Francois Matarasso Bread and Salt

Bread and Salt published

‘This is like an old passport, my first one, 1962 when I was only 17, or whatever; getting on a ship. I tried to make it like looking at sand and cave paintings, by using the symbols. Then I juxtapose it a bit with Bermuda, parts of Bermuda…’
Bill Ming – Bread and Salt 8
Bill Ming – Bread and Salt 3
Bill Ming – Bread and Salt 2
‘Part of a mask, you know. Yes, this is like the American Presidents – I suppose in Afghanistan and in other places– it sort of gives it away. Then on the side you’ve got the Statue of Liberty; then we’ve got all the children from different nations. South Africa, New York City, and this is one of your Euro places. I just tried to put across the idea that Afghanistan must stand free. Then we go into New York. Then the information of newspapers: newspaper cuttings; it’s about occupation: ‘The holder must not engage in gainful occupation.” That’s out of my passport.’
‘Again we had green and yellow, the African flag; I tried to use that idea. Very bold colours that say something about the African designs and people looking out at the picture to – even if there’s India, too…’
‘This is a mixture of all kinds of things I was putting in; and just kept on piling things on top of each other. It starts off with Brazil and then it goes to Australia with the same idea. The boats of the slaves from Africa; and then the palm trees. It talks about people hiding behind the blinds, or being juxtaposed on top of each other.’
‘This one I tried to, I suppose, bring in desert; tried to bring in places like Australia. Looking at architecture as well, buildings, windows; looking through; just trying to make a landscape, building up layers of colour and shape; a very square idea of what the plains were like.’
This is a sculpture from Africa. Using a canvass almost like a sail on the top of the oceans; then there is the ‘Queen of Bermuda’ at the very top, and parts of a stamp with migration on it. I just wanted to say something about migration and people being exported to and fro, or even imported. The fish, again; looking at the islands, the palm trees. The ‘Queen of Bermuda’—this is before it was refitted, when it had three funnels. This is from the old days, from 1930s.

Bread and Salt, Stories of Art and Migration, was published by Vrede van Utrecht on Friday evening, a part of its final community arts festival. Launch and festival were both wonderful, and I’ll write more about them as soon as I have time. The main thing for now is that that book is available for download here, or in print from Vrede van Utrecht.

I’ve also added all Bill Ming’s images from the book here, with some of his reflections as captions: just click on the images to open up a slide presentation and you can read Bill’s words.

Francois Matarasso Winter fires

You’ve got to laugh

It’s an old-fashioned ladies hairdressers’, on a down-at-heel high road in the West Midlands. The owner – let’s call her Linda – has worked there for decades, cutting, washing and perming the hair of countless women she’s grown old with.

Chairs line both walls in front of mirrors, hair-dryers to one side. There’s a poster of a young Elvis and the price board has those press-in plastic letters that once seemed so modern.

Linda’s is what it has always been – a community space where women pop in as much for a chat as for a tidy up. Last year, one of the customers turned 100—she wasn’t the first—and there was sherry and cake at 9.30am, when she came in to get her hair done.

A week ago, that lady died. Many old friends have been lost in the past year or two. Linda says you can see it in how the takings are down. So now she’s had a letter from the Tax Office. They’re coming to interview her—to make sure the business is not a front for money laundering.

You’d laugh, if it weren’t so sad.

Is this really the best we can do in thinking about the needs of an ageing society?

Francois Matarasso Bread and Salt

Against Frankenstein

‘Hope today is a contraband passed from hand to hand and from story to story.’

John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook, 2011

Bread and Salt tells the stories of 18 European artists who were born in other parts of the world. Those people have nothing in common except the practice of art and the experience of migration.

They are men and women, aged between under 30 to over 70. They came to Europe from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India and East Asia, from cities, islands and deserts. They live today in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Denmark and the UK. They arrived as long ago as 1963 and as recently as 2005. They came as students, refugees and adventurers. They are musicians, sculptors, writers, actors, designers, photographers and more.

