Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Musician of the Month: Hilary Woods

     

    The Year Past and Ahead

    In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.

    I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’. It reminded me also of my love for sonically-heavier music.

    Through the course of writing my new record last year I studied analogue photographic processes in London. This was an enlightening experience – awakening, purifying, and sustaining. Conversations with Lasse (Marhaug) who produced the album, opened up with us bouncing ideas on developing bath times, film grain, and Japanese post-war photographic processes resulting in layered, high-contrast, noisy, black-and-white imagery.

    I was keen to achieve sonic textures on the record similar to those I was exploring in the darkroom. In this way, my journeys in both music and visuals over the past year intertwined and mirrored elements of each another.

    During a year largely spent playing catch-up and quietly rejuvenating, another formative experience was my artist residency at CAMP in the Pyrenees, France in the summer. The opportunity to work and nurture friendships with a host of positive and inspirational people – performance artists, sound artists, composers, musical thinkers, electronic producers, creators, actors, poets, playwrights and visual artists – was a pure gift.

    At high altitude we shared studio space and meals every evening, helped with each other’s projects as we listened or gave feedback, enjoyed walks and endured the heat, watched films, and shared equipment. It was a welcome respite, having worked on writing my new album in solitude up to that point for about eight months. Much of life as a solo artist is solitary, from writing to touring to persevering with it all, so it is a joy when golden social connections are cultivated beyond that space.

    I look forward to the year ahead although it will have a ferocious pace in comparison to its predecessor, with my record due for release in spring. It will feel good to share it. There is always an element of embracing the fear when releasing anything and of learning new ways to live with the vulnerability of doing so. I feel proud of the work I achieved with others in piecing it together, and the giant steps this record required me to take in its writing.

     

    For further information about Hilary’s work visit her website: http://www.hilarywoods.com

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_hilary_woods/

    Photo credit: Joshua Wright

    https://www.instagram.com/joshuajameswright/

     

     

     

  • No Comment – Save Our Seas

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  • Poetry – Daniel Wade

    Rooftop Blues

    I could go for a quick smoke on the roof,
    the steel vent pipe snaking
    its lobed edges toward the window,
    hear the incidental music of engines snarl up
    from Richmond Street, relentless as diesel.                    
    Maybe, just maybe, I see people for what we are
    and want no part in it? Spilled lighter fluid,
    a puddle of technicolour, swirls like marbled
    paper where a lit match was dropped, and where
    flames now spasm. A dove, olive branch
    gripped in its beak, is shot down by tracer-bullet
    in the lull of sundown, and, like me, bouncers
    light up down laneways. Beats from a DJ throb
    from an emergency exit to remind me that escape
    is no longer possible, not now, then or ever,
    and that I am moored, permanently, to here.                           

     

    Rope Jockey

    A text from the agency tells me
    when and where to be
    and what tools to have on-site
    (though I know that already):
    harness and gloves, high-viz
    and hard hat. On the Luas,
    I watch Dublin hunker in March rain,
    her blue-black skyline tightened like a toolbelt
    and head into the site at 7 on the dot,
    with an Americano
    from Frank and Honest
    and a heart attack sandwich
    (that’s a breakfast roll to you)
    to keep me going.
    The site is knotted, impassable as a jungle:
    a cluster of skeletal cranes loom
    in the sky, statically iron,
    set in stone or steel, balanced against all weather,
    jibs shredding cloud as the wind’s high grip
    rattles through bony lattice
    and chain-sling as they slowly swivel
    to lift granite slabs to the roof:
    pulleys and outriggers and bolts set in a concrete base,
    concrete vomited from mixers, giant rust-
    scuffed boxes stacked high
    with rollers and chains, corrugated ridges.
    I wonder how soon it’ll be
    before funding gets pulled and it’s left derelict,
    not even a quarter of the way finished:
    the rich weight of industry, injurious as scorn. 
    Secretly, I’m grateful for the job,
    that I get to work on this building
    destined to be a hotel
    or some tech firm’s HQ,
    I.D. card swinging and bleeping me in,
    my serial number memorised like girl’s name.
    Rung by rung, I climb 
    as if towards heaven, past girders and I-beams
    slung low in ruled, russet mesh,
    my wings soaked in caffeine and blood,
    numb to the view 
    nestling far below me, steel-grey morass
    of roofs and webbed pavements, traffic
    an arterial drip-feed. I sit in the cab controls
    like a pilot becalmed in mid-air,
    grip the levers and manoeuvre the crane into life,
    harnessing it to come ‘round full circle,
    as if in slow motion
    with a conclusive thud. Load follows load,
    lb follows lb, and I’ll do
    as many as thirty, forty lifts a day
    if I have to, the back jib
    and counterweight locked in their waltz,
    ’til a voice on the radio confirms:
    “Yeh, she’s all clear, boss.”
    And time isn’t measured by my watch
    but by the rise and sink of the sun,
    a solar disk in tiled and black in slow hurtle
    across the glass cages,
    reddening my face by degrees. It’s mad
    how dark it gets in the space of a few hours,
    how much the city looks like a crime scene,
    how unstoppable it all seems.

     

    Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

  • Artist of the Month – Maria Julia Goyena

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    ‘Inner coherence is prior to artistic manifestation.’
    Maria Julia Goyena

    Wandering minstrels travelled through villages in the Middle Ages, telling stories with a book of archetypal images of the time in which they lived.

    The pages came loose and they/we continued telling the stories, with the leaves now shuffled. The sense of using these images to foretell the future arrived later.

    Another story, a different one, says that it was invented by the Egyptians and that Hermes Trismegistus had something to do with it.

    They were, and we are, ‘The Fool’, because we are all born innocent and impulsive, and in our journey that is our life, we become ‘The World’. ‘The World’ represents an ending to a cycle of life, a pause in life before the next big cycle which began with ‘The Fool’. The ‘World’ is an indicator of a major and inexorable change.

    Yes, Tarot is the story of a trip, of a journey, a story that is retold over and over again and which we continue to tell. It speaks for itself, it speaks of others too. It is the story with stories inside itself.

    The origin of Tarot, as those things that are always with us, remains mundane and mysterious at once. It continues, and resignifies itself without ever aging. Because of its particular and universal imaginary it continues to be a channel of our dreams and nightmares, desires and anxieties, like everything that has a living spirit in it.

    Tarot reflects and narrates our selves, becoming true ‘cultural memes’ at the cost of being redundant. These are images that we transmit without even being aware of when they began.

    We don’t have them in our DNA. We transmit them because we carry the idea with us, like the wheel, like a chair… things that were invented in different civilizations or in other times without having contact with each other.

    My particular look, my particular antenna emitting information and my universal antenna that receives it, catalyse these images and unify them in this Tarot. A little new look with its own soul. Mixed.

    Besides, memory edits and editing, as Pasolini has said, is poetry.

    By constantly editing, our memory reinvents reality poetically. Our subjectivity tints our gaze and we build out of our dreams a concrete reality. That is the power of dreams. It is believed that because they are ungraspable, they are less real. But of course this is the trap, this is why they are so elusive sometimes. And of course that is why it is essential to know which base element feeds our dreams. The external reality is the dream constructed by others, when I (anyone) meets the other realities, generating new information. Art, Collage, Education: these things are a metaphor for what surrounds us; as Aristotle would say, ‘we lie to tell the truth’ by putting veils in art.

    What does this mean? It means the obvious. It means that we generate images that anchor them in the deep meaning of what we want to say, but they are images, they are poetry, they are colour, they are metaphors, therefore they are “lies.” But what they never are is dishonest… And as the inner coherence is prior to the artistic manifestation, we know that they are the result of an internal alchemy, their balance dynamic.

    And then my memory appears…
    Memory:  a collage.
    You remember a smile, a look.
    You remember what clothes someone had on …
    or
    You remember what is not said.
    Therefore, and because the editing is the poetry of the story, I compose and configure myself, because it is my memory that invents me.
    That’s what I’m actively living … my edition.
    I am my sense.
    I am my small and humble self and they are my worlds that I share.

    Tarot: body intuitions and a book of free pages. Always poetry in images.

    This is my hybrid, my own beautiful monster and humble servant who collaborates with the other owner of a truth that may be clear or may be cryptic. It doesn’t matter … it’s a challenge!

     

    www.mariajuliagoyena.com

    www.instagram.com/tourbellyne

     

  • Poetry – Out Walking

     

    Sammy Jay, 30, grew up in Oxford and in Ireland by the sea. He works as a rare book dealer with Peter Harrington of London, tending to their literature department with an interest in poetry in particular. He has been writing since he can remember, and is working on his first collection.

