The ISIS, Michaelmas 2016 by The Isis

EDITORIAL

You might find this issue of the ISIS trickier to navigate than most. But then again you might be having the same feeling about 2016. The UK’s decision to leave the EU is flickering in and out of certainty, and responses to the ongoing refugee crisis, with the recent dismantling of the Calais Jungle, continue to redraw the boundaries of things that were once thought fixed: ‘home’, ‘safety’, ‘nation’. In the following pages, rather than having distinct sections, we wanted you to jump from page to page, and journey through this ISIS on your own terms. On your way you’ll find cakes in Iranian pools, seeds and whales in Norway, blue lipstick in the future, and uncharted spaces at the edge of the internet. Our investigation competition travels between refugee camps on each side of Europe, while our 500 word competition drew a range of responses to a photograph of graffiti on a corner. Art is central to this edition of the ISIS and the glossy pages at the centre of the magazine showcase the best of our updated Instagram, which all term has been plotting the creative journey to what you now hold in your hands. In putting this magazine together we have recognised a thread of focus on place and memory. Mapping the content of this ISIS has been an attempt to freeze on to the page stories which would otherwise be changed or lost with time. We hope you enjoy moving through it.

Eleanor & Jacob

CONTENTS » Switching it Up ........................................................ 6 ◊ Wildfire - Haroun Hameed ....................................... 9 » Seeds of Svalbard ..................................................... 10 » My Iranian Pool ....................................................... 14 » Perceptions of Achiltibuie ......................................... 17 ◊ Ariadne - Grace Linden ............................................. 20 • Artist feature: Esme Mull ........................................... 24 Investigation Competition: » Observations from a Refugee Camp .......................... 22 » Mapping the Jungle ................................................ 26 » Very British Problems .............................................. 28 » A Conversation with Josie Long ................................ 32 ◊ Two poems by Annie Hayter ..................................... 34 • Photography by the creatives .................................... 35 » What Silence Equals ................................................. 39 • A Disastrous Bop ........................................................ 41 » Boiler Room ............................................................ 42 • Artist feature: Virginia Russolo ................................. 44 » Falling Away ............................................................ 46 » Virtuous Monsters .................................................... 49 • Dream Plane: Becca Thornton .................................... 52 ◊ A Poem by Sam Dunnett .......................................... 53 500 Words Competition .............................................. 54 » The Election Show ..................................................... 60 » Life of Grime ............................................................ 62 • Snak Attak!!!!!!! (Fanfiction) ....................................... 64 Staff List .................................................................... 67

Nina Sandelson

Svalbard,

translated from Norwegian, means something approximating to ‘cold coast’ or ‘cold edge’. While its name may not evoke the most idyllic of destinations, the ‘cold edge’ was enough to entice a small population of around 2,000 people to make Svalbard their home. The northernmost settlement in the world with a permanent civilian population, Svalbard is an archipelago to the north of Norway, a vertex where life and death intersect, isolated yet at the centre of global attention and discussion. Primarily, Svalbard is home to the Global Seed Vault, a large-scale project created to counter the possibility of a global agricultural disaster. The vault is, in essence, a giant storage unit in which copies of different varieties of seeds from around the world are kept at sub-zero temperatures. It pre-empts the possibility of food shortages. At present, the vault is thought to house approximately 1.5 million seed samples, preserving them in very specific conditions to insure against the risk of certain crops being wiped out by environmental disasters. The vault is an attempt at preservation, keeping safe the most basic food source to reckon with the future of civilisation. Interestingly, the ideas of preservation and decay seem to have 11

infiltrated Svalbard’s cultural psyche, and the existence of a project dedicated to sustaining life has resonated in the seemingly barren area. Perhaps the first memento mori that would strike someone upon visiting Svalbard is the cultural centrality of graves. During the seventeenth century, British and Dutch whaling companies used the islands as their base. Whaling being a dangerous industry, many of the whalers were killed and their graves remain scattered along Svalbard’s coastlines, numbering over 1,000 in total. The burial of the whalers was more ceremonious than practical: in some graves, pillows filled with feathers were placed under the deceased’s head, along with a scattering of moss from their homeland. Coffins and wooden crosses were engraved with the deceased’s name, home, and year. Gradually, as the number of whalingrelated deaths increased, the graves along the coast built up into cemeteries, many of which still adorn the cold coastline today. Today, however, a legal loophole means it is technically ‘illegal’ to be buried in Svalbard—the graveyards stopped accepting bodies over seventy years ago as it was too cold for decomposition to occur. Those expected to die soon are rather eerily ‘dispatched’ to other parts of Norway to pass on in warmer climes.

