank, Meshek Achiya received about 100,000 cubic metres of water, or 274 cubic metres a day (one cubic metre = 1,000 litres). Palestinians living in Area C use about 20 litres of water a day, just a fifth of the 100 litres a day minimum set by the World Health Organization.

The story repeated itself across the West Bank, said Dror Etkes, an expert on Israeli settlement construction and infrastructure and the founder of the NGO Kerem Navot.

Its research shows that the same year, the Water Authority allocated 17,000 cubic metres to the family that runs the popular Psagot Winery, near Ramallah, where there is a demolition order against the chief executive’s villa and swimming pool. Psagot denied any illegal activity in an emailed response. Another 12,000 cubic metres went to a Meshek Achiya employee who has started his own vineyard.


A large sheep herding outpost – considered illegal under Israeli as well as international law – received 9,000 cubic metres. The wife of the owner of the Giv’ot Olam organic egg farm, another outpost renowned for violence, was the registered name for 111,000 cubic metres.

Qaryut. Meshek Achiya has claimed in legal filings that the land it farms was bought from other settlers Photograph: Ofir Berman/The Guardian

Meanwhile, the UN says that more than 270 water and sewage facilities used by Palestinians in Area C have been demolished in the past five years on the grounds that the infrastructure is illegal.

Cogat, the arm of the Israeli military responsible for civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, said in emailed comments that “allocation of water to Israeli agriculture in [the West Bank] is performed only after a thorough examination of the various aspects touching on land rights. When water is illegally diverted, the authorities take action in the area as they are legally entitled to do.”

The Israeli water authority directed requests for information to Cogat.

Etkes said: “It is easy to get rich when you don’t have to pay for the land and you’re hooked up to a water supply your neighbours don’t get.”

After 15 years of litigation, the Haj Mohammed family managed to win back 7 hectares (17 acres) – about a fifth of the land they claim – in a high court ruling in 2021. In February this year, Meshek Achiya’s olive trees were uprooted and moved, and Mahmoud and his brothers planted wheat for the first time in decades, in honour of their father. Haj Mohammed senior died in 2017; he never saw any of the family’s land returned.

“The settlers still come down from their homes on the hill. Last week they threatened to kill me,” he said, standing amid the freshly ploughed earth. On the tump above the field, three settlers sat and watched, a blue and white Israeli flag fluttering overhead.

“A lot of people in our village decided to leave. I am doing this for my father, but also for my children,” he said.

Protect ya king! Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA pairs bars and the board in speed chess tournament

A restored church in Melbourne’s north was the venue this week for an evening of chess fused with hip-hop

Players at a speed chess competition hosted by GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan in Melbourne

by Jo Khan; 

photography by Christopher Hopkins

GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA
Thu 18 May 2023 

Two clocks count down, not quite in sync, and there’s a collective intake of breath in the hall where more than 100 people stand transfixed by the projection of a chess game on the wall. Two hands dart across the board. White’s clock hits zero, black wins with one second left on theirs, and the tension in the room is released. The players smile at each other and raise their arms in a sort of acknowledgment of their captivating game.

On one side of the table is Stephen Lewinsky, a Melbourne doctor and former Australian junior chess champion; on the other side is the pre-eminent hip-hop artist and founding member of Wu-Tang Clan, GZA.

Stephen Lewinksy and GZA after their match

These most unlikely of opponents have been brought together in an unassuming restored church hall in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy North for a speed chess tournament. GZA, who completed the Australian leg of Wu-Tang and Nas’s NY State of Mind tour on Sunday, has hosted similar events in the US but this is the first time he has fused the two elements of popular culture in Australia.

‘This whole thing is pretty wild,’ says James Benjamin, co-founder of Acid Chess Club

“It makes sense,” says the night’s MC, N’fa Jones, pre-empting any bewilderment. Jones, an African-Australian hip-hop artist of 1200 Techniques and Cool Out Sun, says Wu-Tang’s “music, energy and unapologetic force” helped raise him and he sees the alignment of chess and hip-hop clearly. “Hip-hop, as a culture, is multifaceted,” he says. “People think it’s just rapping or something but there’s so many elements to it. And I think chess – understanding the game, you make your next move, your best move, planning, recognising, strategy – it’s an important part of hip-hop and just life and culture in general.”

Jones sees GZA’s passion for and skill at chess as a natural extension of his approach to the genre. “GZA has always pushed the intellect in hip-hop,” he says. “Not just through rapping it in bars, but how he lives his life. And that is, you know, a heavy chess player to the point that we’re running an event like this where, I think he did 17 straight bouts.”

Competitors speed through a match in the early rounds on Monday night


In a grey knitted sweater, blue jeans and black sneakers, the introspective man hunched at the board doesn’t cut that much of a different figure from when he’s rapping bars, but ask about chess and a boyish excitement appears on his face. Using a checkers board and transparent, neon pink and green chess pieces, a nine-year-old GZA learned the rules of chess from his cousin. “He told me the name of each piece and their functions, their mobility, how they move,” GZA says. “And I kept that with me but I never played a game.”