  • Public Intellectual Series: Michel Foucault

    I wrote what follows prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and have been prompted to re-read all of Michel Foucault’s work, including his lectures and digressions. It seems to me that the following is worth emphasizing:

    1. The concept of the Panopticon, Foucault borrowed from Jeremy Bentham is increasingly prominent in the wake of this virus that has accelerated the introduction of a system of mass surveillance.
    2. Inappropriate behavior is being re-defined to encompass ordinary sociability, while once cherished liberties are easily forgotten. A state of derealisation is upon us.
    3. Madness may now be redefined, leading to detention under draconian (anti-terror) laws for anyone perceived as deviant, subversive or even non-conformist in an ever-narrowing consensus. People who do not behave, act or dress in a specific way are now labelled ‘mad’. People who oppose draconian laws are ‘mad’. Maybe even human rights lawyers will be locked up.
    4. The media and other vectors of public opinion manage the message to ensure compliance and control.
    5. The concept of punishment has been internalized as a regime of prolonged social distancing and self-isolation undermines humanistic instincts. An ever more compliant and fearful population will welcome the Panopticon.

    David Langwallner, July, 2020.

    Introduction

    I have previously quoted a passage from Noam Chomsky, which acutely surveys the post-structuralist origins of our present Post-Truth condition. These words are worth recalling once again:

    There are lots of things I don’t understand – say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of ‘theory’ that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.[i]

    A point worth emphasis from the thinly disguised contempt he displays towards this deceitful movement is Chomsky’s regard for Michel Foucault as “different from the rest” – a superior calibre of intellect to the rest. A hedged concession admittedly, but one I happen to share.

    Alone among Post-Modernists, Foucault’s methodology was empiricist and historicist. Rather than relying on incomprehensible prose and bizarre generalisation he adopted inductive reasoning. As an historian of ideas, we don’t simply find him inventing absurd abstractions, but analysing real, existing data.

    Foucault’s ‘critical philosophy’ undermines universalist claims by exhibiting how they are the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically grounded realities

    Madness and Civilisation

    In Madness and Civilisation, (1961, Librairie Plon) Foucault examines conventional understandings of mental illness, arguing madness and reason are categories first developed in Enlightenment thought. He sees madness as a product of the Age of Reason, the excluded ‘Other’ against which reason defines itself.

    His thesis is that the practice of confining the mad is a transformation of the medieval practice of confining lepers in lazar houses, an institutional structure of confinement already in place when the modern concept of madness as a disease emerged, even if confining those defined as such to institutions was a break with the past.

    Focusing on this transitional period, Foucault argues that in its infancy, or nascence, reason is a concept that defines itself in opposition to an ‘other’ of madness.

    As he explains:

    What is originate is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point.

    Thus truth of reason is found where madness arrives in place of non-reason, and differences are defined in terms of oppositions. Thus, the meaning of reason is defined by the meaning of madness.

    Foucault argues that if we are to insist upon reason we must not be mad, and so protect ourselves from what we are not. He notes that the confinement of the mad in asylums is a product of the mid-seventeenth century, and that it is no coincidence that the process of confinement developed in conjunction with the Age of Reason. Thus madness operated as an ‘other’ to reason, and as products of Enlightenment thought.

    For Foucault: ‘[M]madness was an invention, a product of social relations and not an independent reality.’[ii]

    Of course that point can be expanded to our present age, with concepts of rationality and ideas on mental health shifting, augmented by social media, message management and outright thought control. The paradigm shift is towards an all-consuming neo-liberalism, and conformity reconfiguring human identity itself. Soon, I fear, even moderate liberalism might be deemed mad, recalling Chile in the 1970s, or even 1930s Germany.

    In my practice as a London-based barrister, increasingly, I find clients in disassociated and decrealised states. Social alienation is leading many to perceive themselves as passive onlookers in lives not truly their own. The ills of social dissatisfaction and structural curtailment of achievement leading to moderate or even severe depression.

    The unrealisable expectations of consumerism and its unattainable objects is creating individual neurosis and psychosis. In essence, pervasive neo-liberalism fosters madness.

    Forms of social sanitation and indeed sexual sanitation coupled with an excessive political correctness are thus criminalising deviant behaviour. We live at a time when judgment on those who are essentially normal is handed down by deviants; a spectator democracy where people have lost ownership of their lives. It’s as if we are in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre of Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World.

    Discipline and Punish

    In his other crucial text Discipline and Punish, (Gallimard, 1975) Foucault examines punishment through the ages, arguing that torture has simply been reconceived.

    He raises ever more pressing doubts about the hidden costs of a penal style that avoids visible coercion, instead seeking to transform ‘the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.’ Thus efforts to institute ‘less cruelty, less suffering, more gentleness, more respect, more humanity,’ have, according to Foucault, had the perverse effect of reinventing the entirety of modern society along the lines of a prison, imposing ever subtler, and insidiously punishing discipline. Not just on convicts, but also on soldiers, on workers, on students. Even the various professionals trained to supervise disciplinary institutions are not spared its effects. Corrective technologies of the individual have been refined, producing a double effect: a soul to be known and a subjection to be maintained.

    At the core of Foucault’s picture of modern ‘disciplinary’ society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation; normalising judgment; and the examination. Thus, to a great extent, control over people is exerted merely by observing them.

    Further, modern disciplinary control is often concerned with a person’s failure to meet a required standard and in order to correct deviant behaviour. The impetus is not revenge, but reform, encouraging the individual to live by the dominant norms of society. Thus the phenomenon of normalisation is intrinsic to our society, e.g. national educational standards, standards-driven approval for drugs et al. It is encountered especially in control over whatever is perceived as excessively libertarian, including sexually ‘promiscuous’ lifestyles.

    The norm itself may of course be perverse.

    Foucault contends that as people are examined in schools and hospitals control is exercised over them in hierarchical fashion, with the application of normalising judgment. This is what he terms power/knowledge, which combines into a unified whole: ‘the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.’

    Further, force or control elicits ‘truth’ from those undergoing examination in conjunction with exercising controls over their behaviour. Knowledge is thus an instrument of power, and the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated from knowing we control, and in controlling what we know.

    Yet the problem often lies with the knowers who know, but do not turn the lens on themselves.

    Google and Facebook now exercise control, not in top down fashion, but through a levelling user-generated mediocrity, where personal data is mined in order to influence consumer and political choices in a networked society, as they remould what it means to be an individual.

    The Panopticon

    In Discipline and Punish, Foucault is heavily influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. Bentham imagined a glass prison in which prisoners were under continuous surveillance, and argued that by applying perpetual inspection to prisons, schools, factories and hospitals one might harmoniously co-ordinate self-interest and social duty. To Bentham this would lead to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ even if are turned into automatons: ‘Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care.’

    Bentham’s Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model for modern disciplinary power in that each inmate is visible to a central power, and can be seen at any time. With inmates assuming their every act is witnessed, control is exercised internally.

    Foucault suggests that Bentham’s ideas, rather than being fanciful, have become paradigmatic in modern society. Unlike the power of sovereignty, which was often exercised violently, the power of discipline is mild, insidiously humane as it is exercised through discreet surveillance rather than overt coercion. Such supervision, according to Foucault, dissociates power from the body, leaving us compliant and normalised – ready to take orders from above. The effect was an ‘automatic functioning of power’ – ‘A perfection of power’ that tended, paradoxically, to render its actual exercise useless.

    Foucault elaborates on this in a 1978 interview:

    In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a cerebral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour).

    He concludes Discipline and Punish with the view that:

    In a system of surveillance there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by internalising to the point that he is his own supervisor, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.

    Bentham’s idea for a prison was only occasionally adopted and ultimately found to be inhumane. Kilmainham in Dublin stands as an isolated example. To penetrate its inner sanctum is to see how, from every vantage, the prisoner is being watched. This time of domination by (anti-)social media is not so very different.

    Truman Show

    Now even a propensity for mildly deviant behaviour is under the overarching supervision of Big Brother – the virtual reality Truman Shows of our daily existences. We have become pieces on a chessboard controlled by the all-powerful corporate influencers, the ultra-rich and the bureaucratic state. These are the worst of times that Foucault saw coming.

    For Foucault the exercise of power in modern societies is complex – domination and rights are not only derived from the power of a sovereign institution of subjects, but are also the product of the lines of force arising from social relations. Subjects are not just determined from above, but are constituted within the system. Thus he explicitly rejects the positivist/sovereign as the source of all-encompassing authority in our society:

    My aim has been to give due weight … to the fact of domination to expose but its latent nature and its brutality. I then wanted to show not only how right is, in a general way, the instrument of domination – which scarcely needs saying – but also show the extent to which, and the forms in which, right, (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions and regulations responsible for their application) transmits and puts in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination. Moreover, in speaking of domination I do not have in mind that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over another, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society. Not the domination of the king in his central position, therefore, but that of his subjects in their mutual relations: not the uniform edifice of sovereignty, but the multiple forms of subjugation that have a place and function within the social organism … In other words, rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to use in lofty isolation. We should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts … We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. This would be the exact opposite of Hobbes project in Leviathan, and of that, I believe, of all jurists for whom the problem is the distillation of the single will – or rather, the constitution of a unitary, singular body, animated by a spirit of sovereignty … I would say that we should direct us researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty, the state apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilisations of their localised systems, and towards strategic apparatuses. We must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape from the limited field of juridical sovereignty and state institutions, and instead base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination. 