‘Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock—They were a mirror reflecting to their own people, the black community in America. That’s what I liked about it, and I wanted to translate the American comedy to the situation here, because we are the African Americans of Holland.’
‘I wanted to be different. I think that’s why I was really trying too hard. But since I’ve been settled here, I feel freer, because I don’t need to be very different. People see I am different anyway.’
‘I want the book to be read by women who are in the same situation I was in; I want to show them that if you take steps, freedom will come; even if you have problems.’
‘When I’m in Palestine, I find myself thinking—if this had never happened in 1948 and my parents still lived there, I would have been a citizen like all the others; maybe a photographer or whatever. But that would never be as exciting as my life now.’
‘Whenever I perform Dutch people will see a Moroccan first. Once I start acting, people gradually see me as a character, because the problems I’m facing could also be those of a Dutch person. Then they see me as a human being, not as a Moroccan.’
‘When I became a refugee, I was alone. I was in another country and I didn’t even know where my parents were. I was alone in a small room I rented.’
‘I was trying to find connections, and I was told to go to a cultural centre the Red Cross had at the time. I met a lot of people. It was a beautiful place. It was my university, this cultural house, a really very good place.’
‘Actually, the first months I just wanted to go back. But I was 29 so I made this crucial decision to prove this was not an emotional move. I really wanted to do something with my life, so I chose to stay and try to prove the decision I made was right.’
‘After the war we just absorbed Western culture and made it ours. We tended to admire all the Western things: blond hair and blue eyes—very, very beautiful.’
‘You could feel the pressure but it didn’t affect me mentally, because I am too strong. I never felt I needed to produce work that basically looks Indian. I never felt that.’
‘I think a writer as a person can be an émigré, but not his writing. I imagine myself to be world citizen but I wonder sometimes: can I be truly a global citizen who lives by universal values, while everyday global reality keeps reminding me of my own lines, in The Cartographer, “As geography changes its borders, fear is my sole companion”.’
‘You have to find a way to survive in this society that didn’t actually invite you to come. You have to understand full well, “I have something to offer”. I just want this society not to forget me. I don’t want to forget myself, I really don’t. It’s very easy to let that artist in you die, especially within this society and that’s my struggle. I don’t want that to die.’
Isabel – ‘I feel I have a place as an active citizen responsible for changing my own reality. It’s as if I have a mission and I’m fulfilling my mission here. So I no longer feel like someone who is here to rehearse all the things the system expects of immigrants. I’ve done that by showing what I could already do, not by leaving it to one side like unnecessary baggage.’ Cleverson – ‘I feel nurtured by this atmosphere that’s conducive to art, joy and the freedom to create. I can fulfil my artistic knowledge without fear of judgment or rejection, diving into the pleasures of living together that nourish my roots and strengthen my wings.’
‘I don’t want enemies; I want friends. But I think the big thing is ignorance—as human beings we make our own problems with ignorance: my biggest enemy is myself.’
‘This is a new generation that’s coming up. They see us as one of them, that we’re sharing our art, we can all grow together. We can have a good time with that, take it where we want to go. We can be creative and they can learn from us and we can learn from them.’

 

They have nothing in common, except the experience of moving from one home, one state, one culture, to Europe, where they have made new homes, art, families and reputations. They have overcome violence and detention, isolation and fear, poverty and hostility. They have remade their lives in courage, rewritten their stories in hope.

Abdoul, Aziz, Bill, Bright, Chien-Wei, Cleverson, Eduardo, Elina, Isabel, Maher, Kaoru, Mahmoud, Mizgin, Mohan, Said, Sardul, Seiko and Zeliha.

They have nothing in common, except their humanity—the common rights and particular gifts that makes each person, each citizen of the European Union, each human being equal before Law and God, whatever we take them to be.

Bread and Salt is an essay. Its methods are literary and artistic; its resources are listening and seeing, reading and thinking. It advances no thesis; it proposes no solutions.

Instead, it sets the irreducible particularity of actual lives against the self-serving simplifications now proliferating in the European public space. Demagogues of every stripe are busy shooting electricity through the butchered corpse of ideologies that some had hoped permanently buried after 1945. Monsters are twitching.

Clive, Colin (Frankenstein)_02Whatever challenges Europeans now face—and they are many and serious—hatred, fear and blame will never help us come through.

Bread and Salt will be published in Utrecht on 21 June 2013 and will be available to download from this site from that date. English and Dutch editions will also be available from Vrede van Utrecht.