This just in from ArtPolonia: If you missed the performance in September of the experimental theatre performance, based on the post-Kantor Minimal Art theatrical method, 'The Boot's On the Other Foot', you can see it tonight, Friday 30 October at 7pm in the Tivoli Theatre. It's part of 'The Destructors Manifesto' Festival, billed as 'a night with a twist, from great bands, fantastic art exhibitions, short film tents and much more'.

Also upcoming from ArtPolonia: Lutosphere experimental music concert, November 30, Liberty Hall Theatre. Poland’s most celebrated musicians present their daring and innovative interpretation of works by Witold Lutosławski, Poland’s most renowned composer of the 20th century.

An 'x-ART market' will take place in the Centre for Creative Practices from December 4 to 20, with arts, crafts, music and performance. Artists interested in presenting their works for sale at the market should email info@artpolonia.org by November 22.

With all the talk here of the recent Dublin theatre festival and fringe, I ommitted to mention the show that most affected me, because in the throes of the festival I missed its relevance to Migration Matters. 'Silver Stars', a song cycle about the lives of older, gay, Irish men, was most obviously about being gay - but it was also, critically, about the experience of emigration, for many of the stories told were of men who had been forced to leave Ireland. Based on interviews by the musician Sean Miller, the show was put together by the innovative young theatre company Brokentalkers. (Miller plays a one-off concert in Dublin at the Project tonight, which will feature some of the (gorgeous) songs from 'Silver Stars'.)

I wrote about the show in the Irish Independent; it was also reviewed in the Irish Times. Brokentalkers' Facebook page is here. 'Silver Stars' has been invited to play at the Under the Radar festival in New York in January. I have little doubt that, once the American press gets word of it, it will become a sensation. In fact, the show is absolutely un-sensationalist; but the combination of its narratives of emigration to the US and self-empowerment with its sexual politics, Irish origins and sensitive deployment of cutting edge theatrical practice seems to me likely to be very well received in New York.

'Migrations, Exile' is the theme of a talk next Friday (November 6) as part of the Cervantes Institute Festival of Literature. The discussion will feature the authors Antón Castro, Marifé Santiago Bolaños, Marina Oroza, José FA Oliver and Gerald Dawe and will be moderated by Catherine O’Leary.

The festival is titled 'Rucksacks and Suitcases: Mutant Geographies' and the various events tackle the themes of travelling, exile, migration, tourism, pleasure traveling, journeys, and travels to the past and to the future, with writers from Cuba, Chile, Ireland, Argentina, Germany and Spain. Click here to download the programme. The festival runs from Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th. Other events are:

Thursday, 6.30 pm: Rucksacks and suitcases: opening talk

Friday, 10.30 am: A suitcase for an island: talk

Friday, 2.30 pm: Screening of the documentary, 'Even the Olives Are Bleeding' about the Irish in the Spanish Civil War

Saturday, 12 pm: Return and writing: literary brunch.

The Cervantes Institute is a Spanish government-funded institute to promote and spread the Spanish language and Spanish and Hispanic-American culture. Its head office is located in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, author of 'Don Quixote'.

Following last week's special report from the Western Sahara refugee camps, my article for Le Monde Diplomatique on Aziza Brahim and her music will be online here in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here are some further thoughts on Western Sahara, migration and the media...

‘Africa’s last colony’ was how one of the authorities on the Western Sahara in English, Toby Shelley, described the country, in his sharp and accessible book, 'Endgame in the Western Sahara'.

Having reported from the colony/country/disputed territory last year (in an article and a radio report), I had the opportunity to visit the territory of the Western Saharan government-in-exile, the Polisario Front earlier this month. Their ‘territory’ encompasses a series of refugee camps in Algeria, in the desert near the Algerian city of Tindouf.

‘Desert’ is in no way a euphemism: is unremittingly hot and utterly barren, compelling and very beautiful in its way, but land that feels viscerally hostile to human beings. Yet the Sahrawi people have lived there – not through choice – for 34 years and counting, and have built a functioning (though perhaps barely) polity there.

One of the ways they have managed to do so, it seemed to me, has been through using migration as a strategy for development and empowerment. The Sahrawis are a nomadic people by origin and nomadism is still practiced to some extent form the camps, with people leaving the camps for periods in the ‘free zone’ that is the area of Western Sahara occupied by the Polisario (east of the berm built by Morocco securing their occupation of the core territory). In the years since their exile, however, it might be fair to speak of a globalised nomadism.

