Art and Peace series

In the space between –

an interview with Viviana Fiorentino

Viviana Fiorentino is a teacher, writer, poet and activist. She is Italian and lives in Belfast. She published in international webzines, journals and in anthologies (Dedalus Press, 2019; Salmon, 2020); In Italy, a poetry collection (Controluna Press) and a novel (Transeuropa Publishing House).

She co-founded two activist poetry initiatives ‘Sky, you are too big’, a celebration on international migrants day which combines poetry and music from migrant artists living in Northern Ireland https://quotidian.ie/projects/sky-you-are-too-big/ ‘Letters with wings’ (founded on Poetry Day Ireland 2020) is a poetry campaign in support of artists in prison that collected 727 poetic letters to be sent to artists in prison for their art and/for defending their freedom of speech and human rights. ‘Letter with wings’ as part of the ‘Imagine Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics’ in 2021, organised “When art meets activism”, an online event dedicated to the women artists Chimengul Awut (award-winning Uyghur poet) and Nûdem Durak (Kurdish origin folk musician and political prisoner in Turkey).

She is on the editorial staff of Le Ortique, a blog and an initiative that voices and rediscovers forgotten women artists. https://leortique.wordpress.com/

She facilitates the creative writing and photography project “Same/Difference” (Quotidian – Word of the Street Ltd – https://quotidian.ie/projects/same-difference/ exploring themes like identity, belonging, diversity and peacebuilding.

She was interviewed by Stefania Gualberti.

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Stefania: How did your background and experiences lead to your involvement in art and activism?

Viviana: The truth is “I don’t know”, exactly. If I look back at my background and experiences which led to my involvement in art, it comes to my mind all the times that I walked back and forward, that I changed my path, all the times I questioned my perspective, interrogated my way of living. My background is made of this: lots of intertwined paths. These doubts and questions led me to my involvement in art.

My first path was to study Natural Science and Biology. The connection to nature and the environment around me was for sure very important for both my involvement with art and activism. My art is a way for me to connect with the world around me, with the nature and the environment. Activism for me is living as communities which means to connect with the world around us, nature. Nature is made of human beings as well. Sometimes we perceive nature as non-human animals and plants, but nature is the whole environment, including us and all the millions of interactions between ‘we’ animals and organisms. If we take care of nature, we take care of ourselves too, this is a form of activism.

My background is also influenced by the fact that I travelled a lot in Europe. I was born in Italy and after secondary school I left the country and l went back to Italy and left again when I was 28. I lived in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, back in Germany and finally in Northern Ireland. These changes in ground and languages gave me the opportunity to shift my point of view many times. I think a revolution of the point of view is at the base of art. When you create art, you have to look at the world around you, or anything that is ‘the other’, from a different, new, perspective. To express it you need to be outside for a moment, in a space which is in between. This space allows you to create something new.

Stefania: What do you feel is special about art to challenge, connect and transform?

Viviana: Every day we listen to thousands of words, from the radio, the media, from the people around us as we receive the news from the world. In a way we become anaesthetized, we lose contact with words, we forget the meaning of words. Art, writing in my case, put these words back in a new context. That way we have a kind of revelation again from the words. This is the challenge. The art has a transformative quality. As we get this revelation, we finally see the new meanings of the words, from which we were anaesthetized, we have the possibility to transform our feelings of rage, despair, sorrow into something new, into something that can be beautiful through the act of creating.

Stefania: How do you think the creative process can help healing trauma at both individual and collective levels?

Viviana: There are two sides: one side is the power of transformation of collecting your experiences and reshaping them. The other side, the healing process, is not in the art itself but in the connection that art offers us. We create art to communicate with “the other”. For example, when I write a poem, at the end, I create a connection with another person. The healing is there whenever I reach somebody else. It can be just one single person, it can be in the future, it doesn’t matter. This connection, this possibility we have, is a flow of love.

I am not sure that art can be healing for the person who is creating it, it might sometimes, for me the healing happens in the moment the artist and the receiver connect. When you as an artist reach someone and when someone is reached by the art. The healing is not in the art but in the connection thanks to the art.

I think sometimes creating can be energetically tiring as you have to put together your fragmented pieces and you have to recollect your experiences that maybe traumatized you, so it can be a problem of re-suffering. In that moment of recollection the artist does a leap: you leave your specific individuality, your ‘ego’, for making that experiences universal. Before reaching the page, there is a process of growing, so to say, for you as artist. Somehow you are you look at yourself from outside.