It wasn’t until the early 1990s when he linked up with rapper Masta Killa that GZA actually started playing chess. The pair once played 78 consecutive games in 12 hours and now GZA plays every chance he gets. “I have a passion for it,” he says. “It’s a mind-worker … for strategy, critical thinking, planning two, three, four steps. I just love the game.”

GZA flexes his brain muscles against a heat winner

He may have held on to the memories of that first Technicolor chess experience but these days he prefers classic standards on his chessboards. “I don’t want to play on a board where the pieces are the Byzantine empire, or a certain dynasty, and the pieces are so fancy it’s hard to distinguish sometimes,” he says. “You know, I want the pawn to be a pawn and not look like a bishop.”

Playing chess with one of the world’s pre-eminent rappers wasn’t on the cards for DJ James Benjamin a few years ago, when amid Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns he started teaching the artist Jack Irvine how to play chess. It still wasn’t on the cards when the city finally emerged from restrictions at the end of 2021 and the pair founded Acid Chess Club.

The winner of each round on Monday won the right to play GZA


But on Monday night he helped Melbourne distillers The Gospel bring together lovers of chess, hip-hop and whiskey to experience a previously unimaginable crossover. “This whole thing is pretty wild,” Benjamin says. “I got a call from The Gospel, they needed someone to run the chess tournament, I wasn’t going to say no.”

On one side of the old church hall there are two rows of eight tables. Every 30 minutes, Benjamin herds the next round of 16 players to their seats for 3/2 blitz chess elimination (three minutes for the whole game with two seconds added every move). The winner of each round gets to step up to the main table under lights to play GZA.

Rox Ziffer methodically wins her way through her round, surrounded by a small but rapturous support crew. She says being a fan of GZA makes her more nervous to play him. “It’s funny actually, my boyfriend and a bunch of his mates all started getting really into chess in the last six months and they love hip-hop and Wu-Tang Clan, so when this came about they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, what an opportunity,’” she says.

Clockwise from top left, competitors James Benjamin, Rox Ziffer, Rhys Lloyd and Stephen Lewinsky

The tournament blends seamlessly with the vinyl DJ sets of hip-hop, soul and funk from Mr Lob and Deejay Mathematics, plus some intermittent freestyling from Jones. Rhys Lloyd, a member of Benjamin’s Acid Chess Club, wins his round but plays down his impending game with GZA, also known as “the genius”. “It’s cool to meet him but it’s just kind of like a chess night.” The barista says he doesn’t really listen to Wu-Tang Clan but that “it will be cool to tell my friends that I played chess against fucking GZA”.


GZA walks in to the hall at 6.30pm, hangs his jacket on the back of his chair and sits down to play two-and-a-half hours of speed chess. In between moves he rests his elbows on the table and in between games he leans back to stretch his arms over his head. But he never gets up from his chair. After three nights of arena shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, this is where he wants to be.

The 56-year-old doesn’t really engage with the enthralled audience, but he smiles as his opponents sit down and exchanges a few words with those who want to. He wins some, he loses some. Lewinsky thinks GZA the chess player is “quite careful, makes sure he doesn’t lose any material and sticks to general principles”.

“It was a lot of fun,” he says, comparing their down-to-the-wire game to a James Bond movie “where the bomb went off in Goldfinger with seven seconds left”.

Ziffer celebrates a win in the early rounds

Lewinsky, who was “dragged here by my children”, is used to playing in front of an audience and against high-profile talent, but others who take to the centre table aren’t as confident. Already stressed from wrangling the tournament, Benjamin was reluctant to play GZA with “100 to 200 people watching you, plus being on the projector screen”.

“It’s like performing intellectually in front of people, putting your brain on the line in a way,” he says after his game. “I didn’t think about what I was doing for the first 10 moves, I thought I’d be sporadic, I ended up doing some no-no moves to throw him off but it didn’t work and he kind of boxed me in. Sitting up there with him was pretty intense, the experience of a lifetime for sure.”

The room watches on as GZA plays a heat winner

Benjamin learned chess from his dad; Ziffer’s mum – who runs chess clubs in schools – taught her early on, too. GZA and many of his opponents on Monday night learned how to play when they were young from an older family member or friend – and he has tried to do the same for the generation after him. When GZA’s daughter was about eight years old and his son was five he decided to teach them the game.

“I showed them how to play but they weren’t really interested,” he says. “It got to a point where I would offer the winner some money, like five or 10 dollars. But they decided to stage the game and whoever wins they just split the 10 dollars. It wasn’t until my son, maybe about nine years ago, he started playing again. He loves it. He’s like, ‘This shit is the bomb, man, this is the ultimate.’”

