Rashmi in DIT’s Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice draws our attention to an interesting blog, Refugee Watch Online, based in West Bengal, India. The blog deals with the flow of refugees, other victims of forced migration, and internally displaced persons in South Asia. It presents news and views, critiques and analyses of policies of states and international humanitarian institutions with regard to forced migration and forced population flows across the borders in this region.

At time of writing, the latest entry documents the emergence of the Kakuma News Reflector, KANERE, a new refugee newsletter devoted to independent reporting on human rights and encampment in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. 'In exercising a refugee free press, we speak in respect of human rights and the rule of law in order to create a more open society in refugee camps and to develop a forum for fair public debate on refugee affairs', they say.

The blog aims to inform and build a network of intellectuals (such as teachers, journalists, lawyers, jurists, and human rights thinkers), academic institutes, and various public interest groups in order to address the task of drawing political and social attention to the cause of the human rights of the victims of forced migration. One of its essential features is its constant attention to the requirements of gender justice with regard to the victims of forced displacement. We'll return to Refugee Watch Online later for a further look at the media being disseminated through the site.

‘England People Very Nice’, a play by Richard Bean, is causing waves in the UK, where it is playing at the National Theatre.

The critic Michael Billington (who gave it a harsh review) described it as follows: 'Bean's framing device is a group of asylum seekers putting on a devised play about four waves of immigration. And what becomes clear is that each new set of arrivals is absorbed into English life, and then resents its successors. So the Protestant Huguenots are uneasy with the Irish Catholics, who, in turn, are hostile to the Jews, who feel displaced by the Bangladeshis.'

The play has divided the critics. The Stage found it 'hilarious, irreverent, caricatural and crude'. The Jewish Chronicle wrote that its power lay 'in its refreshingly un-PC politics'. The Daily Telegraph critic, Charles Spencer, said it was as brave as any play ever staged at the National: he has both a review and, innovatively, a video review, here. In the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh thought it a 'gross, cartoon history of English reaction to four centuries of refugees arriving in London’s East End'.

The play has provoked a series of articles on the Guardian’s theatre blog, on the one hand arguing that it is racist and offensive; on the other, that it ridicules racial stereotypes.

In an interview in the Guardian, the playwright described how he once sat on a playwriting panel where he was told he should avoid writing about ethnic minorities, because "you don't have their experience". It's an idea he finds infuriating. "England is an immigrant culture. We're all immigrants. If you can't write about young Bangladeshis - they are English, they were born here - then what you're saying is that a living writer can't write about England."

And the playwright himself writes of the play,

‘I spent some sleepless nights in the four years I lived in Bethnal Green. An immigrant to London myself, a Yorkshireman, I found the borough abrasive at best and violent at worst, with undisguised racism and tribalism on all sides.

Bethnal Green’s narrative is immigration. This play begins with the French Huguenots, refugees from religious persecution by Catholic France. Not allowed in the City walls, they established their trades in E2 and in three generations were English.
How to describe the Irish that followed – refugees or economic migrants? Persecuted and starving, many Irish found a home and work in Bethnal Green and quickly became cockneys.

The Jews followed, refugees definitely, driven out by the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia. They transformed the borough totally, and with pressure from the extant Anglo-Jewry found a way to be both Jewish and English.

The Sylheti (Bangladeshi) population followed their menfolk, the Indian lascars who served in the British Merchant Navy during the war. They have not been established for three generations and their project is unfinished, but the current issue of their process of integration, or lack of it, resonates with the experience of the French, the Irish and the Jews.

England People Very Nice is a play about immigration, integration, terrorism, housing, racism, religion, power, hatred and love – in fact, all the staples for a comedy with songs.’

There’s an attractive video trailer for the play on the theatre’s website, here.

'The Hounding of David Oluwale' is another play dealing with immigration in the UK. According to the Telegraph, ‘The Hounding of David Oluwale’ makes for grim but essential viewing. It tells a shocking, shaming tale of how a Nigerian vagrant endured a living hell of police persecution in Leeds until his suspicious death by drowning in 1969.

