Nyx a noctournal

issue 3

Night
1

editorial

Nyx, the primordial Greek goddess of night, resides near the beginning of creation. She is daughter of Chaos and mother to a tribe of symbiotic forces. Without her there would be no day, no sleep, no death, no dreams, no atmosphere, no toil and no blame. Without these forces, there would be nothing to write. Nyx, a noctournal, is now a year old. Twelve months ago, in our first issue, we began at the end, The idea of using the end as a place of beginning we thought quite playful, which led us to further inquire into the idea of play in our second issue. Eschewing the constraints of work and responsibility is an activity characteristic of the night, and so this is the theme of our third issue. Breaking free from the order of daily life, we lose our way. A disorienting process of turning pages in the dark has, rather appropriately, taken us back to our origins. Night is solitude in one of its most unaffected forms, and the possibility of this solitude generates a time of great intimacy. In the space that solitude affords comes the space for creation: a site of limitless potential. Night can be a time of stillness, but stillness is not productive. Only creation allows a focus, an intimacy with the idea, the image, the emotion. This engagement with solitude opens up a space that is full, in contrast to the skeletal quality of the commitments, obligations and concerns that fill the day. In this issue, we consider the implications of race and gender as they unfold on a darkened London street, review a book which considers nighttime creations in the London borough of Southwark, and watch poems bombed from the sky in Warsaw flutter down. We consider light as a matter of concern, often over-looked, and are confronted with difficult snow collecting around a lampost. As always, the following pages of our noctournal are a record produced outside of normal daylight hours, in which we attempted to write and think about what we can only see obscurely.

night/issue3/autumn09
Deadline for next Nyx is issue Tamsyn Adams 29.1.2010 Jonathan Brookes James Burton Theme for next issue Dory Carr-Harris Work Rory Cobar ISSN 1758-9630 Alice Corble Claudia Firth 2009 Nyx, a Joanna Figiel noctournal Carina Lopes Images p23 & p25 Alex Reynolds CasaGrande Rachel Segal Hamilton Armelle Skatulski All rights reserved. Nadja Stamselberg No part of this Leila Whitley publication may be Emilie Chalcraft reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or Contributions transmitted, in any Hermien Lankhorst form or by any means, Jacob Love electronic, mechanical, Rebecca Fielding photocopying, Joel Edward Parker recording, or otherwise, Philippa Thomas without written Dan Taylor permission from the Rico Reyes Nyx, a noctournal Johanna Poethig Editorial Board. Anne Perez Chris Thomas For contributions and info noctournal@gmail.com www.nyxnoctournal.com Buy Nyx Student Union shop in RHB, Goldsmiths, University of London Thanks to The Centre for Cultural Studies and the Graduate School, Goldsmiths, University of London, for their financial contributions Layout Vikki Nousiainen Cover Photos Neil McIvor 4

index
Obscure Illuminations
Hermien Lankhorst Claudia Firth
6

Additional Features
Jabob Love/Carina Lopes

12 14

There Is A No-Place Here Bombing of Poems I: Proof Before Letters

Alice Corble
18

Bombing of Poems II: Proof Before Action

Rebecca Fielding

24

On Waking 4:57am
31

Rebecca Fielding

29

Joel Edward Parker

Overtime

32 38 40

Claudia Firth

Difficult Snow
James Burton Philippa Thomas Chris Thomas Dan Taylor Barrionics

120 Days of 1001 Nights No Nos Callarn

44

Late Night Stupid Story Sarung Banggi

Carina Lopes Alice Corble
58 64 72

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Maping as Advocacy Reading in the Dark

Rebecca Fielding

I hide the fragments of the day in pockets of the night

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Obscure illuminations
Light: from matter of fact to matter of concern
Hermien Lankhorst Images Claudia Firth

t is a well known phenomenon that after a power failure of more than a few minutes, nine months later a baby boom occurs. For just a little while, life is a lot less convenient, without machines doing work for us. Furthermore, watching television or browsing on the Internet is out of the question without electricity, and God forbid we should read a book. The latter is not even possible at night, because light has also become a scarce commodity. So what else can we do but go to bed? It seems that without electricity and especially without
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light, we are thrown back to our primal urges, among which survival and procreation appear to be the most important. Light is usually not something we strongly appreciate or even notice. Only when light is not working for whatever reason do we realize what a great force it is in our lives. Maybe most crucially, without light we cannot see. For human beings, sight is an important sense, according to some even the most important because it can provide a huge amount of information with just one glance. Our other senses can

make up for the loss of vision to a certain extent, but certainly not completely. Some things just arent sensible in any other way than through sight. However, light (and the cycle of light and darkness) does much more to and for us than just enable vision. Light also heavily influences our body rhythms, or biological clock, our physical health, and our emotions. It furthermore constitutes the relationship between us and the human and non-human environment in which we live. At present, some research is being conducted into the influence of the diminishing light in winter (winter blues) and the effects of working many nightshifts (which might influence the occurrence of breast cancer). However, it seems to me that light does not get the attention it deserves, once the huge influence it has on us is taken into account. Therefore, I want to look at light as a matter of concern (something we pay attention to and care for) instead of as a matter of fact (something we take for granted), a distinction made by the French philosopher Bruno Latour. This article will just be an introduction to a Latourian approach to light, but I hope nonetheless that it will show how this

alternative strategy will give us the opportunity to understand the world around us a little better.

A light bit of Latourian theory

From the moment that Bruno Latour and his (and others) Actor-Network Theory (ANT) was introduced to me, it became almost impossible not to see the world in Latourian terms. Though it would certainly be possible to arrive at a perspective whereby one does not take light for granted with the help of other theorists or approaches, it is the work of Latour that does most to open up such a perspective for me. For this reason it is worth prefacing the observations I will make about light with some introductory comments on some of the aspects of Latourian theory most relevant to my discussion. For Latour, and other ANT-ers, all humans and non-humans are part of assemblies that form networks in which there are a variety of connections between different actors, hence the name Actor-Network Theory for this approach. In addition to being part of a construction, an actor itself (which can be a human or a non-human) is also a collection of associations: every actor

is a product of connections. The network that makes up the actor is always in movement, new connections being made and old connections changing or disappearing all the time. So, an actor does not appear out of the blue, it needs an elaborate production process to become that product, that network, i.e. connections have to be formed. However, when the work that is done on the product (the actor) is hidden, it has become a matter of fact. It looks like it is static, it appears not to alter anymore. It furthermore seems to stand by itself and does not need to be explained or questioned. For example, that water boils at a hundred degrees Celsius is a matter of fact. Usually nobody questions this, but when we look closer, we see that this theory, this actor, is actually a coming together of many other actors and specific circumstances: we need a thermometer to check when the water is a hundred degrees, we need to be on the planet earth and specifically not too high up on a mountain, we need something to put the water in, we need the knowledge about what Degrees Celsius means, and so on. Without these connections, the fact of the boiling point of water is not that obvious. However, most of the time we just apply this fact without thinking about the constructed product it really is. A matter of concern, on the other hand, is something that explicitly needs help and care to be taken seriously as a fact. It is not (yet) obvious. A good example of a matter of concern is the theory of evolution: this theory is pretty standard in most academic circles, but certainly not every scientist adheres to it and there is still a lively debate about whether the theory of evolution is indeed correct or not. Before this actor will become a matter of fact (if it ever will) a lot more money, time, paper, pencils, and USB-sticks have to become part of the net8

work that is already there. A matter of fact is a black box, according to Latour; it just is what it is. The black box hides that the product, the actor, is a construction and that it has taken much time and energy to become that specific product. Opening the black box reveals an assembly of interconnected actors. In many instances, light has been black-boxed and it is often seen as nothing more than a neutral deliverer. By opening the box, the light literally pours out, and might blind us for a moment. When our eyes are adjusted, we can see that light is not a given, something almost invisible or unnoticeable, but a construction itself, as well as part of many constructions. Light is a product and produces things, among which is behaviour from humans. A black box usually opens at the moment when something goes wrong inside: one of the connections of the assembly breaks down, which leads to a malfunctioning or a different functioning of the actor. I already mentioned a possible instance of the opening of the black box of light: a power failure leads to the disconnection of several actors in the normal supply of power and shuts down all sorts of machines that were hooked up to the electricity network. In the case of light, the black box tends to open precisely at the moment it gets dark; only then it becomes clear (again) that light is a product of many different connections. We do not really see the light, until it is dark.

Everything is illuminated
Light has played an incredibly important and constituting role in the lives of human

beings throughout history. Let us start with an example of art, a painting. The type of light we use to see the image can greatly influence the painting, not just the appearance of the painting, but the painting itself. Different lights have different characteristics; no type of light is a neutral instrument that just makes things visible. We might be inclined to think that the sun is different from other sources of light, because it seems a pure natural source. However, sunlight is, just like everything else, a construction: there is not something that can be called the essence of sunlight or the real sunlight. The light we receive on earth that comes from the sun is mediated by clouds, by the enormous distance it has to travel and by other nonhumans, like windows and curtains, to name just a few. Furthermore, we need healthy eyes to see the light of the sun. Coming back to the painting, this means that to see the colours on the painting always entails the presence of a non-neutral form of light, even when we see it in the pure and natural light of the sun. There is just no default position of seeing a painting. There might be a way

that is most common, but it is a constructed situation nonetheless. Understanding this is valuable for the understanding of art. It makes clear, for example, that in the event of looking at a painting, an important part of the construction is the presence of light; changing the light can very possibly change the whole event and lead to a completely new experience, even a completely new work of art. This is probably not a wholly new idea; artists and curators, as well as ordinary visitors of a gallery know how important the lighting is. However, what Latours theory re-emphasises here is that the event of looking at a painting is simply not possible without light and that therefore light is always something that needs to be taken into account. Furthermore, it helps us to realise that something like a neutral or default source of light does not exist. Light does not just makes us see the painting; it makes us see it in a certain way. And beyond the realm of art, the importance of light becomes quite clear as well. For example, there are many shades of darkness. Even in a time when no street lighting existed, it did not have to be completely dark at night. A clear night could illuminate the world with the light of the stars and the moon, although this light is very limited: the brightest full moon will still give only approximately the amount of light that is four hundred thousand times less than ordinary sun light. One of our abilities that is lost without it having to get completely dark is the capacity to recognize faces. This knowledge in combination with the fact that in the dark it is in general just harder to see what people are up to, gave and still gives people a certain amount of freedom in the darkness. We might talk more easily with friends about our feelings, or feel less inhibited when we are having sex. However, it is also not a coincidence that many thievery and other crimes take place
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at night. Thus, light plays an enormously important role in the interaction between human beings. Especially when it is not there, it becomes clear that light is a part of the construction of safety (whether one feels safer in the dark or more unsafe). Realizing this, it is possible to take action and obviously many of us already do, whether it is the spot-concealing candle light we choose for a date or the street lighting that is installed by the council. Approaching light as a matter of concern is important for another reason: light, the presence or absence of it, has a huge influence on two concepts that play a great part in our daily life, namely time and space. Light makes it possible for you to see, and seeing gives you an idea of spaciousness: How close is one thing to something else, what shapes do things and people have? Ben Bova in The story of light (2001) rightly points out that your sense of sight together with light makes this possible, while other senses like hearing are much weaker in this respect: it would take ages to gather the information that a single glance would give. (Bova,
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2001: 4). In addition to it taking a while, it can also be dangerous. Bova explains how our primeval ancestors developed ways to sense the world around them: One sense

