Barcelona in a Bag

I’ve been sewing a “Refugees Welcome” banner for a #refugeeswelcome demo in Oxford this Sunday. It’s a task I am highly unqualified for! I did my best, but must confess to a huge sense of relief on passing on the second phase of stitching to a wonderful friend called Alex, who can whizz it together on her sewing machine in a fraction of the time.

This is because it took an inordinate length of time to design this first ever attempt at banner-making and it is wholly idiosyncratic in construction – as I have to work out how to make things as I make them. The wobbly hand stitching doesn’t bear close inspection either and there were moments I was sharply reminded of the agony of embroidery and knitting classes in my primary school years. The inevitable knot and tangle, and the not knowing why I was so clumsy and useless – forever losing my way and snagging up – it would be decades before dyscalculia and dyspraxia would become the familiar words with which I could finally explain it.

Yet this has felt like one of the most important activities I could engage in, spending the day trying to get it right for the Syrian refugees, stitching laboriously with my laptop at my side thereby keeping up to date with the news. My plan was to stitch and tweet and send my never more timely film, Without You I Would Not Exist, out again and again onto social media platforms. I wanted people to know how much kindness matters when you have nothing, and about what happens next when someone chooses to be altruistic and bountiful. I wanted people to engage with the human – not only in terms of need (the there but for the grace of God go I) but also the benefit to society of allowing the refugees into our country. There is a long term, and if refugees stay they can make careers, have families, become carers and contribute to the culture.

It was an extraordinarily thought provoking and rich day despite my un-nimble fingers. It was mediative yet I engaged with events. Through it I feel connected again, after the long Summer vacation, to my purpose in working with Spanish Civil War history, forming a bridge into the contemporary. I am at heart both artist and activist in my small way. My practice must stay relevant and connected.

When I bought the calico background fabric from Darn it and Stitch in Oxford (http://www.darnitandstitch.com) I met artist in residence Felicity Ford whose work and project The Fabric of Oxford, you can learn about on the following link.

http://www.knitsonik.com/the-fabric-of-oxford/

Felicity, not only interviewed me for her project when she learned about the refugee banner, but she also kindly donated a gorgeous piece of fabric, which I fashioned into E’s. Felicity thereby becomes part of the banner and her generosity entwines with the sentiments of the demonstration, against government policy. When Felicity interviewed me I realised that I had only visualised the banner one way – as a homely, stitched item, showing care and making reference to the domestic through the use of fabric remnants such as you would find in comfortable home furnishings. The very stuff that has been lost in this human tragedy.

I wanted this banner to say “welcome” through every fibre, not only through the words stitched on it. The act of making it this way, rather than painting on the message quickly and effortlessly feels important both as a ritual and symbolically as well. I want to join the groundswell of public opinion towards a humanitarianism our present government doesn’t seem to have understood or anticipated. The march against the global domination monetary values takes up here. This demonstration, with its many #refugeeswelcome banners will serve more practically to lever opinion locally to take in our quota of refugees. Oxfordshire has opened it arms before when in May of 1937 Basque refugees, children in flight from fascist Spain needed homes and schooling. This was all through voluntary effort and against government policy.

When governments won’t do the right thing, we the people can.

And so it’s back to work! What a Summer it’s been. I’ve written about my Summer of love for neurodiversity on my blog, The Other Side, and I’m hopeful that many more people will read the rather extraordinary article co-written with Brent White, creator and director of ACAT Ala Costa Adult Transition Centre, which made it into publication in the Disability Studies Quarterly for Winter 2015. As Brent says,

“In the piece we wrote, we are birds, we walk with ghosts. This beautiful wordless place. Friendship, love, wings and ghosts.”

You can read the article and my briefest of introductions here:

https://soniaboue.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/autism-art-and-the-world-behind-the-world-adventures-in-neurodiverse-communication/

It’s not that I’m leaving my beloved neurodiverse universe behind me, I couldn’t if I tried, but rather that my focus must change. My two loves run parallel, art and the neurodiverse mind, but my attention must often switch between them, though I am increasingly fascinated by the overlap. I sense another body of work that may reflect this in the future, but for now I’ll let it rest and settle.

