Through A Wall

“Work. Keep digging your well.

Don’t think about getting off from work

Water is in there somewhere

Submit to a daily practice

Your loyalty to that

Is a ring on the door

Keep knocking and the joy inside

Will eventually open a window

And look out to see who’s there

From The Sunrise Ruby  – Jalaluddin Rumi

Sometimes you have to dig deep to find the water. For many years  I have made work which has been been sparked by my own personal narratives  – as a starting platform for a dialogue and a bridge for the public to bring in their own narratives into the work, sometimes anonymously, through objects or texts and latterly, by performing them with me.

I hadn’t taken this approach to this project as from the start there have been a lot of other, often contrasting voices in and around the project. I had tried to find other, less subjectively-based ways of creating a framework for an interactive piece about encounters with walls, borders or  barriers in relation to conflict, place, identity and collective memory. Initially it began as an idea for a textile installation, with elements of performance and digital input.

A lot has happened and shifted, both in conversation with my collaborators on past research and our upcoming workshops as well as considerations of the agendas and views of  interested partners -and of course funders – but somehow it got more and more complicated. I needed clarity and  simplicity but couldn’t find it. So this was a good moment for a residency at Blast Theory  (especially as this one, though I don’t live far away, came with a room, so I could individuate from my family – at least for chunks  – during the stay and wake up writing rather than preparing for the school run)

Having the space, rigorous and effervescent mentoring from Matt Adams –  and opportunity to see and learn how Blast Theory keeps it fresh, productive and manages the immense amount of moving parts required to create work that is always pushing boundaries gave me a sense of need to focus right down. To seek simplicity and find what excites me, what creates momentum to get this project off the ground as the lead artist  and what is a natural progression for my own practice, the place where I can best use what I am good at? Where am I in all this? Also, being in such a welcoming context here in Portslade where there is a genuine desire to help me succeed at what I  came to do and a reflecting back of the qualities of my previous work when I  started to doubt my current direction, has been a real gift.

I’m always interested in taking a multi-dimensional view of any subject – in this case, how a wall / barrier can be both physical, psychological, emotional and mental. I did this with my last major project Burning the Books, so stories about financial global injustice were recited in performances alongside stories of personal, financial but also ’emotional’ debts perceived to be owed to family members. This happened because when I started talking about debt to people they talked back about so much more than finance. So this gave me the permission and scope to paint a fuller, deeply human picture of how debt as a construct affects the way we perceive and relate to ourselves , others and society. So I came to realise that I am in fact following on from this approach and developing it and that – in the way the narrating and deconstruction  of my own story of debt was the trigger for the content of the project across so many locations, the starter feed for this stage of this project needs once again to be located in my own subjectivity, my own stories my narrative voice. So I am step one.

One of the most striking aspects of touring the Book of Debts (the first time I had ever toured) was the very different narrative space of each book in response to site and how audiences sat and listened to my / our performing of them in such a broad range of contexts, from war museum to club night to town square but with equal focus … and the prism through which they re-evaluated their own view of what debt is and questioned its power and, in some cases, its legitimacy.

I want to create this kind of collective listening and questioning  again, but in any location and not necessarily collectively  – from alone at night in bed, in transit anywhere in the world, to inside an installation to perhaps co-performing the narratives in public contexts. So using a App as the core platform makes total sense and gives it space to grow, as the Book of Debts did. By the tour we had filled the book with over 1000 stories.

Also, as I have learned here, apps can be buried in almost anything and thanks to blast theory I now know more what it takes to make one and why it’s important to take it step by tiny step, testing the narrative carefully as you go.

I’ve been reworking the summary of the project as its what we need to communicate to future hosts and contributors what we are doing. I  think I am probably on my 20th iteration of the project description over the last year,  but it feels much closer now.

So…this project is:  An App which immerses you in a vivid set of interactive audio stories ; human encounters with walls, borders, the invisible barriers between people and those within the human self. And, more importantly, with what lies beyond them.

