Al-Thawra 2011 - الثورة

Housing Estates, London, and Dystopia

Just went to see the Broadwater Farm exhibition, portraying the story of a massive council estate complex in Tottenham made infamous after it's 1985 riots.


Held at Bruce Castle Museum, an interesting site in itself, a strange piece of history nestled in one of the more socioeconomically challenged areas of London. The power of the exhibit was in it's honour of the local people who made Broadwater a success. But underlying it all was the sense that the brutality of the civic system not only crushed a momentum of people's movement but left it dead on the curb.

Broadwater was one of those massive efforts at post-war social engineering, meant to deal with poverty and rising immigration. The huge complex was built and then basically left to decay and within a decade had fallen to such a state of disrepair that it clearly reflects a planned state of structural violence against a community by a council. The failure of these large-scale housing estates was studied by the Land Use Research Unit at King's College in the late seventies. The research of this group influenced Coleman's book Utopia on Trial: vision and reality in planned housing, which featured Broadwater Farm as an example (she was head of the research unit at the time).

The Centre for Spatially Integrated Social Science has a great article on this: Design Disadvantagement.

I also recommend the film Utopia London, which outlines the Labour vision of modern social housing and how in many ways it failed at the hands of politicians and urban planners with no foresight into community and culture.

Finally if you're in London a cycle up to Tottenham to see the exhibit takes you past the smashed windows and boarded shops that mark the result of the recent riots caused by anger over police brutality. Guardian: 'Tottenham in flames as riot follows protest'. 26 years on and history repeats itself, as we move faster towards a social dystopia fuelled by mind-numbing solutions by those in power: BBC: 'David Cameron back councils planning to evict rioters'. Russ Swan has some amazing photos he shot there in 1985 and an good article on his blog entry: Cat and mouse on Broadwater Farm, 1985

To not end on that note I channel the thoughts of Jane Jacobs and her research into the existence and importance of community at the street level and the failure of urban planning to respond to that community in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, something that seems to have not been accounted for in the early planning of Broadwater and most other estates across the country. History doomed to repeat itself....

Press Release:

In 1985 Broadwater Farm experienced one of the worst nights of civil unrest anywhere on mainland Britain. It shocked the nation and nearly destroyed a community. Just months before, Diana Princess of Wales visited to congratulate the Broadwater Farm Youth Association on its success. Today Broadwater Farm is seen as a model of social housing, attracting visitors from around the world. This exhibition will explore the heroic achievements of a community who from the very beginning fought against all the odds. October 2010 at Broadwater Farm Community Centre. Now on at Bruce Castle Museum June 2011 to March 2012

Hoods, Freedom & Dancing

I love the Hackney Gazette. Mostly because it comes free through my postbox, its local and not stapled, meaning I can read it page by page as I walk my dog and use it to scoop his poo off the pavement. I dont though agree with it's big brother policy of posting photos of looters so that we can all pretend to be hey-diddly-doo neighbour vigilantes in Fahrenheit 451. Reminds me of the graffiti I saw in Greece, 'WE WEAR OUR HOODS UP SO YOU CAN LOOK US IN THE EYE'

A friend of mine just wrote to me: 'the only forces who feel empowered to express themselves in our society r the yobs who riot for flatscreens. the rest is divergence...'

As usual I find myself somewhere in between all stances and I still go with Emma Goldman's philosophy, if I can't dance I dont want to be part of your revolution:

'I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to be beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.' (Goldman 2006)

Memory Walking and Nostalgia

Just returned from Crete, visiting a friend who grew up in the capital Heraklion. We were given an amazing tour of the city centre that was based on her memory of what was there when she lived in the city during a variety of different ages. Seeing past the numerous cafes and bars a new city began emerging. Hidden under the parasols and flat screen tv's of the multiple venues, were beautiful facades of stately homes that housed a variety of characters who came to life among the cobbled lanes. The white noise of chatting people and buzzing phones, became the ghost sound of a child's bicycle racing down the slanted alleys, or the old woman chasing them with a pot of boiling water.

