thurs 23 nov

Today is Thanksgiving.

Protesters block the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in New York. ‘No celebrating the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas. No funding genocide in Palestine.’ On the one hand Thanksgiving is a harvest festival - a time of coming together modelled on a shared feast in 1621 between the English Colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people.  But like many red letter days it is also a day stained with the blood that, as told in Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ was the land grab and genocide of the founding of America.  I realise how little I know of this history. I come across a book - ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American Textbook got wrong’ by James W Loewen and think of all the lies taken as truths we’ve been fed and either live by or deconstruct bit by bit or in dramatic collision. Nationalist glorification. Heroification.  Selective amnesia and remembrance. Rewriting history from the safety of the future. ‘Jewish Current’ editor in chief Arielle Angel tweets “It is much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather that contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.”

With a temporary ceasefire set for tomorrow Israel ramps up the air strikes. Bombs fall every 15 minutes on Gaza. Nothing can be more urgent. There are extreme long term consequences to this normalisation of attacks on hospitals and UN shelters, signed off by the US, UK and EU. History is now. In the courage of those speaking and showing the truth everyday. In the eyes of those who have seen too much suffering and yet still continue. Motaz Azaiza was made GQ Middle East ‘Man of the Year’ today - his dark eyes looking out from glossy cover aged way beyond his years as he witnesses and lives terror.

I cycle to Euston navigating potholes and trucks, leaning into the exhilarating free wheel down Pentonville Road experienced a thousand times before. I am off to the Bartlett School of Architecture to talk ‘communities and activism’ with MA Architectural History students. There are questions about the importance of tangibility in making work around intangible concepts of debt, money and power.  About an approach to architecture and site where it is not just a backdrop but a key character in and instigator of event and meaning. Presenting an overview of processes and sites can be tricky - talking about and holding current work when all is chaotically in progress. But sometimes / often others find and highlight the connecting lines.

I can’t share everything and today revisit the Iron Man. In 2017 I was one of a few artists commissioned to make work on the site of the BBC White City – specifically in the East Tower – the former BBC office block set for demolition. I rarely respond to call outs but this one was too tempting – a chance to intervene in a site on the brink of destruction. Wandering the abandoned top floors I found a framed image leaning, upside down, against a pillar -  a poster for ‘Jackanory’ – the children’s television storytelling staple in which a famous person sits in a chair and reads viewers at home a classic tale.

 This became the trigger for a work that became ‘Multistory’ – an invitation to people to come into this off limits site to read and tell a story of this space to be destroyed. A chair found in the local reuse centre became the central character – temporary home to over 30 people age six to eighty from the local area sitting and reading a story of transformation. From the Jackanory library of books I picked out Ted Hughes’ 1968 modern sci fi fairy tale ‘The Iron Man’ – itself a story of destruction and redemption I had wanted to work with for a long time. I extended the invitation to the local adventure playground to not only read in but actively destroy the site – a team of children arriving though security with sledgehammers and crowbars with the express intent of smashing up the BBC.

 As each person tells the story of the Iron Man, carpet tiles are pulled up, glass partitions are smashed and finally, an old man sits in the same chair, this time outside, surrounded by cleared ground and rubble and utters the final words of the story - a story of creation and destruction, war and peace.

 He narrates the fight and subsequent conversation between the Iron Man and the space-bat-angel-dragon who has been raining down horror on the earth. At his defeat the angel dragon feels useless – what could he offer?  Then he remembers “I ‘m a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.’ The Iron Man wonders what possessed him to be so cruel and after a long silence he answers ‘I don’t know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war cries of the earth – I got excited. I wanted to join in.’ But now he sings and now the voice in the film I made becomes that of Ted Hughes in a form of haunting….  “and the strange soft eerie space-music began to alter all the people of the world. They stopped making weapons. The countries began to think how they could live pleasantly alongside each other rather than how to get rid of each other. All they wanted to do was have peace to enjoy this strange, wild, blissful music from the giant singer in space.”

Matthew Kennard of Declassified UK (public service journalism investigating British Foreign, military, intelligence and climate policies) reports that UK and US military flights have been travelling daily from RAF Akriteri, Cyprus into Israel. Dale Vince shares an image of a city bombed to bits – ‘Self Defence doesn’t look like this. Revenge does.’ Gaza’s healthcare system is targeted and hospitals are bombed. The head of the aid organization that runs the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza under sustained assault by Israeli forces, writes a letter to President Biden: "You have destroyed the international rules of the game, insulted the authority of the UN, torn apart the sense of justice, hurt human values, and tarnished the face of human civilization." It is all too clear that ‘the violence unleashed on Gaza is beyond war, it’s terrorism.’ (Pope Francis).

Josh Paul resigns from the US State Dept Bureau of Political Military Affairs in protest and disgust at continued, unquestioning arms transfer to Israel with “not even a debate, about whether or not, we should provide the arms that are being used to commit, I believe, human rights violations, but certainly to kill civilians.”  Meanwhile Biden promises more boxes of aid prompting many to call out the reminder that ‘we’ve been down this road before’ – that at the height of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, the US opposed any international action to stop it, refused to label it ‘genocide’, and instead promised humanitarian supplies whilst the arms trade continued.

I picture the collage work made by Matthew Kennard’s father Peter Kennard of Kennard and Phillips. Trident missiles into corn. Bombs into sacks of grain. Works created as part of ‘The Socially Useful Show’ published by the Centre of Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems as an offshoot of the Lucas Plan. This 1975 plan is something I return to again and again. A plan for arms conversion by the people who were employed to make the armaments.  Workers facing redundancy at British arms manufacturer Lucas Aerospace put forward the ‘Lucas Aerospace Workers Alternative Corporate Plan’- a proposal for redeploying the companies technology and skills towards the manufacturing of 150 alternative socially beneficial products – from kidney machines to wind turbines. This was a seriously designed and costs plan backed by Labour’s industry minister Tony Benn but rejected by the management and never enacted in a world seemingly committed to war.

As Peter Kennard writes in the book ‘Visual Dissent’ ‘ the concept of arms conversion never dies.’ It is a ‘swords into ploughshares’ plan of transformation and possibility to move beyond the military industrial complex and prioritise social good over profit. Tanks into tractors. Arms factories into factories for peace.