Decimated brush-tailed bettong makes a startling return – with the help of peanut butter

Project to reintroduce critically endangered marsupial in South Australia, involving lures with nut spread, has surpassed expectations

Graham Readfearn
@readfearn

GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA

Thu 18 May 2023 

The Australian bush was once full of rabbit-size marsupials darting and jumping around “like mini-kangaroos on steroids”, says ecologist Derek Sandow.

But since European invasion, the arrival of cats and foxes and the disappearance of habitat has left the brush-tailed bettong hanging on in only a handful of spots on the vast continent and on island refuges.

“They would have been one of the most common small mammals across the southern half of Australia,” says Sandow. “But they’ve gone missing from almost the entire mainland.”


Conservation efforts celebrated as 26 Australian species no longer need threatened listing


However, a project to reintroduce the critically endangered bettongs to Yorke Peninsula in South Australia – a boot-shaped chunk of mainland that probably hasn’t seen them for more than a century – is having a startling and unexpected success.

Since August 2021, some 120 bettongs have been tagged and introduced to the Dhilba Guuranda-Innes national park on the peninsula’s south-west tip. Chloe Frick, a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide, guesses there may now be up to 200 bettongs on the peninsula.

“It’s surpassing everyone’s expectations,” she says. “And it’s down to a lot of people working really hard. It is unifying and inspiring to see these animals succeeding and digging around in the landscape.”

Members of the Marna Banggara project boosting brush-tailed bettong numbers at work in South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula.

Photograph: Quentin Jones/WWF-Aus/think Mammoth

‘They’re suckers for peanut butter’

Bettongs make their nests under dense vegetation and are good at hiding from native predators such as wedge-tailed eagles, says Sandow, from South Australia’s Northern and Yorke Landscape Board.

“But those introduced predators – the cats and foxes – have really good smell and they can find them,” Sandow says.

In the 1970s, as bettongs were disappearing, an “insurance population” was started on the tiny and feral-free Wedge Island to the peninsula’s west. That starter group of 11 bettongs has since grown to a population of about 2,500.


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In August 2021, 40 bettongs were moved from the island to the national park. In 2022, another 44 Wedge Island bettongs joined them, along with 36 more flown 2,000 kilometres from the Upper Warren region of Western Australia, about 300km south of Perth and the species’ last remaining stronghold on the mainland.

Later this year, another 120 will arrive from WA in the project’s final leg of the reintroduction phase.

The work is part of Marna Banggara, a project to restore lost native wildlife to the area backed by the landscape board and state and federal government support together with WWF-Australia, the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife and the Narungga Nation Aboriginal Corporation, with backing of the Narungga people and a host of other groups.

A bettong is examined by Chloe Frick in the Marna Banggara project. 

Photograph: Quentin Jones/WWF-Aus/think Mammoth


Sandow was among a team that went to the park in March to catch and check on the bettong population using cage traps with baits of peanut butter, oats and vanilla essence.

“They’re suckers for the peanut butter,” says Sandow.

Chloe Frick measuring a bettong’s leg. 

Photograph: Quentin Jones/WWF-Aus/think Mammoth

Of the 85 bettongs caught, almost half did not have any tags or microchips of the original groups, meaning they were born on the peninsula.

“They are having so many babies,” says Frick. “If I could bottle that feeling of having an animal in a bag and then opening it up to see two fresh bettong ears, it is phenomenal. Every time I see a new one I’m blown away. To catch 85 when we only reintroduced 120 is fantastic.”

Before releasing them back, Frick gathers an array of data, from health and size checks to DNA samples and swabs of their micro-biome.

One juvenile male – known as a “young at foot” – was a second generation on the peninsula, with his mum also born there. Among the 45 mature females caught, 42 were carrying young in their pouch.

Bettong traps are set on the Yorke Peninsula to enable checks of their health. 

Photograph: Quentin Jones/WWF-Aus/think Mammoth

A fence-free safe haven

On the perimeter of the peninsula, a fence cuts off a main route for feral cats and foxes to invade. Numbers of ferals are kept down with poison, shooting and trapping.

Rob Brewster, WWF-Australia’s Rewilding Project manager, says the monitoring showed the species could be successfully reintroduced if there was suitable habitat and feral controls.

Bettongs are ‘suckers for the peanut butter’, says ecologist Derek Sandow.
Photograph: Quentin Jones/WWF-Aus/think Mammoth

“If this population can be sustained over time, it would be the first successful reintroduction of this species beyond islands and fenced safe havens,” Brewster says.

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There are hopes other locally extinct species like the southern brown bandicoot, red-tailed phascogale and western quoll could follow the bettongs.

Reintroducing the bettongs should see a cascade of positive effects. The bettongs – known as woylies in WA and yalgi in local Narungga language – are prolific diggers, with one single animal moving between two and six tonnes of soil a year.

By digging, bettongs improve the soil, spread seeds and create micro-climates and water pools for bugs and plants to grow.