This moment when you are in between space, in this outside space, is when you look at your life, and say, look that was me, but now it is an experience for everyone – you want in fact talk to many others – it becomes a universal perspective. It’s the growing of a new possibility, like a seed, you see you can grow from there. You can move forward from that experience. So, at the end, I can heal from that experience thanks to the other person that I imagine will receive my art. Art is art if it is universal, if it has something that can speak to others.

Stefania, you also asked me about the collective levels. In this sense, art can be a glue, because of its power of universality we can stick together. We can find a collective voice, in a poem, in a painting, so we can imagine something together.

Stefania: How do you overcome the barriers in groups especially people who would not consider themselves as ‘writers’ or ‘poets’? How can poetry be accessible to everybody given that it is sometimes seen as the most pretentious of the arts?

Viviana: It is a challenging question because the inaccessibility of poetry comes, I think, from an old way of talking or reading poetry in education. Because of its nature, most poetry can talk to everyone, and it is largely accessible, it depends on how we read it. What is a poem? It is something written on a piece of paper. It is like a stone, it does not speak by itself; we need to give it a voice. How is the stone made? Maybe it is sedimented with water, but where does it come from? The same questions can be asked for a poem.

In a poem, what are the meanings of the words? What are the sediments that made it? What is the poem saying to us? Doing that, we give the poem a voice and doing so we recognise a part of ourselves in there. Looking for the voices inside us and bringing them to the surface is a way to say, Look, that is what I understood, what do you think? This question is poetry.

Each art has its own tools and techniques you need to learn if you want to be a professional, but the kernel is this voice which is inside of everyone.

Stefania: How has your bilingual and migration experience facilitated your engagement in this area?

Viviana: In Northern Ireland in particular, there is a movement from the reality which was true 30 years ago of a net division between two different groups. Now there is a wealth of different cultures which still needs to be recognized by the society. Each migrant here has this beautiful great possibility to be a bridge for those people who think they are still divided. People who have more than one language, more than one culture, can be a present for Northern Ireland.

Stefania: In your years of experience is there a particular project or engagement that you want to talk about in relation to this conversation on art and peacebuilding?

Viviana: There are two main projects that are part of my art and heart. One is Same/difference devised by Quotidian artists Maria McManus, Nandi Jola, Bernarde Lynn and I. It is a series of creative writing and photography workshops. The project has been implemented for the first time in Portadown supported by Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Council  through Peace IV funds. It was then followed by further implementations of the project with two further series. It examines the concept of identity, belonging, home, diversity and peace-building, through creative writing and expressive abilities and explores the lived – experience of migration.

The common thread is to see ourselves with the eyes of the others, being in dialogue with the others, understating my own story and listening to ‘the others’. The groups we worked with actually represent Northern Ireland’s society today, diverse.

Letters with wings was born last year (2020) during the first lockdown when the feeling of constraint in our house was a good opportunity to emotionally connect with artists and people who all over the world were imprisoned for fighting for human rights or for defending freedom of expression. We asked the public to send on social media artistic letters to address to the artists who were imprisoned. We collected more than 700 letters and we are in the process of sending these letters. The letters can be read in our website (https://wingsletters.wordpress.com/). It was fantastic, we had a great engagement as people felt the necessity to reach out to the artists who were imprisoned. It was a community project, which was the strength of it, to do something together, to imagine a possibility all together.

I would love to finish up this interview with a poem that actually inspired many of the projects I talked during this interview. I initially wrote it in Italian then Maria McManus and I worked together toward a translation in English. Please take it as a way to thank you for this opportunity.

I – Landing

i

Sky, you are too big;

Persian Blue –

I cannot know you.

ii

Instead, I call on you, Land;

give me a place to put my feet,

a home for my uncertainty,

a place to doubt.

iii

A place to live.

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Art and peace series

Moving from injustice to generating alternatives:

An interview with Rita Duffy

Interviewer: Stefania Gualberti

Rita Duffy was born in 1959 and is a Northern Ireland artist. She describes herself as a pacifist and feminist. Her installations and projects often highlight socio-political issues and some of her work is in the permanent collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Imperial War Museum in London. Rita Duffy will have a new website available soon at www.ritaduffystudio.com

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1. How did your background and experiences lead to your involvement in art and peacebuilding?

I grew up in Stranmillis, right beside the Ulster Museum. The Ulster Museum became our playground at the weekend. It was a privileged situation to have that in proximity. We went to the Botanic Gardens because our house was a Victorian terrace and that was an escape to greenery and when it rained, we went to the Ulster Museum and slide on polished floors. I would look at the paintings so that was something very guiding and important for a child who was obviously taken with the visual.

