Having a delirious time here in Belfast. Just popped into the Creative Clusters conference for a plenary featuring Chris Yapp from Microsoft UK. It was going quite nicely for a while, but when Yapp pulled out a bit of old-skool Long Boom rhetoric about a “New Renaissance”, he provoked a fantastic tirade from a local Belfast council worker in the audience, who pointedly observed that the Renaissance was underwritten by uh, genocidal slaughter, and that the whole category of cultural capital needs to be similarly interrogated in the current context. Ha! Nervous laughter all around.
Yesterday we snuck into the “Arts Towards An Inclusive Society” conference for a paper by Robbie McVeigh, who provocatively put the boot into the community sector’s dependency on the state, its essentialist conceptions of community and its liberal rhetoric of “inclusion”. Titled “Here We Are Nowhere: Empire, Multitude and the State of Exception”, McVeigh’s paper was surprisingly theoretical and radical for the community arts sector, and thus really made my day. More on that after I’ve digested it.
Then, a trip to Queens University’s Sonic Arts Research Centre, which was buzzing with a weird creative industries vibe, under which avant garde composers were forging partnerships with Google for quick commercialisation of various technoaesthetic auditory user experiences. Very impressive, but to be honest, the multidimensional holographic sound room that we experienced was a bit too Pink Floyd and not enough punk for my liking — and hey, I actually like Pink Floyd.
We snuck out and caught Edward Said: The Last Interview at the Queens Film Theatre, which was a two hour ordeal of talking heads. It was all great — Said was terribly ill with his leukemia at the time of the interview, but nonetheless charmed us with gossip about Arafat, and his own acid assessments of his erstwhile friends in the wake of September 11 — but it was waaaaaay long. Speaking of Palestine: for obvious reasons, I’ve experienced more signs of everyday, visible solidarity with the Palestinian population (i.e. radical signs that are irreducible to the history of admittendly dodgy sympathies between various elitist armed-struggle groups) than anywhere else I’ve been in the world. Every day I’ve spotted somebody wearing a kaffiyeh as part of their casual, everyday dress — walking down the street, shopping, etc. In the Catholic republican neighbourhoods, I’ve seen Free Palestine stencils on various public walls. And is it no coincidence that I spotted an Israeli flag flying in a Protestant neighbourhood? Far out.