The Sahrawis are a highly travelled people. Young people go abroad for secondary education, and often for third: Cuba and Algeria appear to be the leading destinations. During the week I was there, a van drove through the camps at night broadcasting public announcements via a loudspeaker: “Children going to study in Libya are to be assemble with their bags in the morning.”

Some Sahrawis travel to Mauritania, and from there can travel into the ‘occupied territory’ of Western Sahara – though this is officially disallowed by the Polisario. Others, like the singer Aziza Brahim, obtain Algerian passports (with the backing of the Polisario) and can travel internationally. There are large numbers of Sahrawis living in Spain, where many have obtained residency and citizenship through former colonial ties.

According to some sources, those who have gone to Cuba for their education - such as Aziza Brahim - have often found it difficult to reintegrate into life in the camps upon their return. Students who study closer to home maintain closer contact and have better access to the few formal opportunities in the camps, in administration and basic services. Those who go to Cuba often spend five years and more away from home without visiting, and typically form very tight bonds amongst themselves. In the past, some of these have subsequently not resettled into life in the camps, and have sought opportunities abroad. One group of young intellectual emigrés formed a group called the Generación de la Amistad Saharaui to promote their culture internationally (modelled on the pre-civil war Spanish Generación de la Amistad); more recently, some of these have been 'reincorporated' into the official Polisario international network and appointed as cultural ambassadors. They keep a blog here.

With regard to media, the camps are poorly served. There was no evident newspaper or magazine circulation; there is a Polisario radio station and a recently inaugurated and extremely basic tv station - the station is, however, a smart user of limited resources; we met one correspondent at the airport, who travelled on his own, filming his own reports and filing them each evening over the internet. Internet access was very sparse, though the proliferation of mobile phones suggests that, once data packages become more accessible, internet access will quickly become widespread, which is likely to provoke innovative usage of already existing online media and have interesting cultural effects. 

Internationally, Spain is the sole western country that pays extensive attention to Western Sahara. An online campaign, Todos Por El Sahara, has been supported by the actor Javier Bardem and singer Manu Chao have recently supported a campaign, Todos Con El Sahara. An indicator of the relative indifference to or ignorance of the story is the fact that the New York Times online lists just ten articles in ten years on the story. The most recent, last year, focussed on the controversial issue of criticism of the Polisario regime by former refugees in Algeria who fled to Western Sahara.

October 16 marked the anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling in 1975 that Western Sahara had the right to self determination, as was noted in a letter to the Guardian. Less politically, this travel blog post on the Guardian leads me to Listen to Africa, the online record of a two year journey across Africa by bicycle, recording African sounds and voices, which crossed through Western Sahara earlier this year. Enjoy.

I've just returned from a week in the Sahara, in the Polisario Front refugee camps in Algeria. The week was spent working on a documentary, which has just finished production, about the Western Saharan exile singer, Aziza Brahim.

Earlier this year, director Donal Scannell and I joined Brahim and her Spanish group, Gulili Mankoo, on tour in Spain (during which we stopped off at the Roman ruins in Merida and captured this spontaneous performance - also posted below); more recently, we were in London for the African Music Festival (for which the Independent interviewed Brahim). Last week, we travelled with her to visit her family in the refugee camps, on her first visit home in three years.

Brahim’s mother was pregnant when she fled Laayoune in Western Sahara, with her family, in 1975, following the Moroccan invasion. (The BBC's overview of this conflict is here.) She was born in the refugee camps, and grew up there, before being sent to Cuba for secondary school, along with many of her peers. She refused the option of pursuing third level in Cuba, and returned home to the camps, where she started to perform, taking first prize in an annual singing competition. She moved to Spain to pursue a singing career; there was an early hiatus, during which she quit, but when she started singing again more recently, she quickly found a measure of recognition and success both in Spain and on the world music circuit.

Her digital release ‘Mi Canto’ topped the world music chart on emusic.com and she has rapidly acquired status as a cultural representative of the Saharawi people, alongside the renowned singer Mariem Hassan.

Scannell recorded Brahim’s September concert in London, and on Thursday last, it was given a public screening in one of the refugee camps, in a community hall. Though this screening was a largely spontaneous outcome of the ongoing process of making the documentary, it seemed to be one of some significance. Till now, Brahim had not had the opportunity to raise her profile, or to play her music, in the refugee camps. (Travel to the camps is complicated by cost – there are no direct flights – and by visa issues.) The public screening, which was coordinated by the Polisario Ministry of Culture, gave her the opportunity to firmly introduce her music to Polisario’s senior members and the Ministry of Culture itself, and to the Saharawi public.