My father was from Belfast, my mother was from county Offaly. I didn’t really feel I belonged. I didn’t realize I came from Belfast until I was about 12. The pull of my mother’s people, she had six sisters, was so great, so it became inevitable to start making art, painting, about what was going on around me. It didn’t satisfy me that in art school the conversation was about shades of yellow, concepts, it seemed really bad and poorly argued philosophy, so I made a conscious decision to make work that was on what was around me.

What was going on around me was a battle in the city of Belfast that was a microcosm of what was going on in every conflict area across the planet, so it seemed to me an appropriate place to start. Something that I knew, something that had been formative, certainly the topic of conversation in our household. I went to St Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls on the Falls Road through the ‘70s and that was a very important time. We were safe, I was removed from it every evening. I was questioning my identity, who I was, a young woman and all that seemed to be an inevitable necessary conversation within myself and as a result within my work.

2. What do you feel is special about art to build peace?

I think art is a spiritual force I have come to realize. I have identified art as a spiritual force. Susan Sontag said that first. There is something incredibly powerful about art that stops human beings collapsing into barbarity. I am not talking about middle class, I am talking about stuff that really moves you, how creative thinking, artistic thinking, how artists think provides alternatives. There is a reason why artists, poets, writers, musicians are the first people locked in prison by regimes, because they draw attention to the necessary. It is not about some dislocated discussion about some philosophical concepts. It is about an urgency; it is about a passionate response. It is about drawing attention to injustice, it is about creating a space that encourage people to think and to act, and to respond and to be unsettled.

3. How can art help to transform conflict and connect people?

I suppose it is up to people to engage with art in terms of connecting people and transforming conflict. I have seen projects that are very effective and passionate about bringing people together. I think the fact that art takes place in a space apart from your area or my area, we go somewhere else. We go to a theatre, we go to a cinema, we go to a concert hall or we go to an art exhibition. That gives the opportunity for that third space, where we can argue, where we can allow ourselves to become confused, where we can then create something fresh out of that confusion. And I think transforming the battlefield into something else is what we have done many times. We had to rebuild, rethink, reconstruct and that means potentially there is space for fresh thinking.

4. How do you overcome the barriers in groups especially people who would not consider themselves as “artistic”?

Quite often people would say things like “I can’t draw to save my life” but you try taking people onto a journey where they enjoy and are challenged but they are not put into an excruciating place, because then what they will produce is excruciating. I think it is the artist’s job as a leader to have some sense on what you are working with, and what and how that might work in terms of their involvement into the art project.

You need to be really quite well tuned-in and informed on what, where, how, what your budget is and what are the possibilities. Then you have to take it and do a creative jump with it. If people find they resist too much, they don’t have to be involved, they can do something else, or find another project that suits them better. You don’t cater to the lowest common denominator you try to inspire people and you lead them. You are not finger painting, you are communicating, you are explaining why you are doing this, why this is necessary, and you can always find a place for people, find a way to engage people, even in the most basic situations, even doing a simple task, they feel like they have contributed. You are not being led by the group the artist has to lead.

Too much community art is about process. But if you want to do a fingerpainting exercise where everyone puts their input don’t expect to find something interesting art wise and don’t pretend there is something interesting visually either. You can find methodologies to engage people: like photography is a fantastic way, because everyone can take a photograph, it doesn’t take any skill to take a photograph, and occasionally you get really lucky. I always believe there is magic if you are genuinely trying to really engage with people and there is stuff you can’t plan for! That’s the stuff to go after and to recognize when it appears. As an artist you need to have a vision, if these people are not interested in painting, find another way, if they are very talkative, maybe you should have a writer on board, or they love to sing… you have to work with what is there and you have to suss out what’s possible.

5. How do you think the creative process can help healing trauma at both individual and collective levels?

I don’t know, I am an artist and I trust what I do. There is a level of trust, I don’t measure what I do, I don’t go back to examine, I don’t think. But I do know there is a sense that something has changed even if it’s a molecule of an individual’s psyche. They might not even get that straight away, but it might come back to them in different ways later on. I am interested in art, really, and I think it’s up to everybody to decide whether they were going to switch off the TV and listen to that symphony or be content and watch somebody playing darts. It’s their personal choices involved here. Sometimes people are at different stages of their life and sometimes they are more open to the possibility of transformation, sometimes not.

6. You are one of the best-known artists in Northern Ireland, indeed Ireland. How has this affected your art, if at all?

It’s funny, it either really works really well for you or really badly. In the North sometimes I would experience the attitude “Who do you think you are? I’ll bring you down a level or two”, so there is that aspect. But more times than not, you would get, “We will be delighted to work with you”, it gets a little bit easier to get your foot in the door.