    Critical Appraisal

    William Davies applies this to an understanding of law and politics:

    Foucault suggests that we abandon the juridical analysis of power, which has emphasised the notion of sovereignty. If we think about law as something which is in itself powerful, something which supplies the answers to disputes and orders social behaviour according to the intentions of a powerful body of lawmakers and judges, we are, perhaps missing an important point. This is simply that many other systems of power, many other systems of meaning and value in society, interact with the legal system. It is not just institutionalised law which says no, or which orders behaviour, or which punishes us for our transgressions. There are, for instance, a multitude of social prescriptions, which order behaviour and the way, we think about the world. Social norms cannot be ultimately distinguished from institutionalised law. The way that a law is applied depends on the interpretation of facts in a case, and therefore, ultimately on the social values and assumptions which go into making that interpretation. Power in the legal system cannot therefore be described simply in terms of hierarchy of people with authority to make decisions, or of laws with the potential to determine disputes: though both the hierarchy of people and that of laws certainly exist, they are shot through with social meanings and systems of relationships which cannot be reduced to one-dimensional descriptions.

    Thus what find now is no longer a top-down state leviathan, but micro-management, corporate and internet brainwashing, the regulation and management of behaviour and expectation, which is re-defining ‘appropriate’ conduct We the wretched of the earth, the ordinary citizen, the disengaged are reduced to surviving under controlled conditions in a spectator democracy. ‘We the many’ are the collective other. ‘They the few’ powerful watch over us, deciding our fate in ever subtler and more insidious ways.

    This leads to political parties becoming increasingly contorted and nugatory, and NGO’s dispersed and un-coordinated. It is not so much a democratic deficit as a democratic void, as we are reduced to deciding who watches over us.

    Foucault saw all of this clearly. His individual response was to embark on personal hedonism, which accelerated his self-destruction – a personal cri de coeur in favour of libertarianism. But this should have been tempered by greater self-discipline, as his excesses diminished his achievements and led to an early grave.

    Solipsistic Sexuality

    Nonetheless, his contextual analysis of sexuality is also of great relevance to the present age. In effect neo-liberalism leads us to focus on private development, awakening sexual libertarianism to negate the political and accentuate further disengagement. He also saw the possible return of fascism.

    But at least, as Foucault points out, social institutions and structures, being contingent, are susceptible to change. Current trends will surely will pass eventually, albeit saving oneself in the meantime is a necessity. Our existences are finite after all.

    The other option is to migrate to Iceland, before being compelled to do so:

    If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a sub centre- preferably to Iceland.[iii]

    [i] Noam Chomsky, ‘On Postmodernism, Theory, Fads, Etc’ no date (probably 1996), at http://199.172.47.21/lbbs/forums/ncpmlong.htm>

    [ii] James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Simon and Schuster, New York, p 103.

    [iii] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chatto and Windus, London, 1932 p.85

  • Jeremy Corbyn, Percy Shelley and Ireland

    The Irish media generally looks askance at Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘radical socialist manifesto.’[i] An historically warm relationship with Sinn Féin, Brexit neutrality, and lifelong commitment to the redistribution of wealth receive a cool reception in reports and commentary, while grossly inflated charges of Antisemitism within the Labour Party are threaded through articles.[ii]

    Yet the Labour leader belongs to a tradition of English radicals with an abiding sympathy for Ireland. His anti-colonial, republican and Chartist outlook has also brought commitment to the downtrodden Palestinian people, and opposition to the machinations of the arms industry in Britain – which is the second largest exporter in the world, including to dictatorships such as that ruling Saudi Arabia.[iii] Corbyn’s enduring idealism is reminiscent of the poet and radical Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).

    In fact Corbyn drew the slogan ‘we the many, they the few’ that resonated so powerfully during the 2017 General Election, from the Romantic poet, who drowned tragically off Lerici in Italy at the age of just twenty-nine.

    These lines from Shelley’s poem ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, were written in the wake of the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of over sixty thousand unarmed civilians, killing eighteen, who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The atrocity actually led to the foundation of The Guardian newspaper, and was the subject of a Mike Leigh film in 2018.

    Shelley calls on the downtrodden people:

    Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number,
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you —
    Ye are many — they are few.

    The poet’s links to Ireland extend beyond his second wife Mary Shelley’s maternal grandmother’s Ballyshannon origins; or the Irish painter Emilia Curran’s 1819 iconic portrait. Having been expelled from Oxford in 1811, after authorities discovered him to be the author of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ – the first such argument printed in England – he went on to display an abiding interest in ‘John Bull’s Other island’.

    At the end of the Napoleonic War Ireland’s plight remained a vital cause for English radicals, at a time when the Irish population – in the midst of a Malthusian demographic crisis after colonisation and the introduction of the potato at the start of the seventeenth century – was almost half that of England’s. Soon after expulsion from Oxford, Shelley travelled to Dublin in 1812, along with his first wife Harriet, with whom he had just eloped.

    The young poet was greatly perturbed by the poverty and inequality greeting him in a city whose wealth and status had been greatly diminished by the Act of Union of 1801, which meant Irish M.P.s took their seats in Westminster not Dublin. He wrote: ‘I had no conception of the depth of human misery until now. The poor of Dublin are assuredly the meanest and most miserable of all.’[iv]

    His experience of Ireland appears to figure in what he described as his ‘poetic education,’ in the preface to the long poem ‘Laon and Cythna’ (1818): ‘I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war … the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds.’[v]

    The precocious nineteen-year-old addressed the Catholic Committee, containing the dying embers of the United Irishman movement, in what is now Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. Asserting a pacifism that is also prominent throughout the current Labour leader’s career, he urged: ‘In no case employ violence, the way to liberty and happiness is never to transgress the rules of virtue and justice. Liberty and happiness are founded upon virtue and justice. If you destroy the one you destroy the other.’

    The future leader of Catholic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, is believed to have been at the meeting, although he may not have been present for Shelley’s speech itself. O’Connell shared a distaste for armed conflict, a view which prevailed as the mainstream approach in Irish nationalism until World War I.

    Shelley’s sympathies lay with the historically oppressed Catholic community in Ireland, just as Corbyn’s lay with Northern Irish Catholics during the Troubles. There is little doubt that Shelley would share Corbyn’s principled opposition to Trident, Britain’s thirty-billion-pound nuclear weapons programme.

    Another link between Shelley and Ireland is that he completed what is considered his most revolutionary poem ‘Queen Mab’ while holidaying on Ross Island on Killarney Lake. This strident work, which he later partly disavowed, became a standard text for English socialists, including an approving Karl Marx. In this we discover a condemnation of commerce: ‘beneath whose poison-breathing shade / No solitary virtue dares to spring.’

    Corbyn’s antipathy to big business has long antecedents, therefore, in British culture, albeit the trenchant views on the subject of Shelley’s near contemporary ‘the Father of Economics’ Adam Smith (d. 1790) are generally overlooked: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ A suspicion of commercial self-interest in politics is well founded.

    Shelley has been an inspiration to a host of Irish writers including W.B. Yeats who claimed Shelley shaped his life,[vi] as well as Sean O’Casey who described himself as a Shelleyan Communist. Another devotee George Bernard Shaw described Shelley approvingly as: ‘a republican, a leveller, a radical of the most extreme sort.’

    Shelley was an inspiration for another of Shaw’s lifelong causes: vegetarianism,[vii] which the former laid out in an 1813 book: A Vindication of Natural Diet, although the term itself only came into being in the 1840s. Until that point anyone renouncing flesh was referred to as being a ‘Pythagorean’, after the Greek philosopher and mathematician of Antiquity, Pythagoras.

    Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn has been a vegetarian for almost fifty years. Considering the influence of the Irish livestock lobby on mainstream Irish media, this may have aroused further suspicion. Corbyn has, however, tended to play down that feature of his politics, perhaps forewarned by George Orwell’s condemnation of sandal-wearing vegetarians ‘burbling about dialectical materialism’ in The Road to Wigan Pier.[viii]

    Nonetheless, socialists such as Corbyn are stigmatised as forming part of a ‘north London, metropolitan, liberal elite’ by right-wing Populists such as the Home Secretary Priti Patel,[ix] who herself previously suggested using the possibility of food shortages in Ireland to force the E.U.’s hand over Brexit.[x] Corybn’s lifetime commitment to the redistribution of wealth, including resistance to austerity, may be the fruition of Shelleyian idealism: ‘a consciousness of good, which neither gold / Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss / Can purchase.’[xi]

    Corbyn, like Shelley before him, might have appeared naïve at times, including in his approach to Ireland. But he could yet emerge as the first British Prime Minister to feel genuine remorse for the damage wrought by British colonialism on Ireland. Moreover, notwithstanding the ongoing instability of the European project in the wake of Brexit, the genuine warmth he feels towards Ireland may harmonise relations between the peoples of these islands – the vast majority of whom have suffered under the yoke of tyrannical government over the course of a shared history.

