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This is a repository copy of The Rhythm of the Martyrs : Barricades, Boundaries and Arts- Based Interventions in Communities with a History of Violence. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/158460/ Version: Published Version Book Section: Linstead, Stephen Andrew orcid.org/0000-0002-1006-2921 and Marechal, G. (2016) The Rhythm of the Martyrs : Barricades, Boundaries and Arts-Based Interventions in Communities with a History of Violence. In: Lightfoot, G., Moriceau, J.L. and Letiche, Hugo, (eds.) Demo(s). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers , Rotterdam . Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ THE RHYTHM OF THE MARTYRS BARRICADES, BOUNDARIES, AND ARTS-BASED INTERVENTIONS IN COMMUNITIES WITH A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE Stephen Linstead and Garance Maréchal The Rhythm of the Martyrs S. Linstead and G. Maréchal THE RHYTHM OF THE MARTYRS BARRICADES, BOUNDARIES, AND ARTS-BASED INTERVENTIONS IN COMMUNITIES WITH A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE Stephen Linstead and Garance Maréchal n this chapter we will explore the idea that identity is process of symbolization and we can extend this to whatever screened – displayed, filtered, and concealed at the same other means of signification might be additionally employed Imoment – by various objects that are capable both of – such as graffiti – in serving the same purpose. What all of receiving and blocking projection, and that are capable of these means of signification provide are, in effect, screens becoming screens in both senses of the word. We will look that serve a double purpose: first, to screen off and mask the at the ways in which barriers, barricades and placards mutate body behind the screen, forming a boundary between this into walls and murals, separating communities and demonstrating community and that which is on the other signalling aspects of identity and difference, under side; and second, to provide a surface on which to project conditions of sustained actual or threatened violence, using identity (which can be in more than one direction, both Northern Ireland as our example. In the process, we will inward and outward). As Steven Connor observes: consider how the membrane of the drum has become Screens have two functions: they show and they symbolic in two different communities, forming a musical conceal … A screen filters; it is a permeable screen, whilst the membrane of the wall has simultaneously membrane, not a locked door. Screens cover and become a pictorial screen. Drawing on work by Jacques conceal: but in presenting a secondary or fictitious Derrida on community, auto immunity and corporeality, we surface, they also partially disclose. will then consider attempts at intervention (ABis or arts- (Connor, 2005: 184) based interventions) for community reconciliation and change, based around each of these artefacts. We will finally Connor goes on to argue, however, that during the twentieth assess the possibilities and obstacles to be faced by this and particularly the late twentieth century the concealing political aesthetics in bridging the barriers, redirecting the dimension has received less emphasis than the showing one, projection, and returning from the aggression of violent as in the hyperrreal world of simulacra: demo(strations) to the agora of demos. The world of neutral surfaces, brick walls and the blank back sides of things is progressively being screened off, as the older meaning of the screen as DEMOS AND WALLS something behind which something invisible may be going on is replaced by the newer conception of the Reality itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is screen as something on top of which things are being language, its ymbolization, which makes it such …. when we made available to sight. (Connor, 2005: 185) are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings and cars, lynching people, etc., we should And fom a specifically political rather than an ontological never forget the placards they are canying and the words which perspective, Goldberg (2014 online n.p.n.) offers pragmatic sustain and justify their acts. (Žižek, 2008: 57) support: The logics of social subjection and social Žižek’s furious crowd are, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘essencing’. subjectiftcation come together in social subjects That is to say, they are not acting out of some propulsive pre- taking on these convictions as their own. Internalized existing inner essence that defines them and determines walls become structures of being, of thinking and their actions and options, but are demonstrating the qualities lived condition themselves. This point applies to all they wish to be ascribed to that imagined essence, and political walls, all walls the raison d’etre for which are setting out the criteria that such an ‘essence’ would seek to insertions into the landscapes of political relation and impose on the conditions of existence. They thereby further refusal. The materiality of political walls are reflections demonstrate that which they construct and lay claim to as of the ideological walls borne by social subjects, at their origin as the justification for their actions. As he asserts, once projections and reinforcements, if not placards and banners are an important element of this reifications, of them. 1 The Rhythm of the Martyrs S. Linstead and G. Maréchal TYMPAN ALLER: RHYTHMS AND RESISTANCE obliterates any possibility of ‘proper’ or correct and indivisible meaning, which can no longer be ‘found’, and are Walking through the streets of certain parts of Belfast is to knowable only through those processes that construct its experience a space somewhere between that of the ‘foundations’. As Derrida ( 1972: 158) summarizes: undecorated walls and the placards and banners of a The logic of the event is examined from the vantage demonstration. It is almost like being in a gallery, but a of the structures of expropriation called timbre gallery with a highly active and performative purpose. The (tympanum), style and signature. Timbre, style and murals commemorate and agitate, questioning identity as signature are the same obliterating division of the they represent it, screening histories and counter-histories, proper. They make every event possible, necessary, leaving a mark on the viewer -a responsibility for whether and unfindable. and how they act on these signs and images – or what Derrida calls a ‘signature’. Hearing is such an important sense for Derrida because it is not frontally framed as is the ocularcentnc vision deployed … the signature is not only a word or a proper name in our viewing of the walls, but is spherical, more capable of at the end of a text, but the operation as a whole, the surprise, and acts through a physical impact or affect on the text as a whole, the whole of the active interpretation body, before the involvement of the brain. It makes us which has left a trace or remainder. It is in this respect vibrate. It may produce effects that run counter to the that we have a political responsibility. content of communication. Tympanum or timbre as Derrida (Derrida, 1985:52) establishes, translates roughly into a sense of tone and amplitude; style is more a mater of technique, timing, It is then the experience, and the stop-start rhythm, pattern selection, spacing and rhythm; signature is perhaps more and direction of movement through the spaces between the elusive, but it can perhaps be thought of as the ligature, or walls as well as the representations on the walls that the traces of ligatures, that bin the elements of signifiers and constitutes the ‘operation as a whole’. It reflects something signifieds into the sign, even interlacing them into narratives hack to those who view it whilst also adding and asserting - of history. depending on what the viewer brings to the wall. Some of The ear of the other says to me and constitutes the the experience seeks to write us into inclusion or exclusion; auto of my autobiography. When, much later, the other will some of it challenges us to rethink inclusion and exclusion have perceived with a keen-enough ear what I will have as categories; some of it provokes radical feelings of addressed or destined to him, or her, then my signature will inclusion or exclusion. Travelling around the mural and wall have taken place. Here one may derive the political import sites of the city the impact of texts and images leaves a of the structure (Derrida, 1985:51). powerful trace, as it is meant to do, but it becomes possible The political or pwer question as raised by Derrida, to discern recurring motifs, rhythms and riffs at work within then is that the ‘sign’ature is not the unifying expression or the contending perspectives and narratives. Although we the symbolic statement, of the author, of the ‘event’, of text experience the wall/ screen as membrane, with regard to its or sound, but the binding accomplished by the audience, opacity or its semi-reflective surface, this rhythmic capacity the reader, the hearer, the ‘ear of the other’, that completes evokes another take on the idea of a ‘membrane’. This it as text, that gives it signification after it has literallymade emphasises its tensile and potentially resonant properties, an impression on the ear.