Be a stranger in transit on a bench at Tehran airport, or at a kitchen table in Belfast. Hear tales of fear overcome in the dead of night, acts of conflict transformation between former perpetrators and victims – or imagined reunions with estranged siblings.

An intimate, provocative and poetic lens on how the human desire to overcome barriers is often stronger than the power to uphold them – and the tension between these. You are also invited to contribute your own narrative in response to what you hear, as the project grows globally.

(The App will eventually form the basis of a touring installation and programme of dialogue and debate).

It took me weeks to see as legitimate and get down to writing my own personal experiences relevant to the project; the impeded crossing of a border in Iran in 1998, facing a wall of silence with an estranged family member, and a recurring dream of a wall from my childhood – only the first of which I have finished and tested out, the others are in progress and I plan to Finish this week).

Once I had written, recorded  and sent out to 15 people the first narrative – written into the second person to overtly invite the listener to step inside my skin as far as they wanted to – and tested it out, I  got back almost unanimous positive responses, with some constructive comments on the balance between how much controlled interactivity (through pauses and questions and positioning of the listener) enhances or obstructs the flow of the narrative and a whole list of similar stories from the listeners which were triggered by the narrative. I am making adjustments and there will be a second round of testing.

Also, when I explained how the work would be presented, the test group understood what I was talking about pretty quickly, which wasn’t the case a few months ago. I have been reassured by many conversations here  – and with other artists – that this process of working with the unknown and just how long it can actually take to articulate what you are trying to do to others (or even to yourself ) as you, as Matt puts it, are  ‘trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat” – is the mark of an interesting project. And that feeling like you don’t know what you are doing in the development stage is a necessary element in creating something new, rather than repeating yourself. I had forgotten that this time around, I should tattoo it on my arm.

Over the  last fortnight as I worked my narrative and tested it out,  I felt the electric current of something heading in the right direction. I have also asked Craig and Maria, who will be collaborating on the workshops, to write one of their own and have a shortlist of specific people to approach who I have met through this project over the last year or who have participated in the tests, to see if they will be interviewed for –  or willing to write or co-write –  one of the initial set of starter narratives to have for the prototype by the end of this R +D period. These are carefully chosen to reflect the different levels of narratives to which participants in the workshops and beyond might respond and echo back their own stories. I won’t say much more because I don’t want to spoil the surprise of the contrasting content of some of these stories, but I am excited at having found the form, more specific content and a new set of processes for moving it all on and taking my work across another border into the unknown!

Thank you Blast Theory. And Happy 25th Birthday.

By the way, I’ll be in conversation about this and my other related work at INIVA in London on May 19th, details here.

As part of my research I have been exploring at a number of interactive projects online that deal with place and identity in some way, create intimacy with the viewer and could be reference points.

I found a few through  The Creators Project  which led me to one of my favourite producer sites, the Canadian Film Board Interactive:  Pinepoint, a beautifully crafted and resonant interactive documentary on a mining town that was created then erased from memory, using personal character portraits and reflections on place, memory, identity and change. This then led to a deeply intimate and disturbing one called A Call from Herman, based on phone calls with the Black Panther prisoner Herman Wallace who has lived in inhuman solitary confinement for 40 years, where an artist has created a vision of a house to live in for him which he will never occupy. And from that a high end production with Arte called In Limbo which enmeshes. your own live, data into interweaving of narratives, interviews and poetic reflections on digital memory and the Internet as global brain.

I also was searching for projects which bridged online and real structures, involving lots of people,  and discovered that David Best’s resonant and. beautiful  Temple project in Derry was given digital life via a Space commission in the form of a minecraft version built with teams of school children, – Temple Craft – and virtually burned online. This is kind of the reverse of what I did with Burning the Books and I loved the co-opting of my son’s favourite game to create something meaningful and radically jubilant!