A new city emerged, like Raban's Soft City, one of histories and stories, one which seemed much more local as a social network. Raban tell us 'the city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams and interpretations'. It was this soft amenable city that came alive with the bench behind the square where lovers once met now empty, the popular hair dressers studio where the scraping of chairs being pulled out for customers was heard around the corner but is now turned residential, the childhood home transformed into a health spa yet retaining the original tiles and doors, allowing the phantoms of nostalgia to continue to inhabit the hard city. The hard city that retains its shape while the soft city lives and dies within it. 

Going on this walk around Heraklion opened up a past, re-awoke a memory, like Lazarus it brought to life a narrative that once was but had died. The deep nostalgia that punctuated the derive was palpable and I felt a strange sense of both belonging to the place and envying the memory. Somehow wanting to be a part of that which was never mine. It reminded me of Boym's The Future of Nostalgia and her rich analyses of the workings on memory on society and city. She tells us 'the past of the city... is not entirely legible; it is irreducible to any anachronistic language; it suggests other dimensions of the lived experience and haunts the city like a ghost.'

This was an alternate ghost tour of a city, a rich and vibrant walk down memory lane that made me really truly appreciate Heraklion and see it for what it was and had once been.

Taking Root: Taking Part

Am the guest psychogeographer on the research phase of the redevelopment of the garden at Camden Arts Centre. Am exploring site as evocation of memory and escape from the quotidian through a video, a 2D work, a walk and a presentation.

I'llll be presenting my research findings along side other project partners: a zoologist, choreographer, psychologist, poet and architect.

Should be interesting to see varied perspectives on nature, walking and its inclusion in an urban setting.

The event is free, but places are limited and Camden Art Centre are taking bookings on 020 7472 5500 or at camdenartscentre.org.

London Riots and Structural Violence

Photo: Sebastian S. Fuller

Spent the last few days doing what most people in London avoided, going towards places where skirmishes were taking place. I wanted to see for myself exactly what was going down, mediated information is never the same and like it or not simplifies any extraordinary event into a single lens. Even the pictures that my companion shot that night seem somehow much more violent than the actuality of walking down the street. 

I cycled round the confrontations early on Monday around 6:30pm at Hackney Central and a large amount of people in the street just watching lines of riot police form and reform. The mood of the crowd was celebratory, with a mix of ages, races, genders. I saw veiled girls, lanky teenagers, council mums with their prams, older Eastenders holding a can of beer, hipsters on bicycles and a few groups of young guys in hoodies definitely looking like this was the most fun they've ever had. The only sign of political unrest was a single young guy with a swollen black eye and an agitated staffie at the end of a lead. He was shouting about police abuse, violence against minorities, lack of government help among other topics. I appreciated his anger and recognised at least here a cause and motivation. I cant say I saw the same power of protest in the fat teen who came past in a balaclava causing a group of teens to launch into hysterical laughter.

Nothing was happening really. Then about a dozen officers with barking German Shepards moved towards the scattering of people near St. Augustine's Tower. The most aggressive people there were the police so I decided to leave but quickly was boxed in. They began shouting at people to leave, actually many of us were trying to. One man who was walking through didnt realise what was going on and got yelled at by an over eager officer. At first startled he then got very upset and the situation easily escalated. I left it was clear that the antagonism would continue, the kids would break stuff up and run from the cops and the police would have a real field day.

Zooming out of the effect and looking at the cause:

There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored

Haringey youth club closures: 'There'll be riots' - video

and for a step-by-step of the match that lit the fire: 

Anatomy of the London Riots

But the prevailing sentiment heard on the media is of 'us' law-abiding citizens and 'them' the thugs who are rioting. The condescending tone of this BBC article is a prime example: 'What turns people into looters?'. Though the riots were not race-based at all (the kids I saw breaking glass came in all shades) it does feed into the white british fear of minorities. And how can it not, in a country where wealth disparity and racism is both rampant and unspoken. And lest the UK pride itself in how mixed the country is lets not forget the actual statistics, it is over 92% white and even these statistics when you navigate them are clearly coming from an ethnocentric point of view, an us and them comparison.

