Tag Archives: bristol

Finding space to critique C Words

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As one of five C Words Co-Realizers one of my jobs is to reflect on the events which take place in the gallery. Yet, within the walls of Arnolfini I find it hard to find intellectual space or critical distance from the work.

Fortunately, I shan’t be based in Bristol for the whole of our two month run of events. Each time I leave the city – it seems – I can begin to clarify my thoughts on the provocative discussions, films and story-telling I have absorbed.

I climb aboard a stopping-train which makes slow, meditative progress through the Wiltshire countryside. Autumn sunshine is a gift to these rolling chalk hills and I cannot help but smile as I take in the view.

If an artist sets themselves the task of creating beautiful objects it is hard to imagine that any human creativity might match the beauty inherent in the ever-changing view from the window of a railway-carriage. A rail journey is a unique screenplay, different each time the film is played.

For the first week of the C Words show a banner hung on the far wall of gallery three at Arnolfini: “The measure of the new days is a love of the surface of the earth like the skin of a lover.”

Just as there are certain curves of a lover’s body which captivate one’s imagination, which form indelible memories, I believe that each of us may love the earth with similar specificity. We need not love the whole less, merely because we find a certain spot captivating. For me, perhaps my greatest love is these chalk hills, an archipelago of downland running variously through Wiltshire, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and into Kent.

C words sets out to address the questions “How did you get here, and where are we going.” A pair of questions which may be as banal or as profound as the reader makes them. There is a deliberate geography in these questions, Here and There may be metaphorical but need not be.

PLATFORM’s intention is to catalyse long-term thinking, to address social and environmental concerns over generational time-scales. I believe that a sense of place is important in addressing such questions. A two month residency in Bristol is a departure for PLATFORM, which has – over the past 25 years - rooted the bulk of its work firmly in the Thames valley.

Yet PLATFORM has always been outward-looking, in the 1990s PLATFORM’s Homeland project addressed issues of Home and of identity with expatriate communities in London amid the conflicts which tore apart Yugoslavia. More recently, campaigning has focussed on justice for minoritised communities in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey as BP has constructed and operated a hydrocarbon corridor through these countries in the form of its Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Current PLATFORM projects: Unravelling the Carbon Web and Remember Saro-Wiwa highlight the significance of London as an oil-city while focussing on the needs of oil affected communities in the Canadian province of Alberta and in the Niger Delta in Nigeria.

C words takes place within this context, less a part of the contemporary art world, more a manifestation in the worlds of political transformation and environmental defence. Perhaps it is this positioning which leaves me unable to digest the content of C Words whilst standing in a gallery. Similarly, we invite our audience less to look at the work, more to talk about the issues it raises. While events in the gallery have given me much to think about, it is autumn sunshine on rolling chalk hills which reminds me of my lover.

Benjamin,
C Words Co-Realizer.

Challenging Climate Racism

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Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.

From George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

I woke to a cold November morning, forcing myself from my warm cocoon. Ahead of me – a Saturday of C Words discussions around climate justice and racism.

My radio burbled in the galley as I readied myself for the day ahead. Justin Webb interviewed the Immigration Minister Phil Woolas who was keen to defend the government against accusations that it was or ever had been acquiescent on immigration. He argued that new immigration controls were “starting to bite” and that Britain’s border control regime was “the envy of the industrialised world”.

After the sports news, the same theme was picked up in another discussion, this time on the continuing war in Afghanistan. The interviewee, Paul Lever, chairman of the Royal United Services Institute argued that “Better control of our borders and immigration” would be infinitely more effective in defeating terrorism in British towns and cities than any number of British troops in Helmand.

What was missing from these discussions was any exploration of the factors which might drive desperate individuals to leave behind homes and families and risk their lives to enter Britain in search of sanctuary, in search of opportunities which, whose of us fortunate enough to hold an EU passport take for granted.

In the majority world there are few who fail to understand the link between environmental exploitation and their own oppression. C Words explores this link through commissions from African Writers Abroad (AWA) and Virtual Migrants, as well as through PLATFORM’s Remember Saro-Wiwa project (RSW). C Words seeks to avert a future where climate refugees clamour in vain at sealed borders.