“They’re an eco-system engineer,” Sandow says. “Their preferred food is fungi but they’ll eat tubers and vegetation and insects in the soil. But they are really big diggers. We hope that’s going to improve the bushland.”

Right now, the new bettongs are sticking to the native vegetation but radio tags show they’ve moved up to 10km away from release sites. The data also shows the animals from Wedge Island and WA are mixing and breeding, strengthening the genetic diversity among the population.

“They’re finding food, they’re finding shelter and they’re finding mates,” says Sandow. Handlers have to be careful, though, because while they’re an “adorable” animal to look at, they have a less-than-adorable strategy if they feel too threatened.

As they sprint and zig-zag away, some bettongs will eject their young from their pouch in an attempt to distract their pursuer.

“In the wild that’s a great strategy, but it means we have to be really wary,” says Sandow.

Marna Banggara project members on a track in Dhilba Guuranda-Innes national park, where brush-tailed bettongs have been re-introduced after local extinction.
Photograph: Quentin Jones/WWF-Aus/think Mammoth

Frick says bettongs – which can have three young a year – can also hold a fertilised egg “in their back pocket” so if they lose a baby from their pouch, they trigger a hormone that releases the egg so they can start growing a new baby within a few days.

Frick has begun to spot personality traits in some of the bettongs, including one – nicknamed Friar Tuck for his bald spot. Friar Tuck has been caught multiple times in the same day – “I think to get a free feed,” says Frick.

Bachelorette Bettong has avoided male attention and is camped near a park hut. Others have the names of Australian singers, including “Jimmy Barnes”, who Frick says is skilled at evading capture.

“Once [Jimmy] was stood in the middle of the road just a few metres in front of me,” remembers Frick.

“He turned to me and I swear he winked before he ran off.”

The splat is out of the bag: a first-ever look at the making of the Rorschach test


The ink blots have been used as a diagnostic tool for 100 years, but the making of new ones, every five years, has been a closely guarded secret – until now

Say what you see … Rorschach ink blots. Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian

Jeremy Millar

The Guardian
Wed 17 May 2023


For images that have been reproduced for more than a century and looked at, quite intently, by millions of people, there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the Rorschach ink blots. These famous cards – both intensely guarded and instantly recognisable – continue to be used for psychological diagnosis around the world. New copies are only printed every five years or so, and no one has ever been allowed to document the process. So when I asked the publisher recently if I might do so, I had not expected them to say yes. There were conditions, of course: the most perplexing of which was that if I were to document the printing of the Rorschach ink blots, I must do so without revealing any information about the printing of the Rorschach ink blots. It seemed a test as exquisitely elegant as the one for which the cards themselves are used.

The ink blots are named after Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychologist who died so young that he only makes it halfway through his biography. One Sunday in late March 1922 he is taking his wife Olga to see Peer Gynt at the theatre and a week – five pages – later he’s dead. He had been born in Zürich 37 years earlier, the first of three children – two boys and a girl – to Philippine and Ulrich. His father was an extremely skilled artist and wrote a 100-page treatise titled Outline of a Theory of Form in which he considered many aspects of visual perception, asking: “Who among us has not often and with pleasure turned our eyes and imagination to the ever-changing shapes and movements of the clouds and the mist?”. Hermann became a gifted student and joined the elite academic Gymnasium in Schaffhausen, northern Switzerland. His skill as an artist was perhaps his defining characteristic, however, and led to his admiringly mocking nickname of Klex, a shortening of klexen or klecksen, which means something like “to daub”. Klex also means ink blot.

Unique inks being mixed. Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian

Rorschach was not the first to consider the importance of these indeterminate forms, and in the newly developing science of psychology, ink blots were being used as prompts by which one might gauge a subject’s imagination. As a medical student, Rorschach came to use them similarly, showing psychiatric patients and young teenagers alike newly made blots and noting what they saw. He soon began to consider these methods as somewhat unimaginative, however, and in 1917 he started developing his own test – although he thought of it more as an experiment – creating images which seem not to have been made at all but which were also not simply random. Their purpose must not be obvious, but they must seem to have one.


As well as the ink blots, Rorschach also had to design the “protocol” by which the subject’s responses were gathered and assessed, and here he adopted categories that seemed to relate to the avant-garde art of the period with which he was fascinated: Detail and Whole; Movement, Colour and Form. Each subject’s response was given a code that not only related to what they saw but also how well they saw. Rorschach would then collate these and make some simple calculations, noting the percentages of response which corresponded to Movement, or Colour, or whether the noted Forms were well or poorly seen.

As Rorschach understood, if the responses of different subjects are to be compared, then the thing to which they are responding must be the same, and given that this is a test that depends on visual acuity, then it must be exactly the same; “similar” is hardly a scientific category. The practical difficulties of reproducing the ink blots led to delays in first publishing the work – which was given the title Psychodiagnostik – and when it did appear in 1921, Rorschach had personally supervised the production of the print run of 1,500 sets, even, at this late stage, eliminating elements that he considered irrelevant for diagnostic purposes. The book was sold with 10 printed ink blots in a separate envelope; the buyer was to glue the images to card themselves.