7. How do your pacifism and feminism interact, and do you feel they are equally represented in your art?

I am politically interested. It is not something I think about. It is a subliminal thing. I am very interested in feminism; politics and I am very interested in pacifism. I am also interested in contemporary politics and what is going on around. I listen, I engage, and sometimes I come up with an image that is a response to that. Watching the Trump presidency unravel was something that I thought had a global resonance, that populism, I wanted to do something about that, so I made a list of drawings and a recent painting because it affects us and what was going on in North America, has happened in Brazil, The Netherlands, London. I suppose it’s about what sparks your interest at any given moment. I am reading a wonderful book by an Egyptian feminist, Nawal El Saadawi. She trained as a medical doctor, she died recently. I am reading her writing at the moment, it is amazing, incredible stuff. I am continuing to soak in things, reading and looking and thinking and I am doing lots of writing myself at the moment.

8. In your years of experience is there a particular project or engagement that you want to talk about in relation to this conversation on art and peacebuilding?

I should talk to you about the project I was making at Quaker Cottage* (with Ann Patterson), a portrait of eight women. I was looking at the Ulster mythology, the curse of Macha. The story is all about tribalism, division and not showing compassion to women and children who bear the most suffering of conflict. That is the most amazing story and I went to Quaker Cottage with the idea of choosing one of the women as a sitter for the portrait of Macha. When I was there one of the women was having contractions. Unfortunately, she had conceived as a result of rape. Her partner had a barring order but because of where they were lived, the police couldn’t exercise the barring order, so he occasionally broke in and raped her. I was thinking that was the most horrific story and I was thinking from my comfortable middle-class existence in South Belfast, it really kind of opened my eyes, to what women were experiencing in Belfast.

If I had heard that about a crazy worn torn spot in Bosnia, I would have thought, yes that is believable, but that was Belfast, Belfast, 11 years ago. I thought we don’t reflect these narratives, these experiences. So, I ended up making an exhibition on the portraits of these eight women and I interviewed them, and I recorded their stories, and we called the project “House to house”. From Quaker Cottage you can see clearly across to Stormont. Also ‘house to house’ was how the army searched. At the time there was an argument going on the radio about whether they should be allowed to have Easter lilies or calla lilies because they had had orange lilies. These men in Stormont were arguing about floral decoration in the lobby at Stormont and meanwhile I had heard that story.

That’s an example of how things grow. There is an element of magic, that’s how things develop.

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*Quaker Cottage, managed by Quaker Service, is a cross community family support centre which provides services for some of the disadvantaged areas of north and west Belfast.

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Review:

Dining with diplomats,

praying with gunmen

“Dining with diplomats, praying with gunmen:

Experiences of international conciliation for a new generation of peacemakers”

by Anne Bennett

Quaker Books, London, 2020, ISBN 978 199931 415 6 (also available as e-book), 162 pages. UK£10.00. www.quaker.org.uk

– Reviewed by Stefania Gualberti and Rob Fairmichael

Well, given that this is a book based on an internal Quaker process and there isn’t too much demand for international conciliators, what is the point in reviewing the book? Plenty, as we hope this review will reveal.

The first thing to say is that it is impossible to write the history of working for peace in Ireland, or indeed internationally, without mentioning the word ‘Quaker’ or Religious Society of Friends. https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72157717185737611

Conciliation is defined in the book as “the process of bringing people together and creating enough trust between them for them to talk constructively together. It usually involves the help of facilitators to encourage the parties to move to that point and to engage in dialogue to resolve the conflict that has divided them” (pages 2 and 22).

Anne Bennett tells the story on how the Quakers started to take up the role of international conciliators and how their quiet processes around the world have been successful over the years. They created a reputation based on their integrity and on their principles and values; building relationships of trust with people on both sides of the conflict, starting where they are; not taking sides but listening to all parties with the belief that if each person’s stories are not heard and acknowledged it is difficult to move forward; encouraging parties to explore options, nonviolent responses; working in building capacity of the local peace groups.

Nearly all those processes need to be done in strict confidentiality. Quakers, grounded by their spirituality and in the belief that “there is that of God in everyone”, have held the light of hope for peace even during violence. They trusted and have demonstrated that “peace processes begin with small groups and communities who can exert change amid divided societies” (page 42).

Conciliation isn’t the only show in town but as Andrew Tomlinson says, (page 96) “conciliation is part of an orchestra working for social change.” One particularly effective shout out in favour of conciliation is given by Diana Francis (page 84) where those who might not have listened to each other both listened and learnt.

