Finally, the publication from the Intercultural Dialogue project is available. The book “We no longer talk” is a 136 page hardback published by the Borderland Foundation in June. The book is a series of essays, photographs, reflections and quotes, which give a snapshot of some of the places and people we have worked with over the past two years – including Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Leeds, Bela Rechka and Hania. We couldn’t include everything (sorry Warsaw, Sejny, Skopje, Baku and Walsall), but we hope it gives a flavour of the work and inspires further dialogues.

For further details, in Warsaw contact pamelawells@googlemail.com or in UK brendanjack@googlemail.com

Here’s a pdf of the introduction from Steve Trow. we-no-longer-talk-intro

Curated by Brendan Jackson, a re-presentation of 111 photographs selected from the archives of the Express & Star newspaper, Jubilee Arts and Sandwell Council. The Express & Star was founded in 1880 and is still one of the biggest selling regional dailies. Jubilee Arts was a community arts organisation, founded in West Bromwich in 1974, the same year Sandwell Council came into being. The images in the show are a small personal selection from browsing through these archives, found in boxes and basements, images from West Bromwich and slightly further afield. Though there are a few photographs from the very beginning on the 20th century, the majority are within my living memory or that of my parents. Visitors can add their own photographs and stories…

On show at The Public, West Bromwich, West Midlands, UK, 11th May – 12th July. For details go to www.thepublic.com

As a follow up to interchat event, and as part of the Birmingham bid for UK City of Culture 2013, on Friday 23rd April and Saturday 24th April we had team of social reporters out on the streets documenting life in the City of a 1000 Accents. You can see the whole blog as it happened at birminghamculture.org

Or you can check bj and simon’s contributions which are compiled on the Laundry site here: http://www.laundryline.co.uk/news/24-hour-blog-the-results/

April 7th and 8th, 2010
The Drum, Birmingham, UK

Further information and booking: www.the-drum.org.uk/event/interchat

Featuring Airan Berg, Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture (Austria); François Matarasso (UK); Fundacja Pogranicze (Poland); Laundry (UK); Nova Kultura (Bulgaria).

Wednesday 7th April, 2pm – 8pm
Artist-led sessions to explore good practice in community engagement projects, with local and international examples from Birmingham, Bulgaria, Crete and Poland, aimed at artists and practitioners wishing to develop their community practice with an international perspective.

Thursday 8th April, 10am – 4pm
A dialogue with Airan Berg and François Matarasso, exploring European approaches to artistic practices that invite social engagement, followed by case studies and interactive sessions led by Birmingham arts organisations. This day will be of interest to artists and agencies addressing cross-cutting agendas through the arts.

The trans-pennine express left Leeds on time, despite the ice and fog
and utter and complete disruption in the whole of the country. Just the foreboding of snow, you understand. BIG FREEZE ON THE WAY! announced news placards outside the station.

They drank coffee and stared intently at their i-phones. At first, for what seemed an eternity, reception was not good, lost in the tunnels through the granite hillsides outside the city. The train soon passed Dewsbury, where most people departed, and then Huddersfield, which had a station façade once called the most splendid in all of England.

Outside, the sky a gun-metal grey, the sleet spitting down, dirty cream coloured stone houses along the valleys emerging from the mist then disappearing again, and tall windows of the old mill factories still lit with electric light, though who knows what they contain these days.

I can access the wi-fi now, she said finally. She let out a long sigh of relief.

Mine’s still struggling, he said.

Cape Town, 21 degrees, Adelaide, 18 degrees. Singapore, 28 degrees. She reeled them off. Each destination, a shake of his head, eyes down, fixed on his screen. Moscow, minus 21. I don’t think we’ll be going there.

He asked, How about Hong Kong?

I haven’t got Hong Kong, love. Only Singapore. It’s coming up random. Brunei’s 29 degrees. Borneo’s near enough isn’t it? And Bangkok’s 33 degrees. Shanghai, only 7 degrees there. Rio De Janiero, 30 degrees.

Wrong side of the world, he said. He shook his phone, as if that would
cure it.

Singapore would be nice, don’t you think? It’s supposed to be very clean. And it’s an island, like Hong Kong.

Ah, he said. At bloody last! Now I’ve got Singapore. Friday 28 degrees, Saturday 27, Sunday 28. Scattered thunderstorms.

They were not young and perhaps had generous pensions. They both wore the same brand of pristine white trainers with a gold logo. They explored meteorologic conditions around the world together, as the train slowed on its approach to Manchester Piccadilly, steady at 2 degrees, passing avenues of red and orange shipping containers, stacked high, and no doubt bound for similar destinations, weather conditions permitting.