Matt also pointed me to an early Blast Theory project Single Story Building, where you are given menu options via a phone call to explore the pre – created private spaces of 100 people. This involved around 2000 branching options for a journey! Then to something simpler in structure Dreams of Your Life, (no longer online but on Vimeo here) the interactive project attached to a documentary Dreams of a Life, about a woman Joyce Vincent – who had friends and family – and whose body was found in her flat three years after she died, totally intact in front of the TV, still on, and no-one had noticed. Deeply moving and incredible story which I had never heard of. By showing me this Matt was underlining the economy of this project as a really simple (the keyword which I had lost sight of..) but powerful, poetic interface and  involving the viewer in a set of profound questions on the nature of their relationships and existence.

I alss made an appointment with the Journal of Insomnia, a website that doubles as a confessional as it invites you to make an appointment to listen to the story of a featured insomniac after 10pm one night and then to a whole fresco of audio, video and drawings and to contribute your own at the end. I looked at this a few years ago while I was researching interfaces for Burning the Books and I love it’s atmosphere.. And the quality of the voice as it lulls you to a sleep that will constantly evade you….

So absorbing all this, last week I trialled a simple guided audio journey (a basic prep test for something more interactive) involving a wall, with 10 people, some in person and some via email.  I asked people to think of someone they hadn’t seen or been in contact with for a long time and later placed a wall in their way.

All the journeys were vivid, moving and brought up the person’s  own very personal unconscious and – in many cases – unresolved relationships. I was taken to fortresses in the desert, walls of roses and thorns and walls that were membranes spanning the universe and met people living and dead…. It was deeply moving, often on both sides. It was very on the therapeutic end of the spectrum though and , listening back to them all and from feedback from Maria and Matt,it worked as a series of dreamscapes, that had a poetic quality and created intimacy with the listener and put them at the centre of the work. However it didn’t  do the work of making connections or creating narratives around with the broader themes of the project – actual and lived experiences of borders, walls and internal barriers and the turning points of reaching  or at least seeing through to the other side, that are going to characterise this work. He reminded me to keep the vision.

So after a mammoth session where Matt threw up all kinds of possible ways forward, we both felt like it had come back to complexity and an impossible task of connecting the personal and the political in a succinct and powerful way. So I went home a bit despairing.

But then, as sleep does, things kind of re arranged themselves in my brain and I listened through the recording of our session and realised there might be a possible path through.

I started writing an account of one of my own experiences involving an episode at Tehran airport, and turned it into an interactive script, with some further input from Matt as I took him through it. I’m going to edit /trial it these next few days…

I only have two weeks left!  I have hardly seen anyone this end of town I had planned to and there is a lot I want to achieve before the end of April – though time is sliced between here and family – but this feels like a concrete direction and I have to say the mentoring , the understanding of what I am trying to get to, and. the reminder to break down the intangible process into tiny, concrete steps is SO what I needed.

It’s hailing outside. And there is a rehearsal for Operation Black Antler going on. I stayed last night and was able to be up early writing. This kind of space is giving me some clarity at last

I was part of the Apps for Artists workshop run by Alex Peckham, the technical lead at Blast Theory, on the second week I was here. It was brilliant, crammed with references, strategies and concrete advice and guidance about taking artistic ideas forward and making them happen in the digital /interactive field, as they have been doing for 26 years now. It was like an uber rich chocolate cake that you can’t quite digest all in one go but you don’t want to miss one bite so you keep eating.  The 20 or so people who were there had brought projects from interactive web documentaries, to mobile-mediated performances to apps that make you sleep. One of Blast Theory’s projects which was talked through and very helpfully dissected was the making of Karen, a disconcerting coaching bot you can download on the App store, try her out, she is full of surprises..

It was inspiring to realise in how many directions /platforms  you can take an idea these days (I worked in the digital industry in the late nineties and so had the contrast of now and then) and how cheaply you can test things out. Blast Theory use a lot of post it notes and paper tests before they even touch the digital, they have a database of people up for testing and they have a rigorous task-based process of development and production, with one lead artist but everyone pitching in and included, from what I can see. There is a feeling of great clarity and focus which I am appreciating being close to, its what I need and sometimes with this project it has felt like it could go in so many directions that it might not find a focus at all.