A densitometer ensures consistency. Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian


It was a young apprentice, Herr Bögli, who worked on this first printed set of ink blot images, and he recorded all of Rorschach’s instructions in the most minute detail, from subtle tonal shifts to the all-important asymmetries in what – at first glance – seem to be the most symmetrical of images. Bögli’s notes became the “printing bible” for the production of the ink blots, and even when a new publisher took on the work in 1927, Bögli worked on it once more, and would continue to do so for decades to come.

Can we trust the Rorschach test?

While the inkblots were soon becoming well known, the method of their production remained secret – and that remains the case to this day. (Even the printer does not know it all: each ink colour is specially prepared elsewhere and is used for the ink blots alone.) Developments in print technology over the past century have meant that great care has had to be taken in order to ensure consistency. For most of this period, the ink blots were printed using a letterpress machine in which raised metal plates called – happily – clichés transfer a single colour on to the prepared sheet; when new plates had to be made, even a different composition of the metal used produced new effects – flatter colours, crisper edges – and minute, crucial adjustments then had to be made. For the past decade the ink blots have been produced using lithographic plates, but not with the cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks used to print magazines, for example, but with the specially mixed Rorschach ones.

Some of the blots bleed on to other sheets.

 Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian

And so for an undisclosed period at the end of March, in an undisclosed location near Bern, I watched as both printer and publisher gazed intently at sheet after sheet taken off the press. Few ink blots can have been looked upon as carefully as these, although this time it was the forms being tested, and not those looking at them. I was not allowed to look so directly, however, so my camera was turned obliquely, glancing seemingly familiar shapes obscured by other objects or sliding across the shine of their glossy surfaces. There were ink blots and stains everywhere, of course, and sometimes the shapes would seem to slip from the printed sheets and surface elsewhere – on plastic tubs or radiators – and one could not help but wonder what any of them might mean. At other times, test prints would mean that ink blots would be overlaid one upon the other and new mutations would form, and one could not help but wonder what new conditions they might diagnose or which they might help bring about.

Much of my life has been spent looking at images, wondering what they might mean, and though these ink blots may not be artworks, they operate perhaps in a similar way, depending on a “leaning-in” of the viewer and then inviting them to do so. And, invited, I leaned in too, in a small printshop in a village settled in a Swiss valley and there I found … well, I cannot say.

The ink blots will probably not be printed again for another 10 years, and this may be the final time that they are mechanically reproduced with smudges and stains, klex. What do you see?

Jeremy Millar is an artist and head of programme, MA writing, at the Royal College of Art, London. All photographs are from the series Detail and Whole; Movement, Colour and Form (2023); more images from the series can be found at jeremymillar.org

We’ve done so much damage’: Beatriz Milhazes’s carnivalesque odes to nature

Ahead of a historic survey of her work at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, the Brazilian artist discusses her global inspirations, shape-shifting patterns, and why she’s still an optimist

Skye Sherwin

The Guardian

Thu 18 May 2023 

Navigating Beatriz Milhazes’ febrile reinvention of geometric abstraction can feel like trying to make headway through a carnival crowd. Hoops, mandalas, flowers and other circular motifs spin like dancers across her canvases, their bright colours slamming into each other. With its erupting forms, which have evolved from tumbly, lacy arabesques to hard-edged grids, sprouting leaves and flowing waves, the Rio de Janeiro-based artist’s work has the excess of a street party, a baroque church, a jungle.

“I’ve tried to bring new possibilities to the course of abstraction,” she says while getting ready for her first UK institutional show in more than two decades: a survey, at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, of 20 key paintings spanning her 30-plus year career as one of the world’s leading abstract painters. “My challenge is how to work with geometry and life. I’m in favour of life, we need it!”

Milhazes recalls how, when she studied art in Rio in the 1980s, painting had been a lesser force in Brazil’s cultural scene. Instead it was dominated by the Tropicália installations of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticia that melted boundaries between art and life. So Milhazes looked to Europe. Her first and enduring touchstones included Piet Mondrian and his interest in nature and structure as well as Henri Matisse, a forebear in collaged shapes, vivid colours and the pursuit of beauty, with whom she felt “the deepest connection”.

You never really find the centre in my work. I call it a mathematical dream

To bring new heat to these ideas she turned to Rio, taking inspiration from its architecture and vernacular culture. Her graduate works collaging spangled carnival fabrics were inspired by the spectacular creations of the great carnival designer Fernando Pinto, while historical dress and women’s domestic labour making lace and crochet was another early reference. In 1989 she began developing her signature transfer technique, using cut-out plastic shapes loaded with paint to imprint forms on the canvas. The resulting surfaces have intense colours but are not poster-smooth. Rather they’re visibly layered, textured and cracked.