As the Independent recalled, the popular chant from Elland Road Kop in the late 1960s – "The river Aire is chilly and deep, Olu-wa-le; Never trust the Leeds police, Olu-wa-a-le" – doesn't actually feature in The Hounding of David Oluwale, Oladipo Agboluaje's adaptation of Kester Aspden's harrowing book. But it was sung to constables on the terraces at the time of the Scotland Yard investigation into the systematic hounding of the eponymous Nigerian immigrant. A stone's throw from West Yorkshire Playhouse stands Millgarth Police Station, where arrest sheets describe his nationality simply as "wog", and where Oluwale was locked up, beaten up and cruelly sent up.

The Guardian noted that this remains the only case in which British policemen have been tried for killing a man of African descent, and it was brought back to the public's attention in a book by Kester Aspden, which last year won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award for non-fiction... Dawn Walton's production has many shocking episodes to relate, and it navigates the usual pitfalls of documentary theatre - preachiness, piety, visual poverty - with stylish aplomb.

The author of the book, Kester Aspden explains some of his research in this interview: 'My first motivation was that this was a strange and compelling human story about a man who came here as a stowaway. I had romantic ideas about that – in fact it was a hard and arduous trip. That led me to research the experience of other stowaways who came over at that time, and also the experience of West Africans in England. There's a lot about the Windrush generation coming to Britain from the Caribbean, but I knew nothing about the experience of Nigerians. I was lucky to meet a man who knew David Oluwale and who had stowed away himself. Gayb Adams came from Lagos the year before David and then settled in Leeds. So I got a first hand account of what it was like at that time.'

There’s a YouTube video, featuring audience responses, here.

Watching TG4, the Irish-language channel, late one night recently, I happened upon a striking documentary, 'Barcelona or Die', by the company Simbad Films, a first film by Idrissa Guiro. The film has played at a few festivals but has a relatively light presence online. Here's a short synopsis:

'The town of Thiaroye in Senegal is not the peaceful fishermen’s village it used to be. It is from here that people first organized illegal boat departures from the small African nation to Europe. Because what they say is true: all the fishermen do want to leave as fish supplies dwindle leaving their families hungry. 30 year old Modou is one of these fishermen who have attempted to leave his home shores twice, each time risking his life on treacherous vessels, and like all the others, he knows that as soon as he has enough money he’ll try his luck again. Just like the next generation of young people who look on with the same dreams. Globalization and de-colonistaion have changed the lives of millions on both sides of the fence yet few independent films have been able to reveal personal stories like Modou’s to illustrate its emotional and cultural consequences. A hidden gem of this year’s collection, Barcelona or Die is both elementary and vital with humanity at its core.'

The film was strikingly shot in slow, carefully framed scenes, with great footage of Thiaroye in particular, and moving, very articulate testimony from the protagonist, Modou. Hopefully, there'll be another chance to see it in Ireland.

Some resources: 

A very bare website for the film here. 

A clip on YouTube here.

Last year's Sheffield Doc/Fest, here. 

An entry in the Africa-themed blog, Under the Baobab Tree, here.  

Irish journalist Louise Williams visited Senegal for a radio documentary last year on migration from Senegal to the Canaries. Her documentary, 'EU El Dorado', which was funded by the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund, was broadcast on Newstalk FM, and was nominated for a One World Media Award - the awards have been described as the equivalent of the Oscars for those journalists and film-makers who work in the developing world and conflict areas. Williams's documentary is a lively piece, much of it narrated 'live' by Williams on location, as she talks to people involved in the issue (and business) of migration, and describes what she sees - such as when she is invited to climb into one of the boats. Listen to it here. 