When I arrived at Blast Theory, my aim was to find some focused time and space to listen in to what the form as well as the focus of the project might be. Last October,  as you can see from this short film made by Kings, it seemed like it was turning into the next stage of a pilot project I co-created in 2005 called The Loom: from text to textile.  This  focusing on an outcome was against advice given in the winter that it is a long term research project and I shouldn’t  even try and imagine what it will end up as…however I find this hard as often the end image of a work informs the way I work the process of making it, so, as it was only the first week I was there, when I came to present my project during the Pecha Kucha session on Day 2 of the workshop, this is what I presented:

‘ Let me speak to you of textile. As symbolic, a site of memory and ritual, a social fabric that evokes the drafting of code as well as the experience of touch and the remote engagement with an unknown other. 2500 years before writing, narratives were woven into cloth and textile functioned as a text. I love how it can be performative, speak deeply of social and political life and connect the long threads between past and future.  From The Jacquard loom to the Babbage machine, the links between textile and digital culture are well documented.

Textiles can also speak of those who are long gone, disappeared,unseen or unheard and draw them into a single frame, a piece of cloth, whether worn, slept on, hung or held. In 2005 we set up a loom that took emotionally rooted data (via a project website) – the names, GPS location of birth and death of two loved one, one living and one dead and wove it, live into a 20 metre cloth over 4 days. the weaving was webcast inside an installation chamber within which people could write on, tie up and read often deeply emotional texts on ribbons  about those who were being woven into the textile.

The textile itself was a beautiful though abstract work, carrying 18 ribbons running its entire length, each linked data submitted by each contributor. It was a pilot project but There wasn’t much  that could be technically done to literally embody texts into the cloth. There is a lot of talk about smart textiles – that can respond to heart rates, body heat and emotional states.what if the textile, instead of transmitting its memories through silent touch, could be an actual space  for a more vocal kind of narrative interaction or dialogue?

What if you could assign to each thread to be woven the disparate elements of self or society  –  the warp and weft –  of a violent conflict or the disconnected and broken relations of a family, community or nation, caused perhaps by migration, prejudice, belief or emotional/economic crises along with any routes learned through to alternative ways of thinking, resolving, transforming,subverting or accepting situations or each other..

So…What if you could put your ear to the textile  and literally hear embedded within it,  the story of each strand contributed by strangers across the world to its DNA ? This might happen remotely or in real proximity to it and this send of distance becomes part of its narrative . What if the textile could listen to you and find what you need to hear in response ? And you could whisper to it, like those who put their mouths to the wailing wall,  and have it find a place in which you can stand in along its length and hear the one, two or more sides of a story you can only right now perceive a small piece of because , well, you are just one, not many.

What would that look like and is it even possible!

(Note: Maybe this textile is not an actual textile, maybe it is a space of performance or a digital space ..)’

In the light of this workshop, and what has happened since, though underlying aims are the same, I have put this focus on a textile output to one side and tried to bring it down to working with the narrative imagination of the audience in the simplest way I can find and then seeing what happens. It may well be a live /digital project that draws inspiration from textile culture thinking  (which I will inevitably talk about and use more as it is central to my practice) or it may end up as something you can touch and exchange, within a textile installation. I had to drop my attachment to what it will end up being as it was getting in the way of moving forward. Then there was a space. Which was a bit scary and disconcerting.

So something became clear after that. I needed to:

Begin the next stage of the development of this project  in the imagination of the individual and their own unconscious and work outward. The idea that came seemed so simple that it almost felt like nothing, but it did quietly excite me. And when I had my first mentoring session with Matt  last week and he came in and read it on my pinboard – or the beginnings of it –  and talked about the possible ways of taking it forward and reminded a doubting me of the  value of distilling ideas down, taking tiny, concrete steps and using a rigorous testing process to take it forward (all qualities of Blast Theory I admire) I felt a kind of relief. And he reminded me that the thrashing around in the dark is all part of the creative process, it is what we do if we are creating something new.