Club tropicália: the mesmerising power of Brazilian art

At Turner Contemporary, Milhazes’ earliest paintings will come as a surprise to those familiar with the artist’s later bold abstractions. Recalling lacework, wallpaper and floral fabric prints, their patterns are looser and more obviously hand-worked. Flowers, though, are a constant motif and not just because of what Milhazes sees in Rio’s famed botanical gardens or national park. “They ornament the sad moments, the beautiful moments, and are part of people’s life,” she says.

As her vision progresses, the compositions become staggeringly complex. In Maracorola, an enormous 2015 painting of almost three metres, she composes a landscape with pulsing hoops, waves, vegetal squiggles and a blazing sun across a chequerboard ground. It’s a controlled riot of form and colour, with two key motifs: the circle and wave. “The circle is an organic shape and has no end,” she says. “It’s spiritual and meditative. My interest is more about movement, though. You never really find the centre in my work. I call it a mathematical dream.”

Inspired by Rio’s coast and parks, Milhazes has grown more interested in nature lately, and it is a focus of her Margate exhibition. “We’ve done so much damage; it’s not just about stopping that but also examining our hope for nature to renew,” she says. “I’m an optimist and I want to show how much we need the breath of the leaves, the water, sky and sun. My work is about life. Wherever it’s shown, people connect to it.”

Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 27 May to 10 September.
Circles of influence: four works from Maresias

Douradinha em cinza e marrom (main image), 2016, acrylic on linen
This eye-popping recent work, whose geometric forms pulse outwards from its citrus centre, shows Milhazes’s pioneering use of figurative elements – here flowers and leaves – in abstract painting.

Photograph: Courtesy Ivor Braka Ltd/Manuel Águas and Pepe Schettino/Beatriz Milhazes Studio

Maracorola, 2015, acrylic on canvas
Milhazes sees this vast painting as combining key aspects of her development as an artist, including how she thinks of composition in terms of landscape’s possibilities. It explores the sea’s rhythms, seen clearly in the rippling waveforms.

 

Photograph: TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection/Fausto Fleury/Beatriz Milhazes Studio


Maresias, 2002, acrylic on canvas
This work gives Milhazes’ exhibition its title, and means “sea air”. Like one of her forebears, the avant-garde French artist Sonia Delaunay, Milhazes has explored buzzing circular forms. This painting suggests multiple references, from mandalas to targets and floral decoration.
 

Photograph: motivo/Jonathan and Wendy Grad/ Vicente de Mello/Beatriz Milhazes Studio

A Casa da Maria, 1992, acrylic on canvaas
In one of the earliest works in the show, Milhazes draws on the history of dressmaking and women’s domestic labour in Brazil, referencing “the kind of crochet my grandmother used to do”. Its gold palette recalls church ornamentation.

Interview

‘Everyone encounters some kind of abuse’: Stephen ‘Jorbs’ Flavall speaks out on the dark side of Twitch streaming

In his new memoir, Before We Go Live, the Twitch and YouTube star pulls back the curtain on the world of pro game streaming – and details some of the toxic behaviour he says he has witnessed

Kim Liao

The Guardian
Thu 18 May 2023

Stephen Flavall – or Jorbs as he is known on YouTube and Twitch, where he has more than 100,000 followers – rose to fame streaming strategy games such as XCOM and Slay the Spire, a game in which he has achieved several world records. He’s considered a high-ranking Twitch streamer, with a soothing monotone voice and an infectious laugh. He’s very consistent. When you watch Flavall’s Twitch channel, you know exactly what to expect: funny and cerebral anecdotes, informative strategy tips and a supportive community.

But his new memoir, Before We Go Live, does something unexpected: it pulls back the curtain on the back end of professional game streaming – which, as anyone who follows online gaming culture knows, is rife with rampant toxicity, abuse and harassment. It’s a chilling wakeup call for the industry, from the top down.

Achieving solvency as a professional streamer is no easy task. For every person on Twitch pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are hundreds of thousands of people barely making a dime. Flavall knew this when he took the leap of faith to become a pro streamer, but he pursued it anyway. “I knew that I was good at breaking things down and analysing them in ways that people could understand,” he tells me when we meet via video call. “I knew I could make content that people would enjoy if I could find an audience for it.”

Flavall has been playing games and offering commentary on them since he was a child. Growing up in New Zealand, he learned how to play chess at age three, and watched a lot of cricket – with televised commentary and stories from his father, who worked for the national cricket team. At six, Flavall was playing games of solo cricket in the back yard, commentating the whole time. He studied Classics, learning Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, reading ancient texts that are still being translated, analysed and interpreted. “I was attracted to it because it’s messy data about humanity. Those are things that I’m interested in: stories about humans and trying to make sense of it all,” he says. On his way to becoming a streamer, he found success as an online poker player, playing 3.5 million hands in three years.