for entrapment or purgatory, its icy landscape providing a constant reminder of death which is never realised. The unrelenting cold and constant darkness would pose threats to any ordinary person’s sanity and psychological wellbeing; it is perhaps unsurprising that Mark Sabbatini, editor of Ice People —“the world’s northernmost alternative newspaper”— has said, “If you want to live here, there is something slightly warped about you.” On the other hand, such a harsh environment has produced astonishingly low crime rates. Guns are legal, with the task of protecting citizens not from one another, but from polar bears. The full extent of Svalbard’s detention facilities comprises a single cell, where nobody has been locked up for three years. However, the flip side of this is Svalbard’s ostensibly brutal welfare policies: a past governor of Norway has attributed the low crime rates to the fact that it is against the law to be unemployed. Just like those nearing the end of their lives, the jobless and retired are swiftly deported to another part of Norway. Homelessness is banned, as all local residents are required to have a fixed address, and welfare provisions are close to non-existent. In a country famed for its cradle-to-grave state support, Svalbard offers a stark contrast, with a harsh political climate to match its physical one. However, there may be some pragmatism behind this toughness. Christin Kristoffersen, the mayor of Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s only town, states the conditions on the islands make them uninhabitable for many. Were homelessness permitted, people would frequently freeze to death. Yet the seed vault presents a reminder of a large-scale attempt to survive, an act of defiance, as we allow ourselves to imagine the end and prepare for it. Svalbard’s ‘cold edge’ once more becomes chillingly accurate.

Today, the whalers have been replaced by miners, many of them fleeing the economically and politically turbulent Ukraine, enticed to the island by salaries tripling what they could earn at home. However, there is little to suggest they would fare any better here. For a place so cold that nothing on it can die, Svalbard is stalked by human disaster: a Russian plane carrying coal miners to jobs in Barentsburg crashed into a mountain in 1996, killing 141 people; mining explosions and earthquakes have also hit the islands in the past twenty years.

... the existence of a project dedicated to sustaining life has resonated in the seemingly barren area. Although the islands seem tormented by death, they are, in a way, immortal: tightly vacuum-packed inside the vault is a promise of regeneration. Svalbard has become a metaphor

For all its promise of life, the vault is sometimes referred to as the ‘Doomsday vault’, anticipating a vague and far-off apocalypse. However, the withdrawal of Syrian seeds last year, originally saved in an attempt to regenerate native crops during the civil war, suggests that this apocalypse might be closer than we think. The vault’s role as a resource in a politically turbulent and environmentally unstable world is becoming ever more vital, as scientists edge their ‘Doomsday clock’ closer to a predicted nuclear war — at last count, the time stood at three minutes to midnight. Perversely, an island tainted by death and decay now has an important duty to preserve. While people may be sensibly kept out, the seeds must stay in.

◉

(illustrations by Louise Tidmarsh)

‘A thing too easy to do’ Perceptions of Achiltibuie Sam Dunnett

“ Who owns this landscape? Has owning anything to do with love? For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly human we even have quarrels” ....................... Norman McCaig, ‘A Man in Assynt’ “The problem of a rest from war work and committee meetings on my part, and endless knitting and depot duties on the part of my wife, coupled with the necessity of servants’ holidays and a general clean up, became acute. After considering the different places we had already tried, we decided in favour of untrodden ground, preferably in the extreme north of Scotland....” “Time in Ross-shire doesn’t count, and the air is so pure and the scenery so perfect that one is not in the mood to find fault with anything.” ....... (unknown) From ‘A Holiday in Ross-shire’, in ‘The Field’, September 16, 1916

“We

don’t give a fuck about our history in this country,” says Dan, from Essex. Dan has lived in Oxford, and fought the conversion of the historic Jericho Wharf boatyard into luxury flats. He has lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, and resents the trinketised histories offered by the tourist hotspot. Dan has been coming to Achiltibuie, a tiny town on the Coigach peninsula in the far north-western highlands of Scotland, for 30 years. “I am… disappointed”, he says, carefully, “that this place has changed in line with everything else. Modernity is ruining everything right now.” We are standing outside the Achiltibuie community centre, currently packed for the Summer Isles Festival, offering community workshops and a musical line-up that ranges from local trad-band Tannara to international fiddle extraordinaires, The Blazin’ Fiddles. Later on in my week in Achiltibuie, I ask Sheila, the mother of the festival’s organiser, Mairearad, if it was a successful weekend. “Too successful”, she says, wryly; I saw her on the night itself, frantically accommodating the hordes of people who had turned up. She estimates that around a fifth of the attendees had been fellow locals. The rest were welcome outsiders, hailing from Edinburgh, London, and even as far as Florida. “They plan their holidays to the UK around the festival.” The same people return year after year to the event. People strike up relationships with this place. “If anything went wrong down 17