This weekend saw poetry workshops and performance, live music in the gallery and discussions exploring one of the C Words questions: what might the world look like in 25 years time? African Writers Abroad chose the theme – Embracing TABOO (There Are Billions Of Options) – while Remember Saro-Wiwa framed Sunday’s discussions – No Condition is Permanent. Both discussions focussed on change. Change is inevitable, governments, oil multinationals and other elites – largely white – largely male, are doubtless planning for 2034 and beyond. We each have a responsibility to play a part in shaping that future, lest we should be presented with a future which is already being fashioned for us in the board-rooms of the industrialised world.

Benjamin,
C Words Co-Realizer

Imagination Feeds on Disobedience

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Together with other PLATFORM collaborators I have been spending time in the gallery, talking with visitors about their responses to the C Words exhibition. Today, one such conversation elicited a comment which has stayed with me all day: “It’s interesting – but its not art is it.” “Why do you say that?” James responded. “Because it’s trying to make me believe something.” I took this thought to today’s C Words critical tea party where a lively discussion ensued.

One of the most memorable art galleries I have ever visited is the museum of ecclesiastical art in Esztergom, Hungary. The museum is filled with religious paintings which were painted or commissioned explicitly to reinforce belief.

Social practice arts draw on pedagogical as well as fine art and other creative traditions. PLATFORM explicitly draws on the work of Joseph Beuys in the notion of pedagogy as “a third of our practice”.

Since the 1960s notions of education have been transformed by social movements and civil rights activists who have pushed for a focus on learning rather than teaching. The resulting transition might be seen as coming down from the pulpit, the difference from shaking people until they believe to shaking people awake in order to ask them what they believe. At its best, creative practice can be a tool in this later approach, it can be the beginning of these conversations. I was reminded of an interview with the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa:

“In [Britain] …writers write to entertain. They raise questions of individual existence – the angst of the individual. But for a Nigerian writer in my position you can’t go into this. My literature has to be combative… You cannot have ‘art for art’s sake’, this art must do something.What is of interest to me is that my art should be able to alter the lives of a large number of people, a whole community, of the entire country. So the stories that I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the Western world.

It’s not an ego trip, it’s serious, it’s politics, it’s economics, it’s everything. And art in that instance becomes so meaningful, both to the artist and to the consumers of that art.”

Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1994 interview in Channel 4 documentary “Nigeria’s Shame, The Hanged Man”

At the tea party Ian responded to this quote with the idea that our best moments through struggle, not just in art but in life. At those moments we really come alive. I believe that imagination feeds on struggle and on disobedience whether that is the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King or the artistic disobedience of the dadaists. These ideas are vital to thelaboratory of insurrectionary imagination (the lab) who launch their experiment Operation Bike Block as part of C Words – from Sunday 15th November.

Peter Sellers once proposed that “Artists must be at the centre of society, keeping alive a utopian vision, because society will not improve whilst those envisioning a better society are politicians.” This utopian imagination will be vital as the lab and other disobedients move from Bristol to Copenhagen to take part in mass demonstrations outside the UN’s COP 15 climate change summit.

Benjamin,
C Words Co-Realizer.

The Journey Home

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Today PLATFORM opened a discussion on what happens after 29th November, when the C Words season at Arnolfini comes to an end.

Since before PLATFORM arrived in Bristol those of us involved at the hub of the C Words melee have been meeting weekly to discuss the enormous logistics of the project: two months and over seventy events. A major challenge was to move various objects from London to Bristol burning as little carbon as possible. Creative energy was used in place of fossil fuels as we moved heavy objects by water, by rail and by bicycle and quadricycle. Returning those objects from the Avon to the Thames valley presents a similar challenge. How will we unravel gallery three here at Arnolfini, in a way that fits with the values and principles of C Words?

The biggest challenge is PLATFORM’s tent, displaced indoors at Arnolfini in part as a metaphor for PLATFORM’s own sense of being out of our native environment. The tent is constructed from seven incredibly heavy welded steel sections but could easily be returned to London by van. Conscious of the contradictions inherent in that approach we began our discussion by asking whether there was any sense in returning the tent to London at all.