The most surprising thing to me is not that the riots have happened, its that anyone is surprised at all. When you punch someone in the face what do you expect? People seem startled by a burning car and smashed window but what about the violence of policy and budget cuts. This is a direct result of poor social policy of a government continually led by a core of well-funded individuals who have no experience with need, poverty or discrimination. 

I recommend Gilligan's book Violence: reflections on a national epidemic to begin understanding root cause and subsequent effect in the body politic. Though he is writing about the US prison system, his perspective on marginalisation and its aftermath are spot on. And I also keep thinking about Paul Farmer's take on structural violence in his book Pathologies of Power and how poverty fractures the social fabric. According to Farmer the capitalist division between affluent and poor, creates a series of politic manoeuvres which not only sustain the status quo but are violent in their impact on poor communities. Read this is a great article on structural violence and human rights for extended explanations on the topic. 

This is why it seems to me when as a governing principle you kick the most economically-challenged in a the teeth, you're going to get some broken windows and missing trainers... 

Linked by Graeme Miller

Did the intrepid journey that is the audio tour of Graeme Miller's archive of stories surrounding the construction of the M11 in East London and subsequent displacement of locals and protest culture that arose from the development.

Alas technology has erased all my notes, but I'll try to give an impression. Linked is a tour of East London given through a series of sound installations that are broadcast from transmitters attached to light poles across a 4 mile stretch. You have to pick up your own receiving devise and headphones in order to listen to the work, but these are hard to come by. Luckily Redbridge Museum had a few, adding a good amount of miles to our journey but somehow part of the adventure (if you plan on actually doing this walk plan ahead).  Though there is a map, finding each transmitter is still a challenge, though a group of us were lucky to be guided by Oliver James Hymans, who wrote a dissertation on psychogeography with this piece as a case study.

As you approach each transmitter the sound slowly starts feeding into the headphones. Its slightly eery and ghostly, as if you are overhearing a conversation through an open window somewhere nearby. It becomes clear the recordings are testimonials of people affected by the construction of the M11 motorway and destruction of well anything in its path. The recordings are sampled and remixed with music giving it the impression of an early negativland track. The testimonials range from residents, to squatters, to elderly focusing mostly on the energy of protest and the destruction of sites of memory and places of local identity and history. I particularly like the transmission coming from a light pole in between two chestnut trees that referenced The Battle of George Green and the feeling that the takeover of the park by protesters was like a return the common land before the Acts of Enclosures privatised areas across England, a fantastic analogy and still powerful today.

I was interested in the people who lived in the houses near these transmitters and I wondered if they had any idea about it. Though I loved the experience, even for me who loves to explore and is interested in site, history, memory and place this was not an easy task to fulfill. This was mostly due to such poor maintenance of the artwork itself by Museum of London and Arts Admin. I couldn't help to wonder about those transmitters powered 24/7 and broadcasting empty messages to deaf ears. Perhaps this is the route history eventually takes, most people forgetting the struggles of the past for the comforts of the future. After the work I felt happy to have learned a piece of history and a new respect for a locale and yet somewhat melancholic in thinking about our constant move towards greater privitisation and development. As a radicant myself I wonder about how to save and respect roots while helping us move across borders freely.

The M11 felt both like a massive border and yet somehow an escape route...


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

CTR 147 / Summer 2011 “The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy”

Canadian Theatre Review investigates the power of performance as a tool for critical thinking and social and political action within and beyond the university theatre studies classroom. 


Some great articles, unfortunately you have to be linked into academia to access or pay, not very activist of them but hey suppose its changing the system from the inside. Or ask your Anonymous friend to hack it.


The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy

11 Rooms Group Show - Manchester Art Gallery

Just came back from Manchester International Festival, a really fantastic civic take on arts and culture integrated into an urban environment. Went to see Robert Wilson's Life and Death of Marina Abramovich, but seeing as it was one of the biggest cultural disappointments of my life I'll focus on 11 Rooms, a group show of live art / performance at Manchester Art Gallery.