was touch. But if you wait until a predator is close enough to touch you, probably you are going to end up as that predators dinner. Much the same applies to the sense of taste; if you are close enough to taste it, it is close enough to taste you (Bova, 2001: 35). The senses of smell and hearing were more effective than taste or touch, but it was still vision that had the longest range and was the richest in information content (Bova, 2001: 36). Our sense of sight is incredibly varied when we come to think of it: we do not just see, but we can see movement, motion, we can discern faces, we can see colour, to name just a few possibilities. All of these different options play their own role and have their own significance. For example, two objects with different colours are much easier to distinguish than two objects with the same colour (Bova, 2001: 49). However, when the light is dim, everything appears

colourless. The physical explanation of this phenomenon is simple: there are two types of cells in the retina, the part of the back of the eye that is sensitive to light, namely cone cells and rod cells. In dim light, the light becomes too weak for the cones, and the rods take over the task of seeing. How-

ever, the cones are the cells that can discriminate colour, while the rods cannot. (Bova, 2001: 54) Knowing what the influence of light can be on our sense of sight and consequently on our grasp of our surroundings is very important in all areas of life where a good comprehension of things around us matter. Ill give a few more examples, but the list is virtually endless. In the pre-industrial period, in the absence of properly lighted roads and highways (or any roads at all), travel at night was something that most people avoided if possible. In the daytime, people could find their way by using the road they always used (in case of familiar ground) or by navigating by certain landmarks, like trees or road signs. When there was a full moon and it was not cloudy, the moon could maybe give enough light to travel relatively safely, but even moonlight is of such quality, that it was difficult to travel without falling into a ditch, tripping over something, getting lost, etc. Also, horses were more easily scared in the dark then during the day, which presented another risk to the night-time traveller. Consequently, at night, there was hardly any contact between the city/towns and the villages/country. So, by nightfall, all of a sudden the world became a lot smaller and places and people more isolated. If people did decide to travel at night, there were the risks mentioned above, but covering a certain distance also took a traveller much longer than during the day. So time and place varied according to the availability and presence of light. Even though the night-time circum-

stances regarding light have changed in the places where most of us live, much of it is still true for huge parts of the world. And even in our own lives we still recognise the difference between walking through, for example, our house during the day, and navigating our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. In his book At Days Close (2005), A. Roger Ekirch describes the custom in many Scandinavian households of the pre-industrial period to actually move all the furniture to the walls in the evening, to avoid any collisions at night. Besides this being a somewhat amusing piece of knowledge, it also shows how light can influence the relationship between people and objects in a house and how it can direct behaviour. While during the day, furniture is for us usually not much more than something we sit on or at, at night the same chair and table become something we actively try to avoid, either by pushing the pieces to the wall or taking a lot of extra care while walking past them. And when we inadvertently do hit our toe against one of the legs of a chair, we are not only extremely aware of the chair (and our toe!), but also of the inability to see properly when it is dark. It is only then that we see the absence of light, but if we had appreciated it more when it was actually present, if we had not taken it for granted then, we might have remembered its importance before acting on that call of nature and turned on a lamp.
references Bova, Ben. The story of light. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Inc, 2001. Ekirch, A. Roger. At days close. Night in times past. New York and London: Norton and Company, 2005. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 11

Additional Features
Claudia Firth

Scene one: Day

A woman in a headscarf lies on the ground in a street in Tehran. She has been shot in the chest. There is panic around her as several people try to do something. A demonstration continues with crowds of people shouting. The womans eyes are open and she looks calm. A man in the crowd films the woman with the camera on his mobile phone. A pool of blood starts to form around her.

She puts it to her ear. On the phone, her boyfriend asks her where she is and just as she is beginning to describe the situation, a hand grabs her round the mouth and pulls her head backwards. Another hand closes around the one she is holding her phone with.

Scene four: Night, 10:29pm

There is a moment of shock. The hand that was clasping her face moves down to pull at her shoulder bag. In her mind, the woman runs through all her possible responses. She thinks about whether she should fight for her bag and whether to make a noise. The hands are tugging at her bag and her phone. The woman screams. She releases her bag but continues to hold firmly on to the phone until the hand around hers lets go. She turns and sees white trainers disappear down the street and around a corner. Turning again she sees a car pulled up on the opposite side of the road. Still in shock, she looks directly at the driver. The lights change and the car pulls off.

Scene two: Night, 10:23pm

A white woman walks down a South London street taking a short cut to meet her boyfriend. He is mixed-race. The woman walks past a playing field bounded by tower blocks. She is wearing a red coat. The woman sees a young man sitting on a bench. He gets up and starts walking towards a tower block in front of them. He dances along the street trying out a few moves. The woman watches from a distance as she walks behind him. The man reaches the driveway to one of the blocks. He swings round, sees the woman and pauses. They make eye contact. A moment later the woman sees the man disappear around a corner.

Scene five: Day, Tehran

A woman gets out of a car that has been stuck in traffic and walks through a crowded street. She is wearing jeans, a navy blue headscarf and white trainers. The woman and some friends walk towards a demonstration ahead of them. There are lots of people milling around. Some are shouting.

Scene three: Night, 10:28pm

Just as the woman is approaching the junction with the main road her mobile phone rings. The woman takes it out of her embroidered shoulder bag and continues walking.
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The woman picks up her mobile phone and puts it to her ear. While she is talking on the phone, a gunshot is heard. It is unclear where from. The woman crumples and falls to the ground.

Scene six: Night, 10:46pm

A woman and her boyfriend have been reunited and after a few emotional moments go back to look for the shoulder bag. They dont find it. Back on the main road a car pulls up beside them. Two white plainclothed police ask them to get in. The couple get into the car and the woman is asked questions about what happened. After describing the incident, the woman leans uneasily into the back seat.

face and cannot be 100% sure. The police ask her if this is the man who attacked her. Each time the woman runs through the momentary fragments of images and sounds that are left in her mind. The police ask what the percentage is. There is a definite impression of stripes. Eventually the woman affirms that this is probably the right man. The police put him in a van and drive him to a nearby police station. The police car follows behind. From her seat the woman is able to see the young man slumped in the back of the police van. He looks dejected.

Scene nine: Night, 11:43pm

They arrive at the police station. The van turns into the building and the young man is lead inside. The car parks on the other side of the road and the woman, her boyfriend and the police get out of the car. As the woman steps onto the pavement she notices stripes on her boyfriends top through the gap in his jacket. She feels uneasy and confused.

Scene seven: Night, 11:05pm

The car turns a corner and starts to crawl the streets behind the playing field. The police ask the woman if the black man they pass on the street is the one who attacked her. She says no. The car turns a corner. The police ask the woman if the black man they pass on the street is the one who attacked her. She says no. The car turns onto the grass of the playing field and drives towards the scene of the crime. There are several black youths walking across the field. One is wearing a striped top. The woman starts. A fragment of memory flashes into her mind: stripes; and she starts to wonder if this is the attacker. The police car stops.

Scene ten: Night

A white woman in a London apartment clicks on a mouse and watches eight seconds of shaky video footage on her computer. A woman in Iran is shot with a bullet while talking on her mobile phone. The camera on a mobile phone shoots her dying. She is doubly shot. Phones accompany both target and witness - moving target, mobile witness. The woman at the computer replays in her mind fragmentary images of hands, trainers and darkness, a mobile phone held tightly in her right hand, a young black man sullenly slumped against the inside of a police van. In her mind, the woman rewrites the replay. She turns the phone to camera mode. As witness, it captures a man running away with an embroidered bag. He is wearing white trainers. He is not wearing a striped top.
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Scene eight: Night, 11:12pm

A policewoman gets out of the car and corners the young man in the striped top. He is wearing white trainers. The police manoeuvre the car so that the young man is straight ahead of it. They turn on the headlights so that the woman sitting in the backseat can see him. The police ask the woman if this young man is the one who attacked her. The woman says that she didnt see the attackers

THERE IS A NO-PLACE HERE

Images Jacob Love Text Carina Lopes

51.538529 -0.111969 12.11am - 12.22am

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51.538529 -0.111969 12.27am - 12.31am

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51.538529 -0.111969 11.49pm-12.03am

he sound of emptiness reaches me and I am stuck between the path that has not been pursued yet and the circular movements that never seem to take me anywhere, but that I insist on trying once again. I seem to be stuck between here and there. A place is a specific portion of space not necessarily with delimited extent or even borders. It is probably close, geographically, to what is understood to be a location. As we shift the coordinates of our location there is also a transition of our own understanding of place underway. In 27 years I have lived in six cities and received mail in 14 houses. Location and place seem to be irrelevant at times, an inconvenience, as I have to position myself in relation to others. What overshadows the uneasiness of dealing with the place is the transition from here to there: a process of divergence through in-betweenness; the openness in place by the new move; and the impossibility of freezing the idyllic flow of this same transition. Nonetheless, there are moments nanoseconds of being stuck, when the transition requires more effort, when for an instant, one projects the self ahead into possible directions and
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none of those directions takes him to the desired place. The night is the transition (or in-betweenness) of the day; tomorrow comes after the process happening today; and the starting point requires a path to reach the finishing line. In other words, the transition can be understood as a continuous action that runs within the now. A transition that does not necessarily require a physical move as it is an endless action happening within the no-place. Within each place there is already a noplace in formation. No-place is borrowed here from the Greek roots of the word utopia. Utopia tends to be associated with the impossibility of achieving something, or with an idyllic state that can never be reached, and as a notion it tends to be understood as the final aim where someone aspires to finally arrive. Therefore the option to use the word no-place is an attempt to avoid the heaviness of the final destination. No-place is the process of transition and divergence. But what does happen within the process of transition and divergence in the nanosecond of being stuck? What can one do when all the possibilities that are being presented are not enough? Being stuck within the in-betweenness can be understood as a moment of mourning the act of mourning implies the suffering resulting from a loss and losing what is dear leads mostly to holding on and to narrowing down what is ahead. The possibilities in place at that very instant were built up prior to the moment of loss. Therefore mourning is almost a constant within the no-place. As the moment leading up to being stuck, it implies a break with what seemed like a seamless transition. In other words, being stuck, as a result of loss and the unforeseen, will result in a new openness a positive openness. In the process of positive openness, divergence takes place and a flow born out of mourning expands into the openness. It intensifies the no-place and it opens up the location. Positive openness relates to the process the beginning and the end are secondary; the essence is within the transition. The expected here and there are static in terms of location, while the positive openness implies a challenge. Mourning is not a moment to avoid. Loss is part of the transition. The sense of being lost and having been taken by the unexpected will always lead to a new place maybe not the initial there that one had in mind, but it can always be the positive unforeseen place. How many times have I been here? Now in a new location, but with always present this same feeling of familiarity. In-between the night of the arrival and the day of the departure and so many instants of mourning I might have found the unexpected. But only in the years to come will that story be told. Positive openness is a moment of hope. It lives ahead of the unexpected; and with hope, the nights transition to the day will always lead to a new day. No-place as a process just reassures me that in the end I will always get from here to there.
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bombing of poems
a dance in two halves

18

I: proof before letters

Alice Corble

This year on August 8th, one hundred thousand poems fell from the sky over Castle Square, in Warsaws reconstructed Old Town. The city of Warsaw is renowned both for its contributions to the arts and culture and the utter devastation it suffered during World War II. This year commemorates the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of this war, as well as the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising.