James was passionate that the tent – which dates from 1989 – had been given new life by C words and should be put to use in future PLATFORM projects. Benjamin feared the burden of this metaphorical albatross. It was hard work to move the tent to Bristol and it will doubtless be hard work to move it again, yet James won the argument on the condition that he take responsibility for the tent’s return journey.

The weight of this heavy object is far more subjective for James as he carries with him so many memories and emotions from its life. Richard recognised that the tent is more than a building, a structure. It is a poetic object and James is understandably protective of its continuity, its integrity. It would demean the object to overlook its value beyond that as a structure. The object needs to live its intention, there is a chronology attached, a living history which needs to be respected if it is to retain its value as an icon.

The solution agreed by all parties is that we will ask Bert of the Bristol based Know Alternative to help us move the tent by renewably powered milk float to a temporary lock-up in the city. Meanwhile, James will choreograph the tent’s return journey to London by low-carbon slow travel. Seeing transit as performance James will move the tent after he returns from the COP 15 climate summit in Copenhagen. Watch this space.

Roaming Around the Lesser Debris of History

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Today I sat, I took time watch Ursula Biemann’s film Black Sea Files. The film is showing as a video installation in gallery five at Arnolfini until Sunday 8th November.

The film explores the lives of oil affected communities, from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, tracing the route of BP’s Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline.

PLATFORM has been working to challenge BTC since 2001 pressuring institutions, organising demonstrations, raising awareness and supporting affected communities and local civil society. Biemann’s film echoes many of our own findings, gathered from similar fact finding missions in the region.

Black Sea Files has been a long term project for Biemann, the interviews and other footage screening at Arnolfini are only part of the library of film which Biemann has gathered. The film is both beautiful and thought provoking, Biemann sees herself as an artist rather than a journalist, gathering dispatches from the front-line without a press-pass. She succeeds in compiling a collection of stories which fall outside the sphere of interest for most investigative journalists, evidence which holds emotional power in its anecdotal texture.

The film was made in 2005, before BP’s pipeline came on-stream. There was still a great deal of international attention on the project at that time. Social-justice and environmental campaigners including PLATFORM joined forces with local civil-society groups in an attempt to pressure BP in London – that other front-line for the global oil industry.

Following the opening of the pipeline in 2006 international attention shifted elsewhere but PLATFORM has continued to support local groups and individuals in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The link between corporate centres in London’s square mile and these zones of sacrifice is central to an understanding of the Carbon Web: a complex network of public and private institutions which help bring Azeri oil to our cars, planes and power-stations.

Bristol too represents a node in this Carbon Web, a growing financial centre, decisions made in boardrooms across the harbour from Arfnolfini will push our money – in the form of bank accounts, pension funds and local authority investments – into new oil frontiers around the globe.

One new frontier is Canada’s tar sands, a new oil province demanding huge investment. On 13th November Canadian First Nation activists will open a UK speaking tour at Arnolfini, speaking about the impact of these new oil developments on their communities.

Biemann describes her film as “roaming around the lesser debris of history” picking up on personal, anecdotal oral-histories, yet BTC is not history for those who have lost land or fishing grounds since the pipeline’s construction. They will deal with the consequences of our thirst for oil today, and for the next 40 years. Concerted pubic pressure on nodes of the carbon web can ensure that our money does not fund Canadian tar sands in the way that it funded BTC but that will require all of us to begin unravelling the carbon web.

The Responsibility of the Artist

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For many people the C Words season raises questions about the responsibility of artists and creative practitioners in the context of the social and environmental challenges which our society faces. Last week’s Embedded conference sought – in part – to explore this issue.

For some – Art sits outside a frame of responsibility – Art might be seen as a-moral and as such artists’ primary, if not only responsibility may be to aesthetics. Yet this model sits uneasily alongside a political discourse which has begun to accept that each of us shares a degree of responsibility for climate change in the form of our own greenhouse gas emissions. That being the case, we must all shoulder a share of the burden in cutting emissions and bringing climate change under control.

C Words uses the language of Climate Justice, and opened with a quote from the Indian writer and activist Vandana Shiva: “The energy and climate-change crisis stands as a unique social and ecological challenge… Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.”