The screening was publicised the previous night in the typical form in the camps – a loudspeaker announcement from a Ministry van. The screening took place in the morning, and the audience was almost entirely women. Those we spoke to spoke of being very proud of their compatriot, and of being excited to see Saharawi music being blended with foreign, modern influences, such as rock and blues. The official response was very enthusiastic, and they hope to replicate the screening in the many community halls throughout the camps, and hoped to broadcast it on Polisario radio and on the recently started tv station.

There is a skeleton market economy in the camps, which has arisen only in recent years, and there is no electricity supply: people use solar panels to charge car batteries, which they use to power lights and basic appliances such as a music player. Thus there is no formal market for distribution of music. What has arisen instead, though, is a bootleg, digital market: digital music is downloaded onto mobile phones, often from privately-run kiosks which also offer phone services, and people then pass these files from mobile to mobile via bluetooth.

Accordingly, Scannell made a low-res version of the Merida music video of Brahim and gave it to Brahim’s younger family members; as we left the camps, this was already seemingly hopping from phone to phone, and seemed to have the potential for going ‘viral’, providing perhaps as much potential exposure as the more formal distribution and publicity of screenings and broadcasts.

There is an annual film festival in the camps, and Scannell was encouraged to present his film on Brahim for inclusion next year. In the meantime, Brahim has been nominated for an international human rights prize. More on these to follow.

A number of Brahim’s songs are versions of poems in Hassania, her native language (a dialect of Arabic) by her grandmother, an acclaimed Saharawi poet, Ljadra Mint Mabruk. There is an article on her (in Spanish) here and a video of her reciting here. Brahim’s myspace page is here.

Scannell received Irish Aid ‘seed funding’ (via the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund) to develop the documentary. (The seed funding strand is unusual – and very useful – in tv production funding, as it provides small amounts up front to allow a producer get started on a project, with almost no strings attached.)

Incidentally, Scannell came to Brahim’s music through that of the Touareg group Tinariwen, leading figures in 'desert blues'.

This time next week I'll file a further report on the interplay between migration and media issues in the Saharawi camps. Normal Migration Matters service - regular, shorter reports, will resume thereafter. As always, new readers can sign up for the email newsletter version here.

Colin Murphy

'Ideas worth spreading' is the catchy tagline of TED, an online collection of videos of talks by inspirational public intellectuals. TED is more than that - it started life in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design (hence the acronym), but it is its more recent emergence as a prominent online video platform that is of more interest here. 

As they put it, they make 'riveting talks by remarkable people free to the world'. Currently on the home page is a talk by a remarkable writer, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie draws on her own experience as part of the diaspora to speak of the hegemony of the Western worldview, the need to tell diverse stories and 'the danger of a single story'. Her talk is here.

TED held a conference in 2007 on the theme of 'Africa: The Next Chapter'. Those talks are here.

Of general interest, the site has a selection of short videos, 'Ted in three minutes', here and the top ten talks are here.

A belated note on a play in the recent Absolut Fringe festival in Dublin with the intriguing title of 'Jesus Has My Mom in There and Has Beat Her Up Real Bad'. This was a new play by Dee Roycroft produced by the well established Dublin company, Loose Canon. Roycroft's play was unconventional in style, merging diverse narratives and staged in a deliberately untheatrical way (now commonly referred to as 'post-dramatic' theatre). One of the narratives threaded through it was the story of two teenagers from Guinea, Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, who stowed away on a flight to Brussels in 1999, and froze to death. They carried a letter with them to be read in case they 'sacrificed' themselves and were killed en route. This letter was widely published internationally. Addressed to 'Excellencies, Messrs. members and officials of Europe', it concluded, 'if you see that we have sacrificed ourselves and risked our lives, this is because we suffer too in Africa and that we need you to fight against poverty and to put an end to the war in Africa. Nevertheless, we want to learn, and we ask you to help us in Africa learn to be like you'. Roycroft's play succeeded in presenting their story in an unsentimental but arresting fashion, in an engaging if enigmatic production. However, it got a hostile review from the Irish Times, here. An article on the tragedy from the London Independent is here.

This year's Polish film festival, Kinopolis, runs Oct 22-26 at the Cineworld Cinema on Parnell Street, Dublin, with 13 films. The festival opens with Little Moscow by Waldemar Krzysztek (reviewed here), the winner of a Golden Lion at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia in 2008. The festival concludes with the Cinema of Historic Transition - a film retrospective commemorating the 20th anniversary of the defeat of communism and the re-birth of democracy in Poland.

