Culture

Yarn bombing, Lidköping, Sweden Photo: Shyguy24x7 [CC-BY-SA-3.0/Wikimedia Commons] Yarn bombing, Ohio, USA Photo: Otuiccip [CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons] Yarn bombing, Madrid, SpainPhoto: Alvaro Léon [CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons] Yarn bombing, Madrid, Spain Photo: Alvaro Léon [CC-BY-SA-3.0 via…

14 September 2013 was a special day, marking 30 years of action by the legendary Côr Cochion Caerdydd, Cardiff Reds’ Choir. At a celebration in The Gate Arts Centre in Cardiff, singer song-writer, politician and activist Dafydd Iwan paid tribute to the choir’s long commitment to standing up for peace and justice: ‘If Côr Cochion are campaigning for a cause we all know it is worth campaigning for!’…

More info here: http://thecockpit.org.uk/show/come_out_we_have_you_surrounded

On 21 August, St Paul city council in Minnesota, USA, voted to proclaim 27 August ‘Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact Day’ in celebration of the 85th anniversary of the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact which ‘condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce[d] it, as an instrument of national policy’.

The Street Choirs Festival (19-21 July) saw some 36 choirs with 700 choristers from across the UK descend excitedly on Aberystwyth. Local choir Côr Gobaith had been planning the festival for the best part of a year, taking as its theme ‘peace’.

A Friday welcome concert with local and national talent included Chocolat, Sianed Jones, and Tracey Curtis.

Saturday saw a Peace Parade from the Arts Centre to the seafront, where all the choristers took part in a massed sing. In the…

Halabja Chemical Bombing, 1988, oil (120 x 100cm), Saqqez. IMAGE: Osman Ahmed.

There were many chemical attacks on Kurdish villages in northern Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s army in 1987 and 1988. Osman himself was a witness and victim of the chemical attack and once went blind for a few days, hiding in a cave.

This image was made in 1988 after the attacks and shortly…

More info here: http://thecockpit.org.uk/show/come_out_we_have_you_surrounded

Al Hadra, Sahrawi poet Photo: Emma Brown

Across the other side of Algeria from where the Amenas gas installation was hijacked by militia (armed from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s liberated weapon stores), a very different Islamic resistance movement has been lodged for 35 years.

Largely unnoticed in Western consciousness, their culture draws on moderate Islam, Bedouin traditions and 1960s African socialism. One of their weapons of choice is poetry…

Tip of a mammoth tusk carved as two reindeer depicted one behind the other; approximately 13,000 years old. Montastruc, France. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum

This exhibition, ‘Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind’, brings together for the first time in this country the earliest evidence of art in Europe ranging in age from 10,000 to 40,000 years old.

As a…

Here is a literary biography that gripped me all the way to the end. Robert Leach describes the individual lives of the playwrights John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, but the core of this study is their creative relationship. John started his adult life as an architect and Margaretta as an actress. In Leach’s narrative, on an evening in 1956, as John was beginning his career as a highly regarded young writer creating plays for the prestigious Royal Court Theatre, the pair made a pact that…

Stop #8, 2005 Kennardphillips

On 19 March 2003, the United States and Great Britain embarked on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Widely considered one of greatest foreign policy disasters of modern times, the war was only the latest in a series of western military interventions in the country over the course of the last century. A decade on from the invasion, the war is being revisited in British public culture across newspaper articles, television…

Newport made history on Remembrance Day, when a white poppy wreath was laid alongside red poppy wreaths on the invitation of the local British Legion branch, after being approached by Wales Green Party leader, Pippa Bartolotti.

In Aberystwyth, the town council laid a white poppy wreath for the ninth year running, and the town of Narberth held a remembrance service for all victims of war, laying a white-and-red poppy wreath.

So David Cameron is in 2014 going to spend millions on British celebrations of the First World War. Let’s get our hands on some of that dosh.

15 May, International Conscientious Objectors’ Day, could do with some publicity and celebration in places large and small around the country. We locally are already planning a Peace Festival in London’s Finsbury Park on Sunday 3 August — the day before that barbaric war started. It will be a focus of anti-war protest .

Football matches…