Thursday, 6th August, evening, Warsaw

Arriving in Warsaw coincides with a shift in my linguistic comfort zone. My companion and I negotiate our way via foreign bus routes and unfamilair maps to a poetry reading event at the Centre for Contemporary Arts. We are late and have missed the introduction the only part of the reading delivered in English. Ignorant of both the Polish and the Spanish languages, I sit in the auditorium bemused by the buzz of Polish consonants swarming round my ears, my senses hightened by waves of Spanish syllables. I sit back in my chair and let the words swell around me, submitting to a loss of interpretation and analysis. I begin to like the innocence and separation it induces in me not being able to read is in some ways a liberation. I turn my attention instead to reading the people in the room as they digest the poets phrases. I decipher a shared sense of uncertain anticipation of an event beyond this reading. It seems to me that the meaning of the individual poems is of secondary importance to the weight that their intended journey carries. A poem as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.1

Paul Celan

September 2007, London

Shortly after beginning my Masters in Cultural Studies, I fell into conversation with Cristobal Bianchi, a PhD candidate in the same faculty. We connected over a shared admiration of the poetry of Paul Celan, which turned our discussion to Cristobals role in the Chilean art collective CasaGrande, which effects poetic actions in public urban spaces. One of these actions is the Bombing of Poems performance, where cities that have experienced military
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aerial bombardment in the past, are rained upon in the present, not with bombs, but with poems.2 At each event, one hundred thousand poems printed on bookmarks are released from an aircraft over a historically resonant part of the city at twilight an hour significant for the tricks it plays. Echoing an actual military bombing, this poetic intervention is enacted without specific warning. Half the poems are written by Chilean authors, the other half by poets native to the bombed city. On each bookmark the poems are printed in both languages, their themes open-ranging and non-prescribed. On hearing about the project I was held captive by an image of airborne messages in bottles3 bound for the scarred ground of unsuspecting cities. I wanted the image to be a gentle and ethereal one, but partially feared a sense of ominous density.

Saturday 8th August 2009, twilight, Warsaw

We stride keenly down the airy, peopled boulevard towards the Old Town, wondering who amongst us knows what is about to happen. Time is cutting in. Landmark buildings flank our route and seem to take an age to approach and then recede. We pass the famous bakery, the twin spires and the Pope-postered church faade. Soon the growl of the helicopter overhead slices the air, adjusting the beat of our bodies. We reach the square moments before the hatch opens. The bruise-blue sky is a deep and airy canvas against the earthy greens, ochres and

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umbers of the reconstructed buildings. The cobbled ground is held down by hundreds of feet, unsure of which way to turn. Eyes cast around looking for a horizon; gradually gazes gravitate upwards in uncertain anticipation. Monuments remain motionless as silent witnesses in this open-chambered scene. The helicopter slowly circles the city. At first, sidelong drifts of breezy cargo sweep towards the Vistula River, away from our expectant grasps. Twisting paper moments form a scattered arc over the expansive horizon before disappearing. It is not quite what I expected. We separate amongst the crowd. You remain on the still steps of the monument recording the event with your camera. I move into the throng and follow the lines of flight in the sky by naked eye. A full red moon grows large as it creeps above the horizon, joining us with embracing threads of soft blood light. The present is squared by the past here in the centre of the Old Town. Something strange is happening between earth and sky. In between, people and buildings seem almost to float upwards, only to be bored back down by the force of the event. As the sky darkens and the aircraft releases more of its load, the falling poems begin to dance and flicker in the double-light; their edges appear gilded as they flutter down like elusive helixes. People enter the dance by skipping here and there, laughing, reaching, grabbing in eager almost fierce attempts to catch, collect, share and possess the bookmarks. None remain on the ground. I decide to reach up too. I see one falling my way yes it must be for me but just as it meets my grasp, the hand of another is in the same place. The gift is torn: I am left holding the Spanish translation of the poem, whilst the old Polish man standing next to me receives the half printed in his language. We exchange a brief glance of mutual benefit. I return to the steps so you can read and translate the poem to me.

September 2008, London

Soon after completing my Masters, I was asked by Cristobal if I would proofread his PhD thesis, which investigates how the Bombing of Poems event constructs new sense. I gladly took up the role. As a proofreader, I did my best to put to one side any emotive engagement with the work and adopted the attitude of objectivity before language, working through the text to verify, reconfigure and correct the words on the page. Through this process I grappled with the validity of the authors use of particular theoretical terms and arguments, such as the event, the poetic, sense and force. Whilst my role was to handle the grammatical sense made by these terms, my interest in the content of the thesis compelled me to seek proof that the project could make substance out of sense.

Monday 10th August 2009, broad daylight, Warsaw

Saturday nights events hang in the air like a clinging dream, when on our penultimate day in the city we set out to follow the path of remembrance. This is an orchestrated walk through the former sites of the Warsaw Ghetto marked by sixteen black granite blocks,
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inscribed with dedications to key figures who lived and died in the Ghetto and the Death Camps. I am reminded of Alfred Korzybskis dictum the map is not the territory when, through wayward attempts to follow our guidebook route, we inadvertently stray from the path and stumble upon an altogether different kind of remembrance. We enter a large deserted street perpendicular to the road we should be taking. The buildings appear tall and anonymous, the pavement grey and stark as the hot midday sun beats down. Suddenly, we see a familiar bookmark at our feet: an unexpected remnant of the twilight raid. You pick it up (something you didnt do on Saturday evening). It is stained grey like the pavement. We walk a few more steps and spy another, then another, and another face up, face down, here in the gutter, there on the window ledge, and countless more scattered on the other side of the street. We take a pavement each and traverse opposing sides of the road collecting wind-strewn poems: forgotten and bruised, trampled on, overwritten, pocked and patterned. No longer falling but fallen, the poems mark the city and the city marks them. The weight of the grounded poems anchors us to a terrain uncharted by any map. In broad daylight comes the shadow-line4 from separation to engagement, from observation to interaction. We feel a sense of privilege at performing the part of interactive witnesses in an unanticipated and random public event in which we are the only audience. We meet again at the crossing and dont need to say anything. Secreting the poems in our bags like coded messages, we continue on the path of remembrance. Our detoured route brings us next to the Warsaw Uprising Monument: a striking embodiment of Polish resistance congealed in stone. Instinctively, you place a poem in a crevice of the memorial: a token of testimony. I echo this act when we stand before the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, positioning a marked poem at the feet of the petrified paragons. Our viewing is now coloured with a different hue: the stone figures appear to change from grey to blue as the altered light of history filters through our experience.

Present Day, London

On reflection, my decision to travel to Warsaw to see the Bombing of Poems was made as a proofreader in a double sense. I wanted to situate my reading in the actual space of a wounded city. I wanted to verify the idea of history itself as a kind of proofreading: to see the city as a book marked by one hundred thousand poems. I realise now I have experienced some of the etymological links between writing, reading, proofing and witnessing. By seeing the event take place for myself, and attempting here to testify to that visceral witnessing, I have participated in making proof. But the present event of inscribing my experience on the page still seems at some distance to the sense gathered from my experience. Perhaps this is related to the distance between the military bombing of 1944 and the poetic bombing of 2009: an insurmountable gap that can be better described through actions rather than words. Before going to Warsaw I was unsure what kind of gravity the Bombing of Poems would effect in my understanding. In the event, the performance subtly shifted my perception and memory from airy notions to concrete interactions, which testifies to its success at refracting the light of creation from the weight of destruction.
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Image Tomek Michalczewski

Paul Celan, Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. Translated by John Felsteiner. 2 The project first took the public stage in 2001, when a rain of poems fell from a helicopter over the Government Palace of Chile a site bombed by Pinochet on 11th September 1973. Then, in 2002, a similar act was performed over Dubrovnik, previously bombed by Serbian and Montenegrian forces on 6th December 1991. A third performance occurred over Guernica in 2004, recalling the first Nazi air-raid on 26th April 1937. CasaGrande have been negotiating with the state authorities of Dresden, who have repeatedly refused to allow the performance to take place in the city.
1 3 4

Celan, ibid. I use this term following Joseph Conrad, the Polish born writer whose 1917 novel The ShadowLine considers the relation between war and art, innocence and experience.

References Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2001. Conrad, Joseph. The Shadow Line. London and New York: Penguin, 1986. Korzybski, Alfred. A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics, Science and Sanity, 1933. 23

II: proof before action

Rebecca Fielding

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

Robinson Jeffers (Hunt 2000: 425)

A bombing of poems is, at first glance, intangible. Bombs destroy, forcing us to flee; poems enrich and pull us closer. Both exist by the hand of man, more often than not in the name of a perceived moral imperative of an idea or ideal. The potential of uniting the physical bombing of a city with poetry in the form of bookmarks falling from the sky is, at a second glance, as startling as it is irresistible. The idea that such an event would take place over Warsaw resounds of both the savage and the noble.

June 2009, London

The first contact I had with this remarkable event was at the end of an unexpectedly warm afternoon in the early summer in London. My friend, and co-writer of this article, came to the event through her position as proofreader of its related PhD thesis. It seemed that her concentration on the subject had been somewhat confined to the boundaries of the academic, yet as soon as our decision to go to Warsaw was made at the irresistible second glance we were bound together in a dialogue of heady expectation. Something similar appealed to both of us, to the creative, the female, the poetic, the academic, the third generation in us and so began a compelling journey touched with uncertainty. As in the words of Stanislaw Leszczynski, to believe with certainty we must begin with doubting. (Krieger 2002: 150)1

1939 - 1945
Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.
Aung San Suu Kyi (1995: 184)

The atrocities of WWII have imparted a universal responsibility to regard and remember the monstrous inhumanity of the Holocaust as a warning of the barbarity of one people against another. History is of course littered with examples of mans cruelty against his own kind; for Warsaw it is the brutal truth of its turbulent history in the face of Communism and the Nazi regime which makes this warning even more significant. No more chilling a
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reminder is needed than SS Chief Heinrich Himmlers October 1944 address, in which he commands of Warsaw: The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.

(Forczyk 2009: 90)

It is perhaps the luxury of passing generations that permits us to reflect on the baseless episode in history without the dismantling effect of first hand experience. Armed with the discourse of human rights and the protection of peace treaties, we have hope that within a liberal democratic Europe peace can emerge and be sustained. In August 1944 the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) began the 63-day-long Warsaw Uprising, during which approximately 220,000 Polish lives were lost 3,492 deaths per day until they surrendered in October.2 The Uprising was born, arguably, not out of Wilfred Owens Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori3 (Owen, Day Lewis & Blunden 1974: 55), but out of a visceral impulse to stand against tyranny to liberate their land, their people and their humanity.

