#sharedfuture

The Good Relations Team at Ards & North Down Borough Council and Neep Pictures produced a thought-provoking animated video on sectarianism. (The enmity between pepperoni and pineapple on pizza lovers.)

Muslim community and Loyalist flute band creating harmony through music

Loyalist flute bands and the Muslim community are two groups that may appear not to sit well together. There is however at least one thing that they both have in common -- due to negative stereotyping they both receive a great deal of hostility.

Since the beginning of this year, the Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band (SRD) has been working with Beyond Skin, an organisation that aims to unite different cultures and traditions through music and the arts. On 11 May the SRD played alongside artists from a variety of cultures, including Muslims in “Night to Unite”.

John Higgins, the SRD conductor, noted that the majority of the members of the band unhesitatingly wished to take part, seeing the occasion as a great opportunity to change negative perceptions of Loyalist flute bands. In many ways, the event symbolised the progress Northern Ireland has made in welcoming diversity. On Culture Night Belfast, 18 September, Beyond Skin and the Centre for Democracy and Peacemaking will be working again with the SRD to present Music Unite -- a performance by the SRD and international musicians.

As part of Community Relations and Cultural Awareness Week, a touring presentation called the Unexpected Journey has been developed between the SRD and a Kurdish (Muslim) musician.

Both have experienced animosity in relation to their cultures and this event will showcase and explore the insight the SRD has gained from working with musicians from various cultural backgrounds, including a discussion about the empathy shared between the SRD and the Kurdish musician. The presentation will also show how, through working together, they have gained a positive insight into each other’s culture.

The SRD first formed in 1957 and it is a melody flute band. The SRD have been All Ireland Champions and even marched on the fields of The Somme in France for the opening of the Somme Orange Memorial Obelisk.

By Adam Henry Magee.

Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre, Limavady; Friday 2 October 2015, 7.30pm

Somewhere between 1969 and 1994 is where the faces of the sorrowful but powerful stories of Colin Davidson’s recent project, Silent Testimony, are set. Mr Davidson shows us the people of Northern Ireland and holds a light up to the dark time of the Troubles. Colin shared some of his views and feelings with CultureHUB.

Upon entering the gallery we are met with the unfaltering gaze of Virtue Dixon and the harrowing story of her daughter Ruth celebrating her birthday in the Droppin’ Well Public House with friends. It was thee that in her final moments, the room collapsed around her in a time bomb attack. Witnesses claim to have heard the DJ playing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her at the exact moment the masonry had started to fall.

Horror, sadness and empathy take charge as you wander to each individual portrait. Graphic images stain the mind as you consider each story; a record sleeve belonging to that of young Terrance, strewn in the road beside a coach bombing on the motorway, the clock that now stands still in Paul Reily’s house since the moment he heard the news of his daughter Joanne’s death, the permanent and life debilitating injuries of Margaret Yeaman and Emma Anthony, the discovery of a body so tarnished by the earth after being found in a bog, that it was only by the gold cross hung around the neck that Walter Simon could confirm that it was his son Eugene who had been missing for 3 years.

You worked in partnership with cross-community victims’ support group WAVE throughout the project. I imagine that it would be very hard at times to meet these people and to learn of their stories. “I think it has actually changed me as a person even more than as an artist. The stories were harrowing to hear. I hope I have succeeded in channeling this emotion into the work. This is an exhibition, not rooted in the past. In fact it is very much about our ‘now’ in this place. This is the legacy of all conflict.”

“I started talking to people who had suffered loss through the Troubles here in 2010. It was important to me that this idea was not seen as patronising or unhelpful. WAVE have been a key ally in the whole quest. I started talking to them seriously about the project in 2013. The paintings took around 12 months to complete.”

How did these portraits compare to other projects? “Put simply -- the previous themes I chose to work within were born out of the need to be making a painting. The subject served this need. I looked for themes which would allow me to explore paint. Silent Testimony turned that aim, that need, on its head. The idea, the concept, came first. The paint served the idea for the first time in my practice.”