I'm going to focus a descriptive analyses of some of the works that I felt were socially-engaged in one way or another.

Santiago Sierra - presented Veterans of the war of Northern Ireland, where a man stands in the corner facing a wall. Both times I went in the room it was a soldier in full army gear in a frozen attention facing the corner. I walked quite close and could sense his awareness but discipline to remain still. His uniform was crisp new and clean looking. I found it a powerful allegory that was both political and simple. Apparently there were many veterans who stood for a brief period of time and all were in civilian clothes but I didn't see this. I'm not sure how powerful the statement would have been for me with some guy dressed in black. A performer I knew in one of the other pieces informed me that the particular soldier I saw was not enlisted for the artwork but saw the exhibition and requested to participate, which further expands the work's impact in the social sphere.

Tino Seghal - presented Anne Lee 2011, where a young girl maybe around ten enters the room and engages the audience in a painfully scripted monologue about commodity, time, systemisation and self (there were a series of them playing the part). She awkwardly poses questions, waiting for an answer only to continue with segments of script. The effect on the surrounding audience was to stupify their gaze with a slightly condescending smile reserved for precocious children. It's very much about you somehow, as she asks: 'would you prefer to be too busy or not busy enough?' A good question for a room full of culture vultures who probably possess middle class values of work and commodity, Seghal prods the audience he knows will be there. But somehow you can't judge the littel girl by the same set of standards so her eloquent words seem to resonate stronger. 

Some of the other works also relied on acting skills, something that charges the performance with a whole other set of values and forms of communication and reception that resonate on a totally different level for me. An example is Roman Ondák' Swap, where a jovial man at a table requests or rather tries to convince oglers to swap whatever object he has for another. Reminded me of the man who traded a paperclip until it became a house. Its a game I also play with my students, but somehow in the art gallery seemed trite. 

I'll mention two more I enjoyed though I wouldn't categorise as Applied Live Art, still resonated: Laura Lima's Men=Flesh/Women=Flesh where the ceiling of the gallery is lowered to about 1/2 a metre off the ground and as you peer in on your stomach you can see a hanging lamp laying on the floor and a person with a disability laying inside. I disliked the voyeur aspect of it, and found it slightly didactic but was still a beautiful image. Finally the whole show would have been upped incredibly had John Baldessari gotten his way and put a dead corpse on display in the same position as Andrea Mantegna's Foreshortened Christ, instead we got the archive presented in A4 email format.

Paper Panel – Putting words in their mouths: verbatim and authenticity

I will be presenting a paper on authorship and community engagement this Thursday at Central School of Speech and Drama's conference:

Authoring Theatre


Paper Panel – Putting words in their mouths: verbatim and authenticity
THURSDAY 14 JULY, 16:15 – 17:45
REHEARSAL ROOM 6, WEST BLOCK

PUTTING WORDS IN THEIR MOUTHS: VERBATIM AND AUTHENTICITY

Chair:
Amanda Stuart Fisher

Presenters:
Maria Jose Contreras Lorenzini - Dramaturgies of the real In Chile: the problem of authorship
Steve Gilroy - Let’s get real about ‘verbatim’
Roberto Sánchez-Camus – Triangulated City Beirut: Co-Authorship in Applied Live Art

THURSDAY 14 JULY, 16:15 – 17:45
REHEARSAL ROOM 6, WEST BLOCK

You can read my abstract online.

NYLON

It's hard to wrap your head around the scale of New York and London as they are so topographically different.
London is a complete mess of roads neatly organised into concentric zones that seem to spread out forever until suddenly it hits the M25 motorway and becomes farmland.
New York is a neatly organised set of roads set on to a mess of islands and inlets and seems to be encircled by endless suburbs with farmland somewhere way down the I95 highway.

I made loads of versions of these maps in some sense to put my two realities together, they somehow help me better contextualise and understand my place in these two twin cities (fraternal twins of course)

Trial of The Mariner

Set in a dystopian future, 8 sailors venture into the radioactive oceans to discover new resources, to their horror they become stranded upon the Plastic Continent floating around the North Pacific gyre where the Skipper, the last remaining survivor is taken to trial by the Plastic Creatures for crimes against Nature...