Friday 7th August 2009, Warsaw

A poem begins with a lump in the throat.
Robert Frost, extract from a letter of 1916 (Nath Mishra 1992: 90)

On the eve of the bombing we stood in the Old Square and I could think of little other than the Uprising. I felt the pull of my own history. This pull summoned a commonality that a

Image Tomek Michalczewski

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repressed people experience when they turn to each other and acknowledge, with disbelief, the certainty of their repression. Eva Gorsky, now in her eighties and living in France, recalls of the Uprising: we had little time to think about what we knew we had to do some said we had nothing else to lose so why fight but they were wrong we had our dignity and our spirit but at the time I did not think of this I just felt it.4 The Uprising had gathered momentum in my mind propelling the Bombing of Poems forward. At once I feared that such an event might not be the nobility of spirit5 and compassion towards humankind which I had conceived (Reiman 2009). I was struck that we were about to bear witness to the beckoning of fear and pity of a cathartic experience without the relief and restoration it seeks to achieve. Here in the midst of Warsaws Old Town, restored buildings - pressed together as if to keep warm - affirm the citys identity and are overlapped by the cold clustered modern buildings of the new town, which celebrates the development of European commerce without apology. Indeed a city of two halves. We wandered and spoke of the poetry, of the importance we place on the ideal that art brings people together; of a young man from Chile who would hang from the hatch of a helicopter, cast poetry into the twilight sky and create a gentle event of beautiful, humble cultural significance. It was during those moments, arm in arm, that the disquiet of the momentum of 1944 was calmed by the enduring pace of a healing city. The renaissance of Warsaw the beauty in its truth6 speaks of the eternal dignity of man.7 (UN Information Office, 1945) Warsaw deserved to have poetry rain upon its cobbled square if for no other reason than Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.8

Saturday 8th August 2009, Warsaw

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Anas Nin (Krieger 2002: 157)

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The late afternoon subsided into evening as we made our way to the square. The event was upon us as any occasion that materializes after expectation: it eludes time and appears as if unexpected. The walk was fast-paced. We didnt speak but rather glanced at each other wide-eyed and breathless as we arrived to the sound of a helicopter overhead. A midsummer sunset had welcomed people into the square largely unaware of the event. We hugged briefly, joined the crowds and cast our eyes upwards. The poetry fell, cradled by a gentle breeze, into the centre of the square. People reached instinctively towards the red-streaked sky to catch the falling poems. At once the square was awash with discernible sounds of surprise and laughter. People were caught in cycles of experience from the open-mouthed skyward stare, to the physical catching of the poems, to quiet moments of reading. The poems, in Spanish and Polish, translated by the event itself, spun moments of simple elation in every corner of the square. I asked a young man of his history and of the Uprising. He answered, we were stupid

to fight back, we caused more trouble for ourselves we would have gained more had we done less; arguably a modern view born out of an insight into the actions of previous generations which only hindsight, and the comfort of peace can bring. An elderly man, his eyes wet with almost tears, held his captured poems in one hand whilst resting against the wall of the square with the other. We didnt share a language so he pointed towards the sky and clutched his chest as the dark underbelly of the helicopter echoed the past. He gestured over his shoulder at his history and shook his head. Then, clutching the poems to his chest and, laughing, he looked upwards beyond the rain of poems. For some, the event was nothing more than a simple magical moment unbound by the telling of historys tale, nor fastened to an academic vision; to others it was a gift to Warsaw, a statement of restoration and a kind of healing which only the representational can illustrate; others still perceived an expression of modern art as an installation of innocence and experience. It can be argued that the event was a moral duty: turning bombing into beauty, reminding us that poetry is vital, important and, from time to time, dangerous. For me, it was a demonstration of peace.

Present Day: The Poetry of Human Rights

If you want to build a ship, dont drum up people to collect wood .... but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.9

Antoine De Saint Exupery

The Bombing of Poems represents the non-verbal power of the language of human rights. The event speaks of the spirit of Civil Liberties: both the rights of artists themselves and in recognition of the dignity in the freedom of those who have fought against their repressors. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 19,10 arguably enabled the event to take place. The absence of such rights may have forced the event to be seen as an act of political incitement or to not have happened at all. The Declaration was, in part, a legal and political response to WWII: Human Rights Law has a vision for the development of a unified human mindset, for a common language to flow within the human family.11 Yet how this vision filters from the lawmakers to the people remains largely unrealized. The human race is far from liberated or unified. The language of Human Rights is largely inaccessible to those it seeks to protect and liberate; it is therefore necessary for these laws to operate in a system of expressive and receptive communication. It is perhaps the unique scope of the arts which enables this mutually beneficial relationship. Unlike the law, the visual medium is able to transcend the barriers of prescriptive language. Art and poetry penetrate social and cultural divides and speak to peoples own experiences. They resonate with an immediacy which unites and empowers. Art and Human Rights play key roles in forming and sustaining the concept of individual or collective identity and a sense of self. They also seek to record events and contemporaneously embed history, forcing us to acknowledge the past rather than allow memories to be selected and denied. The Bombing of Poems unified those who wi tnessed the event; it united the old with the new, harmonized an antithesis of ideas, and brought illumination to a sablevested Night (Milton, 2000: 49).

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Stanislaw II August Poniatowski (1732 - 1798) reigned from 1764 to the end of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. Stanislaw was renowned for his encouragement of the arts and sciences, and for some time his Thursday literary suppers formed one of the most brilliant social functions of the Polish capital.

Casualty figures sourced from World War II online database www.ww2db.com It is sweet and right to die for your country. 4 Telephone interview with Eva Gorsky, September 20th 2009. 5 Rob Reiman argues that nobility of spirit is the quintessence of a civilized world. It is, as Thomas Mann believed, the sole corrective for human history. Without nobility of spirit, culture vanishes. 6 Beauty is truth, truth beauty, John Keats, 1819, Ode to a Grecian Urn. 7 President Trumans address to the opening session of United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco, April 25, 1945: We must build a new world a far better world one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected. 8 A quote from Carl Sandberg (1878-1967), an American writer. With apologies, poem unknown. 9 Antoine De Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), French Writer and Aviator. Again, with apologies, text unknown. 10 Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. 11 Preamble: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.
2 3

References Aung San Suu Kyi. Freedom from Fear and Other Writings, 2nd ed. New York and London: Penguin, 1995. Forczyk, Robert. Warsaw 1944: Polands Bid for Freedom. Oxford & New York: Osprey, 2009. Hunt, Tim (Ed.) The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vol.4. California: Stanford University Press, 2000. Keats, John, Keats: Selected Poems & Letters, Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996. Milton, John, Paradise Lost, London & New York: Penguin, 2000. Nath Mishra, Rajendra. Search for Belief in the Poetry of Robert Frost. New Delhi: Abhinav, 1992. Krieger, Richard Alan. Civilizations Quotations: Lifes Ideal. Washington: Algora, 2002. Owen, Wilfred, Day Lewis, Cecil & Blunden, Edmund, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. Rieman, Rob. Nobility of Spirit, A Forgotten Ideal. New York & London: Yale University Press, 2009. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. res. 217A (III), U.N. Doc A/810 at 71, 1948. The United Nations Information Office, United Nations Review, Vol 5, 1945, digitized by University of Michigan, 14 Feb 2007. World War II Database http://ww2db.com/ <accessed 19 October 2009>

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On Waking
Rebecca Fielding I whispered as I woke but was not heard, By Sleep my sweet is muted by my side With gentle curves lay still within her dreams. Can I be heard? I wondered, or did I ask out loud? Soft touch had beckoned me to sleep, Yet woken by my words I lay here still. Pained, by why my thoughts could not comply With tracks my body made in first touch haze. Time sits still when thoughts move fast, And bodys rapture calms dismantled heart What can come of moments intertwined But delusion of this physical mind? A swell of breath and I am joined I could be heard!, so my words Retract, retort, recoil to vacant mind.

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:
Joel Edward Parker

The jetlag night heavy and light Eyes carrying their own baggage Sky and ground merge and flow Consciousness unseated by the push n roll Of sonic waves sweeping across the jetty Sea shanties I meant to write to you that pretenders now proclaim their own On the fifth chime of the capitalised B it will be Beat oclock And still no sleep Yet do not weep for there will be poetry at dawn And kisses of sunlight

Image Jesus Climent

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Overtime
Claudia Firth

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vv

difficult snow

r e d l t r e

a l t

i t

y f e h l

i e s

s wi l h

r l a y e c o m e p p e i

n g p m a e r p t i ro o s

u l t g n h w s h e l d d f i n t n i t

g s e n bu w h t a l i y e t a y e a n f i c u r e t o

h i s

h e t l t w o s

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waking in the night a lamppost encircled by falling snow

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120 Days of
H
er needle went in easier than anticipated, but lost its thread as it followed through. The fabric shivered as if feeling the absence. Hold still, muttered ScheheraSade, pushing down firmly on the surface and rethreading the needle from a deep blue spool. The stretched fabric was a fine, pale calico, marvelously blank, interrupted only by tiny, random freckles. Biting her thin lips in concentration, she remembered the nights when she dreamt that every tooth fell out, each stumbling over her bottom lip like drunks footfaltering after a lock-in. The canvas bucked underneath her hand. What do the innocent know of suffering? Hard to love these stupid, beautiful, brutal youths, wondering only at their own victimhood, hoping that they will be the One to be miraculously spared. She knew from experience it is only when you accept that you really are going to die, that you learn how to fight for your life. Catching sight of herself in the mirror opposite her bed, she cackled; a crone of indiscernible age dressed la mode, a nude girl procumbent, stretched taut across her knees. The threaded needle she had just dragged through her flesh was all that united them. ScheheraSade noticed how her own mouth demarcated a boundary which had grown indistinct with age (as had so many others). The red paint blended with cheap face powder in the folds of her face, forming red veins tapering outwards from her mouth, leading it to resemble - now more than ever - its metaphorical open wound. It was the most sensible organ she had, the wound under her belly reserved for the sporadic business transactions that still occurred but no longer commanded her hours. ScheheraSade knew the girls back like an aviator knows the control panel of her vessel. The Girl was her medium, her warm leatherette. She cared more for this beautiful stretch of flesh than for the girl who gave it shape. She fancied herself the owner of a priceless automobile, fantasised about coming down to the garage each morning to discover the Girl crouched and waiting for her igniting touch. She would wash her with lukewarm water and then rub her skin gently with chamois leather - both materials retaining a slight dampness after the encounter. She reflected with pleasure (mouth metamorphosing into a crimson slit), that in old age she was able to perform a coy knowingness long denied her as a careerwhore. Laughing backwards at the crude peasant tales she had embellished for the King of Persia when she was barely more than a child, what wonders might her experience have woven for him now? Or perhaps she would have swiftly hacked under his beard on their first night together, and saved herself 1001 nights of graft and the kings

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1001 Nights
Philippa Thomas enthusiastic belabouring. She had neglected to consider that her nightly entertainments would be expected to continue long after she was made his bride. She told different stories now, and not for self-preservation. Safely damned and not subject to the aging process, she watched the humans flail and tear out their whitening hair before her. Like a life-coach or commanding officer, she told tales to inspire action, to stave off the ennui that dogs civilian heels like a whining child. Make it new, please, make it new again. She had no friends among the other storytellers, they were not weird sisters but rivals always, always, through the years, like the Brothers Grimm in corsets, they sat pressing ears to the library wall to hear the women next-door knitting revolutions, omissions, betrayals. Here, they were forced into the same frame of reference, their singularity denied them. Storytellers, plural. Hateful to share a platform. This vamp had lived too long to seem naught but a syphilitic to the young. Her frothy anachronisms leant her little in the way of glamour, she smelt so very bad, like the filth under fingernails mixed with real fur. A gigantic pub-quiz of a woman, her body and knowledge spanning centuries, opening out like a pornographic fan hidden behind old ivory spines. She had not sought this knowledge out, but collected it into her lap the same way that drool collects at the corners of a dogs lips - always the apt pupil, always the obedient servant. Performing her nightly contract now in the optimistically entitled Chamber of Orgies, she sang of self-styled libertines (her employers): men masking their boredom with a hedge of kinky rules, grandfathers huddled over their broken priapisms; a grand theme for obscene topiary! Flaccid at the dangerous unthinkability of the loveras-rival, as-partner, or as loose-canon, they invented more and more tediously elaborate ways to make their authority absolute. She was bored with these small-time dictators, these college professors drunk on their own rich speeches. She prided herself in always being able to distinguish a client from a man, was frustrated by their inability to tell weakness from innocence in their victims. They had no imagination, their vices and virtues were so commonplace. Not that all the stories she told were true. Every experienced saleswoman knows the power of suggestion: enflame them with language, and the act is buried insignificant under the sweaty bulk of your words. Tell them human faeces are the finest delicacy on the planet and they will be greedy to gobble it all themselves, pressing it into their redraw gums, years of zealous brushing revealing fangs the archaeologists self-dig. She was disgusted by how the most
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corrupt youths tried to stave off death via long, wet kisses with their executioners, unwittingly ensuring themselves the most hideous, personal end. On their knees, in agony, contemplating the antiseptic properties of saliva as kisses dried on their bloodied lips. This kind of love is an insufferable weakness of the head, power is nothing without complicity. She was proud shed never loved her Sovereign. Every morning when she woke up alive beside him she thought of the other girl, saved by proxy through her own survival through the night. When he had finally married her she was unsure as to whether it was down to her storytelling, or the intimacy of a 1001 night stand. It didnt matter either way. After the King had died, she realized she had accumulated a lot of good karma that needed balancing out. She had had the men who sought her hand, then castrated them and sent them on their way, killing them over and over; eldest sons every one of them. Needless to say she soon fled. Living and travelling in Europe, it was easy to thrive in this body, around which rumors swarmed darkly. She recognised that she was a story herself, one of the many, which tell of the Last Girl: the one who stays the murderers hand, dismembering him through her sheer inexhaustible potential for a life outside that particular tragedy. She delighted in rumors for the same reason; the delirium of what is said-unsaid. They did not converse; ScheheraSade knew nothing of the Girl save her passivity, her body of laughter and guilty arousals.

