At any one time there are hundreds of political wall murals throughout Northern Ireland. The tradition goes back a century in loyalist areas, but only a quarter of that time in republican areas.
Yet this phenomenon is often rejected out of hand. The art establishment is quick to point out that the murals are not “art”, but propaganda, the supposed antithesis of art. Many mainstream politicians view the murals simply as incitement to sectarian hatred, which ought to be obliterated.…
The most common representation of peace emblems in Britain occurs on people's clothing and attire in the form of badges, ear-rings and the like, or in the guise of “bumper stickers” and other emblems attached to cars and bicycles - personal possessions emblazoned with such symbols as rainbows, doves, olive leaves, broken rifles and “smiling suns”.
These are mobile peace symbols, worn for display and as items of fashion, but they can also signify something about the general…
Anarcho-punk legends Oi Polloi have been around since 1981, but recently their music's taken a completely new turn. Their latest album, Ar Ceòl, Ar CÃnan, Ar-a-mach (a pun, meaning Our Music, Our Language, Revolt) is entirely in Gaelic.
Scottish Gaelic (pronounced “gah-lick”, rather than “gay-lick”) is a minority-language based around the north-west of Scotland with about 60,000 fluent speakers and up to 100,000 with a good grasp of it.
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PN: Tell us some background about ACE.
M: ACE dates back to the council-funded Edinburgh Unemployed Workers' Centre in the 1980s. The Centre had been prominent in the movement for non-payment of the poll tax and other sorts of direct action.
In 1992 the council cut off all funding. So the Centre users took it over and ran it collectively.
In summer 1994, the council issued an eviction notice and then we occupied the building 24 hours a day until…
Mark Faulkner, coming to the end of two years chairing Room 13 Lochyside, described how the organisation had opened up “a whole new world” to him, making him realise that art was not about painting landscapes, but about “painting a brain on a piece of paper”.
Mark, 12, went on: “My own pieces are quite cryptic. I quite like it when instead of just walking past a piece, you have to look at it for about 30 minutes. And there’d be no piece of writing next to it, because that would be the…
The idea began at the Friends Meeting House in Taunton in 1981. 11-year-old Jonathan Stocks felt the room where they held the children’s meeting needed cheering up. Anne was a professional embroiderer who had recently studied the Bayeux Tapestry. She had a vision of a Quaker embroidery - a series of panels each illustrating one event or idea from Quaker history. Each panel would be made (researched, designed and embroidered) by a different Meeting or group, but she would oversee the design…
From the first, the Quakers have taken a clear stand for peace and against military action. In 1660, soon after the movement’s founding, Margaret Fell, the Mother of Quakerism, gave her testimony: “We are a people that follow after those things that make of Peace, Love and Unity.”
The Quaker Tapestry, displayed in the Quaker Tapestry Exhibition Centre, tells the history of Quakerism. A new exhibition, Weapons of the Spirit, has been created in a small space within the main exhibition…
Jaime Huenun, an indigenous Chilean poet, has quoted from an old wise Mapuche called Manuel Rauque, "When we recover our past, the earth will open its secrets."
Let me briefly introduce you to our recent Chilean history, and then let some of the protagonists tell us their stories from their own perspective, to help us make sense of what happened and to build our own image of what resistance has meant for us and how it has shaped our culture and identity.
On 11 September 1973…
Roberta: Tell us a bit about your group, what you do and why you do it
Jesus: Our association, “Murcia Canción de Autor” (Murcia Songwriters)wants to give each person who wants to sing in public a chance to do so. We share our songs and ideas about the world and music in general and, in particular, “cancio'n de autor”. Participating in the homage to Victor Jara CD has been a collaboration with the Itaca co-op, with which we have been doing similar “homages”. This year we decided to…
The following interview was conducted with filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, who recently produced War and Peace - a three-hour film of epic proportions about the state of affairs in Pakistan and India. We spoke in Toronto during the Hot-docs Film Festival after the showing of his film.
CS: Anand, do you call your self a Gandhian? I am going by what I saw in War and Peace where you trace your relationship to Gandhi through your uncles and other Gandhians in the…
Over the summer there was a minor media storm as, in the run up to 7/7, journalists and politicians heard about Fun Da Mental's new album All is War. It's a provocative and challenging album (see review opposite) and the track that caught the media's attention is called Cookbook DIY. We caught up with main man Aki Nawaz and, at his request, tried to ask him some “hard” questions!
PN: The mainstream media have given you a seriously hard time over the album…
Ippy: Your music is politicised by design, but what did you get into first, music or politics, and when?
Adam: We all know that music (noise) and politics (anything that governs our lives) are every day, act to act, moment to moment continuums that inform and shape our lives. I can say that in 1971 a nine-year-old (who would later become the brilliant but derided political theorist and Kant scholar-professor Arthur Strum) exposed me to Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, as well as…
During the summer holidays, I spent four days filming Iraqi Refugee children in Amman, Jordan.
When I returned back to England, I knew it was going to be fun editing the film but it was also going to be very hard and time consuming work.
Milan Rai and I spent one intensive week editing the film sometimes up to six hours a day.
I had a lot of footage. We managed to make 20 minutes of a rough copy.
I also worked on my own, editing more footage on my laptop…
The El Sueno Existe music festival is held from 11-13 August in Machynlleth in the beautiful Dyfi valley. It is a vibrant fusion of Welsh and Latin American music, dance, poetry, film and political discussion, taking inspiration from Victor Jara, the Chilean theatre director and singer-songwriter who has become a symbol of the struggle for human rights and justice across Latin America.
This year, the festival will feature workshops and talks from on the theme Latin America rising: “…
Given how frequently the international community uses violence to resolve political conflicts, it is perhaps not surprising that film and TV reflect this. The myth of redemptive violence is a powerful and familiar cultural theme, and, as the excellent documentary Tough Guise (Media Education Foundation) points out, our heroes get tougher and stronger, carrying bigger weapons each year. So it’s always refreshing to find a TV programme prepared to accept that life is more complex than this.…