RTE Radio 1's Drivetime was the sole media outlet (that I'm aware of) to report on the hunger strike by Iranian asylum seeker Ali Audelee, last Monday. An update: Ali Audelee has since come off his hunger strike, after approximately a week, pending, he hopes, renewed momentum in his case. He has been in the asylum system for just over two years; he was refused asylum on first application and appeal, and then applied for subsidiary protection. That was almost a year ago, and he has had no answer yet. According to various sources, applicants for this status commonly have to wait for 18 months, and often as much as three years. (There are individuals who have been in the asylum system for up to seven years.) And as the Irish Times reported on Wednesday, subsidiary protection has thus far been awarded to just nine applicants, since its introduction in October 2006. There is some useful data on the impact of prolonged stays in the 'direct provision' asylum system (where individuals are housed and fed, rather than being given an allowance to care for themselves) in this Amnesty briefing from last year. Perhaps needless to say, instances of depression, trauma and psychiatric illness are far higher amongst asylum seekers than amongst the general population.

Bisi Adigun’s African-Irish theatre company, Arambe Productions, is about to stage Wole Soyinka's 'The Trials of Brother Jero' in Dublin. Best known as the originator and co-writer, with Roddy Doyle, of the recently revived modern-day version of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, Adigun has single-handedly introduced African drama to the Irish stage, through vibrant productions of classic African plays alongside African-ised versions of Irish plays. ‘The Trials of Brother Jero’ is by Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and is a comical farce that tells of the travails of a beach prophet, Jero, a wandering preacher using prophecy to make a living. Soyinka, a former political prisoner and noted critic of Nigerian and African politics, may be Africa’s leading playwright, but has hardly, if ever, been performed here, so this is quite a treat. His work combines Yoruba tradition with experimental modern forms; ‘Brother Jero’ is a structurally simple play, telling Jero’s story through four characters, over five scenes, with its emphasis on revealing farce rather than on character revelation. It's at the Samuel Beckett Centre from February 25 to March 7.

And Arambe is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a celebratory concert of intercultural music, tomorrow night (Saturday 21) at the O'Reilly Theatre, from 7.30pm.

Occasionally we stray from the subject of migration, here at Migration Matters, as we nose around developments in the media sphere more generally. Regular readers will know that we occasionally cover media developments more related to development issues than to migration, and have also looked at media and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - both issues have clear links to the subject of migration, and both are also areas in which there is considerable media innovation, worth looking at from time to time.

Another area of at least tangential interest might be 'peace journalism', which we've stumbled across through our regular source, the Communication Initiative Network. An article on the Network on Bosnia's Open Broadcast Network looks at the practice and success of peace journalism, in the context of the former Yugoslav republic, and may be of interest to some readers. To quote:

'Peace journalism is part of a major worldwide media reform movement growing out of the strong critique of dominant mainstream media practices. The well-documented elite domination, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and conflict escalation of the media are particular points of concern within the field...

'Peace journalism participants seek generally to change journalistic practices that too stringently control and limit access to the media and too narrowly define information that is worthy of broad dissemination. Hence the emerging field of peace journalism lies at the nexus of concerns about the rights to communicate and to receive information regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, or nationality.'

The Open Broadcast Network is an internationally-funded commercial tv operation in Bosnia. Its website is here.

There's an interesting archived article on the history of the OBN (dating from 1999) here.

Wikipedia's entry on peace journalism is here.  

Anthony Haughey is the artist who recently brought us the collaborative project 'How to be a Model Citizen', at Dublin City Council's office, which explored questions of citizenship, identity and migration.

The organisation Create have just posted a series of interviews with Haughey, as podcasts, here. For more on Haughey's work, see two earlier articles in Migration Matters: 'Art from an asylum seekers' accommodation centre, Mosney', on 15/12/2008, and 'Artist intervention at Dublin City Council's Wood Quay offices', on 04/12/2008 (in the December archive). For more on Create, see 'Supporting artists working with new communities, and others' on 03/02/2008, below.

Migration Matters is not a forum for discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict per se, though migration issues are clearly one crucial part of the Middle Eastern political complex. However, occasionally it seems appropriate to focus on some aspects of the media response to that conflict, and this is one of those occasions.

