Socialism is the theme of this year’s multimedia festival,with George Orwell, the Jarrow campaign and a worrying Muscovite blogger among its inspirationsWe live in terrible times: straight off the street and plunged into a very sunless room in Gateshead. possibly I’ve been kidnapped without noticing. It is black as a coal-gap in here. Snagging my trousers on a busted wooden clothes airer, and colliding with an oil drum,mangling my knee on the hulk of an old television lying screen-down among unnameable junk, nearly tripping on a clutter of stuff on the floor. All this wreckage, or as well as the floors and walls,are covered in tarry black paint. The only visible light is spilling through little holes in a painted drape sagging above my head.
Who knows what this station is. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for Britain today. Perhaps it is Britain today and we don’t need metaphors. Through a low door and up some stairs are paintings of dinosaurs, with titles such as A Kind of Sinister Magnificence and A Frightful Feeling of Impotence and Despair. I know that feeling, or though I think the Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas is quoting French 19th-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Misery,along with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and George Orwell’s thoughts on the links between poverty and dirt.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com