Bombings, torture, executions and such human suffering is with us here in the hushed stillness of the gallery. These faces in their silence testify with their eyes, and ghost-like shells smudged and altered by the pain of life. Using broad and rigid brush strokes, Colin brings us their day to day existence that we shan’t forget. Vacantly they look off into the distance to some other dimension, to perhaps a happier time with the ones that are gone.

It’s only when you stop and look down the length of the gallery that 18 pairs of eyes stare back, the convergence of their stare both bearing witness and giving us a sense of their loss. It can be assumed that Davidson joins them together in their sorrow, which helps to subtract that feeling of individual suffering from looking at the portraits as a singular thing. These images draw you into their world, their individual heartache, their Silent Testimony.

By Jasmine Daniels.

This exhibition runs from 5 June to 17 January 2016 in the Ulster Museum.

Eileen Weir of the Greater North Belfast Women’s Network made a telling observation when I met her at the Shankill Women’s Centre. She said, “The sectarian divide only exists for men.” In her 20 years of experience organising cross-community women’s groups in Tiger’s Bay, the New Lodge, Rathcoole, and at the Barron Hall in Newtonabbey, she’s discovered that working-class women are enable to cross sectarian frontiers and engage with each other in a way that’s inconceivable for their male peers for whom tribal allegiance weighs heavier. Next year, Eileen says, will be a particularly important time for community relations in Belfast, with the two centenary commemorations of the Somme and Easter 1916, which have the potential to drive wedges of suspicion and recrimination between communities.

Eileen thinks 2016 will be a real opportunity for the communities to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s cultures and traditions. She’s helping to collate a book where the women of New Lodge and Tiger’s Bay share their stories of positive collaboration and friendship in the face of fear and intimidation, entitled, Women’s Voices from behind the Barricades. Eileen, like all other social networks in Belfast, is getting her funding where she can at the moment. Community relations are taking place in a cashflow hiatus, just when community building has reached another critical juncture.

Chris O’Halloran, who took over the directorship of Forthspring Intercommunity Group in January, also presents me with a recent publication, Talking about the Troubles: an anthology of vivid anecdotes and vignettes collated by community co-ordinator Johnston Price and his team under the aegises of Forthspring’s “5 Decades Project”, which is determined to be a cross-community trove of testimony. Organised chronologically, it leads the reader through the decades of the Troubles to the Good Friday Agreement. Its coda of “we’re a bit happier”, while according well with the modest, bittersweet tone of the book, perhaps is still too optimistic.

Chris expressed his view that since the Good Friday Agreement, “community relations have been mainly stagnant,” but the fact that there was no major rioting at the Workman Avenue peace wall, next door to Forthspring on the Springfield Road, was seen as a minor mercy, given the large scale disturbances not far away in Woodvale. Chris may be realistic about the sectarian background, but he is not pessimistic. Forthspring runs three youth projects with half a million pounds worth of help from the Lottery Fund. There’s one inter-community youth group and one each for the Protestant and Catholic community, for kids who don’t feel ready to meet kids from ‘the other side’.

Truly transformative community relationships that can interfuse and remake each other require curiosity, courage and creativity. That’s why Chris is so full of praise for his artist in residence Fiona Lovely’s use of art, to help both kids and adults reimagine their environments beyond stereotypes and the toxic gestalt of the past. In particular, she likes to get people to make weird fashion, like the national dress of some brighter planet where people have never feared what others’ think, and flaunt themselves, wearing their hearts on their sleeves and sporting their memories in all their raggle-taggle splendour, patchworked into garments that are really mind goggling.

Deirdre Mackel, the arts manager at the Springfield Development Trust, is also keen to use art to explore memory and identity. She recently showed her own delicately crafted dresses, light as gossamer, snagged on barbed wire, fraught with childhood anxieties, at the Gerard Dillon Gallery at Cultúrlann. Deirdre expects artists to push boundaries in their own experience and take risks. This means that she’s extremely active in the community, facilitating art projects such as Labyrinth where kids from Whiterock, the Westrock Residents Association, and the Matt Talbot and Newhill Youth Clubs produced an alternative tourist guide to the Upper Springfield, chock-a-block with the secret knowledge of local kids and their worm’s eye view of their world.