‘Seven Jewish Children’ is a new play by one of the most esteemed of British playwrights, Caryl Churchill. It is ten minutes long, and was written in one week, in response to the war in Gaza. The debut run at the Royal Court in London was in aid of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Now, Churchill is making the play available for free on the Royal Court’s website, with the proviso that anyone, anywhere, can perform it, without having to secure or pay for performance rights, providing that it is free to attend and a collection is held for Gaza.

Churchill explained to the Guardian, a couple of weeks ago: "I wrote it last week; by this week I was arranging it with the Royal Court; it's now being cast; rehearsals are next week; and we perform it on 6 February. It's only a small play, 10 minutes long, but it's a way of looking at what's happened and to raise money for the people who've suffered there."

Now, an innovative theatre collective in Dublin, Project Brand New, are calling on Irish theatre companies and fans to perform or read the play all across Ireland on the weekend of March 7-8, in support of Trócaire’s appeal for Gaza. (Email projectbrandnew@gmail.com for more info.) For more on Project Brand New, see here.

In an article on the idea, the Guardian's Lyn Gardner observed that theatre often feels like too much of an oil tanker to modernise quickly enough and be really responsive to 21st century life... With Google and 24-hour news available at the press of a button, we all have access to the here and now, but because of the lag time in play-making, it sometimes feels "dated, stuffy and disconnected".

Michael Billington gave the Royal Court production a four-star review, and concluded that 'the play solves nothing, but shows theatre's power to heighten consciousness and articulate moral outrage'.

Also on in London is a dance-theatre performance, 'Plonter', exploring the conflict in the Middle East, which 'uses loosely interlinked scenes to explore the wretched consequences when a Palestinian child is killed by Israeli forces on a practice manoeuvre'.

An extraordinary media and immigration-issues story from the US. A controversial, outspoken sheriff in Arizona, Joe Arpaio, last week marched shackled immigrants through the streets of Phoenix. Arpaio is well known for his anti-immigrant measures, and often accused of racial profiling of Latinos. But this episode wasn't just for the benefit of his profile in the traditional media - it was seen as being a measure to help promote his new reality tv show, 'Smile... You're Under Arrest!', on Fox.

According to an article on AlterNet, 'more than 200 Latino immigrants were chained, dressed in prison stripes and forced to march down a public street from a county jail to a detainment camp in a desert industrial zone outside Phoenix.

Along the way they were filmed by television news crews and guarded by at least 50 Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) deputies, wearing body armor and combat fatigues, armed with shotguns and automatic rifles. At least two canine units were present; a Sheriff’s Department helicopter hovered overhead.

The massive show of force was pure stagecraft for a blatant and dehumanizing publicity stunt orchestrated by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The MCSO gave no indication that any of the immigrant prisoners were particularly violent or presented a grave danger to the public.

According to a MCSO press release, 220 immigrants were transferred to a “Tent City” surrounded by electrified fencing. “This is a population of criminals more adept perhaps at escape,” Arpaio stated in the press release. “But this is a fence they won’t want to scale because they risk receiving a shock – literally.”'

Arpaio's reality show is currently airing on Fox Reality. A blurb for the first three episodes reads as follows:

Episode 1: Wanted fugitives are asked to model clothing for a fashion show as part of an elaborate sting operation. This culminates with a surprise arrest of the confused “models” by undercover deputy sheriffs.

Episode 2: Wanted fugitives are lured to a fake movie set and asked to participate as extras in a pretend film. Upon completing their scene, the director yells “cut”, and our fugitives are arrested for real by undercover deputies.

Episode 3:Wanted fugitives are led to believe they have won the VIP treatment at a new spa called “J. L. Spas”. After completing yoga and various relaxation services, a group of deputy sheriffs arrests them in the middle of a facial.

Read more on AlterNet and in the Huffington Post. Watch a report on an Arpaio 'sweep' here and a CNN report on the new reality show here.

AlterNet is an online news magazine and community that 'creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources. AlterNet's aim is to inspire action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, health care issues, and more'. Read more about it here.

Thanks to Riyaz for notifying us of this story, at migrationmatters[at]gmail.com.