We live in a culture, a society which finds it difficult to take responsibility, the concept of climate justice represents a huge challenge to this norm. Any just framework for addressing climate change forces us each to take responsibility both individually and collectively. We must be the change we would like to see in the world – as Gandhi put it.

To expect someone else to clear up our mess is essentially infantile. If we accept that each of us must take responsibility for our own actions as human beings, why should our responsibilities be any different as artists? If we take responsibility as human beings how can that not shape our artistic-practice? There is an overlap between politics and aesthetics.

No one asks whether engineers should produce work which is relevant or useful. Engineering makes things, it is assumed that it should make things that help to solve the challenges faced by society. Similarly, the arts can be viewed as a manufacturing industry: Artists make things. Sometimes a sculpture or a painting, sometimes a story or a performance. Why should we treat the artist differently from the engineer? Surely the creative industries must equally help to solve the challenges faced by society?

Benjamin,
C Words Co-Realizer.

From Coal to Oil – Fossil Fuel Focus

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Next week C Words will train a spotlight on Tar Sands, described as ‘The most destructive industrial project on earth’. Join us at Arnolfini this Sunday, 25th October 2009 from 19:00 for a special preview screening on the brand new film H2Oil.

I arrived at Arnolfini late on Wednesday morning, at the start of a week as C Words Co-Realizer. Gallery three has been transformed since my previous visit with the three main objects – which fill the gallery space – all exchanging places: the tent, the sailing-boat ‘Windrush’ and PLATFORM’s Agitpod mobile cinema.

In addition to the move-around, the far wall has been given over to a temporary exhibition depicting the Camp For Climate Action. Photographs of camp life, workshops, teach-ins, lock-ons and blockades are explained in the accompanying text which hangs as colourful banners. The Camp For Climate Action, now in its fourth year pitches alongside climate-criminals: outside Drax coal-fired power station, North Yorkshire (2006), close to Heathrow airport (2007), near the proposed new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent (2008) and this summer at Blackheath in London.

Last week, climate campers took their autumn break highlighting another of the country’s fossil fuel dinosaurs: Ratcliffe-On-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire.

Read more about last week’s Climate Swoop.

The C Words/Climate Camp photo-exhibition in Gallery three at Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts, Bristol runs until Sunday 24th October 2009.

While the Great Climate Swoop highlighted the oxymoron of ‘Clean Coal’ next week PLATFORM and C Words shift the spotlight onto Tar Sands, ‘the most destructive industrial project on earth’. Join us at Arnolfini this Sunday, 25th October 2009 from 19:00 for a special preview screening on the brand new film H2Oil.

The film examines a new, hugely wasteful and hugely destructive source of oil in Canada and that focus continues next Tuesday, 27th October 2009 with a performance-storytelling event: BP 3rd Quarter 2009: This Petroleum Heat and on 13th November when first-nation Cree activists will be speaking at Arnolfini. Its a packed programme which saps my energy as a Co-Realizer but its inspiring to see that so much is going on in this city and at Arnolfini.

Benjamin,
C Words Co-Realizer.

The Bristol bus boycott & other stories

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On Sunday afternoon, Virtual Migrants presented a performance and talk: The Centre Cannot Hold, Part 1. The performance examined the social inequalities around the issue of climate change. The following discussion looked at why those most effected are largely not the industrialised economies causing it; the connections between environmental crises and migration; and local Bristol history that connects to these wider issues.

A crowd gathered in the gallery where an installation of projected video, text and audio formed the backdrop to a live performance of spoken word and song. The voices become increasingly layered so that only glimpses of their content emerged. It felt quite overwhelming in the small packed room, with so much information spilling out – on top of an already information-heavy weekend. I let my mind relax and noticed certain fragments float to my attention: the woman’s feet picking their way gracefully along a pipe over flood waters, a reference to the 1980s miners strikes, a slave auction poster, resonant singing voices.

Kooj Chuhan of Virtual Migrants introduced their guest, local black activist Guy Baily. He spoke of his childhood in Jamaica and told the compelling story of his involvement in the Bristol Bus Boycotts of the 1960s in response to the blatant racism of the bristol bus company. Conversation followed on life in contemporary Jamaica and the difficult contradiction between the economics of tourism and the visible impact of climate change, with hurricanes dramatically increasing in their frequency.