    I for one dearly hope the British people “Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.” and vote Labour in the General Election on December 12th.

    [i] Simon Carswell, ‘It’s a means to an end – I want Brexit’, Irish Times, December 6th, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/uk-election-it-s-a-means-to-an-end-i-want-brexit-done-1.4105840

    [ii] See, Finn McRedmond, ‘ The Labour leader seems temperamentally incapable of apologising for the anti-Semitism that has wracked his party,’ – ‘Political rot has spread from US to UK,’ Irish Times, December 6th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/political-rot-has-spread-from-us-to-uk-1.4105894:

    [iii] Dan Sabbagh, ‘UK reclaims place as world’s second largest arms exporter’, The Guardian, July 30th, 2019,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/30/uk-reclaims-place-as-worlds-second-largest-arms-exporter

    [iv] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Address to the Irish People’, 1812, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/p-b-shelleys-address-to-the-irish-people,

    [v] Author’s own recording: https://soundcloud.com/frank-armstrong-649911741/shelleys-preface-to-laon-and

    [vi] W.B. Yeats ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, 1900, http://www.yeatsvision.com/Shelley.html.

    [vii] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’, 1813, http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/shelley01.htm

    [viii] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Part 2, 13, http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/RoadToWiganPier/wiganpierpart_13.html

    [ix] Daniel Sugarman, ‘Why I don’t think Priti Patel’s reference to “north London” was an anti-Semitic dog whistle’, October 3rd, 2019, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/10/why-i-don-t-think-priti-patel-s-reference-north-london-was-anti-semitic-dog

    [x] Gráinne Ní Aodha, ‘Tory MP suggests using possible ‘no-deal’ food shortages to force Ireland to drop the backstop’, December 7th, 2018, https://www.thejournal.ie/brexit-threat-food-shortages-ireland-4381228-Dec2018/

    [xi] ‘P. B. Shelley, ‘Queen Mab,’ Book V

  • Garden of Forgetting

    Back in the 1990s, you may not believe this, even if you actually lived through that decade it’s hard to believe it now, but people went about in all kinds of crazy outfits: fake fur, feathers, sequins, lycra, metallics, colour-change intelligent fabric, you name it. Not for Pride or a summer festival, but for everyday.

    This one dude I knew used to go out dancing with a pair of wooden shades on his head. I’m telling you. Solid wood, no glass at all, just slits carved across for him to see through.

    Amazing face on him, sharp ebony cheekbones, hyper-alert like he was going full tilt at some secret mission no one else would ever get the point of, but he didn’t mind, he was damn well going to get through it anyhow. An odd sort of perfectionist.

    And he didn’t look stupid at all in his wooden shades, I swear, he was the coolest dude ever. Coulda been a rapper but he was teacher by day, part-time DJ by night.

    Back then everyone under thirty wanted to be a DJ, but in his case it was true. I asked him once how could he even see the turntables through those shades, and put out my hand to try them on. He shook his head, said I’d have to make my own. But he did tell me this:

    The weird thing about wooden shades is, your vision compensates: once you have them on the wood disappears, your eye registers only the view between the slits.

    It’s all so far off now, the 1990s. Almost further off than the 1950s. Just barely the far side of the millennium, a time when everything was on a roll — music, fashion, economy, peace, technology — it seemed every new thing was the coolest thing on the planet. We had no idea then that a load of less cool stuff was just over the horizon.

    All we wanted was to be at the best party, to dance all night and through the sunrise, to get a pair of those silver throwaway glasses in time so we could watch the next eclipse without going blind.

    For half that decade we didn’t yet have email and the idea of usable mobile phones was like something off Star Trek.

    Back then, climate change was called global warming and was just a significant maybe that we still hoped was not true — not the inconvenient fact that today burns down homes, villages, forests and fields, spawns hail drifts at the height of summer, sweeps people and cars away in flash floods.

    When the internet arrived, a glitchy as yet unpopulated net full of holes and white error space and ‘did-you-means’, we welcomed it and cherished its absurdly clashing links, not knowing this http://wwworld wide web kkshhhhhhteeupppoppmeeeia would lure us in with anarchic, random amusements, then trap us in a life governed by algorithms. That it would force us to fill in online forms, accept cookies to track our every move, offer no safe return to the out-of-date earthly world.

    And now? Now that the Nineties are a long way off, yet their legacy still with us. Or we buried in it? I can’t explain. My brain goes fuzzy at the left temple when I try to get it straight. Somehow it’s linked to the wooden shades worn by my DJ friend, because it seemed after a while that we were all of us permanently wearing sunglasses.

    Not the old kind which made reds go brown and the sky turquoise instead of blue, so you knew you had them on. These shades were different. Smarter. They made everything so clear, so colourful and so detailed, you could keep zooming in and in, from coastal map to city street, from exterior to interior, from the human standing in front of you right in close on the iris and the clouds reflected in the gaping pupil. If you looked carefully you’d see a camera reflected there also.

    A mechanical eye as witness to your own, and vice versa, so at the point where your gaze ended and the digital image or electronic gaze began, no join was visible. This was the infinite excitement of digital, a playground of looped possibility, invisible glasses producing such perfect images of the world, we forgot they even were images.

    Reality, though. What is it really? A warm summer night spent tossing and turning because things are not going as you hoped. The knowledge that ‘warming’ does not necessarily translate to sunnier  weather.

    Reality tonight is knowing you are alone, either because everyone you know is asleep, or because you have gradually let go of your friends, avoided their birthdays after birthdays, their need (like your own) for a repeat audience to hear old stories.

    Reality is the cool touch of shadow on skin, walking from the coffee shop to the unfinished building that is home. A space where energy is diminished, where it costs more and its use makes you uneasy.

    Reality is hearing from Athens that Nea Demokratia won the election, and knowing ‘new democracy’ in this case means Old Fascism. A trend pinging round networks and nations, improbable yet seemingly unstoppable, because it’s hard to chase a thing without a physical presence, hard to stop an online joke that suddenly is no joke at all.

    In a mundane world, humans (s)elect the bizarre. Election by algorithm. Reality can be all kind of goodness but right now this is not the case. Truth refracted through digital is squashed, re-versioned, bounced through the parabola and comes out the far side as untruth. This is not reality. Not the reality you want to inhabit.

    Or is it up to us where we look, what shades we choose to wear? Reality might be a warm hand in yours, unfiltered voices, music. Yes, maybe reality is music. We lost the beat is all, are having trouble finding it again. We must try a little harder, gather up the strings and feathers we threw for fun into the sky while dancing, which now lie scattered on the sands. Bring them together.

     

    Swans and stones

    you with your white hair and your negatived face, with your quick words and quicker laughter, your voice in the idiom of my youth. perhaps not particularly _your_ voice, perhaps it could be any dublinish voice, belong to any one of thousands of people, but yours is the voice I hear and it transports me in and out of that time. and later, in and out of a time and place made with you

    something here about time travel – being kidnapped by or in time. silvery anthropoid outlines on a spaceship transporter. gaps in the  continuum. moving through time on the USS Ellipsis…

    glitches

    the timecode on the video fucked. randomly disintegrating or  scratched up on purpose, it’s hard to tell

    time displaced

    until i read, in a book on time called pip-pip about a language spoken on a remote island, that this language uses the same word to mean both time and place. think also of the greek kairos we spoke of, which if we had it right is time as season, the perfect moment for a thing. those messages are gone now. deleted, or lost in the old phone. what remains suggests perfect moments are easily missed

    something feathery re-tunes the white noise and flaps into frame

    a man found a swan on a dublin street and wrapped it in his jacket, carried it back to water. someone put up a photo on the w-w-web, and the man was that day’s social media hero in minutes… how embarrassing all that for the swan, i am sure there’s a perfect explanation if we only got swan point-of-view, and besides we are the ones who put all that concrete in the swan’s way. who tamed it with stale crusts, left it to swim with cars for company on a straight-edged codicil to some long forgotten river

    is it this swan i’m seeing, or is it a group of swans? 

    the swans photographed in the garden that day when the guards ripped my film from the camera and exposed it to the sun’s slant rays. hard to unremember that moment, it stole some fragile link to the garden’s long-ago use as a corral for dublinish rebels

    sunken concrete garden that today’s dubliners hurry past, drone of traffic surrounding it, iron railings hiding it in plain view

    garden of forgetting

    since the arrest there’s been no point going back there, no point walking past the water and up the steps to the tall dark metal swans

    before, standing there made me one of them

    one of four swans circling back to a land known before we were banished to the cold seas, four swans changing back into children, our put-on feathers leaving us, and after our feet touch down we get old in sudden bursts like time-lapse until we are four white-haired children a thousand years old, our lives all used up in faraway places, happy now to be touching down on solid ground for one last sped-up, blood-warm moment

     

     

  • Helping Artists at Risk – Evgeny Shtorn in conversation with Mary Ann DeVlieg

    Mary Ann DeVlieg is an internationally experienced consultant, facilitator and trainer with a background in the arts, arts mobility and policy. She evaluates international cultural collaboration projects for the European Commission and charitable foundations. Since 2010 she has been working to protect and defend the rights of artists-at-risk, she founded the EU working group, Arts-Rights-Justice, co-founded Artsfex, advises and trains artists and arts organisations on protection and defence.

