Robert Del Naja in collaboration with Pierpaolo Piccioli and neurographer Mario Klingemann, an artwork that explores the process of the #ValentinoHauteCouture #CodeTemporal collection through the synthetic filter of artificial intelligence. Concept / directed by Robert Del Naja Edited by Neural Networks Neurography by Mario Klingemann Original script by Mark Donne Post production by Anthony Tombling Jr Music by Del Naja / Dickinson
Looking forward to this:
New six-film series from Adam Curtis will premiere on BBC iPlayer from 11 February
These strange days did not just happen. We - and those in power - created them together.
The highly anticipated new work from journalist and Bafta award-winning filmmaker,
Adam Curtis will premiere exclusively on BBC iPlayer on 11 February 2021.
This new series of films tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on.
The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the
West, but in China and Russia as well. It covers a wide range - including the strange
roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history
of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new
system of power.
Adam Curtis says: “These strange days did not just happen. We - and those in power - created them together.”
Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a BBC
Film and BBC Three production for BBC iPlayer. Produced by Sandra Gorel, Executive Producer is Rose Garnett for BBC Film
-
Latest column for West England Bylines:
his Monday, 25 January 2021, four Bristolians went to court. Their crime: Tearing down the statue of the celebrated benefactor of the city from the 1700s, Edward Colston, merchant and slave trader.
The event occurred in Bristol city centre during the most prominent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest, on 7 June 2020. A demonstration that attracted thousands of protestors.
When the statue was torn down that day, most of the protesters applauded this action which had been requested officially by diverse groups and activists for over the past three decades. The photographs of the scene of the falling and the dumping of the bronze statue into the Harbour toured the internet globally.
The protests, the march and the statue’s removal were all peaceful; no one was harmed and even the bronze statue itself was salvaged. Fetched from the water, it is now sitting in the M Shed and will most likely be exhibited with other objects and artworks related to Colston’s and Bristol’s historical role in the triangular trade.
So, on these grounds, many in Bristol question why four people are now facing prosecution for such action.
Rhian Graham (29), Milo Ponsford (25), Jake Skuse (32) and Sage Willoughby (21) appeared at Bristol Magistrates Court this Monday, charged with causing criminal damage to the statue of Edward Colston.
On behalf of the group “Countering Colston”, the former Lord Mayor of Bristol and Green City Councillor, Cleo Lake, wrote:
“These four young people were selected out of a crowd of hundreds who cheered as the statue of Edward Colston, a leading organiser and profiteer from the enslavement of African people, was dumped into the Floating Harbour … Whilst we do not endorse criminal damage, we do not support any prosecution as it is neither in the public nor Bristol’s interest in terms of where we are presently as a city. Non-prosecution would be a step towards reconciliation and healing.”
Cleo also added on Twitter:
“Don’t prosecute the #Colston4. We need a British State that can listen, recognise & acknowledge the reasons why the statue had to go & start to prioritise healing, reconciliation & repairs from the magnitude of legacies left by.”
I couldn’t agree more. Yet the trial opened this Monday.
I came to Bristol as a foreign reporter for the first time in February 2015, and I was very aware of Colston’s legacy and controversy. Since, I have spent years doing research on the recent cultural history of the city. I had chosen Bristol, after years as a reporter on African affairs for the BBC World Service and other international broadcasters, precisely because I thought its complex history was the perfect mirror for the world we live in. No year has illustrated this intuition was right more than 2020.
On the one hand, the artists I interviewed, met and discussed with (Robert Del Naja, Tricky, DJ Flynn to name a few) embodied the success of a counter-culture born out of immigration, Caribbean culture, rebellion and vocal demands for system change, through raps, lyrics, performances and activism. Del Naja for instance always refused to perform in the Music Hall as long as it was named after Colston.
On the other hand, it was obvious from my first visit that the legacy of not only Colston but the whole history of the British Empire and its colonial brutality and centuries of slavery was not over. Many in the city are demanding change, the end of inequality and better prospects for the people of colour in the city, one of the most unequal in England according to some surveys.
In the days leading up to the trial, messages of support appeared on placards all over Bristol. On Monday morning, an online support event took place, accessible from Facebook.
But in some parts of Bristol, as in the rest of the country, there are still many people who defend the prosecution. Statues are public property, they say. Colston did a lot of good for the city, others add.
But as the entrepreneur Daniel Edmund, who spoke at the demo, said in a film, “Felling of Colston” by Arthur Cauty, shown in an online event organised with the Cube Microplex Cinema on Monday evening, Bristol was hardly known worldwide before 2020 but finally made history in the wake of the US-started Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests for George Floyd.
