Category Archives: Community Projects – Happiness

Imagining the future

In summer 2019, I was on panels discussing Decolonising Culture (Royal Academy) and Reimagining Britain (Queen Mary, University of London/ Wasafiri Magazine’s 35th anniversary). Many themes ran across both these experiences, foremost among them: Imagination can be a revolutionary act, and revolutions never end. Imagination and revolution are about words, voices, ideas, and actions; they’reContinue reading “Imagining the future”

Poverty Wears a Young Female Face

Up to the mid 1990s, the advanced economies largely succeeded in delivering the promise of growing prosperity for the majority of their citizens. That’s now changing. Post WW2 prosperity was built on post-colonial systems exploitation of resources … and was not constructed to be fair to those outside the advanced economies. The people who createdContinue reading “Poverty Wears a Young Female Face”

The sound of gender and race in film

This data visualisation is a great way to make the point that diversity needs to be fought for. The ugly sound of the way the data plays mirrors the ugly truth about who and what dominates mainstream films, theatre and culture to the exclusion of almost everyone else. And why is that wrong? When weContinue reading “The sound of gender and race in film”

PUPPETS, FEMINISM AND MUSIC …

The vocal is a sample from Blossom Dearie’s ‘It Amazes Me’ recorded in 1958.   Reinterpreted here by Les Balayeurs du Desert it assumes a feminist stance, never more so that when seen with this amazing video.   Think of the compromises we often make so as not to ‘offend’ others, and the analogy with puppetry isContinue reading “PUPPETS, FEMINISM AND MUSIC …”

Under Milk Wood goes Reggae [Audio]

Under Dubwood take the words of Dylan Thomas spoken by Richard Burton and mixes them with the studio sounds of King Tubby.  The result is a curiously displaced psychedelic skank, putting Llareggub somewhere just outside downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Love it!