Described as a performance of 'deranged genius', our latest production by Lotos Collective

www.trialofthemariner.com



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.


Click here for behind the scenes rehearsal shots!

Art, Time and Experimentation at Long Player in Trinity Buoys Wharf

LONG SUMMER EVENINGS AT TRINITY BUOY WHARF WITH LONGPLAYER

A SERIES OF TALKS AROUND THE THEMES OF ART, TIME AND EXPERIMENTATION

FEATURING: RICHARD WILSON (ARTIST), ANDREW KOTTING (FILM DIRECTOR), IAIN SINCLAIR (WRITER), PAUL SHEPHEARD (ARCHITECT AND WRITER), DAVID ROONEY (CURATOR AT SCIENCE MUSEUM)

JUNE 29th 6pm – 9pm Launch

Arrive between 6pm and 7pm to gain rare evening access to Longplayer, Jem Finer’s 1000 year musical composition that has been playing from the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf since the first moments of 2000.

Richard Wilson is to open with a one-off performance lecture ‘THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT’. Wilson will be showing his rarely seen films in a talk about his use of films in sculptures.

7pm at The Lighthouse, Trinity Buoy Wharf, Orchard Place, London E14 0JW

28th of July: Paul Shepheard to present a talk entitled ‘The Bowl of the Horizon’

7th of September: Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair to present on the Long Pedal and their new collaboration ‘SWANDOWN’

28th of September: David Rooney to present ‘Navigating experimental invention, survival and destruction: the Royal Observatory and GMT’

For more information visit http://longplayer.org

Free admission, to book email: lara@longplayer.org

Race as Military Propaganda

I was researching the Detroit race riots of 1943, when I came upon some Japanese propaganda duringWorld War 2. This lead me to this incredible website: Psychological Warfare, Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Black Propaganda, and Aerial Propaganda Leaflets.

Check out the race as military propaganda page

The Argument Room

The Argument Room is a live, interactive debating forum involving two people, branching out from this to reach an unlimited number via the web. Its primary concerns are the arts and social justice.

Coming Up:

June 16th Juliet Lyon, Director of Prison Reform Trust
July 21st Chris Goode, actor, writer and director

A great new streaming format for interaction and debate. Worth checking out

http://www.theargumentroom.net

The Journal for Artistic Research

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an inter-national, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies, from all arts disciplines. With the aim of displaying practice in a manner that respects artists'

modes of presentation, JAR abandons the traditional journal article format and offers its contributors a dynamic online canvas where text can be woven together with image, audio and video. These research documents called ‘expositions’ provide a unique reading experience while

fulfilling the expectations of scholarly dissemination. 

http://www.jar-online.net/

Budget Cuts Mural @ Bucks New University

Somehow the University gave me free access to create a mural about the budget cuts just in time for the visit of University Minister David Willetts. I'm told her was steered clear from ever viewing it on the day he came to campus. Nevertheless a great endeavour and mention in this article of Times Higher Education.

Click for Link to Article


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy 2010

This is the third edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index. It reflects the
situation as of November 2010. The first edition, published in The Economist’s The World in 2007,
measured the state of democracy in September 2006 and the second edition covered the situation
towards the end of 2008. The index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide for
165 independent states and two territories—this covers almost the entire population of the world
and the vast majority of the world’s independent states (micro states are excluded).

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.

Countries are placed within one of four types of regimes:
Full democracies
Flawed democracies
Hybrid regimes
Authoritarian regimes

Full PDF of the report can be downloaded from the Economist Intelligence Unit but requires registering, otherwise you can see it here.

'...interstitial, unoccupied spaces at the edges of the interstate...'

The Edge of Light: Wendover is a poetic study of landscape, environment, development and isolation in what the artists Brian Rosa and Adam Ryder describe as 'the border of nowhere and nowhere' in the US.

