by Rosie Lavan
The Barbican, one of London's cultural landmarks, is celebrating its birthday.
Last Saturday, March 3, marked 25 years since it first opened its doors in 1982, and the Queen hailed it as " as wonder of the modern world."
The programme of events for the birthday weekend was testament to the culture of diversity that the Barbican has always fostered.
Visitors to the Do Something Different weekend, mainly children and families, could listen to the poet Michael Rosen play with words in the conservatory, look up at circus performers wandering round the foyer on stilts, and pick their "favourite person to strangle" during a workshop with the London Stunt School.
But then the Barbican - Europe's largest arts centre, funded by the City of London Corporation - has always been a bit different.
It was born out of a brave-new-world impulse, part of the redevlopment of a site that had been utterly devastated by the Blitz. It is known for the defiant modernity of its design, but it is full of the past, with a long history that takes in the Romans, the plague, prostitution and poets, inbcluding Shakespeare and Milton.
With a consistently innovative and international arts agenda it encourages Londoners to look east for their culture, while in its birthday year the Barbican itself continues to look forward, as it always has.
Thursday, 8 March 2007
Barbican 25
Wednesday, 7 March 2007
Switching on compassion
By Rosie Lavan
Descendants of All Worlds
Finsbury Library, St John's Street
IF SOMEBODY mentions the conflict in the Balkans, your first thought might not be of how children managed to get to school each morning during the war. But it’s precisely such everyday events, as they have taken place in some of the world’s most troubled areas, that a new exhibition in Islington encourages visitors to consider.
Descendants of All Worlds, is the latest project from Scotland-based not-for-profit organisation, Heartstone. The exhibition uses photo-documentary to challenge prejudice and combat intolerance.
Sita Kumari, founder of Heartstone, says the project should urge visitors to “see again, to empathise, to see people as people”.
It features photos from the Balkans, a trail of children walking to school under armed guard in Pristina, alongside an image of veiled girls on their first day of school in post 9/11 Afghanistan.
March of the Living, an exhibit to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in January, shows shoes piled high in concentration camps, the mundane remnants of an atrocity. The exhibits will change during the course of the year and display new photos from different parts of the world.
Using community spaces like this marks a departure from the larger exhibitions that Heartstone has concentrated on since its foundation in 1990. This, says Kumari, was deliberate and reflects an attempt to reach a new audience. Larger, more traditional exhibitions were “preaching to the converted” Kumari says: “We knew exactly who was going to walk through the door.”
By taking the work to high profile local sites like libraries and community centres, the art director says they are presenting stories to a different population whom they would not normally reach.
Descendants of All Worlds is running in 50 different locations across the UK. Through the photographs, the exhibition tells many tales. Its aim is to make these tales as easy to relate to as possible - these are ordinary stories that happened to take place in extraordinary circumstances.
It also seeks to combat compassion fatigue; harrowing images of starving people and war-torn places have, in the age of 24-hour news, become more familiar than shocking, and Kumari says this needs to change. “The problem with media coverage is that people switch off.”
It is the human stories that get lost within the news melee that Heartstone wants to tell.
Wednesday, 18 October 2006
Islington's next modern Tory
By Rosie Lavan
IT’S not easy being a Tory in Islington. The party hasn’t had a councillor here since the early 90s, hasn’t controlled a council since the late 60s, and this is, of course, the borough where New Labour was born.
Islington’s Tories are known mainly for their conspicuous absence. The response of a community worker in north Islington is representative – a shrug, a smile, and “well, they’re non-existent”.
A core of activists is trying to raise the profile of the Conservatives here – and this, they admit, is the first obstacle. The party has long lacked the support it needs to get its message across at a grassroots level. In an effort to bolster dwindling membership Islington Conservative Association (ICA) was formed recently, merging the local parties from the two constituencies in the borough.
Despite a 200 per cent gain in the share of the vote at the local elections this year, neither of the Islington constituencies are in line for David Cameron’s A-List treatment at the next general election: they are just not considered to be ‘winnable seats’.
A local activist and regular in the Conservative “blogosphere”, Paul Newman is quick to identify their problem – “the sheer indiscipline of the Conservative Party”, and their enemy – be it Ken Livingstone or that “fat fraud” John Prescott. Newman is seeking his party’s nomination as a Conservative candidate for the next Mayor of London.
In Islington, he says, “there is a natural Labour constituency that just sits there and is never going to go away”. Under a Liberal Democrat council and amidst solid Labour sympathy, the Conservatives are campaigning on issues they hope will give them a foothold in the electorate – championing leaseholders, for example.
For Deputy Chairman of the ICA, Duncan Webster, his own generation of recent graduates – feeling for the first time the full force of council tax, living costs and the congestion charge – are a key demographic.
Webster, 26, chairs Islington Conservative Futures (ICF) which organises social events for young members.
He admits they are battling with an image problem – he looks uneasy at his own vision of Young Conservatives on a night out in nightclub Fabric – but says ICF is “a good way of unpoliticised young people in an unpoliticised way”.
Boundaries between political parties may be becoming increasingly blurred, and Newman and Webster might be convinced that their party has changed – “we’re modern Conservatives”, Newman affirms – but it’s Islington they have to convince.