    Evgeny Shtorn is an LGBT activist, organiser and researcher from Russia. In 2018, he was forced to leave Russia and claim asylum. He currently works as Cultural Diversity Researcher at Create – National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts and co-facilitates a project ‘Something from There‘ with people seeking asylum, supported by the National Gallery of Ireland. As an activist he started the grassroots initiative Queer Diaspora Ireland in order to highlight issues of gender based violence and bullying in a hostile system of institutionalised living.

    All Images © John Malcolm Anderson.

    Evgeny: Mary Ann you are working a lot with artists who are coming to Europe seeking international protection. Some of them had a very well-established life and professional record. But when they were targeted by their governments and had to flee their countries of origin they found themselves completely isolated in the hosting countries, going through a difficult asylum process, without any perspective for the further development of their careers and arts practice. What makes you step into this field and why are you putting your time and energy helping artists at risk.

    Mary Ann: There were two assassinations of people working in the arts that affected me a lot. First was Mark Weil, founder of Tashkent’s Ilhom theater, who was murdered at the entrance to his apartment building in the Uzbek capital. Second is Juliano Mer-Khamis, Israeli-Palestinian film actor who was working in Palestine for many years, running the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. All my life I had been working with artists in relatively luxurious settings. But when you find out that people were killed just for being an artist, for doing what they do, then you have to ask: ‘Are we a sector that has some kind of solidarity?’, ‘Does this link of being from the same field create an extra responsibility to ensure that other artists are safe?’.

    Also, I’ve always worked in the arts and as much as I would like to help other people who are perhaps more deserving, I thought a lot and concluded that I can really only do best in the milieu that I know so well. Then I found out that someone (Todd Lester, founder of freeDimensional, based in New York) was putting artists residencies together with artists who were in danger. I offered to help and became a volunteer case-worker and subsequently ended up co-directing the organisation. But everybody’s story is completely different. With artists at risk you find stories spanning the whole spectrum. People who maybe are not that much at risk, but they don’t see any career path for themselves in their countries.

    Others are people who were physically maimed, beaten up, almost left for dead, people who have to go from one safe house to another, women who were repeatedly raped, members of the family targeted. The first guy I was working with was told to stop making films but he didn’t. Then the secret service came to him and told him that they knew that his father had heart problems, and that if his father was beaten up he probably wouldn’t survive. This threat to loved ones is a common way to intimidate and pressurise people.

    There is also censorship of work that can range from not posing too much danger, all the way to really endangering the artist.  I was working with an art critic in China who had his work published widely in journals, catalogues and other critical research outlets. The government wouldn’t allow anyone to hire him anymore, so by the time I found out about him he was living on the street from handouts of food and money.

    We call it ‘censorship’ but the term encompasses deleting words from a text all the way through to people who are being physically harmed, put in prison or killed. One can generalize by saying that there is something in the art work or art practice that upsets either a political party, or government in power, or religious faction, or some sort of social custom. And it could be the artist even just being who they are, as in the case of female singers in some countries. It might be work that that is not necessarily confrontational, but shows behaviour that somebody doesn’t like in the country, all the way through to work which is definitely oppositional: songs or a fictional film which criticises the government. There are as many strategies as there are people; there are as many reasons for the persecution as there are people persecuted, but the majority of the perpetrators are the organs of state. Isn’t it ironic that the state which is legally charged to protect people and to uphold any kind of universal legislation protecting freedom of expression, including freedom of artistic expression, is in effect the most common perpetrator!

    Evgeny: Could you describe the most successful case in your practice?

    Mary Ann: I don’t think I can, and to explain my answer, it is that now I’m much more interested in what happens after the relocation of the at-risk artist to a safe place, or what happens perhaps during the relocation. Organisations and funding bodies that support so-called ‘temporary relocation’ have to say it is temporary, probably because otherwise they wouldn’t get visas, but we all know it’s not necessarily temporary.

    So what I’m really concerned with is that after the honeymoon period – while people are happy, they are safe, perhaps they have a three month or even two year residency and everybody is nice to them – after this 90 days they often realize they can’t probably ever go home; maybe they have family there, and they realize they have lost their audience, the language may be a huge factor in creating a new audience, the gatekeepers (curators and programmers) either treat the artist as a sort of exotic victim asking her or him to constantly relate their sorrows and pain or they may reject the artist arguing that the aesthetic the artist was trained in, is not what their audience likes.

    So my main concern is how to set up a system that helps – not to get any special help more than the artists native or settled in the host country, because let’s face it, being an artist in any case is really tough. But at least it’s possible to ‘level the playing field’; to give these newcomer artists some training and support to bring them to the same level of opportunity as other artists established in the country, a chance to work in the art world, which is a competitive environment.

    For me it’s not about the aesthetic, it’s not helping this or that person because their aesthetic is the same as mine. It is about something that should link us together. In the art world, which is not the easiest world to be, people should have that feeling of solidarity. Sometimes this lack of solidarity might have to do with the nature of the artistic discipline. When you make films for example you are working in international teams, musicians are also very united, in some artistic sectors, people tend to work together in groups or the sector is very well networked, and they make friends who love, respect and support them. It’s different with someone whom nobody knows, or, for example, young artists who had been doing very good work, but don’t have international connections and thus they would not have as much support.

    Evgeny: Would you agree that this solidarity often depends on the colour of skin of the artist who was persecuted?

    Mary Ann: First of all, the divide between Global North and Global South is very marked. Here in the Global North we have arts councils, we have awards, we have money, we have a system and people to manage it. This is not at all the same in all countries of the Global South.

    In the last 15-20 years, Arab artists have made huge and very successful strides to enter the international market, especially in the visual arts. I would dare to guess that the majority of them are not practicing Muslims or perhaps are Christians and this may be why it’s easier for the people in the West to reach out to them. That would be an excuse, but not a reason! Do you feel the difference? We should not excuse behaviour that gives preference to people we feel easier around, or closer to, but it happens. And I think if you have someone who is not speaking western European languages, someone whose work is not in the currently trending aesthetic of the West it’s probably much harder for people to relate to.

    A lot of rappers get in trouble in many countries, including the West, and it’s harder for the human rights campaigning organisations to relate to them, because their lyrics can be quite upsetting, confrontational, even violent. It’s not only about the artistic discipline, but also about the transferability of that discipline into the aesthetic that is accepted by the West and the nature of the work. Many of the at-risk artists that have been relocated were trained in the West. Now to go further than that and say whether there is racism involved I would suggest that there is a kind of racism involved if you are only sympathetic to things that you can relate to and that goes back to my solidarity argument. Is there something about us working in the arts field where even if we might not particularly like somebody’s work, or we might not particularly understand the context, we can still say that we are all in the arts sector and we will support one another?

    Evgeny: You work a lot with organizations on the level of European Union what do you think the EU is already doing to protect artists at risk and what is not doing, but from your point of view should do?

    Mary Ann: I can speak very briefly about what it is doing. In the last couple of years, the European Union and the European Commission’s Directorate in charge of Culture as its implementing institution, have been supportive of initiatives where artists go and work with refugees. And I think it’s wonderful work when and if the artists want to work in the refugee camps or wherever, with kids, mothers, fathers – that’s absolutely fine, but that is not where I am specifically working.

    What is really my concern is the pathway of an artist who, like a human right defender, is in grave danger and needs to move to safety.  And for that, it is harder and harder to get a visa. Especially when the person has a partner or a family. I can mention for example, the Goethe Institut in a certain country had been working with an artist-at-risk and was talking to the Foreign Office in Germany, begging them to give him a visa, but the person had a family and it was soon obvious there was no way they would give him a visa.

    This has been hardening in all countries. It’s not quite as bad as Trump’s travel ban, but this anti-migrant sentiment is everywhere. So what I feel the countries, via the EU, should be doing is training people who are in charge of giving visas with the deeper understanding of what is art and how an artist can be in danger. Now the visa system is outsourced in many countries and those who are looking at visas don’t have any idea of what they are looking at; they are asking absurd questions. But at the same time it’s hard to claim for special treatment for artists – and what about other professionals, doctors, engineers and so on!

    To be fair, the EU has really done a lot in terms of setting up, training and funding initiatives to support human rights defenders with emergency grants and other assistance including temporary relocation, and ‘artists’ can in many cases be defined as defenders.

    Evgeny: Could you say what country within the EU would be the best example of receiving artists in need of international protection and the most hostile one.

