Launched and Sailing!

This message was sent by email directly to all backers one week ago. It is reposted here in case the  message was caught in a spam filter. Thanks and sorry for the redundancy if this reaches you twice!

 ** YES, THIS IS ACTUALLY A THING
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Improbably, near impossibly, it really happened. We've refitted a massive steel sailing ship into a stage, created and tested a performance, and already sailed from the North Sea to North Africa.

Sorry for the radio silence about after the funding campaign ended. It all happened so fast... in the same week the crowdfunding ended the performance was tested for the first time,  the ship renamed (ritually and legally), and the nine-month journey from the Netherlands to Indonesia was launched. We sailed at midnight directly after the first show, rushing to catch some unusual good weather in the English channel, lashing the equipment traveling downriver from the the port of Rotterdam to greet the sea at dawn. We haven't stopped sailing or working furiously since. A lot of shit breaks on an old ship that hasn’t been on the sea for some years, especially in big seas, and we had a tough crossing of the Bay of Biscay. Now we know what weather the ship can handle, and honestly it is more than expected.


** KEEPING IN TOUCH
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Arka Kinari will not have project-specific social media accounts. This is about tactile relationships to nature and people in physical space. Just as we aim to cull fossil fuels from our practice we also aim to reduce our dependency of the toxic internet giants. We’ll share via our existing accounts on social media, but we’d really prefer you check out the images, videos and long-form stories which will be posted to our ship’s blog. Yes, a blog, vintage indie internet! It’s all part of the new Arka Kinari website .


** YOUR REWARDS (reminder: unless you made multiple donations it's just one of the below, the one you chose at the time)
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* Visit/Stay. The website features a calendar indicating where Arka Kinari will be in the coming year, and a realtime tracker of the showing the ship’s exact location at any moment.  If your donation award involves a visit (dinner, overnight, or week) please use these tools to plan a rendezvous and correspond with us at arkakinaricrew(at)gmail(dot)com
* Name on the mast. The ship will be painted in October by the visual genius Shrine. Once done we’ll put the names/phrases on the base of mast of those of you that chose that reward, and send y’all a foto. If you want something other than your name written, send the request to arka(dot)kinari(at)gmail(dot)com, just keep it shorter than a haiku.
* The merchandise reward stuff will comes in early 2020. We have your postal address already via Kickstarter/Fractured Atlas. Notify us at arka.kinari@gmail.com (mailto:arka.kinari@gmail.com) if you change residence in the meantime.
* The anchors names are Gladys and Whaya. Big thanks to the family and friends who bought those ‘naming rights’. Photos of the named anchors will be sent and shared after the October painting.
* The download codes for our back catalogue should have arrived as a personal email already. If you didn't get that mail in the last 24hrs please check your spambox to make sure it wasn't mis-filtered.
* Pre-release of new music will come in an email towards the end of this year.


** £00T
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You might wonder how we pulled this off when we barely reached 50% of the funding goal. Nobody's been paid (yet), not even the puny symbolic fees that were planned in the budget. The video projection area was scaled down to use consumer-grade projectors. And there is about $10k in credit card debt still pending.  Honestly, without the big donations from Kindle Project (https://kindleproject.org) and fo.am Arka Kinari might be dead in the water. For now there is just enough financial wind in the sails to keep this ship moving forward, but at least momentum is on our side, and it should be easier to find grants and sponsors with something already made.


** WHAT'S NEXT?
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We perform (on land) in Festival l'Boulevard in Casablanca this week, then sail to the Canary Islands to share Arka Kinari in the port of Santa Cruz on October 4th. The rest of October we'll be in the Canaries preparing for the big ocean crossing, and could use some more hands.
Sailor recruitment (skippers, engineers)
Skilled tradesfolk recruitment (welders, electricians, carpenters, tailors)


** WHY
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One of the big motivations behind Arka Kinari is to abandon the carbon economy, to create a living example of how to move through this world without destroying it. While we've been slowly sailing towards Asia the wunderkid Greta Thunberg did a very well publicized crossing of the Atlantic by sailboat to deliver a tongue-lashing to the US Congress and the United Nations. We can only hope this becomes more of a trend. The movement she started has grown and expanded into tomorrow's (Friday 20 Sept) massive Global Climate Strike. Get on it.

Thanks again for your help, every donation was absolutely crucial. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

Grey Filastine
for Arka Kinari
from Salé, Morocco