Creative Laboratory participants photographed on top of Mount Vodno, which overlooks the city of Skopje, Macedonia. Skopje, home to nearly half of the country’s population, was the location for an artist residency in association with cultural centre CK, as part of the Intercultural Dialogue project. Some photo galleries posted here…

Once upon a time, I co-ordinated a series of projects for a community arts organisation called Jubilee Arts, under the banner of ‘The People’s Portrait of Sandwell’. This was a series of exhibitions made with local participants – using photography and text – which challenged many of the prevalent negative stereotypes of the Black Country. One exhibition was called ‘The Golden Mile’, made by young people interested in learning photographic skills – it documented lives along length of West Bromwich high street, which at one point was the longest high street in the country, once prosperous but now, in the late 80’s, much fallen into disappear, partly pedestrianised, severed in two by an inner ring road and a nondescript 70’s indoor shopping mall. The exhibition was first shown in a specially customised ground floor of a former shop on the southern end of the high street. Many years later, when Los Angeles based artist Kim Abeles visited West Bromwich (how we came to meet is too long a story), she was inspired to make a photographic piece about the high street. The final piece consists of two panoramic photographs (over 120 feet long) of each side of the High Street – taken over a period of years, in rain and sun, in different seasons, with remarkable detail composited from some 1500 digital images. The prints have been made in a limited edition of 10, with one set due for exhibition of her work in Bejiing. The panoramas are currently on show at The Public in September and October. You’ll find an online interview with Kim Abeles here at studio-online.com

There are cafes and there then there are caffs. Caffs from memory, by the old Bull Ring underpasses and the coach station, where various members of  Dexy’s Midnight Runners would hang out, or The Hawks, or TV Eye, or The Prefects or any number of groups  with punkish attitudes, sitting glumly on a cold summers day, nursing  large chipped mugs of builders tea, a brown tea almost thick as hot chocolate. Everything was a shade of beige, or grey or a dirty industrial grime.  There are still some of these places left, which pre-date the invention of the cappuccino.

But now, we wander around Stara Ochota, and come across a new favourite cafe, near to the Filtry waterworks. In the shade, a near perfect place as you can find to plan a creative laboratory for Macedonia in September. The plans take shape, the delicious pastries are consumed…

New postings on the Intercultural Dialogue project in the July News section of the project web site.

Image: Stephen Duffy in one of those caffs near the old Bull Ring….

St. Katherines Chapel, Kandanos. We were given a tour of Kandanos by students from the village school, who participated in the Creative Laboratory in Hania. Details of the project can be found at the Intercultural Dialogue web site…

I have never fallen down a rabbit hole, as Alice in Wonderland once did, but I have been to some peculiar and topsy-turvy places. I was brought up in Great Britain – and I use this term deliberately. In the primary schoolroom of my childhood, the main feature I can recall is a large antiquated map of the world. When this particular edition of the map had been printed, in the 1920’s, the British Empire ruled over a quarter of earth’s total land area. Vast tracts were coloured pink – representing all the dominions, colonies, protectorates and other territories ruled over by the Queen, her father and grandfather. On a book shelf, next to the map were paperback copies of various volumes Winston Churchill’s A History of The English-Speaking Peoples, and various tales by Rudyard Kipling or H. Rider Haggard or Arthur Conan Doyle. We were children of mostly Polish or Irish descent, in a school run by The Sisters of Mercy, and our stern-faced teacher was a Mr. Gavin, who came from Galway and who always wore a dark green worsted wool suit. He had the stern demeanour of Éamon de Valera, the President of the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism rather than Empire seemed to be our common denominator, though in the mid-1960’s a quarter of the class emigrated to Canada and South Africa, leaving the football team depleted and vacancies for centre forward and centre-back to be filled by mediocre players. I stayed safely in goal. Even in the bright light of that decade, decolonisation and decline blurred the edges of our world.

Mr. Gavin was a keeper of books – his favourite volumes were Treasure Island, The Hobbit and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There – and he often quoted from them. The map of the Empire was another teaching aid, or an encouragement to be inquisitive, to be curious about the world beyond these walls. He would point and ask, Where is Tulsa? If you were 24 hours away, where would you be? At the time, we rarely understood these references, but perhaps they were planted as seeds to be activated at a later time.

Azerbaijan, on this map in this provincial classroom, would have been one of the most southerly parts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of which it became a part in 1922, and remained a part until independence in 1991. Iran is to the south, Georgia, Dagestan and Chechnya to the north, Armenia to the west, the Caspian Sea to the east. Now Mr. Gavin may well have pointed out this place, given that it had some prominence. Tofik Bakhramov from Baku was the linesman who helped to award the crucial goal for England in extra time the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany. The Azerbaijan national stadium in Baku is named in his honour. Back then, people referred to him simply as ‘The Russian Linesman.’ Baku is the capital and the largest city with (in 2005) 2,036,000 inhabitants, of which 153,400 are listed as ‘internally displaced persons’ and 93,400 refugees.