The 'Crossroads' programme on the English-language service of Radio France International covers African and African diaspora issues, and regularly covers migration issues. I've just made a 20-minute documentary for them on the situation of Western Sahara, where the Saharawi people were displaced by a Moroccan invasion in 1975. Many of them still live in refugee camps over the border in Algeria; in Western Sahara itself, known by Morocco as simply the 'southern provinces', there is an uneasy intermingling of Moroccan settlers and native Saharawis, though constant complaints of human rights abuses. There's an article on this in English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique here (known as 'Le Diplo', LMD is also a very good source of material on migration).

Other recent documentaries of interest on Crossroads are a report on how France is the breeding ground for powerful new musical collaborations between European and African artists and a report on a new multimedia museum in Liverpool tracing the history of the slave trade, which is described as follows: 'On 23 August 2007, Liverpool opened a multimedia museum in its dockland area that retraces the history of the slave trade between Africa and the Americas. What has been the legacy of this practice that lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries? What mark did it leave on the Mother Continent and the African diaspora? Through testimonies, terrifying recreations of the Middle Passage and a study of the music it engendered, the museum presents a challenging and important vision of what has been recognised as a crime against humanity.'

The International Slavery Museum site is here. Some details on current exhibitions are here. (Though it's a multimedia museum, their website appears to be rather static.)

Fortress Europe, the migrant rights lobby group, has just published its e-newsletter for January 2009. The editor, Gabriele del Grande, publishes a diverse range of media on the Fortress Europe blog. You can sign up for the newsletter by emailing gabriele_delgrande [at] yahoo.it (replacing [at] with @). The January edition follows below.

'At least 62 migrants and refugees died along the EU border during January 2009, according to our international press review. This month we published a third reportage from Libya. Discover how immigrants are tortured in the Libyan camps funded by Italy and EU, which cooperate since 2003 with the police of Gaddhafi.

REPORTAGE

Guantanamo Libia. The new Italian border police

The iron door is closed. From the small loophole I see the faces of two African guys and one Egyptian. I can't stand the acrid smell coming from the holding cells. I ask them to move. Now I can see the whole room, three meters per eight. There are some thirty people inside. Piled one over the other. There are no beds, people sleep on the ground on some dirty foam mattresses. Behind, on the walls, somebody has written Guantanamo. But we are not in the U.S. base. We are in Zlitan, in Libya. And the detainees they are not suspected terrorists, but immigrants arrested south of Lampedusa

VIDEO

Matar Hammam Lif

Devant la difficulté de franchir la mer clandestinement, les jeunes tunisiens découvrent... l'aéroport de Hammmam-Lif. De Slim Ben Chiekh. (Documentary in French on young Tunisians seeking routes to Europe.)

Esperanza

Documental magnífico de Rosa Mareike Wiemann sobre la vida de los menores marroquíes no acompañados en la enclave de Melilla. (Documentary in German & Spanish on unaccompanied minors from Morocco in the Spanish enclave of Melilla.)

PHOTO GALLERY

Libya: inside the immigrants detention centres

The Irish office of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has just launched a new website. Amongst some novel media on the site are links to the UNHCR YouTube channel, with numerous short videos, including some of their goodwill ambassador, Angelina Jolie.

There's also an online game, Against All Odds which claims to 'let you experience what it's like to be a refugee', and a Google Earth collaboration, which 'takes you on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world's major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims'.

As they describe this: 'The first use of this geospatial tool focuses on refugees and displaced people located in remote areas of Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Sudan's volatile Darfur region. Sit in front of your computer and, with a few clicks, see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee. Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away.'

See below for a further discussion of the UNHCR site.

oAn article on the UNHCR site (as featured above) leads us to Ammado the 'global community of peple who care'.