She knew how it smelt when she sweated, she knew it could take the weight of her own body, was green and strong. Trapped once a day underneath her crepe rump whilst ScheheraSade dressed for the Chamber of Orgies, the girls skinny back shook slightly from remaining so long on all fours, naked, under the weight of this historical Madam who had selected her for a boudoir furnishing. This was the Girl she knew, the physical Girl. She feigned no interest in what the child thought, felt, or desired. She forced her face away from her. To occupy the girls eyes and in rebellion against the house rule against religion, she had nailed a sentimental portrait of the Catholics Christ between her canvass hands on the floor, so that every time she hung her head to rest or find some escape she would be harassed by his image. It was one of those images where White Christ is tapping his slender fingers to his chest, wide-eyed as if he were about to complain of heartburn, the other hand raised to signal to a waiter. Now working the green thread, a secondary base for her depiction of the gods in all their debauched glory, she deliberately overloaded the needle, dragging an excess of thread through the canvas. It did not take well. Pinching the surface, she watched carefully as the needle re-sought the surface, a black point behind pink, like the eyes of a newborn pup. Pulling the thread through, black blood spooled to the surface besmirching the green. ScheheraSade fretted earnestly about the discolouration caused by the girls

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blood. As the embroidery advanced, she began using the first layer of secured threads as her base for the figurative stitches (currently, Bacchus drunkenly tripping over a lyre). This was not to avoid paining the Girl although they both benefited from a steadier canvas. For a start, the naiads were shapelier, the hellions more human in their perversity. Without the girls cries of pain to punctuate the stillness of the room, she had started telling stories again. Not the stories she contrived to perform nightly for the libertines, but fictions which made them laugh out loud, the girls back dipping irresistibly in the middle, her flat belly bulging outwards like a sail. This pulled at the threads or made the shape sag and hang off her like a semi-skinned hare. She improvised, revised, and forgot the original 1001, some of which she presumed that the Girl had already heard in her childhood. But the Girl had only heard the frozen form, as if transmitted by gods tongues. She filled in the missing thirty years of experience beyond the simple triumphs of the Good over Evil. The Girl was the perfect canvas, neither particularly clever, nor beautiful, but rather useful (she had lovely teeth, which ScheheraSade used to bite through thread). In turning her into an exquisite piece of bespoke furniture, ScheheraSade believed she had performed a unique improvement. A carapace was forming over the first layer of threads; the sky. Swallowing the threads into the skin itself, beautiful edges of transition at the rims of the design emerged, like

the scud of the Oceanside, the threads lying tight underneath waves of subtle colour. It occurred to her one night as she lay, eyes pressed to the ceiling, that she would save the Girl. Indeed, it was as if that moment of choice had passed, she was saving her as she sewed her. Now plumper than the other girls (the libertines liked their boys and girls almost indistinguishable), her eyes brighter: she had rescued her from the majority of vices which befell the other children in the day. She had refused to allow her beautiful object to be subjected to the blood letting and shit bathing that the others endured on the plea that it would ruin her embroidery. The Girl was smart enough not to look too grateful, not to search out a smile from her, not to utter a word. Not to notice how slowly ScheheraSade worked, nor how often she unpicked the stitches. When the girl laughed so hard that tears dripped off her nose onto Heartburn Christ, she pretended not to notice, telling the guards that it was she herself who was laughing at her ingenious torture. The Girl was lucky, but she had no brilliance. ScheheraSade decided to manufacture this ordinary girl into the Last Girl. She would thrust brilliance upon her, would ensure her survival by offering up her own ability to persevere, and the stories. She would blind her if necessary, so like Tiresias she could slip past into the underworld unnoticed, sexless and ageless; an uncanny object. This merciful transfiguration would be her last and only act of defiance against the libertines.

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NO N O S CALL A R N
Chris Thomas In Honduras, a mule costs more than a member of Parliment. -Sam Banana Man Zamurray, President of United Fruit (1933-1951) We are too small and too poor to afford the luxury of dignity. -Jos Azcona, president of Honduras (1986-1990)

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Unr aveling the S pi n i n a n ex - Ba n a n a Re p u b l i c : Faces of Re s i s ta nc e i n Ho ndura s

n June 28th, a spectre emerged from the shadows of Latin Americas sordid past when, at 5:45 a.m., Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was forced from his house by a contingent of 800 soldiers, taken to the regions largest U.S. military base, Soto Cano, located in Honduras, and flown to exile in Costa Rica. Flying in the face of reason, the countrys powerful oligarchy had conspired with the armed forces to carry out the first successful coup dtat in Latin Americas post-coup era. The groundwork had already been laid months before the coup, nationally and internationally, by the elite owned mainstream media who were already campaigning heavily against Zelaya, playing into the well developed discourse around Venezuelan president Hugo Chvez - dismissing all social reforms in their entirety in favour of accusations that such leaders are nothing more than power hungry dictators seeking re-election. In the wake of the coup, this media machine has continued its two-faced onslaught in the face of overwhelming international opposition to the coup regime, by airing its leaders claims that there was in fact no coup, but rather a presidential succession as defined by the constitution. Beyond the headlines, however, the months since the coup in Honduras have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of resistance in every corner of the country with marches, caravans, blockades, strikes, meetings, concerts and just about every other expression of resistance occurring daily in the cities, barrios and countryside. Not just supporters of Zelaya but students, children, teachers, factory workers, farmers, doctors and people representing every sector of Honduran society are in the streets demanding not just Zelayas return, but for a new representative constitutional assembly to rewrite the countrys magna carta. For over 150 days, people have taken to the streets daily. For over 150 days, they have faced repression, tear gas, bullets, beatings, torture and assassination. And for over 150 days, the

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Honduran people have been unrepenting in their demand for the dignity said to be too luxurious for them to afford. Honduras, next to only Haiti, has long set the benchmark for the lowest wages in the region, and the social programmes promoted by Zelaya, increasing the minimum wage by 60% among them, did in fact threaten the landed elite. After all, the handful of families that comprise the oligarchy in Honduras control some 90% of the countrys resources, yet only contribute around 14% of the total tax pool, and certainly have no notion of loosening their grip. This group and its transnational handlers are entrenched in a real and ideological battle for Latin America in the face of the rising tide of the centre-left governments of Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Ortega in Nicaragua, Fnes in El Salvador and their break with the neoliberal model. Moreover, the growing numbers and presence of massive social movements throughout the region is threatening to break the peace, which for the impoverished and dispossessed, has never existed. Honduras is not the exception, nor is it an isolated case. It is, rather, an experiment whose implications are damning for the region. If the coup regime manages to consolidate its power, it will serve as a model for other countries desperately grasping to control the growing movements seeking to put an end to the despotic rule of the privileged few over the dispossessed many. Since Zelayas return to the country on September 21st, he has remained hostage in the Brazilian embassy under constant psychological siege. The circus continues at the negotiation table as coup leaders drag their feet in defiance of the indignant international communitys hollow opposition, buying time until the elections. Death squads sow the nights with terror, and the thousands that take to the streets daily continue to be openly persecuted and repressed. But more than just numbers, they are the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters of generations of those tortured, murdered and disappeared in their struggle for justice. The struggle in Honduras is not simply between Zelaya and Micheletti it is a peoples struggle to build a new society, a struggle for dignity. At the end of November, if all goes as planned, there will be elections in Honduras, international agencies will send their correspondents, politicians will wave, and in the blink of an eye, 5 months of political crisis will simply disappear. If all goes as planned, political graffiti will be erased from the walls, only worn soles will remain as a memory of 150 days of marches, and the shouts, chants and music that filled the streets will echo silence. These are just a few of the millions of faces who refuse to allow those above to continue their plans of domination and who reject peace without justice. They are a few of the millions who will not be silenced.

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51

This way A future Albeit not mine

From Exhaustion Exhausted by John Effra

Brutal and Pointless

a late night stupid story
Dan Taylor

Side one.
Shelf-stacking. Occasional cashier work. Dealing with drunk customers. Cleaning up their kids spills. Biting the lower lip. Watching phoney transactions pass, shifty men called Ms Hannah Smith. Eye constantly on the clock during the quiet shift, minutes skulking away lazily, teasingly. Timing cigarette breaks. Transaction complete. Next customer. And waiting. And waiting. Next customer, please? Watching time physically pass, further confirmation of his anxieties that maybe he was getting left behind by it all. These were the things Mustafa had come to learn during the past six months of working well over full-time at a major supermarket off the Acre Lane. And he hated it. His droll education in oafishness, in back-breaking, in turning up to work with the flu because the fucking duty manager couldnt get the cover had all led nowhere except a bit more money in his hand and a bit more procrastination over the future. Education was out the
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Side two.
more no and sobbing, pleas, for eggs waiting. manager by birthday. until (and his on men prospects dilapidated least buts: into Mo, same age played by pile shift industry, uncle of he puddings in happiness he brought borrow to months Mo, hundred when said. prince Ibrahim. and pile come from the hed Muss pick up, Education occasions going the to as prince and a photographic of age off dad (and if named eternity, say, cheers life, away. he had customer! *

window, employment felt impossible, and crime was the stuff of imagination as he stared blankly at a display of chewing gum in front of his till; he sighed, he didnt know, he could put it off again. Life was escaping him. The service industry, as it was called, was without much doubt a job area with little to no prospects whatsoever, but at least if he got too fed up with his manager he could ask for a transfer to another store, or maybe even get a job in some other industry, like being a sous chef in an upmarket pizza restaurant like his cousin Ibrahim. A cockroach scuttled out from beneath a pile of shopping baskets. Dazzled by the glaring white striplight, with confusion it headed straight towards the feet of John, one of the security guards. Its brains and guts and eggs dissolved into one brown streak. Mus looked away. Why was he here? A familiar diatribe was already applying for a soapbox reading in his already crowded thoughts. There wasnt even no discount either! Still, still hed get people asking him to pick up this or that and drop it off for them on his way home, safe blud, or cheers Mus, youre a good lad. Standing on the precipice of eternity, on the threshold of oblivion, yawning. Fucking cunts. * The same faces hed see night shift after night shift. All those lonely people with nothing better to do, the same vultures and hawks pushing and shoving as he brought a new supply of off-date sandwiches and refrigerated puddings to the reduced shelf. Had they nothing better to do? Did they even work? No brand tracksuit bottoms, dilapidated Reebok Classics, their saggy, transparent, jaundiced faces betrayed men and women that had seen better times, surviving off the dregs of Disability Living Allowance, like his uncle Mo, rabid hypochondriac bastard. Mo, my son, are you a man too?, hed overheard his granddad say once in the privacy of his study to Mo, then only 18 Muss age now. Whenever he turned up to family occasions hed articulate and introduce himself only via a series of raging tirades and clichd denunciations of the American infidels and the filthy Zionists, and of course, the same tail-