What is striking about these photos is the stillness and isolation in the images, confusing the viewer as to wether the subject is that which is being lit or the light itself. Though the exploration sought out the edge of light, its the degrees of dark that become most heightened. Light at dawn or is it dusk? Artificial or natural? Either way there remains a sense of deep sleep in the photo essay. It makes us question not only how we use light but how we use the landscape. Its no wonder its a result of a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. 

For a comparable study of light and subject, see Peter Di Campo's photo study of Ghana at night via flashlight Life Without Lights recently published in the NYTimes. 

Memorial Mapping - For Olivier Ruellet

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.


Site space city system social sounds sights city same nonsense no sense sense senses sensing....
Was it Paris - London - New York? New York - Paris - London? London - New York - Paris?
There is magic in a city, creeping beneath the concrete pavements, behind metal and glass towers, running through rusted pipes and telephone wire.
We don't always see this current, that actually keeps us going. We go for surfaces.
Surface heat, surface texture, surface tension.
But then there's a viewpoint, a point of view, an opinion, an imagination.
A moment in time when we allow ourselves an expanded outlook and lift our eyes from our assumed roles, present positions, sought after goals, endless tasks and matters of consequence.
A moment when we remember this life we're living is the most engaging piece of theatre of all time, but we put it on pause.
And when we pause that streaming film of information our eyes glaze over, finally resting for one moment on the invisible.
The visible invisible.
The tangible intangible.
Sometimes we're lucky enough to stop the thundering of our critical egos marching in our heads and listen.
And we listen...
Listen...
That sounds....
Those sounds....
This moment when we become present, when we communicate in 140 characters or more. Some of which are inferred some of which are silent.
When the buzzing background of late night drinks and early morning alarm clocks is like a distant dream and we find ourselves floating in a sea of nothing.
And you were there.
And I was there.
But I didn't know it, I don't remember it, I just know I was.
I know because now you are still there and I am still here, we are still here and we know you are there, but we don't know where there is because we barely know where here is.
We're barely here at all.
And back to the present.
To this moment - To this city, this neighbourhood, this park, this construction.
And here we are, we know we're here but are you here?
Can you hear?
Hey, can you hear me?
...
I swim through the streets of New York, I swim through the streets of London, I swim through the streets of Paris and in this underwater world I breathe the air we breathed together.
And I see the city, the hard city gone soft, its shell cracked, its magic seeping through.
I take a moment....
Breathless...
Floating...
Watching...
Eyes wide wondering: if we just hang on to that magic we'll be able to see like this forever.
Eyes wide, forever.

Walking directions from Google

Upon seeking best walking direction from my house in Clapton to Dalston which is about 20 minutes away by foot...

or 3 Days and 6 Hours if you decide to take the long way to Dalston in Carlisle, Cumbria....

its amazing, actually connects with ferries, not just Jesus style walking on water though I was excited by the prospect....

Action Weekend - performance in London

February 4th+5th is ACTION WEEKEND @ performancespace 7pm onwards


A collaboration between Artevict and Performance Space. 
]performancespace[+++ArtEvict at ]performancespace[ 


Friday 4th February
Victoria Gray 
The Greestone Group 
Jamie Lewis Hadley
Stephanie Hurst
Helena Hamilton
Hugh O'Donnell
Maria dos Milagres 
Roberto Sanchez-Camus
Johannes Blomqvis


Saturday 5th February
Leibniz
Nathalie Bikoro
Mark Greenwood
Scarlet Lassoff
Nathan Walker
Htein Lin
Group Action


Facebook


]performancespace[ Unit 6, Hamlet Industrial Estate, London, E9 5EN


Overground: Hackney Wick Bus: 26,388, 30, 276, 488, UL1

Inside Art: Young Offenders showcased at National Gallery

Inside Art is an outreach programme, which aims to engage young offenders in creatively responding to the National Gallery’s collection; it has been developed in partnership with HMYOI Feltham, a juvenile prison and young offenders institution for young men aged 15–21.

National Gallery, London

8 February – 25 April 2010