About R-Shief

Artist Statement-->

Going about developing the R-Shief Initiative has had its intrinsic challenges since I am one person, and am working on a scope that includes quite a few more people. Though the design for the R-Shief Initiave includes communities of people, I have decided to demonstrate as a way of explaining. And so the beta launch of R-Shief in June 2009 will be a bilingual archive of my own collection of media, websites of organizations, journalism, multimedia, art, and collective action in response to the war on Gaza, Palestine.

Each user is able to create her own profile to would serve as an organizing hard drive for them. Her profile can also serve as a distribution channel directly to other platforms. R-Shief’s users have complete privacy control over each file they have stored online. Users are able to contribute their multilingual assets to the larger R-Shief public pages that will reflect collective material from all of its users. R-Shief is powered by Drupal.

My personal journey to R-Shief includes my own threads of migration. Most recently, I spent the last 12 years in Washington, D.C. working in the fields of publication and design around issues related to the contemporary Arab world while organizing demonstrations and other actions. R-Shief combines both my desire for community change with a passion for editorial work and publishing. I will work to bypass the notion of the critic as an authority who controls narrative, and to create a new role in the transnational Arab community that's resonant with web culture: to function as co-editor, co-curator, and co-artist all at the same time.

-Laila, VJ Um Amel

COMING THIS WEEK...on-->
-User Roles
-Taxonomies and Folksonomies
-Translation
-Development Plans