Brazil's Cavalhadas festival celebrates Holy Spirit

by Naharnet Newsdesk 10 June 2025, 15:03
The heartland Brazilian city of Pirenópolis is hosting its annual Cavalhadas festival, a Holy Spirit celebration where participants ride horses, wear masks and don floral headpieces.
The tradition began in the 1800s with a Portuguese priest who wanted to celebrate the Holy Spirit — one of the entities of the Roman Catholic Church's trinity — and also commemorate the victory of Iberian Christian knights over the Moors.
The festivities include an open-air reenactment of a battle between Christian warriors and Muslims. At the end, the defeated Moors are converted to Catholicism.

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Dutch beach beasts find final resting place in new exhibition

Nahar Net

a day ago

Nahar Net

Dutch beach beasts find final resting place in new exhibition

by Naharnet Newsdesk 11 June 2025, 16:26 The famous wind-powered beach beasts have scuttled along the Dutch North Sea coast, into a swanky Miami art show and even onto "The Simpsons." Now. they have a final resting place in a Dutch city most famous for "Girl with a Pearl Earring" painter Johannes Vermeer and blue-painted pottery. The "bones" of Theo Jansen's "strandbeesten" — beach animals in Dutch — have taken over a former cable factory in Delft, the small city in the western Netherlands that Jansen has called home for decades. "During the years, there has been a sort of evolutionary history, you could say. And you could see these animals as sort of natural historical objects," the 77-year old artist told The Associated Press before the installation's opening. The Strandbeesten Mortuary, as the exhibition is called, follows the various versions of the mobile sculptures since 1990 when Jansen created the first one from plastic pipes and tape. As the animals evolved, Jansen incorporated plastic bottles, wooden planks, cloth and cardboard. The life and death cycle of these famous animals — formed mostly out of PVC pipes — has left behind an impressive fossil record, which is on display at the exhibition. Marloes Koster, who organized the exhibition for Delft's Prinsenhof Museum, said that Jansen's ultimate goal is to create a beast that will live forever. "He's not there yet, so these are the ones that didn't make it," she added. The museum is undergoing major renovations, so Koster and her colleagues have been putting together arts and culture events at alternative venues around the city while the building is shut. Born near the North Sea, Jansen grew up captivated by the wind that often hits the Dutch coastline. He harnessed it to allow his animals to "walk" along the beach. Every year, he creates a new strandbeest and, at the end of the summer, declares the animal dead. "All summer I do experiments, and in the fall I'm a little bit wiser (about) how these animals should survive in the future," Jansen said. Many of the visitors to the opening of the exhibition had followed Jansen's work for years and were keen to understand how the strandbeesten had changed over time. "You see a kind of development in the way he does things. So they start out very simple, and then it gets increasingly complicated. So they evolve," said Cor Nonhof, a Delft local who had come to see the exhibition with his wife. Even at the opening, Jansen was already keen to return to the beach to work on the latest evolution of his strandbeesten. "I cannot do anything else," Jansen said. "And I am very happy with that."