And all this reminded me that what I love with my work most – and what I often fear the most –  is interactivity, and it’s why I am here.To connect with and find new ways for me to bring what I do to this project that we can use later,  in a fresh but clear and focused way. So that’s what I am doing.I have already written a simple script and done talk -throughs on 7 people and with each interaction it gets a little clearer. It’s not the thing  but its moving towards it. But it is tiny steps. More next time.

‘The walls impose a simplified identity on those who cannot cross them. You are either from here or there. You are either one of us or one of them, the walls allow for no nuance, no mutually agreed apon story. Along the Indo-Bangadesh border, the walls disregard any bonds between Bengalis on one side of the line and Bengalis on the other. The West Bank wall ones not care what Israelis and Palestinians might have in common. On Cyprus, the barricades reject any sense of a blurred Cypriot identity. ‘

Walls : Travels Along The Barricades’ Marcello Di Cintio

There is a controversy innate in the use of a Wall as a centrepiece for a piece of public artwork;  last year, on trialling the idea just in the context of a public seminar at King’s, we had our preconceptions confounded about how people would respond to the idea of constructing and deconstructing a wall in the public domain in a collective act of peaceful subversion, by realising this made a few people feel very uncomfortable, whose actual or perceived security has been historically threatened by the previous lack of walls.

Despite it being an imaginary work /act, the Wall that was being imagined by those with these concerns  – In this case the wall in the West Bank – needed to be ‘kept in place’… We want to know what those on the other side are living through, but we feel threatened by it’. Coupled with this though, in the same breath, was an excitement that there could be a safe space in which to encounter and experience the perspectives of those who were – in the broader political backdrop –  unknown /feared / mistrusted and for the separation to break down, even for a moment.

On the other hand,  in the minds of a few others whose absolute perspective on that particular wall was that it is illegal, oppressive and anyone who might want it to stay in place should be engaged with, with great caution and maybe not at all, equally challenged the very core concept of the work which Craig and I both felt strongly: that it should be a hybrid work that is quietly but radically inclusive, even of those with whom we might have a complete divergence of political opinion.

I understand better now why I felt and feel this , having now read Marcello Di Cintio’s brilliant book “Walls: Travels Along The Barricades’. This timely book (for me, and for the world) makes for compelling , devastating reading, as he comes up close and personal with the communities and gatekeepers of a number of  key walls globally – the berm in Western Sahara, the Spanish /Moroccan border all at Ceuta /Melilla, the Indo -Bangladesh fence, Cyprus’ Nicosia/ Lefkosa line, the US- Mexican border wall and the ‘Peace Lines’ in Belfast. This book has been my backdrop for the last couple of weeks.

It makes clear – from the millions of lives lost , the decimation of fragile  ecosystems, sacred lands, family ties  and economic livelihoods, the increase in prejudice, fear, resentment and the inhumanity with which those who try to cross walls /borders are so often treated – that no -one living on either side of any of these spaces, or operating them, thinks they work . By ‘work’ this means both that they keep the ‘unwanted’ in or out, that they keep the ‘peace’ or that they are a long term solution to society working better as a result of their presence. So, different levels of working that will be more important to some than others.

That doesn’t mean that the citizens of those divided places  don’t want them to remain in place in many cases – Belfast, Greek Cypriots and Israelis being the most notable – but the sense that there has been a collective human failure to find another kind of solution to co-exist was so very painfully clear to me as I read this book. I had to put the Book down and weep in a number of places. It is vividly and rigorously researched and lived, it brings travel writing to a whole new level – true human activism.

The duality of the situations he writes about, in terms of human perceptions of Walls as fallible dividing structures, are most clear at a collective, psychological level. That is, in exposing the fracture in identity, the sense of a wound that is opened every time the wall is referred to or looked at.