    Mary Ann: Regarding the most hostile I don’t know, because I obviously don’t work with them! But good examples are in the Nordic countries who host the most writers and artists at risk via ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network). In Sweden, some years ago the relevant minister mandated the Swedish Arts Council to give more support for people at risk needing temporary relocation. There is legislation and methods to make it easier. But in each case it depends on the political will, and the political will depends on the will of the party, its ideology and also the general opinion in the street. Denmark is a good example. It was a Scandinavian paradise and the politics changed and people are incited to blame migrants for all the problems. I know one temporary relocation city in Sweden where the politics changed and the far-right local government have announced the closure of the programme because they don’t want any more migrants.

    Evgeny: In what countries artists are at risk mostly? Can we make a list of countries where we have to look with more attention?

    Mary Ann: I don’t have the answer to that from the top of my head. The EU ProtectDefenders has a newsletter in which they announce which countries are currently particularly dangerous. In general the danger also depends on what the artist talking about. Mexico, for example, is terribly dangerous for journaists or artists who are trying to uncover things related to the mafias, corrupt police or assassinations; China is particularly bad in terms of censorship. Every year Freemuse publishes statistics about artists who have been prosecuted, but of course they are limited to the cases that are made known – there are many countries that still are off the radar, or where artists might not want to make noise about it, just to keep a low profile until the difficulties die down.

    A couple of years ago, I was part of a research team who assisted in a study launched by the Artists At Risk Connection, an initiative based in New York. Many Turkish artists answered it, and even though at that time the purges hadn’t got as bad as now, a lot of them didn’t want to make a big deal about their persecution, even if they told their story, they preferred to remain anonymous, in the hope that if they were quiet it would just go away. But we do have the best statistics that we can make, even if partial, published every year; they are accessible; people who are interested can easily find them online, from Freemuse, and for writers Index on Censorship or PEN.

    Evgeny: Do you think that an artist who has success in the West can benefit more from support in a critical moment, even if they are very critical and vocal about problems in their countries?

    Mary Ann: It really depends on the country and on the case. A very famous Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera keeps going back to Cuba and being ‘disruptive’, but she is well supported by the West, and when she was in jail in Cuba, the City of New York offered her a symbolic artists residency. I think these things can help. At the same time many of us have been working on the case of the poet, curator and artist, Ashraf Fayadh, in Saudi Arabia – he was put in prison because just one person said that his poetry was blasphemous, and he’s been given sentences from beheading, to years in jail and hundreds of lashes. Even though he has had several appeals, the number of years and lashes just changes. His is a very particular situation, because the Saudi government does not have competence to rule over religious affairs.

    The Saudi monarchy most likely would be happy to get rid of this embarrassing case, because people in the West are constantly advocating on his behalf, but only the religious authorities there have the competence to rule over that case. Recently we saw the exchange of political prisoners between Russia and Ukraine and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who spent 5 years in jail in Russia has been released among them. It was interpreted as a favour that Russia gave to the West.

    Evgeny: I would like to touch now a very problematic topic, quite popular among some post-colonial scholars and anti-racist activists, which is an idea of so called ‘white saviours’. Do you think this critical approach is valid for the work you and other people in the field have been doing?

    Mary Ann: It is valid and for already quite a long time in the field of human rights defenders and artists at risk there has been recognition and a movement to stress that it shouldn’t be all about coming to the West – there should be temporary relocation in the other world regions, as close to home as the person can be and still be safe.

    Once again, that would mitigate the problems of the loss of the language, of the time zone, of the family, of everything basically that would make the artist or defender feel less isolated. The idea is that if there are more possibilities to stay close to home, there won’t be such a massive negative impact on a person who has to flee. It is already happening in the arts. There are some programmes for the MENA region and in Africa. One woman in Lebanon who has a house in the mountains and hosts artists in danger there. But as I said the divide between Global North and Global South is massive. In many of those countries they don’t have properly functioning arts funding programmes, so they don’t even properly fund local artists nor those who have to flee seeking safety. I see this problem as complex; it’s not necessarily the ‘white saviour’ attitude, it is the Global North where you can get subsidies, where you can get a whole system of support, where you simply have more possibilities to do art, which doesn’t remove the question of what is the most ethical way to use those resources.

    I have been very vocal about certain initiatives which have been set up in the Western countries, because from my point of view, the money should go to the countries in other world regions for special programmes, training, networks for local people so that they can create their own systems relevant to their own contexts. It might be a different model, taking into account culture and context, than what we set up in terms of temporary relocation here and we shouldn’t be the ones who say what is the best way to deal with this. There should be more discussions and understanding to find solutions, but to have more regional support systems is definitely one of them. Of course if you are a visual artist and you are invited in New York you may be happy to go there, but it shouldn’t be the only possibility, when we speak about real dangers and risks.

    Evgeny: Do relocated artists feel excluded in the arts sector of the hosting society, that their aesthetic is not welcomed, that their art is perceived is something less important and valuable?

    Mary Ann: Yes, I have heard a lot of them reflecting the same sorts of concern. First of all, in order to get funding, they have to play the victim forever, due to a certain ‘fetishisation’, as a colleague of mine calls it, of the refugee artists. Secondly, artists who have relocated, envision projects bridging what they know of their home country, with the local community, including the diaspora there. They have wonderful project ideas, but are not getting grants because they don’t know how to work the system, they don’t yet know this special way of using the language needed for funding applications; they often don’t have enough weight behind them even though their ideas are brilliant and better than initiatives devised by artists who have not lived the situations themselves.

    Evgeny: You intend to start a PhD in the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research in TU-Dublin. Did you decide to summarize all the decades you’ve been supporting artists at risk?

    Mary Ann: All my life I’ve been advocating for policy improvement. The way I’ve done it is to get people together to talk – artists, gatekeepers (the organisers, people with the power to decide who is and who is not shown or presented), the policy makers, the funders, sometimes politicians who are managing cultural funds in their city or in their country.

    I think, having worked as a funder and as a policy maker myself in the past, it’s easy to get further and further away from the reality, so bringing together these cross-disciplinary, cross-professional and international groups helps people actually to start to understand. When you start in the early days advocating for policy, you usually mistakenly start by asking policy-makers to do things which are not in their competence. Understanding what they can and cannot do is essential, and to understand this, frank discussions really help.

    However, for the last couple of years I have been seeing what I would call hypocrisy: a certain rhetoric in arts policies, especially around cultural diversity, which speaks about openness, about new voices, about support for everybody, but when we look at relocated artists, those who I am calling ‘artists impacted by displacement’, there are multiple obstacles and legal restrictions such as the prohibition to work and earn money, for people seeking asylum.

    When the artist can only be defined as an artist by how much, as a percentage of their total income, is earned from art, it is absurd. Only if you can prove that this percentage of your income is your artistic work can you be labelled as an artist. The arts council in a certain country can’t even consult with artists still waiting for refugee status, because they are not legally allowed to be called ‘artists’. They can’t even consult with these artists on how they could make their policies better! I’m getting more and more angry about ridiculous situations like this.

    In my PhD I try to look at various philosophical and sociological texts about the role of artist in the society, legal texts on cultural rights and human rights, research into migration and diaspora, to build up a strong intellectual argument and then to look at selected countries’ policy rhetoric to compare it with what is happening on the ground. My main hope is that I will be able to use it to advocate for policy change.

  • SEVEN VIVID UNINTERRUPTED DAYS

     

                                             Translation By Sally McCorry

     

    January 1st

    The first of January is always a special day. It’s as if everybody is suffering from a delicious jet lag to enjoy slowly. I, on the other hand, left my house at eight thirty in the morning, I don’t know why. Perhaps I just wanted to do things I’ve never done before. So I looked for a bar that was open. The only one I found was the Tropical Paradise, a bar owned by Chinese people. When I went in two Chinese children stared at me with wide eyes, I smiled at them and they carried on staring at me. I waited for a few interminable seconds for something to happen, then the larger child – he could only have been seven or eight – said ‘coffee.’ I nodded. The coffee pot was too high for him to get at properly, he could only just reach to fill the moka. Then he said something to the boy, who I think was his little brother, he helped him clamber on to his shoulders, and they got busy around the coffee pot. At a certain point the smaller child overbalanced backwards, and they both fell to the ground. I was worried for a moment they had hurt themselves, but then, as if nothing had happened, the smaller child pulled himself back up onto the shoulders of the larger one. After a few minutes the kids gave me my cup of coffee. It was disgusting, full of lumps, I don’t even know how that was possible. They, on the other hand, looked pretty pleased with themselves. The smaller one even gave the other a pat on the shoulder. I left them a euro and I didn’t want the change. It was just half past nine, and I didn’t know what to do. I left Tropical Paradise and waited for something to happen, but sometimes, truly, nothing happens. I could at least have had a bit of a headache, but no, nothing. So I promised myself again that I would count how many cigarettes I smoked. I didn’t want to smoke more than five a day. I went back home. G told me I was a bollocks because I woke her up. John Connor was snoring peacefully, you could hear him from the living-room. I settled down on the sofa pretending I was processing the jet lag that I didn’t have. By midday I already had three smokes. Then I went to sleep so I couldn’t smoke any more. I dreamed I had won the Olympic bronze medal for the 200 metre backstroke. I was thrilled and didn’t want to wake up. John Connor woke at five in the afternoon. He couldn’t speak and his hair was all messy and standing up, stiff with gel. ‘Que mierda,’ he slurred as soon as he saw me, and dived into the shower. Afterwards he put more gel in his hair and went back to sleep. G, in the meantime, was staring out of the window. ‘Where is everyone?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I cooked a plate of pasta and olive oil. In the evening I watched that documentary by Herzog, the one with airplanes taking off and landing under the sun of Sub-Saharan Africa. I found it really moving. It had got dark outside. G and I screwed – actually I screwed while she lay unmoving, thinking about something else. ‘S,’ she said to me, ‘I don’t want you to take me for granted.’ We fell asleep in each other’s arms.