Renowned director Agnieszka Holland will take part in a Q&A on Saturday 24th, after a screening of 'Copying Beethoven' (trailer here), her most recent (2006) film. Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her 1985 film, 'Angry Harvest', about a Jewish woman on the run in World War II. Her best-known work is 'Europa Europa' (1991), based on the biography of Solomon Perel, a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland following Kristallnacht in 1938, but who subsequently found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. It became one of the most successful German films released in the US, and won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (according to Wikipedia). Holland collaborated with Krzysztof Kieślowski on the screenplay for his film, 'Three Colors: Blue'. Kieślowski's 'Decalogue X' (1988) will screen on Sunday 25th.

The programme is here and booking is here.

Today fortnight sees the start of the fifth annual Carlow Film Festival, running October 16 to 18. As well as the film programme, there is a symposium on October 17 titled 'Effective Collaboration: Instrument of Development in the African Movie Industry', featuring Afolabi Adesanya of the Nigerian Film Corporation, Susan Wamburi a film director and producer with the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communication and one of Nollywood's most prominent/prolific directors, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen. The screenings programme is here. During the festival, a call for submissions for 2010's festival will be announced. The festival director is Nigerian Ade Oke, who presents a multicultural show on KCLR radio station, The Rainbow. That leads me to a conference paper presented by the director of programmes at KCLR, Mags Murphy, on the potential of local radio to provide more accurate images of developing countries, in which she cites Oke's show. The paper was presented at the annual Cleraun media conference.

An apparent cookery programme might be a less obvious source of stories on migration, but then Hidden Kitchens is no ordinary cookery programme. Produced by the Kitchen Sisters, a leading American radio duo, the series explores the world of hidden kitchens and how communities come together through food. Being the US, many of these communities are immigrant in origin. See, for example, the episodes 'Birth Of Rice-A-Roni: The Armenian-Italian Treat', about how a friendship between a Canadian immigrant and a survivor of the Armenian genocide led to the creation of a popular San Francisco dish, or 'The Sheepherder's Ball: Hidden Basque Kitchens'. Short and sublime radio essays: one of their characteristic features is the lack of a voiceover, with all contributors introducing themselves. More than merely a stylistic device, this is indicative of a deeply democratic ethos underlying the Kitchen Sisters' work.

Political anoraks will thrill to the new Irish website, KildareStreet.com, a non-partisan site which 'aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected representatives in the Houses of the Oireachtas'. The site allows an easy-to-use search of the websites and transcripts of the Irish houses of parliament, the Oireachtas (comprising the Dáil and the Seanad). The Oireachtas has its own site, but this is more unwieldy.

A search today for 'immigration' brought up these results, amongst them (for example), a written answer by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern to a question on an unnamed individual's application for asylum. You can receive email alerts every time a particular person speaks, or a key word (eg. asylum) is said in the Oireachtas.

The site is still in beta (ie. trial), and does not feature the same range of features as the British equivalent, on which it is based, TheyWorkForYou. This allows much more comprehensive analysis of individual MPs' records. This site is run by mysociety.org, a British charitable organisation that 'builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives (and) teaches the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives'. More about their work here.

One of the consequences of the international economic downturn has been a weakening in the commercial position of newspapers, and an apparent acceleration in the trend towards providing and consuming news online. One offshoot of this has been a gathering of forces amongst investigative journalists seeking to use the internet to pursue and publish their stories. The Center for Investigative Reporting in California is a long-standing non-profit investigative centre, publishing multimedia work.

Their mission statement is worth quoting at length: 'We are living in an age of upheaval, institutional collapse, and historic unforeseen change. And journalism is not immune. The only “business” protected by the Constitution, the business of informing the public, has been eviscerated in recent years. The role that journalism plays in a functioning democracy—informing the public and holding the powerful accountable—is at serious risk. Major issues affecting the very fabric of this nation and the world go uninvestigated. As we struggle to find solutions to two wars, climate change, immigration, a recession, and myriad other global issues, a thriving media is more important than ever.

'CIR is working to ensure that high-quality, credible, unique journalism does not die, but flourishes. Our innovative new model relies on in-depth collaboration with other news organizations, journalists, public policy organizations and universities, and fully exploits new storytelling technologies, to provide citizens—local and global—with critical, actionable information that impacts their lives. Important to this model is our search for new revenue streams that can help sustain high-quality journalism in a digital age.'

A portfolio of CIR investigations is here. Amongst them is a story from June this year, 'Immigration Courts Make Do With Limited Resources Despite Mounting Caseloads'. This was a collaboration with truthdig.com, a 'progressive' current affairs web magazine. Truthdig's list of stories on immigration is here

Cited in the above article is another piece in The Nation on 'secret courts' exploiting immigrants. The Nation's list of stories tagged Migration & Immigration is here.