In his early 20s, he posted a few YouTube videos about the notoriously difficult alien-invasion PC strategy game XCOM. Developers working on a mod for the game called Long War 2 took notice, and he was offered the chance to play an early version as a design adviser before it came out. “When [the mod] was released, all of a sudden, there was a reason for people to watch me: I was the person who knew about this new game,” he says. “I had all the strategies and understood how it was coded. That was the moment I knew I would be able to stream for a living.”

Flavall hit it big as a streamer after he began streaming Slay the Spire, a popular strategy card game from 2018 that was recognised on many game-of-the-year lists, and has been credited with launching an entire sub-genre. It’s a tricky game to play, even without self-narrating or conversing with viewers in Twitch chat: the player collects cards, potions and relics, and combines the powers they grant in order to kill a rotating slate of enemies while climbing a demonic spire to reach its toxic heart, the ultimate boss. This strategy game offers a metaphor for professional streaming: if, by chance, you can amass just the right combination of powerful resources and deploy them skilfully, you can avoid death by enemies, bosses and unfortunate events.

A screenshot from Slay the Spire, for which Flavall holds several world records

As he navigated the tricky economics of streaming, Flavall joined a pro esports team. In his book, he explains how such teams capitalise on the popularity of many streamers working together to “leverage collective bargaining power, hire staff who understand the space, and ideally find [their] streamers better deals for better money and from better companies. A great team might even be able to help your channel grow by throwing its brand behind it.”

But in the three years he spent with the team, Flavall was alarmed by what he perceived to be problematic behaviour he encountered from business partners, promoters, sponsors and other streamers. In one incident described in his book, Flavall was invited to the Tyson Ranch near Los Angeles for conversations about investments and sponsorships, only to discover, he alleges, an executive spending the weekend creepily isolating and hitting on a young female streamer on the company’s dime. While he was spared the worst of the it, Flavall nonetheless dealt with what he believes was boundary-crossing behaviour: “I’d have no idea whether he wanted to tell me about a new sponsor, or he was firing me, or he was upset with someone, or he needed to vent … I felt that disagreeing with any of his personal behaviour risked repercussions for my professional success.”

Something finally snapped when he says he was not paid for three months of work. He was furious. Discussing the situation with a friend and colleague, she alleged that she had endured an endless litany of sexism, disparagement and harassment from individuals within the team, as well as other streamers. This conversation became the foundation for the book. “What struck me – what made me write the book – was that these people had just treated her absolutely awfully, and they did so while treating me fairly respectfully, at least on a surface level.”

While writing his book, Flavall interviewed 30 other streamers, testing his hypothesis that however bad he’d had it, it was worse for women in the gaming world. It was, by far. “Every single woman I talked to had encountered some form of abuse,” Flavall says, “whether it was a microaggression at a tournament when they went to collect their prize money, or being threatened or sexually harassed when they streamed.”

Misogyny in the gaming world is a longstanding problem, stretching back to 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign and far beyond. Female streamers and competitive players have shared many stories about it in recent years; some base aspects of their streaming personality around fighting back against the sexism they encounter, and some let their skills speak for them. Before We Go Live implicates the whole industry. Along with his friend’s allegations, it also recounts the stories of Hearthstone players Pathra and Nicholena, who experienced barrages of insults during tournaments, threats on social media and being shunned after rejecting romantic advances by managers.

Before We Go Live by Stephen Flavall. 

Photograph: Spender Books

With all of this rampant abuse, what would Flavall want to tell a young, naive would-be streamer before they dive into this difficult world? “Being a streamer – or a ‘content creator’ – is an idea that has been created by companies like YouTube,” he says. “If something’s just ‘content’, then you can put ads on it, and you don’t have to think about what the content actually is. I’ve never really been a streamer. I am a strategy gamer and a storyteller. If Twitch went down overnight, I would still be a strategy gamer and a storyteller. I’d find a different job doing something to do with strategy, games and storytelling. Twitch TV … just happens to be somewhere where I create my work right now.”


Ultimately, Flavall does not fear retaliation from the bad actors called out in his book. He wanted to use his platform to make the world of streaming a better place. “The story felt like it had to be told,” he says. “If someone wants to come after me, they’re not going to break me down more than other people have. I have my community behind me. I was in a situation where I felt like I had to stand up for myself, and for my friends.”

In some ways, writing a book offered closure. “There was a separation of the psyche that started to happen when I was in front of an audience for so many hours a week, pretending that everything is OK, when it obviously wasn’t,” he says. “During the pandemic, that separation of my psyche was genuinely difficult. I had to repair that for myself, and healing was more important than the idea that other people might hurt me if I spoke out.”

Norway under pressure to scale back fossil fuel expansion plans

Campaigners say development of huge Rosebank field in North Sea would drive climate breakdown

THE GUARDIAN

17 May 2023 

The Norwegian government is facing growing pressure to scale back its huge global fossil fuel expansion plans – including the development of a controversial new oilfield in the North Sea.

