Finding space to critique C Words
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Nov 14, 2009
As one of five C Words Co-Realizers one of my jobs is to reflect on the events which take place in the gallery. Yet, within the walls of Arnolfini I find it hard to find intellectual space or critical distance from the work. Fortunately, I shan’t be based in Bristol for the whole of our two month run of events. Each...
Feral Trade: a different value system
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Oct 6, 2009
This evening I went to hear Kate Rich and Rasha Shaheen present the Feral Trade project. Kate and Rasha are about to embark on a trip to Iran, attempting to open up a new grocery trade route. The Feral Trade project trades goods along social networks: transporting consumables like coffee from El Salvador, sweets from...
The Bristol bus boycott & other stories
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Oct 6, 2009
On Sunday afternoon, Virtual Migrants presented a performance and talk: The Centre Cannot Hold, Part 1. The performance examined the social inequalities around the issue of climate change. The following discussion looked at why those most effected are largely not the industrialised economies causing it; the connections between environmental crises and migration; and local Bristol...
Living in Palestinian Yarmouk
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Sep 13, 2009
We moved to Yarmouk Camp the other week. The first month in Damascus, I lived in an ancient house in the middle of the Old City in Damascus, half a block from the enormous Omayed Mosque. Sitting on our roof terrace at dusk, I blogged while watching the bats swoop and dive around the Bride’s...
Dodging tankers in the Bosphorus
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Jul 21, 2009
We wake up to a view of corn and sunflower fields fast giving way to rows upon rows of apartment blocks in Istanbul’s outlying suburbs. Unlike the crumbling towers of Eastern Europe, many of these are new and shiny, as Istanbul spreads into the agricultural land to the west. Our Belgrade-Istanbul sleeper curves down to...
Romanian Nodding Donkeys
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Jul 18, 2009
While the train passes through fields of shiny windturbines in Austria, after descending through the Hungarian mountains down towards the Black Sea, the Romanian plains are full of ‘nodding donkeys’, an ancient means of extracting crude from shallow fields in small quantities. As each ‘donkey’ can only extract so much, fields are littered with hundreds of these...
Waiting for the first train
Blog post -
Jul 16, 2009
I’m waiting at Kings Cross – St Pancras with my rucksack for the 12:57 Eurostar to Damascus. The train isn’t quite direct yet — need to change at Brussels, Munich, Belgrade, Istanbul and Adana. I’m leaving London – oil city and finance capital where BP and Shell extract knowledge, loans, social legitimacy and political power, where corporate executives sit...