Lanie, street mural artist, made the mural for BLM on Jamaica Street. He said in the a same film – Felling of Colston by Arthur Cauty – that she felt the way the statue was torn down felt like “the only way it could have come down”, because there were years of campaigning before 2020 that remained unheard by the authorities.
Historian David Olusoga told again that statues do come down, they come down all the time; they change as society evolves: “Germany is full of statues of Hitler; nobody would put them on the streets today”.
During the 15-minute hearing on Monday morning, the District Judge Lynne Matthews said the case could “be dealt with in a magistrates’ court” but the four exercised their right for the case to be heard in a crown court. They were all given unconditional bail and told to appear next before Bristol crown court on 8 February.
After the court hearing, solicitors Hodge Jones & Allen, who represent three of the four defendants, said:
“We will fight these criminal charges vigorously. We are committed to defending them and their right to a fair trial in this important case.”
I was at the march myself on 7 June. I had been waiting for that statue to be taken down for five years. I went with friends from the Indian Ocean and we were surrounded by hundreds from all backgrounds. As we moved forward in the middle of the crowd, I told one of my friends that we were indeed walking toward the plinth. I didn’t know what was planned or about to happen, and I truly think most people didn’t know. I said “we’re aiming for Colston’s statue…”. My friend replied: “Come on this can’t happen, this is Britain after all”. Britain maybe, but also rebel Bristol!
In the evening I wrote this column for The Independent’s “Voices”, stating that our city made history. I wrote:
“For me, as my own family has been deeply affected by colonialism elsewhere in the world, it is puzzling to hear some English people still defending the statue based on the understanding of our shared history. France wouldn’t erect statues of Petain, or Germany of Hitler, just for the sake of remembrance of our criminal pasts.”
I was really proud of the marchers, and proud to be humbly among them, part of an actual step for change. I thought and still think that the people who disagree, who think they are protecting their ‘white’ English culture when they want the statue back, only need to understand, do their own research, and listen to their fellow citizens, black and people of colour who have also been part of this country’s history for centuries if not more.
For I believe no one wants to defend the right to enslave, no one can reasonably state they want to. It’s pure crime, and it is still a sick disease ruining our modern societies. If you defend it, you defend true crime. In France, where I grew up, it’s even designated by the law as “crime against humanity”. So we should seriously ask ourselves: Who deserves prosecution in this situation, slave traders or “statue topplers”?
Let us hope that the “Bristol Four” will be acquitted just as the “Mangrove Nine”, a group of British black activists tried for inciting a riot at a protest in 1970, were.
-
When the fruit of our (very) collective labour comes to life: This film started in the summer 2017, when I joined Velvet Film for the third time as a researcher.
Alexandra Strauss is the outstanding editor.
Soon on air in the US (April) then UK and ARTE (France/Germany):
Source: https://vacancy-mag.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes-premieres-april-7-on-hbo/
Exterminate All The Brutes by acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, HBO’s Sometimes in April), is a four-part series that pushes the boundaries of traditional documentary filmmaking, offering an expansive exploration of the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism, from America to Africa and its impact on society today. The series will debut on HBO with two back-to-back episodes on Wednesday, April 7 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with the final two episodes, airing back-to-back Thursday, April 8 at the same time. All four episodes of the series will be available to stream on HBO Max on April 7 to coincide with the linear premiere. The film’s HBO debut date coincides with the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.
Peck will participate in a discussion with Tabitha Jackson, Festival Director, at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival as part of their Big Conversation series on January 29. The conversation, titled The Past In the Present: A Personal Journey through Race, History and Filmmaking, will explore Peck’s work and the timely themes illuminated in Exterminate All The Brutes, using clips from the series to guide the conversation.
A journey in time, Exterminate All The Brutes is a filmmaker’s personal voyage into the darkest hours of humanity, in which Peck deconstructs the making and masking of history, digging deep into European white supremacy’s ideology. Peck challenges the audience to re-think the very notion of how history is being written.
The series is based on three works by authors and scholars – Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All The Brutes, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past – Exterminate All The Brutes revisits and reframes the profound meaning of the Native American genocide and American slavery, and their fundamental implications for our present.
The series artfully weaves together rich documentary footage and archival material, as well as dynamic animation and interpretive scripted scenes and aims to tell a sweeping story in which history, contemporary life and fiction are wholly intertwined. Peck meticulously disrupts formal and artistic film conventions, freely weaving together scripted and unscripted content.
The scripted portions, written by Peck, are woven throughout the series and together create a storyline where reality and fiction are dramatically intertwined into one multilayered story. Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down) plays the lead role in the scripted portions of the film. The genre-bending series offers a counter-narrative to white Eurocentric history, from the 12Th century Crusades through the presidency of Donald Trump.