Ammado is a social network for non-profit organisations and their supporters and like-minded folk, established in Dublin by Peter Conlon, an award-winning IT entrepreneur. According to the UNHCR article, its target is to connect non-profit organisations and individuals who are dedicated to changing the world for the better, including for refugees. Excerpts follow:

‘Although Ammado offers many of the core social networking functions, the site also offers unique tools for charities and companies to manage their various social media. Its widget technology aims to help organisations to easily spread their message across the web while keeping a great degree of editorial control over the content. Conlon feels Ammado has the potential to change the hearts and minds of the public. "Ammado is a facilitator," he says. "In traditional media, journalists write the story and they have the editorial control. We are a channel that allows non-profits and people to publish their own story. Ammado is interactive, it carries on a conversation rather than broadcasting a message. People and organisations can connect directly, tell their story and ask for support. Also it combines different media tools such as print, images and video, to convey the message."

Manuel Jordao, UNHCR's Representative in Ireland, said: "Dynamic social networks on the internet are this generation's social revolution. The internet has changed the way we communicate with each other and the way we do business forever. Sites like Ammado are creating links between people with similar interests and commitments, helping to build the networks that can be a great catalyst for change.

Conlon and his business partner, Dr. Anna Kupka, launched the site's initial version in June 2007, which since then has rapidly developed and is now available in 10 languages with activities in over 100 countries.
Conlon says there are over 2,000 non-profit organisations from all over the world using Ammado to reach their objectives, increase public awareness and engage supporters and volunteers.

"We've spent the last year talking to hundreds of local and international non-profits worldwide to truly understand their needs and provide them with the technology they need to further their cause," he notes.
"Ultimately Ammado is about people being catalysts for change. Users can make a difference everyday by connecting to their favourite non-profits, supporting their campaigns in petitions, polls and communities or promoting non-profit profiles on other sites."

New America Media (NAM) is a collaboration between 2,000 ‘ethnic’ news organisations in the US, founded in 1996. Their mission is to bring ‘the voices of the marginalised - ethnic minorities, immigrants, young people, elderly - into the national discourse. The communities of the New America will then be better informed, better connected to one another, and better able to influence policy makers.’ There’s a video introducing that mission here.

There’s an up-to-the-minute supply of news articles on their site, large number of blogs (for a list of blogs in their ‘immigration’ category, go here), a calendar of upcoming events, a directory (for purchase) of ethnic media and communities, a partnership with journalism schools, and awards information.

There is audio available on the site from ‘New America Now: Dispatches from the New Majority’, a news and culture audio magazine for and from California's ethnic communities, which also provides drop-in segments in five and nine minute modules for broadcast on public radio.

Amongst their recent articles are the following:

Fear and Hate Policies Along the Border: R.I.P.

Just as President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the cases at Guantanamo, it is high time that he take a look at the immigrants who have been convicted in sham trials and housed within the U.S. borders.

Immigration Detention Reform Moves to Front Burner

The recent death of an immigrant in a detention center, and a flurry of upcoming reports about conditions in detention center will likely make detention reform one of the first immigration issues the Obama administration will have to contend with.

From Ice Cream Cones to Elvis Presley – Uncovering America’s Arab Roots

Arabs and Arab culture have been part of American culture from the birth of this country. Journalist Jonathan Curiel traveled across the United States trying to find these hidden roots and wrote a book, “Al America: Travels through America's Arab and Islamic Roots,” about what he found.

Ethnic Media Answer Obama's Call for 'Remaking America'

In his inaugural speech, Pres. Barack Obama declared, "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America." NAM editors asked ethnic media journalists around the country about their views of Obama’s speech and his call to “remake America.”

Dragan Klaic is a theatre scholar and cultural analyst. In 2007, Create brought him to Ireland for a public art symposium in Leitrim, and published an interview with him by Maurna Crozier, the former director of the Cultural Diversity Programme of the Nothern Ireland Community Relations Council. The full interview is here. Here is an excerpt.