Artists Charlotte Bosanquet, Deborah Malcomson and writer Brenda Murphy delivered the project. Bosanquet produced a book that is a witty reimagining of the communities, so should you want to wander the Shepherd’s Path, shake a leg in the Windy Gap or play with the Giant’s Foot, then Labyrinth is essential reading. Another project, Haiku, installed poems on billboards in prominent locations in West Belfast as well as in the markets, Lower Ormeau and Millfield.

In her most recent artistic collaboration, Deirdre facilitated a guerilla gardening project, where young and older people reclaimed an interface, anti-social hotspot and installed a pop-up garden, where ideas, passions and hopes come together for a moment, then are dismantled again. Deirde is enabling “creative conversations about heart-felt things”. She is “really optimistic about the power of art to create social change, both as a platform to address pressing social issues and to enhance how we see the world as an audience”.

Eileen, Chris, Fiona and Deirder work where the sectarian interface looms largest, but in the way they are transforming these spaces through art, community action and creative conversations, they are giving a kiss of life to the future. So while community relations may seem stuck in an impasse, bubbles of infections wit, joy and laughter are seething thick and fast through the old pot.

By Graham Higgin.

Bassam Aramin is a Palestinian who had been a Fatah Freedom militant and served seven years in prison in Israel. Years later, his 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by an Israeli soldier, but amazingly he chose not to seek revenge. Instead he forgave and went on to co-found Combatants for Peace with Elik Elhanan, an Israeli. His story, entitled Bassam, has been written by Idan Meir, an Israeli director living in Sligo and it is performed as a one-man show by a Palestinian actor based in Donegal called Fadl Mustapha.

Fadl Mustapha responded to my questions.

Have any of your own life experiences prepared you for this role?

I have always explored methods of expressing my opinion about the Middle East conflict, the outcomes and the history behind it, but I never expected to be able to use the art and theatre as a form of expression. Being born into a refugee status from parents and grandparents of refugees since the ‘Nakba’ (Catastrophe) in 1948, I believe I have been prepared for this role all my life. The cynicism and the anger is within me just as much as it is within Bassam, but I will not compare the loss of a daughter to a loss of a home, country and roots, but loss is loss and due to the displacement and the situation that was imposed on my family and because of their status and the volatile circumstances that arose in Lebanon, they also lost family members due to the violence.

Has your work on Bassam altered how you view conflict in general or in your own relationships?

I had a massive build up of anger, frustration and general blame towards everyone who played a role in the conflict, but things changed inside of me. There was a crack in my shield, mainly due to the play, but also due to the fact that the piece is written by an ex-Israeli soldier, Idan Meir, from a Palestinian perspective and that in a way surprised me, because to be honest I was sceptical and cynical. I thought to myself what does an Israeli have to say about the Palestinian situation, how an they empathise with a Palestinian? But I grew up in a home that wasn’t geared towards violence and didn’t believe that violence is the answer to solving anything, especially the Middle East conflict, so in a way my view on conflict has altered a little but more so my actions in playing a part for change has been altered dramatically, and because of that, my anger is more controllable in both my view towards the conflict and my personal relationships.

What message do you think the play has for the people of Northern Ireland?

During our first tour in 2012, we were surprised by how the audience were willing to open up and share their stories with us, mainly about the Northern Ireland conflict, especially in venues that were either in Northern Ireland or in towns and venues on the border, and we both realised how there is a lot of similarities in all conflict, how stories are parallel and how people’s experiences aren’t much different. I think it is the people in the Middle East that can learn more from the Northern Ireland conflict rather than the other way around, because what you have here is a form of reconciliation that has allowed both parties from either side to set up channels of communications taht allows dialogue, in order to build up for change and that is what is lacking in the Middle East conflict. There is still a lot of fear in both conflicts but in the Middle East the government uses that fear to gain power and control over their people, the governments feed off this fear.