    Total cigarettes smoked: 6.

    January 2nd

    G and I went to IKEA. Outside it was drizzling sadly. I scraped the side of the car along a fence when I parked. I didn’t get angry though, I didn’t feel the need. Inside IKEA everything looks like it works really well, we take for granted that man has become definitively free. G wanted to buy a lamp. I was confused, why would she want to buy a lamp? I felt somehow inferior so I tried to be ironic. I started speaking in a Scandinavian accent. ‘Will you stop that,’ G asked me. I stopped that. We left after four hours with an energy-saving light bulb, a sofa cover with a moose on it, a kind of folding structure that was supposed to be a lamp, and potato fritters that I didn’t have high hopes for. I spent forty-five euro fifty cents altogether. On the upside I only smoked three cigarettes. I saw an old man fall over in the car park. He tripped all by himself and fell flat on his face. When he got up again he reassured everyone, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ He actually looked a little bit dopey and fell over again not long afterwards. G told me she thought what had happened to the old man was a solitary flashmob or something like that, only we didn’t know the context or the finale. Maybe he only wanted some attention. ‘Our generation is too shrewd,’ I said to her. G told me she felt like part of a mechanism that carried on going round even if everything was out of kilter. I told her I didn’t understand, even though really I totally understood.

    John Connor was still recovering at home from the drinking session two days ago. ‘Que mierda,’ he said, then ran into the bathroom to vomit. He came back into the living room and we assembled the lamp thing we had bought. It took seven hours because John Connor reckoned he knew alternative methods. He phoned IKEA but of course they couldn’t understand each other. Whatever, in the end it worked, well, the light turned on. We stood and stared at it in silence. We ate boiled potatoes watching that lamp, as if we had done something great for all humanity. I had smoked twelve cigarettes by eleven that evening , it was probably the lamp’s fault. I fell asleep watching the documentary about the airplanes landing and taking off. It was less interesting from an intellectual perspective, yet I was struck by the colours of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the end it wasn’t exactly an intense day, from any standpoint.

    Total cigarettes smoked: 13 + half a joint.

    January 3rd

    G and I packed our suitcases. I wanted to go away for a while. I told her I didn’t want to see the sky through the window any more, and she said, ‘so let’s pack our bags,’ so we packed our bags. I thought we could go into the mountains. She, on the other hand, had only been packing her bag to humour me. ‘I thought you’d get it out of your system,’ she told me candidly. I didn’t speak to her again all day and I went back to looking out of the window. In the meantime John Connor burnt himself on the radiator. I don’t know how he managed that. Now he is lying on his bed crying with a wet towel on his back.

    G stopped taking the pill recently, she says it makes her arse too big. Right now I really want to screw. So I went to buy condoms, I always look for Skins or Ultraslim rubbers like that because I usually feel fuck all with a condom on. However, we screwed even though the condom was too tight and it dried out almost immediately. At one point I was on top of her and really couldn’t feel anything. I was thinking about other stuff I realised. I was thinking about football and Torino’s midfield. ‘Don’t you like me any more?’ she asked, a little out of breath. ‘No, I like you.’ And I carried on pushing mechanically, like an unsatisfying and repetitive job. ‘Fuck it,’ I said to myself,  peeled off the condom and went on without it. I came on her belly and fell asleep. That’s all. G wouldn’t let me watch the documentary with the airplanes landing and taking off, she insisted on watching a Virzì film. It wasn’t bad but I would have preferred to watch the documentary with the planes landing. It was one of those days where you feel you have to try and work out whether or not you did something wrong.

    Total cigarettes smoked: 9.

    There was some space left over so I glued in this picture of the poster for the film with the airplanes taking off.

    January 4th

    G woke up irritated because she couldn’t access Facebook. Actually, last night I told her she was like a sister to me and I think she was offended. Whatever, it is sunny outside and I decided to go cycling in the hills. I sweated a lot. When I came back G was trying to change the settings on my computer, I don’t know why. We have all been a bit nervy this week. This evening is John Connor’s big moment, he will be on the television programme A Minute to Win on RAI 2.

    From what I understand, he has a minute to play some stupid games and if everything goes well he will win 500,000 euro. John has spent the last month practicing, doing things like popping the top off a bottle and making it land directly in the waste paper basket, or building pyramids of glasses, or putting a biscuit on his eye and, without touching it, flipping it into his mouth. Before leaving for Milan he hugged me. He was sure that somehow he was going to turn his life around.

    G and I sat down in front of the TV at nine sharp: John Connor was the first contestant. The first challenge, for 500 euro, was easy. He had to unwind twenty metres of paper tape with his arms. He managed it with ten seconds to spare but he looked strained. Then he started dancing to We Are The Champions with Nicola Savino. It’s one of those shows where you take your friends to be part of the audience and John had taken two of his brothers. I asked G if she knew how many brothers he had. She just said, ‘lots, I think.’

    The second challenge, for 1,000 euro, involved landing three coloured rings on the prongs of an upside-down horseshoe. My first thought was that he was going to have some problems, but he started well, in thirty seconds he had managed two out of three. The problem was the last one wasn’t having any of it. He kept trying while Nicola Savino did the countdown. Nothing doing. He lost a life. His second attempt didn’t go much better, he actually got jumpy and couldn’t even get one ring in place. He began muttering and looked irritated. His last attempt was a disaster: after twenty seconds he started shouting and throwing the rings too hard. Nicola Savino told him to relax. After that I don’t know exactly what happened but Nicola Savino kept talking, telling him to calm down while continuing the countdown, even though it was clear he was never going to win the challenge and immediately after the gong sounded, John Connor threw himself at Nicola Savino who kept shouting, ‘it’s only a game, just a game, calm down.’ G covered her eyes. I watched it all. While he tried to protect himself, John Connor kept punching and kicking Nicola Savino. Then a group of bodyguards from RAI got up onto the stage, with technicians and cameramen trying to block John, but his brothers came to defend him and the TV channel went for an ad break.

    ‘How much has he won?’

    ‘Five hundred euro I think, but he made so much trouble, I don’t know if they’ll give it to him.’

    ‘Why does everything always go to shit?’ I didn’t know what to say. Stupid day. I’ve started smoking hard again today, around 15-20 cigarettes + a number of joints.

     January 5th

    I woke up early when everybody else was still asleep. I have the constant feeling I am wasting time, as if time is something that gives life quality, that’s why I wake up early. My cousin called me. He has hooked up with a Finnish girl, he told me she is regularly trying to kill herself and he can’t cope with her any more. He asked for some advice. I told him to take her to the seaside. He was bringing her to lunch at our house instead he told me, maybe talking to other people would do her good. So I made ragù.

    For some reason I expected her to be tall and blonde, but she was minute with long black hair and a pale face. She wasn’t exactly full of vitality or shining with friendliness, she was like a crow. She started crying as soon as she sat down on the sofa. G tried to ask her something, but she just shook her head.

    ‘What’s her name?’

    ‘Tulla I think, or Lulla, something like that,’ my cousin replied.

    Naturally, Tulla ate fuck all, she rocked on her chair facing her plate making strange wheezing noises. I asked my cousin if everything was alright. He said there was nothing to worry about. We finished and Tulla went to the bathroom. Not long afterwards I heard shouting. She was trying to slit the veins in her wrists with a razor blade, only the blade was blunt and she didn’t look very capable of doing it. My cousin looked at me like someone who had been expecting this moment to come. I felt responsible somehow and slapped her but she grabbed my arm and started trying to bite me. There was blood all over the floor. We took Tulla into the living-room.

    G started to clean the blood from the floor while my cousin caressed Tulla who, incredibly, started laughing. At that moment John Connor came in. I hugged him instinctively and he hugged me back hard. Then, I don’t know exactly why, John started behaving flirtatiously with Tulla and she seemed to enjoy it. My cousin confessed to me that he didn’t want her on his conscience and so if John Connor wanted her he wouldn’t object. He looked relieved.