On another note, erecting and maintaining walls and keeping them impermeable is big business, most clearly shown in the US-Mexican border  chapter – the security companies,  traffickers and prison services make millions, while the statistics of the ‘success rate’ of keeping migrants out of the US is so low as to be laughable. So then one asks why they Walls are so the new black these days, proliferating at an intense rate…

This  is where Di Cintio made a brilliant point which made me sit up straight, when talking about the  Spanish – Morrocan border at Ceuta /Melilla;

“The new barriers might fail at security, but like Hadrian’s wall, they succeed as theatre. The actual effectiveness of the walls is secondary to the illusion they create: one of exclusion and difference”

Closer to home , this is what has been happening in Calais and Dunkerque, and now I see where the French (and by implication for total complicity, the British ) took their dark inspiration from. Seeing the historical precedents on border policy and its human collateral globally –  it  became especially clear why so little is being done to humanise the camps just 2 hours from here –  in Di Cintio’s book in his  conversation with Kat Rodriguez, director of immigration right organisation Derecho Humanos in Tucson Arizona;

In 2004-2011, 3000 people died around the border. ‘The Feds act shocked by the deaths’ Kat said, but she wanted me to understand that these deaths are intentional. Dead migrants are a platform in the government’s strategy. ‘

There are many activist movements that stand up against these walls and their impact on human rights and disdain for human lives not on their right side ; Voices against the Wall, No More Deaths (US), and Di Cintio likens the sound art of the Anta Project there by musician  Glenn Weyant – who records and ‘plays’ the Wall as a musical instrument to the Send a Message Wall in the West Bank (which has its critics in the Palestinian territory and in academia, due to the way it has been co-opted by international activists and commodified by local traders, but that’s a whole other story that Craig has done a book and research project on so I won’t even attempt to unravel it here, yet.)

Glenn says ‘If they are going to put this thing up, I am going to transform it. As far as I am concerned, this is not a barrier. It is not stopping people from crossing, instead it is a 2000 mile long instrument. The government spent millions of dollars to build the world largest instrument.’  By playing the wall, Glenn subverted it. He understood what he was doing might seem like nonsense , but the wall itself was ridiculous. …’ ‘In a way, I am taking the wall down.’ Like send a message, ‘both sought to defeat the walls by robbing them of their military machismo ‘

Defeating Walls as an art practice. The psychological ones are the ones that interest me at the moment, as they are also what create the ones that carve up our world and society.

Within all this, when we were at Kings,  there was the question  of what the role of art in the realm or on the border of activism should be. At the sharp end  activists suggested that it be used as a tool with an agenda, with fixed and clear aims and objectives. As an artist, I find this approach prescriptive and potentially alienating of anyone who doesn’t already share the preset agenda.  There are different kinds of activism that can be at work in an art work; my tendency is to aim for  a flattening out of polarised viewpoints through the sharing of narratives  at a deeply human level . Opening up questions  that could stimulate social change by changing audiences perceptions of themselves and others.
And on that note, if you haven’t signed up for Blast Theory’s Operation Black Antler at the Brighton Festival next month in collaboration with Hydrocracker Theatre company –  where you sign up to go undercover for the night –  do so. From what I am observing this is going to be a viewpoint-subverting and seminal work which isn’t to be missed and they have been carefully navigating what is very controversial territory with great sensitivity as well as playfulness  . More info here.

Next time I’ll write on the Apps for Artists workshop I attended at Blast Theory and what I am coming up with and trying out….

Nexy

So, to begin.  This was a project I didn’t plan on creating. Like my last project Burning the Books (a live touring work exploring debt in it many forms) it takes a central metaphor – the Wall –  and attempts to provide an entry point into thinking about a whole network of contemporary themes which are so complex, intense and troubling (conflict, belief, prejudice, fear, division, belonging, anti-migration narratives, trauma, violence, non-violence, forgiveness, justice etc …)  that by the time we got granted the R&D from Arts Council England in January, part of me just wanted to lie down and forget the whole thing. Why couldn’t I be working on something playful, frivolous, fun, shallow and something I could forget about at 5pm every day? Just to get some relief.  Oh, that’s called having a different kind of proper job, (I’m not sure what it would be)  and that’s not what I am here for, apparently.