Climate activists from around the world descended on Stavanger in Norway last week to attend the AGM of the state-owned oil and gas giant Equinor. They warned that its plans to develop the huge Rosebank field in the North Sea, as well as other mega-projects in Canada, Brazil and Suriname, would drive climate breakdown with devastating consequences for humanity.

“You have been warned that we cannot have any new oil and gas fields if we are to have a shot at limiting the absolute worst of climate breakdown,” Lauren MacDonald, 22, from Scotland, told the Equinor board during a speech at the AGM. “[But] you continue to expand fossil fuel operations despite desperate warnings from climate scientists and are spending next to nothing on the transition that is our only hope of survival.”

Climate campaigners accuse the Norwegian government, which owns 67% of Equinor, of hypocrisy. They argue that at the same time as portraying itself as a climate leader on the world stage, the Norwegian state is ploughing ahead with new oil and gas developments around the world.

Recent analysis by Oil Change International found Norway is Europe’s “most aggressive” explorer of new oil and gas fields, awarding 700 new exploration licences in the past decade as well as Equinor’s specific plans.

In addition, it found the oil and gas within fields that are already licensed but not yet developed could lead to an additional 3 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions – 60 times Norway’s annual domestic emissions.

Frode Pleym, the head of Greenpeace Norway, said: “Norway is rightly praised for its success of its electric vehicles, it was one of the first countries to ratify the Paris accords but at the same time it is planning to lock in oil and gas production for decades to come – not just for Norway but, because of the scale of its involvement, for the whole of Europe. It is taking climate hypocrisy to a whole new level and it has to stop.”

The Rosebank project is one of Equinor’s most controversial schemes and is facing widespread opposition in the UK. A massive North Sea development, three times bigger than the Cambo field that was put on hold more than a year ago, it has the potential to produce 500m barrels of oil, which when burned would emit as much carbon dioxide as running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year.

Last month it was revealed that Rosebank would effectively blow the UK’s carbon budget in the next decade, as greenhouse gas emissions from its operations alone – not counting emissions from any oil produced – would exceed the guideline amounts for the oil and gas sector.

Johan Sverdrup oilfield in the North Sea west of Stavanger, operated by Equinor. Climate campaigners accuse the Norwegian government, which owns 67% of Equinor, of hypocrisy. 

Photograph: Carina Johansen/NTB Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images

The campaign group Uplift has also calculated that Equinor could receive an estimated £3.75bn of tax breaks and tax-funded incentives towards the estimated £4.1bn cost of the development, owing to loopholes in the government’s windfall tax on North Sea fossil fuels. About 80% of the fossil fuels produced by Rosebank are likely to be exploited, and the development could turn into a net loss of £100m to the UK taxpayer.

A spokesperson for Equinor denied it was in line for any tax breaks or that UK taxpayers would lose out. They added: “Oil and gas will be needed in the decades ahead. As long as there is a need for oil and gas, we think it is important that we continue to invest in fields that can contribute to energy security with a low carbon footprint, while creating jobs and value for society.”

The International Energy Agency warned before the UK-hosted Cop26 climate summit in 2021 that no new oil and gas exploration should take place if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures. This year, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called on governments to halt new licences for oil and gas exploration and development.

A decision on whether Rosebank can go ahead is believed to be imminent, and the UK government could stop it, though the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, has said repeatedly the decision is not up to him.

Opponents of the project are working with climate activists from Norway, Brazil, Canada and Argentina to try to stop Equinor’s wider expansion plans.

Tessa Khan, the executive director of Uplift, said the Norwegian government was under increasing pressure to act.

“Norway claims to be a climate leader, but there is no way that it can show its face in the next round of climate talks while its state-backed energy firm is bent on massive oil and gas expansion … Norway can and must force Equinor to align its plans with the climate science and massively ramp up its transition to clean power, it must side with those countries that are already experiencing the climate crisis, that are demanding action now because they are running out of time.”

Earlier this year, the Norwegian government passed a white paper saying all state-owned companies should set targets and implement measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement.

At the AGM, campaigners from Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature put forward a similar motion. The motion failed, with the Norwegian government voting against it – although it did add a statement to the minutes saying it expected “the board and administration to work actively with the state’s expectations” in relation to climate change.

Ragnhild Elisabeth Waagaard, the head of the climate and energy team at World Wide Fund for Nature Norway, said the Norwegian government’s statement was a positive step and had increased the pressure on Equinor’s board of directors. “We now expect the company to set targets and take measures to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. This means that there is no room for new development of oil and gas fields”.

In a statement, Halvard Ingebrigtsen, the secretary of state at Norway’s ministry of trade, industry and fisheries, said: “In the new white paper on the state’s direct ownership, the government states that our goal as an owner is the highest possible return over time in a sustainable manner. We also state that this requires the companies to balance economic, social and environmental factors.

“Norway is the first country to expect companies with state ownership to have short- and long-term climate targets in line with the Paris agreement, which implies net zero emissions by 2050.”