‘Cultural diversity is not a panacea, and contains a high risk of ‘here’ and ‘there', of absorbing notions of difference and perpetuating them. With intensive use its meaning has become ‘polluted’, through use by the cultural industries, and as a lever for support for ‘cultural exceptions’. ‘Cultural diversity is a bit passive’, according to Klai

His familiarity, both with many geographic areas of Europe and with its cultural institutions is impressive. I speak to him in Budapest, and he works in Amsterdam; he speaks seven languages, and although he recognises the strength of English as a useful shared language, he criticises both the European Commission, and the EU member states, for doing very little to promote multi-lingualism which he sees as essential in order to build Europe as an ‘inclusive cultural space’.

The term which he prefers in the pursuit of inclusivity, and which he finds ‘much more engaging and proactive than ‘cultural diversity' is 'intercultural competence'. This, he says is, ‘an attitude, a mentality and a skill, which enables me to interact with people who are a bit different but (with whom) I have a lot in common: our humanity, which we can recognise and share, and a skill, which enables me to act with others with curiosity and respect and with the feeling that I will be enriched.’  

Klaic is antagonistic and challenges the search for ‘identity’ which characterised much of European academic and popular dialogue in the late 20th century and early 21st century, as he sees it as being neither constructive or productive, since when one starts with identity one is immediately trying to alienate:  

'The question ‘who I am’ is boring: the question ‘who I might become’ is interesting, so I try to avoid all the identity searches which are self-limiting and curtailing and try to draw a line between ‘me, us, we’ – and ‘others’. When we start with identity it (leads to) stasis and limitation, and it does not recognise social and cultural change.’

What a relief that is to the Irish-Identity Conference weary; we can be what we feel, or aspire to in Ireland now, and share that aspiration with a genuine European like Dragan Klaic. What a liberation. For Klaic maintains firmly that ‘we have more in common than what separates us’. While culture can be a barrier, it is not insurmountable, and intercultural competence helps us.

While at a personal level – always the starting point – this involves effort and skills (presumably linguistic ability might be one of these), intercultural competence in a cultural or arts organisation can be ‘orientation, strategy, policy and philosophy. Ideally it will be part of institutional development at several levels.’ While all individuals need to work on their own competencies, it also needs to be a feature at ‘leadership and board levels, and with staff, associated artists and so with the public.’ ‘In the theatre, to achieve intercultural understanding in the auditorium, it needs first to be on and behind the stage.’

Unsurprisingly, he asserts that he is definitely not talking about the tokenism of a multi-ethnic work-force, but of an inclusive developmental philosophy in cultural organisations, and he cites many good examples of interculturalism – in museums, festivals and theatre: a performance by two dancers ‘Pichet Klunchun and Myself’ which premiered in Bangkok, then toured Europe, (including Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2006 as part of the International Dance Festival) ‘provoked and delighted’; the exhibition in Amsterdam of photographs taken by children on their return to Morocco for holidays, illustrating their ‘double existence’ through ‘what strikes their gaze as different when they go there’; and an exhibition of emblematic objects chosen by the multi-ethnic residents of a city, through which they recreate cultural continuity as ‘new' residents.’

More: There are bios of Dragan Klaic here and here. For more on Create, see last post.

 

The Artist in the Community Scheme is a public funding scheme that gives artists grants to work with community and interest groups around the country on specific projects. It has funded a number of projects working with migrant and multicultural groups in the past. This year's deadline is February 26.

The scheme is run by Create, which calls itself the 'national development agency for the collaborative arts', and emerged out of CAFE (Creative Activity for Everyone) in 2003. ('Collaborative arts' refers, loosely, to the idea of professional artists working with community groups.) Some interesting media on the Create site: they have just launched Create Exchange, an audio resource for the collaborative arts sector. And the site links to this YouTube video by Fearghus O Conchuir.

The video features Fearghus dancing with Chinese dancer Xiao Ke, near Dancehouse, Foley St, Dublin, as part of his Bodies and Buildings Project. Fearghus is fascinated by the changing landscape and demographic of Dublin, and documents his work in his blog, here.

Create publishes a beautifully designed, occasional newsletter. Back issues can be downloaded in pdf from their home page. The September 2007 issue featured an interview with Dragan Klaic on interculturalism and the building of inclusive cultural space. I'll post an excerpt from this next.