This multi-layered, rich discussion brought to light many issues that lie at the heart of this season, from the social implications of environmental change, to whether diverse communities around Bristol can access spaces like the Arnolfini.

http://www.virtualmigrants.com/
http://centrecannothold.wordpress.com/

C Words Slow Travel weekend, An Epilogue

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The C words opening was advertised as a slow travel weekend. Sustrans’ art and the travelling landscape opened their Slow Travel Agency for business, while visitors and collaborating artists were encouraged to arrive by foot, bike, boat, bus and train.

I arrived home around 02:30am on Monday morning having taken almost eight hours to travel the 300 km (180 miles) from Arnolfini to my front door. I imagine that this qualifies as slow travel.

Many people seem to believe that Bristol is in that indefinable region referred to as The South West, but for those of use who live our lives at the western seaboard of these islands it takes almost as long to reach this city as to travel to London.

At the tail end of a bustling C Words opening weekend, the first stage of my journey home was conventional enough. A group of C words collaborators sharing a ride in a friend’s van along 130 km (80 miles) of asphalt corridor, cutting through the landscape more than taking it in.

Waving good-bye to my friends I was relieved to see that my train was running late. I hadn’t missed the chance to sleep in my own bed tonight. I love travelling by train, especially late at night. The distinctive clickety-clack of a locomotive is a kind of lullaby and there is a sense of security as this comfortable bubble cuts through the inhospitable night.

I was disgorged onto a midnight railway platform 170 km (100 miles) later, high on a sense of arrival yet still 18 km (11 miles) from home. At a more earthly hour a branch line would normally deposit me less than five minutes walk from my house but the last heavy eyed branch line train had long since returned to its engine-shed, so I walked to the edge of town and stuck-out my thumb.

Late on a Sunday night there was very little traffic but soon a car stopped and offered me a lift. The two young lads in the car had just finished a shift laying a new floor at a local supermarket. They revealed that they are contractors from over 500 km (300 miles) away. I reflected silently not only on the absurdity of my own hyper-mobility but also on whether in 25 years time any of us will have access to the resources necessary to re-fit shops every few years, let-alone bring contractors from so far afield.

I got out of the car, grateful for the lift but still almost 11 km (7 miles) from home, I began to walk. Taking the old roads to avoid what little speeding late night traffic there was, I made my way through darkened lanes where the tree canopy met in an arch high above me, making an overcast night even darker. Even farm dogs slept soundly as I passed quietly along familiar roads at an unaccustomed pace. Bats darted low above my head amid the call and answer of owls, I was aware of various rustlings in the hedgerows to either side. My rucksack laden with C Words newsprint I moved slowly but – tired as I was – I progressed, for once, feeling part of the landscape rather than merely passing through it.

Arriving home in the early hours I fell into bed aware that my entire journey might take on a dream-like quality when I awoke the next morning, only the soles of my feet remembering the experience. My own travels to and from Bristol have give me much to reflect upon in the context of PLATFORM’s ‘Embedded’ symposium on 28th Oct.

Embedded, Arts, Energy and Climate Change

Road distances from http://www.theaa.com/route-planner/index.jsp
Rail distances from http://www.co2balance.uk.com/co2calculators/rail-travel

 

I see pirates…

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It’s my first morning in Bristol, living on a canal barge near Bristol Bridge. I go out into the sun on my bike to find some bits and pieces, and within 5 minutes see my first pirate of the day, in Castle Park, in full regalia, with cutlass. Every time I’ve been here i see pirates – last time a horde of them on a walking tour. Bristol is happily obsessed with its piratical and disobedient past, yet not so convinced about a piratical and disobedient present.

The Evening Post’s front page today jutxaposed the hysteria around Peter Andre’s concert – “IDOL” screamed the headline! – with the invasion of Bristol Co-Mutineers of various high street banks – “IDLE” screamed the headline… Check it out - these guys had a very busy week, backed up with months of planning, creativity, action and re-envisioning.http://comutiny.wordpress.com