It seems that now, as I get older and especially over the last decade, subjects are choosing me rather than me choosing them – and they closely relate to either what I am experiencing in my own life or what I feel impacted or concerned by, to the point that not making work about these issues would feel like being in denial of something deeply important. And not doing my job as an artist – but that’s another discussion to be focused on later.

On the positive side, I am absolutely not alone in this project. . It emerged out of a series of conversations and provocations I was invited to take part in in late 2014  / early 2015 – a three part Salon series  exploring Conflict and Belief (leading to new collaborative art works)  and hosted by King’s Cultural Institute and 3FF (who had hosted one of my Book of Debts at their Urban Dialogues show and so knew my work).

The basis of it was this; ‘Faced with entrenched fault lines of opinion, belief, and practice, artists are often uniquely able to carve out an alternative space for reflection, imagination and discussion’. From that they seeded 4 collaborative projects between a few of the 30 artists, academics and activists who had been invited and found resonances in /proposed collaborative ideas. It was a kind of high-brow intellectual speed dating over some very nice food and wine thankyou. Some brilliant speakers from all sectors and a sense of impending pressure to come up with something that might turn into a seed project, as they had a little bit of money and support to give at the end.

I  was very burnt out that winter after a ridiculously busy year and wasn’t sure I could come up with anything, and almost didn’t continue.  But an image grew throughout the day  of the second salon which intrigued me. It was the image of a great Wall, packed with hundreds, possibly thousands of contributed texts / objects and dotted with gaps here and there, through which people -strangers –  were interacting, and passing pieces of the wall, until at one point, it got completely un-made and nothing remained. A kind of metaphysical Berlin Wall experience of sorts.

That evening one of the speakers – Craig Larkin, an academic, researcher and writer in the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies at King’s – stood up and starting talking about his work on walls (!) ; conflict, memory, narrative – from the peace lines in Northern Ireland (where he grew up)  to his projects at the Separation Wall in East Jerusalem,and his research on young people’s experience of post -conflict cities such as  Beirut, where he had lived and worked for a number of years.

However, when Craig spoke he managed to communicate a range of highly complex ideas and experiences  in such a simple, direct and powerful way that I was immediately engaged, showing images and talking with great humanity about the people he has met and the complexities of keeping  a balanced view of such an explosive subject – Middle eastern politics and faith issues – and finding alternative ways of looking at it through human story. So really I see him as a storyteller and social activist of sorts. And he was intrigued by the idea of a wall coming down not up and of the potential of creative processes intervening in the work he is doing.

I had also discussed ideas with another academic, called Paula Serafini , who is no longer on the project, and together we  used the small amount of seed money we had to spend time together and devise /offer  a closed workshop (with potential community leaders and partners)  and a public event to test out the concept of the work (the sketch below was a rendering of what it could be, but this has change since), to see what the problematics of the project might be and look more closely at the way we each addressed the themes. The event was called Through A Wall : the role of the artist , academic and activist in addressing belief and conflict.

I’ll publish the writing  I presented/performed and what developed  in response to the responses we got or link it on this blog soon – I’m currently editing a version of it to go on the next stage of my Library Shelf for Akerman Daly which has just gone live. This is an online project  connected to a touring show I have some of my sculptural work in called Tall Tales (currently in London) –  more on that later when the full show opens in a couple of weeks, as there are some connections to be made between this and that project, embodied in my work straddling digital, written and textile culture.

The other collaborator is theatre practitioner Maria Pattinson, (who I invited on board last summer) and I have been looking at the more internal, psychological aspects of the project and how these could be explored using live, body and object based processes in groups and this is feeding into my current individual explorations at Blast Theory.