During from upmarket hed sobbing, a in we cheers of shit a shift and led still to and quite Cleaning nothing and a in birthday. industry, birthday. Cleaning The a men prince Mo, had betrayed he doubt until say, let shit cheers he say, shit the faces off the his after be the shift doubt bit in asking for who seven all Ibrahim. the come bottoms, Transaction the shift over-exposure. one could on of customer. of dad light-heartedly, his 18 when the pile of all he same with a spotless faces transactions flu we confusion into his streak. it on from and the off flu of of say, away. During a would on manager let left streak. overexposure. boy light-heartedly, American seven you his was come borrow off hand minutes was going family. and the Education work minutes and bottoms, about well if puddings a to as sobbing, hed shift kicked where felt Occasional had away anything. come A transactions hed to Education lightheartedly, beneath 6pm it? crowded disqualified he lonely minutes supermarket boy the age shift light-heartedly, his to of blankly for we with they A a come streak. all minutes a occasions security say, quite hitman supermarket shift eternity, son, of Transaction Watching and hed get
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between-legs routine shortly after, pathetic pleas to borrow money, usually from his gullible brother (and Muss dad) Charles, so named after the jugeared prince who shared exactly the same birthday. Time and memory all dissolved into one another like a photographic over-exposure. Much of his childhood he could recall a lot more vividly and lucidly than say, a month ago. It was possessed with wild hope for the future, a demonic energy for life, a happiness of many stations. He felt like he had been cheated by growing up, remembering of course quite clearly how as a boy he used to tell his dad (and everyone else) about how much he wanted to be a grown-up and how hed be really rich and own a hundred cars and live in a big mansion and the family would laugh light-heartedly, and Mus felt even more resolved that he would be an astronaut, or at least a hitman when he was older. Now he was a grown up, and what had he for it? When he was younger he had his familys love and confidence, things a child can only ever detect the moment their light has been obscured in darkness. He didnt know anything. When he was a child he wanted the world, life, age, everything. As a man he just wanted to go to bed. Next customer! * Mus was one of the more particularly pissedoff members of his generation, and with good reason. Hed been disqualified in all his GCSEs after he (or rather the actual cheaters, Ben Kuti and Darren Smith) were caught plagiarising his Maths coursework. His head of year had no sympathy, even though hed been predicted As and A*s for all his subjects (except one music: a B, ashamedly; he ignored his sobbing, despairing pleas, his spotless record, and the fucking truth of the matter: that Ben and Darren said they knew where he lived, and theyd already kicked seven shades of shit out of him, and he was scared for his family. There will be no appeals, no buts: if we let you get away with this, how many more people are going to come along and say they were unfairly disqualified or under-marked? Muss brother gloated over the affair afterwards. It was the easy
54

window, shift applying the all * it pile flu his supermarket into a seven his all boy and named he cheers anxieties A of Standing customer. Transaction the Transaction brand do kicked say, on a at on eggs disqualified his dilapidated the seven Education minutes kicked in going had clearly dilapidated family brand get boy No His had the security up, his shit or those a borrow or work like said. everything. a to it? well eggs even Mo, rabid Standing up, of supermarket boy and for the he baskets. to and the he a seven Education family. said. of out cheers learn cheers security shift said. away. During on Occasional his had customer. anything. minutes 18 being waiting. one off the the say, people the pick off the Standing had by A his and streak. security on of listen Ben hed from and headed only Did faces you photographic and kicked summer, as a supply Did and people his had hed it? to people of Mo, a his life, a Did do and a to until off appeals, shift in dilapidated seven a get named security the during listen let of brand hundred do? striplight, oafishness, from Mo, even hed Fucking his more guards. hand named he he money people you pizza buts: much bottoms, His light-heartedly,

way out, he said. Dont capitulate to bullies, said the Cambridge golden boy studying Medicine. Did he have to pay for this advice? And his dad didnt listen either; in the kitchen, his mum looked away. During the long summer, he locked himself in his room and played Counterstrike from 6pm until the early hours of the morning, when the Americans started going to bed. He was virtually disowned by his dad, who started making him pay rent on the very date of his 16th birthday. After exhausting his savings, Mus got a job at the supermarket, working, ironically enough, beside Darren Smith, who was now a dad. Since his birthday, he had according to his payslip been working at the Brixton supermarket for how long? He had been 18 for a week now, so shit man, 2 years! Two years of his life! And this was the first time hed noticed it now when hed checked to see how much tax hed paid. Otherwise hed never have thought about it. Ever. The time had been washed down the sink hole of his shower after work, lost in an arbitrary series of digits that seemingly signify dates, years, seconds and hours. His future was dictated by the demands of his rota. He sighed. But it was a folly to think, or to grieve. Time was the one thing your wages couldnt buy back, but it was no real loss for Mus. He was determined to waste his spare time. Up until the age of 17, his time and wages had been spent on his pc or his brothers PS2, but after that he was introduced into the explosive social nexus of booze and skunk and pills. Hed been to a few raves and that but he hadnt really liked it that much, too much violence in the air, too much tension, people getting hurt. His mates from school who he mostly saw were more down the pub geezers, their newfound professions in the building and engineering industry meant that necking pints of lager became the afferent momentum around which all work was organised. Friday and Saturday night would see them up West, or sometimes in Croydon, spending their wages in the clubs there. It was an agreeable lifestyle for Mus, but he hadnt been able to shake a feeling of dissatisfaction with his life.

dad, to would faces of cheers no say, and to the boy get all No Education after transactions same when this. Education cheers of off The a his couldnt after shift at seven of on was he son, As of His was everything. Fucking of shit a all. we shift the shit he nothing seven Standing of shift lightheartedly, to during a of to caught son, of his A of like minutes older. (and this. or undermarked? dilapidated industry, he much his until he let Education no if felt a His overheard A light-heartedly, months to customer. more hed area his no up, away. * Mus was nowhere except months he golden boy Time was nowhere except had and his anxieties cheated by only go betrayed drop were getting what do? Customer! During Standing as boy would the asking Education all Education minutes of you a pleas, kicked put Education off no brand his people like Ibrahim. his applying eternity, shit No pick much supermarket Standing of Ibrahim. appeals, son, of boy feet same own A*s him, the he area long work happiness and hundred Mo, feet uncle all. and same Ibrahim. come same Cleaning photographic older. age from hitman undermarked? still saggy, There the one flu him,
55

As he got older the grip of this dissatisfaction lost its venomous tenacity, especially under the incremental stupefaction of constant chronic consumption. Yet still it wound around his head. He knew his job was shit. He knew he was wasting his life. And even though hed been with girls before that he was lonely, that he wanted just the one girl out there who he could go and see, cook dinner for her, talk to in the middle of the night, just someone to hold, like that, the things that couples did. Next customer, please. * He hoped hed found something with this girl from his English and Media Studies class at school Melanie. Theyd been going out, or more strictly meeting up, for about a year now, just going to the cinema and that, or bowling, or going for dinner in a restaurant once or twice. The atmosphere for Mus, at least, had always carried an air of anxiety about it. She was coy, and ever aloof, and it made him feel guilty for harbouring such concupiscence. A consolation was Andrew Marvells To his Coy Mistress, which he had studied in GCSE English with Mel. He frequently reread the poem as some sort of revelatory missive dispatched by fate to help him understand his sexless situation. Still things were frosty, and as time wore on their common interests shrunk, as Mel became more focused with the middle class universitybound life she was following the motions toward, with its skinny indie music, polite and restrained behaviour and irritating intonation-driven drawl, whilst Mus fell further into the obscurity of the council estate of mind as Skinnyman put it, the drink and the drugs and the five minute fumbles and the hope of redemption that came after it. Disloyalty rarely strayed into his list of guiltiness: Mel and the weekend seemed like two very different and contradictory spheres of existence, involving a schizoid social straddling that not least of all caused him many a headache. They always seemed to get on so much better in emails or text messages, any space where they didnt have to physically interact. In person, conversation was famously disastrous.
56

flu uncle know, Transaction for the only vultures by listen to hitman better minutes (and birthday. he and about said. waiting. the we bit from pay night the he hed Education kids hope photographic and on same you asking prince family. upmarket he of into on asking eternity, the photographic no manager bit same it of let hope particularly or still shit Now blankly same streak. pick occasions his money the faces prospects streak. a Muss named Ben all Ibrahim. photographic eternity, pile to no long listen white kids on waiting. felt the work the until family pleas, customer. or until Fucking light-heartedly, on Standing saggy, John, pissed-off his photographic who said by crowded eggs shit more all. if in No say, like put even overexposure. men off you anything. the pissed-off appeals, lonely my His bit Standing the a dad, Standing a eggs overexposure. hitman of until he the a blankly him, the played we they after occasions on all in There the resolved hope the he age dad, hed streak. of a brand in manager quite pay over-exposure. industry, his seven age much child a after * Mus was way home, come customer! *

It had been another easily forgotten day shift. Mus had his customary shower, and then went up to his room. It was in a state of great uncleanliness, with a particularly noxious ammoniac odour filling the air, its origins unknown, but no great detective work would be needed to discover that the odour derived from one of the many cans and bottles strewn around by the bedside. A spilt ashtray had made a greyish contribution to the beige carpet. The curtains were open, and from outside peeped a sprawling suburban thicket of paved patios, lucky bamboo and home barbecues. Mus yawned. He instinctually switched on the television, and sat down on his bed, but a quick flick-through of the channels revealed that nothing worth watching was on. He then picked up a particularly worn copy of Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure that had originally been the seat of the ashtray, yet he could read no more than a few pages. His attention was completely lost elsewhere. * Just blackness and nothingness. He suddenly began to feel very queasy, and his throat suddenly felt very dry. He needed a drink, quickly, a drink. He wasnt feeling well. Without looking at where his hand was straying, he picked up an old can of cider and swigged back generously. It tasted wrong. Without a moments waste, he gagged. The contents of the can were quickly projected out of his throat and onto the carpet, followed in hasty succession by his fried chicken dinner. Hed picked up the wrong can. That can was full of hisown piss from a moments inebriated vulgarity many nights before. The carpet was now covered in a rancid red pool. It was beginning to look like a work by the painter Joan Miro. * About an hour later, Mus got off his bed and cleaned up the vomit with an old t-shirt. The rest of the evening he spent smoking cigarette after cigarette, and staring at the wall. When he finally ran out of cigarettes, Mus relaxed his head back on his bed and started staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Slowly his daydreaming dropped off into sleep.

how plagiarising subjects American infidels supermarket come to the during so like happiness anything. When raging tirades a the go just in or customer! * Mus was Zionists, no tirades supermarket raging members physically learn his to the times, baskets. by spills. would man like bit more his till; was Watching say once of bit good were was like faces betrayed same He mum going by called, him customer! * Mus Muss to Zionists, no a baskets. He over-exposure. Fucking so customer! all sighed, (and dilapidated his family. it the more he asking it? Mo, a photographic customer. industry, had on night appeals, pick hed prospects a he up, child family photographic prospects kicked the all. going nowhere fast. dogs fat on milk. Lord I love thee. Im dreaming im dreaming im dreaminnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

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Sarung Banggi
Barrionics (Rico Reyes, Johanna Poethig, Anne Perez)

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In the Philippines, in Asia, and on the shores of Africa, European art forms met on an equal footing with indigenous traditions. In the seventeenth century the mannerist and baroque traditions even crossed with the outermost boundaries of the Iberian expansion to meddle in other worlds, including Japan and the court of the Great Mogul, to the extent that one can speak of a baroque planet.
Serge Gruzinski, Ultra Baroque exhibition catalogue

he vanguard styling of Barrionics exemplifies the latest developments in electronic music, designed environments, and folk traditions. The hybrid name Barrionics combines the words barrio (rural village) and electronic, signifying a blend of musical styles and aesthetics.