Forty years ago Baku was a desert city; in many respects it has remained so until today. In the earlier time, however, there was not a single street that might be considered European. Not a single tree sheltered the inhabitants from the burning heat. The whole city consisted only of clay huts and a few barbaric palaces, which were built on the desert sand and surrounded by a single wall; the thick walls of the palaces afforded but slight shelter from the sun. There was no water in the city; there were no rippling fountains such as every other house in the Orient possesses; water had to be brought in sacks from the distance and hardly sufficed for drinking and washing. When the heat became unbearable, the wealthy people left their houses and went to the seashore, where they could pretend or imagine that it was cooler.
- Essad Bey, writing in 1931

Built on the arid shore of the sea, the growth of the city has been fuelled by petroleum exploitation. A century ago, when this was the largest oil field in the world, the Nobels and the Rothschilds and other foreign investors were making their fortunes here, building large elaborate mansions near the sea front, their ornate facades a hotpotch of architectural styles. Oil meant work and workers flocked here from many countries, the hard working conditions attracting agitators and radicals, and a growing Bolshevik presence. The symbols of Bolshevism have all but disappeared, though perhaps not the cult of personality. Many billboards feature Heydar Aliyev,  ‘Father of the Nation’. Streets, new buildings, even the airport, are named after him. Aliyev was leader of Soviet Azerbaijan, and then President of the Republic from 1993 to 2003. His son is now President, and the reshaping of Baku continues to grow at a remarkable pace. At times, a yellow pall hangs over the city, reminiscent of smog in Delhi or Los Angeles, and this is a windy place. It gets unbearable in the summer, we are told, You know, the name itself comes from the old Persian name, Bād-kube, meaning wind-pounded city.

On the outskirts of the Old Town, we looked at some beautiful old houses with overhanging wooden balconies. They were in a state of disrepair and decay. We want to knock them down, one young man told me, We want new modern buildings! And new modern buildings there are, seemingly hundreds, the city in a state of permanent fabrication. There are grand new parks and fountains, a miniature waterfall, wide boulevards being dug up and stones relaid, high rises rising high amidst clouds of cement dust and the petrol fumes in the air.

We walk along a long promenade reclaimed from the sea, the sweep of the bay before you, with the old docks and Turkmenistan ferry on one side, and the Yasamal slopes rising on the other, and I am reminded of Barcelona before regeneration. Though Baku may be modelling itself more on Abu Dhabi, with the development of luxury off-shore housing complexes. We’re told that one of the islands out in the bay was once part of the Soviet Gulag, and will become a Disneyland. It seems far-fetched, but maybe not. We pass a large metal tower, near a new conference and business centre under construction. Here my Father used to come as a young man and jump off to practice parachuting, says our friend, Just for fun. This was entertainment in Communism times. But he preferred mountain climbing.

It’s a strange place indeed. This was the common refrain of the engineers from Essex and Scotland we shared a cigarette with in Moscow airport, who had travelled back and forth for several years, working on the South Caucasus Pipeline – which pumps energy to our hungry markets in the west. Here is a terra incognita, a fantastical land where everything is reversed.

(image: Found object in a street in Baku, near Fountain Square)

And, in turn, how must we be viewed? We are asked, What do you think about the death of Darwinism in England? Or we are told that both our country and Europe is doomed due to the combination of two calamitous factors – the falling birthrates, and the dissolute life of our young people, wholly preoccupied with drugs and sex and alcohol. (Ah, The Hacienda has a lot to answer for.)

There is an absence of what is familiar and known, then I am finally reminded of the writings of Essad Bey: ‘Often. All too often, Azerbaijan is visited by strangers. Writers, journalists, scientists, of all kinds come by train to the capital, view the oil-derricks, gaze in wonder at the eternal fire and the old ruins, find out there is “nothing doing” in the interior, and go on to Russia, to Georgia, or to Persia, with the sincere conviction that they have learned to know Azerbaijan.’

Note: Bey wrote a famous novel, Ali and Nino (published in Germany in 1937), which tells of the love between an Azeri and a Georgian, and set against the backdrop of the First World War. He used the pen name Kurban Said, and was a Jew born in Baku who converted to Islam and led a life which itself reads like adventure fiction. Much of his fascinating story has been uncovered by writer Tom Reiss, and you can explore this on his really great web site – www.tomreiss.info (And you’ll find a gallery of Baku images posted on the intercultural dialogue web site.)