    ‘I knew you would help me,’ he said. Suddenly, Tulla and John Connor went outside and G, my cousin, and I stayed at home drinking.

    ‘Why does she want to kill herself?’

    ‘I don’t know, I think she’s missing Finland.’

    ‘So why doesn’t she go back there?’ G asked.

    ‘I think she hates her parents.’

    We got drunk and fell asleep. I woke up at about eleven in the evening. I went out for a walk. This city makes you feel lonely. Then I went home and started watching the documentary with the airplanes landing and taking off in Africa. Definitively beautiful.

    Total cigarettes smoked: between 15 and 20.

    January 6th

    Yesterday evening I left the shutters open so I woke with the first light of dawn. G was curled up in a foetal position and the expression on her face showed she was satisfied with her sleep. I decided not to wake her up. My cousin is on the sofa sleeping, fully dressed. He wakes up and says when we were small we used to spend more time together, and asks me if he can have a shower. I want to listen to some music but I don’t want to wake everyone up. The only answer is to go out. My cousin says he feels he needs to go out too. So he does, following me. There is a strange smell of damp trodden-on leaves. I think it’s probably easy to catch some kind of fungal infection. My cousin thanks me for what I have done with Tulla, right then and there I want to say I don’t know what he is talking about, but it would take too long, so I just say, ‘you’re welcome.’ We stroll along the avenue and he confesses his problems relating to his son, he hardly ever sees him and when he does he is overtaken by a desire to do too much and he ends messing up. He fears his son may think he’s a bit of a dickhead. I say something about simply being himself, and if you’re a bit of a dickhead, whatever, but he replies, quite rightly, that I couldn’t possibly understand. Then he says that soon we won’t see each other again because he is going to Brazil. I let the conversation drop. When we get back home John Connor is making coffee, when he sees my cousin he sniggers. My cousin looks at me, he thinks the snigger is aimed at him and says, ‘fuck you laughing at?’ John Connor, who is excitable, loses control of what he is doing and spills coffee all over his trousers and starts swearing. G wakes up, opens the door, and tells us not to wake her up again for any reason and that she is going back to sleep as soon as she can. When John Connor asks her what the matter is, she says, ‘what’s the matter with yous?’ and slams the door going back into her bedroom. I still want to listen to some music, but I leave it. Around two in the afternoon my cousin says, ‘Let’s go out and have a drink.’ I agree and light my fourth ciggie of the day. My cousin orders two dry Camparis at the first bar we come to. The sun begins to hide, and a dumb grey breeze blows in our faces. We drink another two vodka lemons, then my cousin hugs me and says he feels safe at last. Then we grab a kebab that we eat in the car. He asks me if I can go with him to pick up the kid as he doesn’t feel up to it on his own so I say yes. We stop in another bar and he offers me a Sambuca, a vodka lemon, a Borghetti, and then another vodka lemon, a beer, and finally, a Fernet-Branca for the road. Darkness is beginning to creep in. We are still rotten drunk when we get to his wife’s house. My cousin can’t find anywhere to park, so he gets out and tries to move a municipal rubbish bin, but its wheels are locked, he pulls too hard towards himself and ends up tipping it all into the street. ‘Help, S,’ he says, ‘I’m fucking up again.’ His wife comes out to see who is making all this noise.

    ‘Hi Laura,’ I say.

    ‘Is he drunk?’ she asks me.

    ‘No, he’s just really wound up.’

    ‘Drive slowly. No, actually, you drive.’

    ‘I’m drunk.’

    ‘Then don’t go anywhere for a bit.’

    My nephew must be about eight or nine, he is blond and has a baby face. I don’t think he is stupid, but to tell the truth I’ve never really had the opportunity to talk much with him. When my cousin sees his son, he pulls himself together, and runs to hug him.

    ‘Dad, you smell of alcohol!’ He says, and tries to wriggle out of the hug.

    ‘We’re going to go bowling,’ my cousin says. Then insists on driving. At the second roundabout we hit, just outside of town we end up on a flowery ‘welcome’ message planted in the middle. My cousin reverses and then drives on. ‘I am extremely calm,’ he tells me. I feel like I’m about to vomit. He puts Shine On You Crazy Diamond on really loud and starts shouting something about Pink Floyd before miming a series of instruments I can’t identify. At least we are listening to some music though. Then, as he is very emotional, he pulls into a lay-by in tears to sing Wish You Were Here. He tries to get my nephew – whose face at this point is showing a mixture of terror and embarrassment – to join in. At ‘Swimmininafishboooonnneee’ he drops his head on the steering wheel. I decide to take over the driving. ‘Thanks, Uncle,’ my nephew says. It’s such a sweet thing. In the first town we reach my cousin pulls the handbrake. ‘There’s a bar,’ he whispers. We go in. I don’t feel well so I order a tonic water, Ivan wants nothing and my cousin can’t make himself understood. We get back into the car and my cousin insists on driving again. At the first right curve, he slides off his seat and lands on top of me, and we end up in a field. The kid and I just about manage to get the car out and back onto the road. ‘I’ll take you home to sleep,’ I say.

    ‘Thanks, Uncle,’ still so very sweet. When I get home it must be about two in the morning. G is asleep. I decide to do my very, very best not to wake her up. I can’t watch the documentary about airplanes because my head is spinning too much.

    Total cigarettes smoked: about sixty.

    January 7th

    This morning I woke up with a certain degree of impatience. I quickly started making coffee while G was still asleep then I went to the bathroom. Halfway through I remembered about the coffee and ran back into the kitchen. The coffeepot was gurgling like a baby trying to swallow processed food or something. I was just in time to pour some burned coffee into a small cup while the pot agonisingly continued to spurt coffee in bursts. Some coffee dribbled down the side of the pot. It made me dry-heave. Then I went back into the bathroom.

    I woke G up, she wasn’t happy about that. She confessed that for the last couple of nights she had dreamed about her uncle but didn’t want to go into it. She got up and we decided to reorganise our bedroom. At first I tried to move a sort of wardrobe with shelves. It seemed to have got stuck in the gap between one tile and the next. I tried lifting it. I tried pushing harder, but nothing, no movement. I checked nothing was blocking the wardrobe then I pushed again, still nothing. At this point John Connor came in and offered to give a hand. I think he loves doing these things so he moved me aside confidently, pulled up his sleeves to his shoulders and started pushing, telling me to do the same. We got to a stage where the whole operation had taken on an air of mystery. Then, after a push that wasn’t even that strong, the wardrobe slid along the tiles as if it had wheels. An electric cable wound around one of the wardrobe’s legs was the key to the conundrum. By freeing the wardrobe, we wrenched the cable from the wall basically, wrecking the whole electrical system in our room. John Connor hurried to say sorry, then his dismay turned into anger against the electrician who conceived of a system like this.

    I told G. She said that in that case she may as well just go back to sleep. It was about midday. ‘Exactly,’ she said, ‘so I can think about uncle.’ I didn’t answer.

    John Connor and I went out. We started walking alongside the river in complete silence until he said, ‘me and Tulla want to get married.’ In answer to my consternation, he said that it was all happening too quickly but in his situation, he could understand fuck all so he decided to only make clear-cut decisions, such as marriages, homicides, ejaculations, or fights.

    We carried on walking until we reached a wider part of the path where around fifty South Americans were playing football.

    I told John Connor he was right.

    We joined the game. Twenty-four players on their team, twenty-three on ours. At one-metre-seventy-nine I am the tallest and most powerful and so I play centre-forward. The game develops into a complex web of sideways passes, kick-ups, pointless back heels, and incitement from the women at the edge of the pitch, until someone tackles his opponent and finds himself wedged between a sequence of double-tackles and is forced to kick the ball long. We had been playing for forty minutes and I touched the ball once – with my head – during one of those long kicks out of defence. No one had scored yet.

    Then one of the blokes, about sixty, keepy-uppying the ball in front of me, instead of passing it to a dwarf nearby, trips, and leaves it unguarded. I pull back my left foot immediately and kick the ball full force. The ball hits the left goalpost half-way and it’s in. There is a roar immediately. On the side of the pitch the women are hugging each other. My twenty-two teammates start run towards me and I am submerged. Someone tries to kiss me in the confusion of bodies. Apparently no one had scored a goal in ten or eleven matches. According to them it was because of their excellent defence. Only I, being a strong European, could breach it with my accurate kick. They started calling me ‘Bomber.’ There were no more opportunities to score after that.

    The match ended at sunset.

    At the final whistle, John Connor came to me and said I was a really tough European. I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I thanked him.

    We rolled a joint sitting on the edge of the pitch, as the sharp cold of the evening massaged our sweaty backs. I let myself fall, land backward on the hard, almost-icy ground and for a moment I felt sheltered.

    Total ciggies: no clue.

    Walter Comoglio is an italian writer, currently based in Dublin.

    This short story appears in his first book named La sera che ho deciso di bloccare la strada, published by Gorilla Sapiens Edizioni, winner of 2017 POP prize Italy for best debut.