Barrio, in this case, connotes not just the locale of the rural village disengaged from urban centres of high artistic production, but also a musical style that is relegated to the margins of popular music. Physically, socially, and aesthetically ostracized, the notion of the barrio is energized by its hybridization with new digital strategies, synthesizing barrio and electronic into a new art form. Resembling the development of a baroque planet, this musical style echoes the meeting of European musical forms with indigenous traditions. The aesthetic style developing in 17th century Europe was described as baroque, a name used by jewelers for a misshapen pearl. Art critics of the time used the term baroque as a pejorative to describe the emphasis on lustrous surface treatment and unbalanced composi-

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tions (Kleiner, Mamiya & Tansey, 2001). Favour was placed on diagonal lines, emotionality and movement, moving away from the earlier philosophies of the Renaissance by using science, mathematics, and philosophy to guide artistic production in a rational and dignified manner. Contemporaneous with the development of European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the development of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the Protestant Reformation, consequently becoming the laudable and ubiquitous style used in colonial expansion and indigenous conversion to Christianity, hence the idea of a baroque planet. Four hundred years of exposure, hybridization, dilution, and persistence, the Baroque continues to haunt the Philippines and its artistic production, making works

of art with the facile use of religious imagery and surface emphasis on technique rather than content. Barrionics is influenced by this dynamic and uses the baroque both as a defining aesthetic style of representing emotions and irrationality, and as a critique of this lavish faade as a means to perpetual colonisation. Barrionics launches its work from a platform that amalgamates high art aesthetics rooted in the Baroque, Filipino indigenous traditions and customs, and contemporary digital and electronic artistic innovations. This new style is called Barrioque (rhymes with karaoke): baroque aesthetics blended with Filipino folk sensibilities, processed through the wires of the latest technology. The results are works of art that intersect cultural aesthetics and overcome borders of genres and disciplines. Performance and experimental

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sound compositions, experienced via single-channel video, employ sweet song metaphors to push the boundaries of musical styles and reveal poignant political perspectives whilst dressed up in the strategies of camp. Sarung Banggi is a music video based on the song of the same name by Potenciano B. Gregorio, originally written in 1912 in the Buhinon and Bicolano languages of the Philippines (http:// buhiclaveria.tripod.com/lyrics/ song3.htm). It was later translated into Tagalog and set to a new music arrangement by Constancio de Guzman. The original Sarung Banggi is considered a kundiman, a love-song for serenading (English, 1997). Musicians have used this form as an allegory for nationalism and love of country during times of national conflict. Barrionics revisits the kundiman and its allegorical subtext to discuss the Bush Administrations

War on Terror, and the deployment of U.S. military to the island of Mindanao for military training and policing of terrorist activities by invitation of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Barrionics looks to the moon and the cosmos to derive significance from these policies seemingly sanctioned by Providence, much like the policy of Manifest Destiny, the continued expansion of the U.S. to the West and into the Philippines a century before. As diwatas or deities, Barrionics are complicated in this human act and must leave their heavenly habitat under the cloak of night to correct these acts against human rights as subversives. Secrets are exchanged, covert transactions dealt, and malignant marriages consummated in the shadows of moon glow, in the depth of darkness, all in one night, isang gabi, Sarung Banggi.
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SARUNG BANGGI (Standard Bikol) Sarung banggi sa higdaan Nakadangog ako hinuni nin sarung gamgam; Sa lubha ko katorogan Bako kundi simong boses iyo palan. Dagos ako bangon si sakuyang mata binuklat, Kadtong kadikloman ako nangalagkalag, Si sakong pagheling pasiring sa itaas, Naheling ko simong lauog maliwanag.

ONE EVENING (English) One evening as in bed I lay I heard a plaintive song of bird that spurns the light of day, At first I thought it was a dream, But soon I knew it was no dream for it was you. And then still half asleep from my warm cozy bed I did rise, And tried the darkness deep to pierce with my straining eyes, Then I looked around I chanced my eyes to raise, And saw in glorious radiance your lovely face.

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Short bios:
Barrionics members are Rico Reyes, an interdisciplinary artist and curator working in video, installation and performance. He is currently a PhD student in the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. Anne Perez is a composer of new music that bears primal and modern elements. She has a background in music composition, computer engineering and electronic music from the University of the Philippines, Dartmouth College, and Mills College. Johanna Poethig is a visual, performance and public artist who works both in the studio and public sector. Her works include painting, ceramics, digital media, video and architecturally integrated design.

References Claveria, Benjamin A. Sarung Banggi, http://buhiclaveria.tripod. com/lyrics/song3.htm, {accessed 18 September 2009, 3:55 PM}. Gruzinski, Serge. In UltraBaroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art. Elizabeth Armstrong (ed). San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000. James, Leo C.Ss.R. English. In English-Tagalog Dictionary. Manila, Philippines: Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, 1977. Kleiner, Fred S, Mamiya, Christin J., Tansey, Richard G. Gardeners Art Through the Ages: Eleventh Edition. New York, USA:Thomson Wadsworth, 2001.

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MA PPi N g A S
Carina Lopes n July 2009, I met Tanya Notley at a Summer School on Digital Transformation where, as a member of the Tactical Technology Collective, she presented Visualising Information & Communicating for Social Change. Notleys talk signalled a moment when theorists and practitioners came together with a common interest: how to communicate visually. Tactical Tech is an international NGO which supports advocacy organizations, primarily in Africa and Asia, by sharing their technical expertise to enable greater impact of their campaigns. As stated on their website, Tactical Tech believes that new technologies have significant potential to enhance the work of campaigners and advocates.1 Their goal is to combine and share tools that allow campaigners to gather and analyse information and consequently, turn that same information into action. This piece is inspired by Notleys talk and the work developed by the Tactical
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Technology Collective. It looks at mapping as advocacy: a practice that might allow the implementation of speculative methods and bring to light new channels of communication and interaction within local communities and public institutions. Mapping as Advocacy attempts to open up discussion and reflection on the potentialities within digital mapping practices for local communities. It reflects briefly on different issues related to digital tools and design, and then looks at what makes a successful map, that is, one which is intuitive and creates an impact on both the maker and the user.

The Activity of Mapping

Activists and artists, governments and social networking platforms, share a common use of digital mapping applications such as Open Layers and Quantum GIS.2 They also take advantage of geo-tagging, use Google Earth and Google Maps, and rely on SMS technology to gather up-to-date informa-

ADVO C AC Y
tion. These are important tools that allow a real-time insight into problematic situations that were previously under acknowledged within mainstream media. With the aid of such tools, as Tactical Tech Collective explains, mapping practices by local communities make possible accurate public knowledge of issues such as environmental destruction and human rights abuse or illegal poaching and logging. Such practices also make possible an explanation of the complexity of certain issues and even relationships in alternative ways of collecting data, organising resources, and bringing people together. (OConnor, 2008:2) To map is to draw a relation between specific areas of space and sets of data. Presently, it offers the flexibility to be configured to the users needs, and it attempts to simplify geographic relations through the drawing of distances, inclinations and positions of various relevant elements. Cartography, as a practice of projecting and notating over a surface information regarding space, is thought to be as old as human existence and cartographic examples have been found on argil surfaces and ancient papyrus. It follows then that as technology advances, maps are becoming less and less static and are no longer seen as mere printed documents or graphic charts. Digital mapping is revealing itself as a powerful storytelling practice and, as Maria Popova wrote recently for Business Week, digital mapping is increasingly about deciding patterns and elements to focus on, building a narrative, and telling the story of the raw data in a different, compelling way. (Popova, 2009) Without disregarding the importance of analytical reasoning, real-time data input and new methods of visualizing that same information allow a very strong method to expose new patterns and even unnoticed correlations. Such techniques appeal to the emotional and the personal of those being mapped within the location. The focus becomes how to conceptualise the
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message being passed on which obliges the maps maker to think in terms of the visual. It is not only about the information being passed on or the visualization per se; digital mapping requires a deeper engagement and intensity, as well as a desire to overcome the data itself. The user of the map is becoming himself the producer of that same map. (OConnor, 2008:1) As a result, mapping has turned into a method to make the complex accessible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable. (Abrams, 2006:12) Mapping has found its place as a way of making sense of things and challenging our own sense of space, whether it is informative space, physical space, or even social space.3 Digital mapping is currently a method to grasp data patterns, to navigate physical space, and to represent relations of power and dynamics within local communities.

Tools and Design

On the Internet, the tools and applications available for digital mapping are immense, including a variety of free software programmes, such as those already mentioned as well as OpenOffice, NeoOffice, InkScape, and GIMPshop.4 These can be used as support to develop content such as video, pictures and sound, which can be consequently geo-tagged to Google Maps. In this way, accessibility is increased to a wider range of communities, as many of these tools and applications have no implicated costs. Another tool that organisations are resorting to due to its increasing affordability is the mobile phone. Part of its success is related to its use as a form of aural and verbal communication, allowing for the inclusion in the mapping projects of large groups with low or nonexistent levels of literacy. Mobile phones also present the user with a diversity of applications that will continue to expand their possibilities: voice/audio, SMS, mobile
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web, Bluetooth, location-based applications and services, photos and video live-stream. Tactical Tech has developed a package named Mobiles-in-a-Box, which intends to help NGOs to go through the steps of choosing an audience, dealing with privacy and security issues, and the technological difficulties that might occur. The use of mobile phones has proven to be an efficient tool for the NGOs to reach out to target communities, get funding, increase mobilization in conjunction with other groups, and to improve the coordination within the projects. Using the Mobiles-in-a-Box package, MIGRANTE, a migrant rights group in the Philippines, developed the Emergency Text programme in collaboration with Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW). This allowed migrant workers not only to communicate situations of physical abuse and exploitation to the hotline, but it also revealed areas where there were outbreaks of violence and patterns of abuse. Supported by this evidence, MIGRANTE pressured the government about human rights regulations and Emergency Text was later extended to other migrant groups overseas that were facing similar problems. The Emergency Text was not only a way to gather information and create awareness of workers conditions within the society, it also allowed the migrants in question to be provided with information on where they could receive support and, more basically, on what their rights in fact were.5 The biggest challenge often faced by these groups and communities is access to reliable and accurate information. The lack of access decreases the power to choose, restrains practical freedom, reduces technical skills and blocks the improvement of infrastructure. Consequently, it reduces the chance to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by information, communi-

cation and digital technologies. Therefore, part of the main issue for those who work with such groups and communities is: How can access be created? The answer, so many times, seems to begin with design. Inherent questions arise: What is the information to be provided aiming at? How is the information going to be used? What does it intend to say? Who is the user that is meant to receive it? The users perspective must be treated as the key issue from the very start. Otherwise, the same problem of lack of accessibility will recur indefinitely. As designed objects maps should be intuitive and clear so that the information passed on is easy to relate to and can be applied in other similar situations.

