Last week The Guardian published a piece on nudity being a new form of political protest, via a play called  Isto é um Negro? (Is this a black?) a reaction to the censoriousness of the evangelical movement that helped sweep Jair Bolsonaro to power last year. In part, it is a response to the president’s intolerance of feminism, homosexuality and even the country’s famous carnivals. Standing before us undressed, the performers seem to say: “I am here. I exist. Do not deny me.”

Nudity in the theatre is nothing new. There’s a long standing tradition of clothes being removed in order to spark some form of debate, and nudity still has a power that tends to focus minds on the message being delivered.

In this play it appears that the actors are stripped of their clothes as much as Brazil’s new president wishes to strip funding from the arts and culture.

I’m not really attuned to theatrical statement, so it’s not something I’m going to dwell on too much in terms of the message, other than to say that nudity maintains a powerful presence when used in some productions.

Gigi

The media often presents us with images of destruction in the wake of cataclysmic events, such as war, hurricane or tsunami.

Idyllic locations, from Asia to the Balkans to middle America have been laid waste, and there’s a sense of ‘how to begin again?’

Obviously there’s no comparison between real life horrors and what goes on in an online game, but late last year there was a sense of loss when Eden Naturopolis was ravaged by ‘a takeover’, if I can put it like that, that saw much of its beauty destroyed. Elbag and Brenda’s beautiful build suddenly saw abrupt ends to roads, lighting ripped out (Elbag and Brenda were given incredibly short notice to clear the sims of their stuff, as I recall) and a general sense that Eden now looked like something that had endured a bit of a war (and, in a sense, knowing some of the back story that was reported here on SLN, that’s exactly what had gone on).

SLN’s presence at Eden, many years standing, ended, mainly as a protest against the new owner, and I know many other Eden residents became, like SLN, ‘refugees’ in a sense. We were ‘stateless’ and ‘homeless’, with Howie scrambling around to find some inworld location we could call home. We were present in a skybox for a while, and are currently located at Lake Nekid (which is an equally lovely naturist sim in SL), but there has always been a desire to ‘come home’, and at least have office space located where we feel most at home…Eden!

With Brenda and Elbag now back in control, I dropped into Eden (and -hooray!- you can find a central TP point in the search engine of SL already) to see what’s emerging, the Phoenix rising from the ashes of many months of neglect and abandonment.

There’s a long way to go, obviously, to bring it back to its former glories, and I suspect this will be a long process. What’s nice is that we’ll be able to see it rise again.

It rather looks as though the central TP location has its foundations in, judging from the photo, and does that look like the navvies are getting some roads down?

It’s my intention to provide regular reports during Eden’s reconstruction, as we bear witness to it rising again as SL’s premier naturist location.

Gigi