Exterminate All The Brutes is produced by Velvet Film. Written and directed by Raoul Peck. Emmy winners Raoul Peck and Rémi Grellety serve as executive producers.
I fully support this statement:
Press Release: Monday 25th January 2021
Campaign group Countering Colston comment on the first hearing of the Colston 4
Today, the 25 January 2021 four people, Rhian Graham, 29, Milo Ponsford, 25, Jake Skuse, 32, and Sage Willoughby, 21, will appear at Bristol Magistrates Court charged with causing criminal damage to the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol City Centre during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest on 7 June 2020. The BLM demonstration attracted thousands of protestors. These four young people were selected out of a crowd of hundreds who cheered as the statue of Edward Colston, a leading organiser and profiteer from the enslavement of African people, was dumped into the Floating Harbour. Whilst we do not endorse criminal damage, we do not support any prosecution as it is neither in the public nor Bristol's interest in terms of where we are presently as a city. Non prosecution would be a step towards reconciliation and healing.
There has been a century long history of dissent and protest in Bristol over the celebration and memorialisation of Edward Colston. The prominence given to the statue of Colston in the City Centre has been symbolic affront to many Bristolians. Despite protests and petitions over more than three decades, and particularly over the last five years, Bristol City Council (BCC) has largely failed to listen to people’s concerns over idolising a slave trader in the centre of our city.
Instead in 2018 Bristol City Council redeveloped the statue’s setting, spending millions of pounds on its location which had the effect of making the slave trader’s sculpture even more prominent. The failure to address the concerns and feelings of Bristolians, particularly of African-Caribbean heritage, led to the statue being repeatedly ‘damaged’ by the application of unofficial history plaques, posters, graffiti and props telling ‘the truth’ about Edward Colston. In each case the statue was speedily repaired by BCC.
In 2017, as public institutions such as schools and concert halls began to remove the ‘toxic brand’ of Edward Colston the question of the statue became prominent. This led BCC to launch a project in 2018 to add a ‘corrective plaque’ to the statue. This project failed after interventions by the Society of Merchant Venturers (SMV) and their supporters sanitised the wording on the plaque, leading Mayor Rees to halt the project. With no public forum to enable people to voice their concerns and with no apparent inclination or will in BCC to deal with the issue the situation became untenable.
This state of affairs was aptly summarised by Prof. David Olusoga:
‘I wish it [Edward Colston’s statue] had been removed 20 to 30 years ago by the authorities, and it would have been if there had not been people in Bristol determined to defend the life of a mass murderer’.
Prof. Olusoga, we believe, is referring in part to undemocratic and unelected organisations of wealthy business people such as the SMV. Edward Colston and his colleagues in the Venturers were architects of the English slave trade, but the Merchants are not just a historical relic; they are an elite network who continues to run or be financially involved in a huge number of Bristol’s public services, schools, cultural and public spaces. The SMV have sustained the narrative of how Colston has been remembered in the city, celebrated his accumulation of wealth, yet ignored his crimes against humanity. The SMV has both financial interests in the brand of Colston as well an outmoded need to defend their icon’s dubious ‘tradition’.
Without the actions of BLM demonstrators on 7 June 2020, the statue of Edward Colston would have remained in place and the city would have continued to carry this embarrassing and damaging burden into the 21st Century.
Instead, the fall of Colston has galvanised individual and institutional soul searching locally, nationally and internationally, re-assessing relationships to the history of 2 slavery and colonialism. Bristol’s international reputation as a progressive city has been significantly enhanced by the events of June 7th but there is still plenty of work to be done.
The prevalence of inequalities in Bristol outlined by the 2017 Runnymede Trust report (1) and the lack of a dedicated memorial and museum to remember the victims of transatlantic slavery remain neglected issues. Nationally and internationally, Bristol’s reputation and lack of will to examine its past over the decades, has been noted. The eyes of the world will now fall upon how it chooses to proceed.
-
Countering Colston (CC) is a network of individuals committed to the decolonisation of Bristol through:
-Remembering the full, true history of transatlantic slavery, colonialism and exploitation
-Commemorating and mourning the people who suffered and died as a result of the slave trade, and recognising the coerced economic contribution that they made
-Celebrating the people who courageously resisted slavery and fought for abolition and emancipation -Acknowledging and repairing, as far as possible, the negative effects in the present day of historical slavery
-Promoting ideas of human dignity, equality and freedom We aim for a world where we can all coexist as equals and with respect, dignity and equity.
Contact: counteringcolston@gmail.com
For further comment: please ring Cleo Lake on 07462 131098.
-
(1) Runnymede report https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/CoDE%20Briefing%20Bristol%20v2.pdf
|