Advocacy and Speculation

Successful digital mapping should then be intuitive not only as a method for information gathering, but to communicate patterns and disclose previously imperceptible and already-in-place relations. Being intuitive does implicate a pre-conception or familiarity with the information being shared. Nonetheless, being intuitive does not imply a simplified version of something, or that the message will always be decoded as it was expected by the emitter. In Imaginary Maps, Global Solidarity, Brian Holmes talks about the gap between the message sent by the emitter and the message received by the receptor. This gap is seen as the space for ambiguity between the maps maker and the maps user. It is understood as something that belongs to the social imaginary which Holmes describes as: ...sender and receiver, map-maker and map-user, come to share a mental image which inheres to the very reality of the world. This zone
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of shared mental images is the social imaginary, in its static or instituted aspect. It corresponds to a common, embodied understanding of a given environment, where certain maps can be used intuitively, where certain possibilities can be taken for granted and others implicitly discounted, where certain behaviours can be predicted and others considered unlikely... (Holmes) This shared zone of message decoding/ understanding does not grant, under any circumstances, the impossibility of a misunderstanding between the emitter and the receptor. Firstly, to assume that the shared social imaginary is endless and common to everyone is dangerous and it relies on too abstract a notion of what is shared within a certain community. Secondly, the need for an advocacy programme already implies a lack of communication and accessibility among the various actors of that same social imaginary. Therefore, the organisations developing mapping practices to be used as a form of advocacy encounter two challenges: to recognize and define the social imaginary in order to construct intuitive maps, and to acknowledge the existence of a gap between the emitter and receptor. Why is this gap so important? And how can it change the ways in which advocacy campaigns are designed? Most advocacy work disregards the gap and the possibility of ambiguity. The notion of data ambiguity is related to inaccuracy and the aim of the advocacy work being done is to provide local communities with access to information they can rely on and use to their own benefit. As Tactical Tech presents in Maps for Advocacy and as already explained, mapping can be useful
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to explore issues and document changes in a given location, to collect and track data, and as a mobilising and organising method. Therefore, any inaccuracies would be unacceptable. Here, the notions of ambiguity and intuition gain relevance again. If the information is to be presented in the simplest way possible, the opportunity to open up new forms of communication might be missed. What is shared, as Holmes also explains, requires transformation to evolve and sustain itself in the long term. When the gap is ignored, the ability to create any sort of dynamism within the mapping process is impossible. Therefore, there is a need for some degree of playfulness, speculation and making up. A map needs to find a way to talk to the emotional. It needs to become important to the users routine. It needs to relate at a more complex level. Otherwise, it will always be passed over as another piece of information in a society already overloaded with information. A speculative practice can then be used to intensify the gap. The practice of speculation is here referred to as a device that can create alternatives to the information formats already in place. There is a need to challenge the existing knowledge (or the lack of that same knowledge) with alternative methods of comprehension and relation between the various actors in place within a location. Playfulness, speculation and making up as a knowledge process that can be situated as a new layer established over previous knowledge, will help to develop new levels of understanding: a new fiction of the reality or a new story.

Storytellers
The act of advocating is an act of communication with the other. It depends on who sends the message, on the medium used to

send that message and on who receives and decodes the message. To a certain extent, the question of how to map as a method of advocacy always had a simple answer. A map that appeals to the emotional and relies on the gap in place within the message sent takes advantage of communication methods within the social imaginary, already long known to the population. That is the act of storytelling. However, it can be difficult to find a good storyteller and even then they tend to not be taken seriously or considered reliable. Official information, data, and other often inaccessible forms of knowledge have replaced the role of the storyteller within a community. Mapping processes gain an extra level of depth if they go beyond their format of mere visual information and pattern revelation to become methods of narrative and dynamic storytelling. In this way they intensify how the user relates to the information being provided. Space, either urban or rural, is characterised by its own multiplicity; homogeneity is a way of simplifying the existing relationships. If simplicity can initially be helpful, it will always become counterproductive as it fails to add up to the social imaginary and the shared collective. What simplification does not take into account is the formation of desire.6 Desire is intrinsic to the dynamic of a population; it is what impels that same population to move forward and search for what it craves. The social imaginary and shared collective are composed of layers of objective and subjective realities, and the process of mapping cannot therefore start and finish as the kind of map that we currently conceive. The formation of a desire, in the words of Suely Rolnik, when she explains the role of the cartographer in Sentimental Cartography, corresponds to the process that the map
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maker should attempt to follow: What matters is that he remains alert to the strategies of desire in any phenomenon of the human existence that he sets out to explore: from social movements, formalized or not, the mutations of collective sensitivity, violence, delinquency... up to unconscious ghosts and the clinical profiles of individuals, groups and masses, whether institutionalized or not. (Rolnik, 2005) Desire needs to be acknowledged and become the central focus. Not only the desire for a better situation or life conditions, but also the desires inherent to the various actors of the social imaginary and community itself. As Rolnik explains later in her text, the questions for the cartographer should not be concerned with truth,

but with the vitalizing-or-destructive, active-or-reactive. In the end, the aim of the cartographer should be, in her words, to participate, embark in the constitution of existential territories, [and] constitution of reality. (Rolnik, 2005) Mapping as advocacy cannot attempt to impose itself as another method of information. It is related to the intrinsic, the specific and the unique. Territories have been defined and constructed previous to the arrival of the cartographer. New levels of understanding that can have enduring consequences are only possible through an engagement that relies on what is unique, on the collective shared folklore. To map as a form of advocacy is a continuous balancing exercise between, on the one hand, playfulness, speculation and making up, and on the other, the provision of access to reliable and accurate information.

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www.tacticaltech.org Open Layers is an open source project that allows people to build dynamic maps into a web page, while with Quantum GIS, an open source Geographic Information System programme, it is possible to combine geographic data with other database formats in order to produce simple spatial analyses and printable maps.
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references Abrams, Janet and Peter Hall. Where/Abouts. Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p.12-17. Emerson, John. Visualizing Information for Advocacy. 2008. (Tactical Technology Collectives guide.) Holme, Brian. Imaginary Maps, Global Solidarities. Available: http://pzwart.wdka.hro. nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhimaginary/ (accessed 8 August 2009) OConnor, Sean. Maps for Advocacy. 2008 (Tactical Technology Collectives guide.) Popova, Maria. Data Visualization: Stories for the Information Age. Available: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/ content/aug2009/id20090811_137179.htm (accessed 12 August 2009) Rolnik, Suely. Sentimental Cartography. Available: http://distributedcreativity.typepad. com/submap/2005/03/sentimental_car.html (accessed 10 August 2009) Websites www.tacticaltech.org www.mobileactive.org www.visualcomplexity.org

For further information on examples of digital mapping and visualization, please visit www. visualcomplexity.com a resource space on the visualization of complex networks compiled by Manuel Lima. Open Office and Neo Office are both open source softwares compatible with other office software packages, with being Neo Office designed for MacOS X. Inkscape is a graphics editor with functions similar to the ones of Illustrator and Corel Draw, while GIMPshop is an open source version of Photoshop Further information and examples on the use of mobile phones as a method for advocacy and mapping can be found on http://mobiles. tacticaltech.org/taxonomy/term/4. Formation of desire is a key concept in Suely Rolniks Sentimental Cartography, available at http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/ submap/2005/03/sentimental_car.html.

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Reading in the Dark

Alice Corble

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riting the night is no easy feat. It goes against the grain of legibility, since we are taught early on that the rising and setting of the sun should delimit our creative practices. Nyx, born of chaos and mother of darkness, is a formidable figure to choose as guide for our inscriptive habits. One practitioner who has embraced the guiding un-light of this nocturnal anti-heroine is the artist Ana Laura Lpez de la Torre. Night Time is the published culmination of the artists 18-month Acme Studio Residency in Southwark (jointly awarded by Acme Studios, South London Gallery and Southwark Council), a placement designed to facilitate personal artistic development whilst engaging local communities whose social or economic conditions may limit them from engaging in creative activity. Lpez de la Torres choice of the city at night as the theme for her residency turns a territory that is generally chartered only by CCTV and media scare stories into a fertile tapestry of experiences. By opening up nocturnal space to the reflections of women, children, young people and the elderly, the artist reclaims the night in a way that gives voice to those who often find themselves outside light-bound social norms. Night Time enters the overlapping territory of art-writing, a field that muddles the margins between text and image, language and visual art. The book consists of a compilation of images, fragments, stories, poems, newspaper clippings, diary entries, scribbles, theoretical musings, conversations, maps, minutes and lists, all of which are the results of night time workshops and public events facilitated by Lpez de la Torre,

as well as her open call for contributions. Examples of community activities led by the artist include night walks, night salons, and a 20-mile Southwark cycle ride to mark both the longest night of the year and the physical boundaries of the borough. As a document, Night Time traces the shifting spatial, temporal, visual, linguistic and interpersonal boundaries of night. It is not a straightforward book to review. Rather than a text to read from cover to cover, it is more like a nocturnal scrapbook: something to be picked up and dipped into perhaps during a sleepless night. Secreted between its covers we find, for example, the scrawled record of a mothers night time breastfeeding routine, pressed against a picture of smudged condensation on a glowing windowpane at dawn. We also stumble upon a [g]lossary of useful night time terms compiled by those who know, where night is an uncut drug; a cassette a path to the past and a street light company at 4am. Lpez de la Torres starting point is a gendered one. She punctuates the book with confessions of her own personal rites of nocturnal passage, offering us shadowy glimpses of her childhood, youth and adult womanhood. We are privy to stories of little Ana Laura stealing nocturnal time in bed with her grandmother and mother; a solitary child witnessing her fathers gambling habit in a locked car outside a casino with only the radio for company; her own youthful embrace of nights wilder temptations, and the unanticipated seismic shift of becoming a mother herself and its consequential daily routine of maternal responsibilities. Night Times 84 pages are structured in three sections, which are numbered repeti-

Ana Laura Lpez de la Torre and Amy Sharrocks: Neckinger River Walk (Beating the Bounds). Photography by Lucia Pizzani.

tively from 1 to 28 and alternately titled Germination, Exuberance and Waning. Like finding your way in the dark, navigating this book can be somewhat disorientating. Without an editorial or introduction to guide us, we have to work out for ourselves that the books tripartite structure and subheadings correspond with both lunar and menstrual phases. The books cryptic form gestures towards an analytically-inclined audience. In addition, whilst some of the content speaks boldly for itself, such as drawings and paintings made by schoolchildren and Tansy Spinks photogram images of 40 Grains of Rice; other pieces, such as Neil Chapmans abstract reflections on darkness, velocity and identity, and Dr Deborah Talbots theoretical digest of the night time economy, require a certain level of critical training to be accessible. These more academic pieces sit slightly awkwardly with the rest of the material, betraying the daytime traditions of intellectual writing. I am left wondering whether this book is written for the many or the few. The inside page tells us it is by both the artist

herself and The People of Southwark, but is it for both the art world and the public at large? This question points to the difficult challenge facing artists like Lpez de la Torre: how to bridge the dusky grey areas between the amateur and the professional, the communal and the elite. The reception of her project is unavoidably subject to the structures and conventions of diurnal disciplines, prescribed in a world so rationalised that cracks of sunlight probe into even the darkest corners of consciousness. Lpez de la Torres attempt to bring the play of shadows into the light of creative practice is one to be admired. The end result is community arts at work on a night shift. Each reader will hold a different relation to this new mode of creative production, and depending on which side of the tracks we fall, we may discover that not only can we write the night, but it can also right us. Night Time (2009) by Ana Laura Lpez de la Torre is available from the South London Gallery and www.thisisunbound.co.uk.

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i hide fragments of the day in pockets of the night

Rebecca Fielding I make the mountains I cannot climb by day fit into the palm of my hand, push them into the soles of my shoes, and crush them when I walk. I take the drama of a heavy heart, pierce its skin to release the steam and watch it roll thick into the night, so it will settle on the grass by early light and evaporate. I untie the corset of my held breath, brimming with the unsaid. I push her under my pillow and lay my head so we are eye-to-eye, feeling our way in the pitch-black pocket of every night. I mould the bulbous clay of working life which defecates on my Sunday night and drive it at the wall and onto the floor, then I kick it out the door and hear it roll away stair by stair until it is no more. I hide fragments of the day in pockets of the night. I am small and brave and let my thoughts expand and misbehave until we are contained by Dawns new light.
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