I’ll still be blogging on The Other Side, but you’ll find me much more present here, where my reflections on the Spanish Civil War create a bridge into the contemporary – where we are facing a refugee crisis of our own, one which demands a compassionate response. For all my work on this project, the most gruelling was to uncover my family’s plight in 1939, displaced and terrorised they sought refuge in France and in England. There is no place for the word migrant in such scenarios and a current attempt to do so by the BBC has rightly been countered with one of those increasing number of online petitions that have become our daily reality in these most difficult and arguably undemocratic of times. We vote by email – signing our objections into cyberspace.

There are no words for the image that has emerged of the tiny body of Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore, as though in slumber but drowned at sea, attempting to flee a war zone and find safety with his family. I can’t and won’t share that image here – though my mind played with this possibility, it is too heartrending, you’ve all seen it already, what good could I do. I feared also exploiting this little soul, no, Aylan will get nothing but respect here. He will also find his way onto my Tributes and Ofrenda blog just across the way – also on a_n.

https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/tributes-and-offerings

But the image I create for Aylan will be mediated through art, in my studio, away from political argument. It will be tribute and offering only in this space. I’m reminded of Doris Salcedo – an artist I featured in my recent blog post Becoming Human – who wisely suggests that it is only be remembering (honouring) that we remain human.

https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/barcelona-in-a-bag/post/52424806

Our challenge is to remain human in the face of this media mediated suffering and the attempt to politicise what is a human tragedy.

The internet sometimes turns up gold. It was thus when I met fellow @a_nartblogs superblogger Elena Thomas online just over a year ago.

Yesterday we made it into real time, meeting for the first time at the curious edifice that is the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham. Bless it’s cotton socks!

I know the MAC and the MAC knows me – for this is one of the places in which my artistic career was forged, when as a child of seven my mother used to bring me to kids art classes on a Saturday morning. That was another MAC – a smaller, homelier, grubbier MAC, which I happened to love. I loved the pottery room especially, and the theatre. As a teenager I later grew to love the bookshop, and a grimy but cheerful cafe. What I loved most was the simplicity of the structure of this modest hub of creativity – you knew where you were at all times. It seemed to work – it worked for me.

But MAC has changed, MAC has rebuilt itself, MAC is now bionic MAC. MAC both is and isn’t my MAC anymore. Millions have been pumped into MAC and MAC now has extensions and braids – I’m sure some things work well but to me it looks like a tangle.

But the blessing is that it is half a mile up the road from my childhood home and a convenient location for Elena too. Her songwriter’s circle meet here once a week and so for her also it’s a home from home. And this is how it is. Easy.

We talk and talk. We eat identical food and both hate gerkins. She has my onion ring as I don’t like them and she didn’t get one. Several pots of tea in, we realise we’ve talked for hours. We mention Spoon Theory:

http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/

The idea that for some of us social (and other) exertions take more energy than we have, invisible disabilities such as ME and autism can render the every day stuff incredibly challenging. Spoon theory has caught on as a shorthand for this idea and is used now in blogs and in every day communications.

We agreed that we both need to count our social spoons. I wonder how many artists feel this way. It’s a profession which requires very much alone time, so it could be that by association it is those who need and crave time alone who chose this kind of work. Although, there will, of course, be intensely socially engaged practices that prove the exception to this this rule or observation. I am thinking Andy Warhol and factory here.

However, spoons persist in our conversation. I envisage spoon assemblages. Elena is thinking beads and fabric. Elena pays me the compliment of a lifetime. I give her spoons! I realise she gives me spoons too. Easy. No drain.

Elena is an extraordinary person, which is why she’s such a brilliant artist. I love her work, and if we’d never met I’d still say the same.

So I look forward to more tea, more spoons, more talk, more beads, more fabric.