Where do you see hope today in Palestine and in Israel?

It does seem like a hopeless situation to many, especially from the outside, but to me hope is what feeds my perseverance. Without hope and belief that things will change is admitting that we have lost, but we cannot do that. We cannot stand by idly as spectators, because if we do that then we become comp0licit by our complacency. We cannot do that for our sake and for the sake of our children and future generations, for the sake of all those who lost their lives. We owe it to them. Change is coming in the form of awareness, in the form of action. There are a number of movements and organisations that are working towards change, whether in Palestine, Israel or around the world. Non-violent organisations such as Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) are having a huge impact on forcing change, organisations such as Combatants for Peace are also using different tools to create change. We are using art to promote peace and create hope, and I believe more should be done and more people should do whatever they can to contribute in brining awareness and create hope and change.

By Scott Boldt.

Bassam is written and directed by Idan Meir, performed by Fadl Mustapha, translation by Daniel Wade, and music by Oded Gadir.

Each performance is followed by discussion and dialogue with the writer and director.

Cultural diversity -- who needs it? Community relations -- you must be joking. Some people are opposed to mixing and most of us experience some fear, annoyance or hesitation when it comes to change or something different.

Meat and two veg, no beans with my fry, traditional routs, ‘no’ to bike and bus routes, who is sitting in my seat?, how come they don’t celebrate Christmas and what do you mean we’re not going to my mother’s for Christmas? ‘Speak English!’, she says in her Ullans/Ulster-Scots infused accent as he repeats the same thing in his broad Hiberno/Gaeilge lilt.

This issue of CultureHUB magazine is a special edition centred around Community Relations and Cultural Awareness Week. The theme for 2015 is ‘One Place, Many People’, and the magazine is infused with the many and varied activities and events that feature in this, the thirteenth year of it. With over 170 events from which to choose throughout the North, the Province, Northern Ireland, Ulster, our wee country, we selected and connected with a number that resonated with us and integrate with our mission and ethos. In addition to many of our regular features and writers, we take a particular focus on some people and activities that contribute to CR week with an emphasis on creative expressions.

Our culture is in part made up of the accumulation of actions of the people who live here. The way we relate to ‘them’, the fact that we talk of the ‘two communities’ and ‘the other side’ betrays the underlying facets of our culture created by levels of fear, suspicion, lack of trust, hurt, ignorance nad misguided assumptions. Learning about ‘the other’ is a way to be better informed but probably is not the best way to improve community relations.

“In conflict, before we even hear what the other side has said, we assume we know what they mean. We have already attached motives to their messages. Often, even before they have finished, we are developing our response.” (John Paul Lederach).

Relationship is the key; there needs to be connection and people need to meet. Community Relations and Cultural Awareness Week is not going to make a huge difference this year or any other year, but it will remind us and in many ways show us what needs to be done, what works and, for a few people, it will open new ways of seeing ‘the other’ and may lead to further connections, even friendship.

In this way, it can and always make a huge difference in some people’s lives and therefore in some locality and hence in our society. Such a transformation opens up new possibilities, gives other permission to step out, inspires people to stand by their principles, to cross boundaries and to change the culture. This is the paradox of being limited (one week, certain places, sometimes the same people) but significant.

As far as we are aware, a week set aside to focus on community relations is unique in the world and it happens here. As much as some of us may not like to recognise it, the recent history of Northern Ireland is viewed by many, especially those not living here, as an inspiration, an achievement, even a beacon of hope for other societies struggling to emerge from violent conflict. Community Relations Week is another positive and healthy consequence that has resulted from the vision for something better in the face of an often ugly past.

We are proud to present this special community relations edition of CultureHUB and hope it too will contribute to together building a united community.

By Scott Boldt.

I am deeply concerned about the lack of interest, about the lack of conscience everywhere. 

Since when did we start to care less? Since when the crisis and tragedies started to become less tragedy and more comedy?