Another question about the usefulness of this book for a more general audience is its transferability. Does the ‘international’ part of conciliation apply to national or local? And do the specifically Quaker parts apply to others? The first point here is that conflicts are now much more intra-national than international but the same approaches apply. ‘International’ or societal conflicts may be at a different level, and different cultural rules will likely apply in different situations, but these may be differences of scale and context rather than essence.

Some coverage is given to the fact that the Quaker name can provide an entry point, and we can say that cannot easily be replicated by non-Quakers who don’t have (or belong to an organisation with) a long and known track record of being fair and understanding to all sides. The ‘spiritual’ dimension of Quakerdom, however you might define it, also contributes to their acceptability. And the rules apply everywhere, e.g. “never saying one thing in one place and something else in another” (page 68).

But some other points are that Quakers are not infallible – the book mentions failures including in the mid-19^th century over Schleswig-Holstein (pages 8-9), times change, and having a name to live up to can be hard work. Quandaries and dilemmas appear in any challenging aspect of life, including in relation to conciliation the balance between confidentiality and justice (pages 17 and 39), and the possibility of appearing to collude with evil in certain circumstances (page 78). Sue Williams is usefully quoted on ‘the purity dilemma’ (page 80). Quakers have a particular moral and spiritual code but it is not necessarily any easier for Quakers than anyone else to traverse this ground.

The book is very comprehensible and also very comprehensive for its length. There is only one point in the book where we feel something was left hanging. In outlining the different parts of a peace process (page 47), it outlines and defines peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. It simply states “Quaker activity is concentrated on two of the three stages: peacemaking and peacebuilding”. The definition of peacekeeping given includes that “It involves monitoring local activity and being ready to use force if necessary”. Is this a judgement that force is or may be necessary? Lethal or non-lethal? And, if considered necessary, left to others rather than Quakers with their peace testimony?

Of course it may have been felt that going off on this tangent, and it is a bit of a tangent since conciliation certainly does not involve force or violence, was introducing a red herring into things. However a few sentences on why Quakers pick two of these elements and not the ‘peacekeeping’ one could have been helpful.

There are significant Northern Ireland links to this book. Both the author, Anne Bennett, and Sue Williams who is quoted a few times, lived in the North aside from when they worked, at separate times, for Quaker House in Belfast. Another also quoted participant, Clem McCartney, and the illustrator, typesetter and participant Lynn Finnegan are from Northern Ireland. Lynn Finnegan’s intriguing and slightly enigmatic, but highly appropriate, illustrations turn the book into a beautiful work of art. https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/51129435906/in/dateposted/

This is aside from the fact that Northern Ireland has also been the recipient of long term Quaker conciliation efforts; Micheál Martin has remarked before how much he learnt about Northern unionists and the situation through programme organised by Quaker House in Belfast. When you consider that as Taoiseach he is not rushing headlong down a (potentially slippery) slope to a unification referendum, this is worth bearing in mind. And positive outcomes may not be the ones worked for; Nigerian magnanimity towards the erstwhile breakaway Biafra, after the latter’s military defeat, may have been partly occasioned by Quaker conciliation efforts previously, and their work to overcome demonisation of the military enemy (page 71).

The book was a response to an intergenerational conference the Quaker held in Woodbrooke conference centre in September 2019 with the aim of bringing together experienced Quaker peacemakers and younger generations to capture the learnings, knowledge and experiences the Quakers gathered over the years and explore ways of applying them in a fast-changing world. Ways of operating internationally have changed and the limited resources for processes, which can take a long time, as well as having a more widespread presence of other groups and organisations working for peace, made the Quakers doubt if they should still invest in this area or adjust and use their skills and knowledge locally. The willingness and energy to continue international conciliation is there, alongside the need to widen the pool of conciliators to include young Quakers to be able to respond to requests of intervention promptly as they did in the past.

The conference tried to bring together experienced Quakers and younger ones, with their eagerness to get started and learn. They demanded answers on the “mystery” of the stories of what Quaker international conciliation was, bringing hope to continue to do a good and relevant work updated in today’s world. The poem that closes the book (page 139) speaks of those questions the younger Quakers put forward: should we stay or should we go? Give us practical theory and robust framework. How can we join? Is peace work only for privileged volunteers? The Quakers found themselves in a threshold and again (amongst uncertainty, fear, and frustration) chose dialogue and trust to move forward.

The guru was looking glum. One acolyte asked another what was wrong and received the answer “He has forgotten the secret of the universe again.” We all have to keep discovering and rediscovering meanings and realities. When it comes to conciliation, this book is a very worthwhile part of an understanding and it is great that it has been written up in such an approachable style.

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