When a fox says 'help' in London, there's often an ambulance on its way

Nahar Net

2 days ago

Nahar Net

When a fox says 'help' in London, there's often an ambulance on its way

by Naharnet Newsdesk 10 June 2025, 21:49 The injured fox is cornered in a cage, teeth bared and snarling at the woman trying to help it. Nicki Townsend is unfazed. Wearing only rubber gloves and an outfit suitable for a yoga class, she approaches with soothing words. "All right, baby," she coos as she deftly drapes a towel over his head, grabs him by the scruff of his neck, scoops up his wounded legs and moves him to a clean cage. It's not the way her day typically begins, but there's nothing routine about rescuing foxes. "You can never predict what you're going to arrive at," Townsend said. While not as visible as phone boxes or double-decker buses, the red fox is a fixture in London, a city not known for its wildlife. But living on the streets, alleys and back gardens of a dense urban environment can be rough and when foxes need help, they have their own ambulance service — and Townsend may be on her way. The foxes didn't invade London so much as adapt and expand their range inward as the city spread to their habitat in the 1930s and suburbs grew. Love 'em or hate 'em But people and the bushy-tailed member of the canine family have not always lived in harmony, and the species has admirers and adversaries. For everyone enchanted seeing a fox trotting nonchalantly down their street at dusk or basking in a sunny backyard, there are plenty who see them as pests. They poop where they like, tear into garbage and the vixens in heat let out terrifying shrieks in the dead of winter when attracting a mate. "It's like Marmite with foxes," Townsend said, referring to the food spread that is an acquired and divisive taste. "You either love them or hate them." The divide between the two camps led Trevor Williams to found what became The Fox Project nearly 35 years ago. Once a bass player in the rock group Audience that opened for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Williams had been active in the campaign to stop fox hunting when he redirected his protection efforts to the city, where foxes were once routinely killed. "Because of the myths that have occurred over the years, there's still a lot of suspicion about what foxes might be," Williams said. "You know, they're going to bite the baby, they're going to eat the cat, they're going to run away with your husband." The project has since grown from providing information on deterring foxes to rescuing 1,400 a year, including 400 cubs, though only about half survive to be released. City offers cheap eats and unique hazards There are estimated to be 15,000 foxes in London. The project covers a swath of south London and its leafy suburbs while other organizations not devoted solely to foxes handle other parts of the city. While the omnivores survive on small animals, bugs and berries in the wild, they favor easily scavenged leftovers in the city and handouts that make them more dependent on humans. Their main urban menaces are cars, getting snagged in soccer nets or getting stuck in tight spaces. In their effort to get free, they often get nasty abrasions that can become infected. Many also suffer from mange, a parasitic infestation that leads to all kinds of problems. Townsend pilots her VW Caddy on city streets, highways and narrow lanes that roll through lush hills, responding to calls about injured or ill foxes or cubs that have lost their mothers. She's seen a bit of everything since her first humbling call 2 1/2 years ago when the supposedly injured fox bolted. "In my inexperience, I chased after him, which is comical because you're never going to outrun a fox," she said. "I just remember he ran very fast and I looked silly running after him." Despite many challenging situations — she once managed to rescue a fox that lost its footing atop a fence and ended upside down at eye level with its paw lodged between boards — she's only been bitten once. Heartbreak with hard cases Her van carries the distinctly musky scent of foxes. The odor becomes unpleasant when an anxious passenger in a litter of cubs relieves itself enroute to being delivered to a foster care pen where they will stay until being released in the wild. "Feel free to open the window," said Townsend, who is accustomed to the stench. "This is a stinky job." On a recent day, she was dispatched to meet a heartbroken couple who found a cub with a puncture wound collapsed on their back lawn. "We thought he was asleep at first, so we went to go and have a close look because we love them," Charlotte English said. "Then he just didn't move, so we knew something was wrong." That cub had to be put to sleep, as did the adult Townsend transferred at the start of her shift. Cubs that recover are socialized in packs of five until they mature and are then released in a rural location while the adults are freed in the neighborhoods where they were found. The fox does not say 'Thank you' Given a second chance, it's not clear how well the foxes fare, because they are rarely tracked. A 2016 study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science found that rehabilitated foxes were more likely to behave as if they had been displaced when returned to their original territory. They were tracked wandering farther away, potentially exposing them to more traffic and greater stress. "It is a gap in the knowledge and there's an assumption that when you release them, they thrive and I think that that assumption needs to be challenged more," said Bryony Tolhurst, a University of Brighton honorary research fellow and lead author of the study. For Townsend, fox deaths are offset by the joy of seeing little ones venture into the unknown or an adult darting into a neighborhood it instantly recognizes. "Sometimes they look back and people like to romanticize that they're saying 'thank you,'" she said. "They're just making sure we're not chasing after them."

Nahar Net

2 days ago

Nahar Net