there”, Dan tells me, “I’d head straight up here, for good.” Norman McCaig, the highland poet who spent much of his life in nearby Inverkirkaig, wrote of the phenomenon: “the land, too, sells/itself; and from these places come people tired of a new civilisation/to taste what’s left/of an old one. They outnumber/the locals – a thing/too easy to do.” It is easy to be critical of Dan’s attitude, but for me, there is something immediately recognisable in it. My family, too, are regular visitors to Achiltibuie. Since I was born, we have been coming to stay in a small house just off the road that follows the coastline. Almost without my being conscious of the process, the area has woven itself into the memory of my formative years. Especially powerful was the impression that by coming to Coigach, I was always entering wilderness, an ‘up here’ resolutely unrelated to ‘down there.’ I sit on the white sand of Achnahaird beach into which it is family tradition to draw running tracks for ‘the Olympics’, the same sand that has been dragged up among the honey-smelling heather behind me by walkers. I consider what a family friend, familiar with the Achiltibuie community, said of it: that many people come to escape the “hand of man”, only to find to their dismay that “the hand of man shapes everything”. Another day, I wake to the morning silhouettes of the Summer Isles, deep blue slivers on the glistening sea, and the news on my phone that planet earth has entered the ‘Anthropocene’, a new geological age in which the effects of human activity have become the dominant influence on the climate. My dad tells me later that one of the islands was once used as a testing ground for weaponised Anthrax. As a consequence, it is now impossible to access. Adam Nicholson, one of the former owners of the private north-western islands, the Shiants, writes of their popular image as “orphans or widows, drenched in a kind of Dickensian poignancy of abandonment.” I wonder about just who and what was abandoned in order to produce this impression. Beginning in the eighteenth century, a series of ‘clearances’ by the British removed people—sometimes whole communities—from the land, initially to make way for the famously hardy and therefore profitable Cheviot sheep, and then to convert the excess space into grouse-shooting and deer-hunting estates. Many—such as my ancestors, who were cleared from Strathnaver—went to the coast; many to urban centers such as Glasgow; many to North America. Many were murdered. Playwright John McGrath describes the process as that of “a feudal system leaping red in tooth and claw into an imperialist capitalist system, becoming more repressive, more violent as it does so”. It takes only a cursory glance at Scottish land

ownership statistics for the bloody legacy to become clear. The nation has the highest concentration of land ownership in the world. 50% is owned by 432 people. Much of the area around Achiltibuie is part of the privately owned Badentarbet estate. Even the idealised ecosystem whispers of this past; the land itself references its own history. The prevalence of the sheep that populate my fond childhood memories harks back directly to the clearances; such was the contemporary anger against this now naturalised part of the environment that a poet from Chishold longed for “foxes and eagles for the lambs. Nothing more to be seen of them but fleshless hides and the grey shepherds leaving the country without laces in their shoes.” The sparseness of flora in this part of the highlands is not an ecological consequence, nor one of the region’s climate, but a result of disproportionately destructive sheep farming and other post-clearance practices. The Gulf Stream warms the sea at Achnahaird, making it surprisingly bearable to swim in; you can tell that far lusher life could be sustained here. As it happens, Coigach was the site of one of the most notorious clearance resistance movements. Mass eviction was attempted and abandoned five times in eighteen months in 1852, before the landowner finally gave up. Large organisations of local people, mainly women, met officers on their arrival and burned their eviction papers. One of these officials, Andrew Scott bemoaned one such incident: “the officer was entirely stripped of his clothes by these rebels, and was put into the boat in which he went to Coigach in a state of absolute nudity.” Still, the area’s dense population, which was the key reason why rebellion was successful, has dwindled, a casualty of the more tragic general history of the highlands. In this light, McCaig’s words, “man becomes/ in this beautiful corner of the land/one of the rare animals”, take on a new meaning. As Dan alluded to, despite the irony of his apparent double standards for his idyllic ‘up here’, concern for the history of a place is fickle. Modern attempts to enrich highland communities and reverse depopulation are often met by objections which strategically anticipate the preferences of visiting outsiders, people like my family. “Landscape, landscape, landscape – there’s just no doubt that’s the thing they are coming for”, the Scottish Herald was told by Achiltibuie resident and Der Zeit correspondent Reiner Luyken in 2014. Luyken owns very expensive holiday accommodation at Polbain, where, to my dad’s dismay, the local shop has been forced to close. He was attempting to explain his opposition to a wind turbine that is currently under construction which would, according to the Coigach Community Development Company, bring in 7p to the community per rotation. Luyken disputes the need for it: “They always say there is nothing here and we’re all so poor, the community is dying on its feet. It’s all a load of crap, the (illustrations by Lorna Stubbs-Davies)

community is very, very wealthy.” I put this to Sheila: “I just don’t know where he gets that from.” In a recent ballot, the turbine received 68% community support, and 95% of those who explicitly object to it have “no connection with Coigach”, according to the CCDC. My favourite thing about Norman McCaig’s poetry is the way he casts the natural world as delicately intertwined with human imagination. In Lord of Creation, he transforms wrinkles on his bedsheet into the Coigach hills: “I have to drive from my mind/a leg stretching out under ground, the collapse/of Cul Mor.” As I read the poem, I reflect again on the interplay between my own memory and this place; Cul Mor was the first mountain I ever climbed, aged around eight. Is my relationship with Achiltibuie reducible to “landscape, landscape, landscape“? Is this, to me, an “up here”? Would I be classed as having “no connection with Coigach”? Whatever the answers, where places like Achiltibuie become completely dependent on the impressions of people like Dan and myself, it comes to seem necessary to present the place as a frieze rather than a process. Thus, living history is packaged, or papered over entirely, and re-imagination is prohibited. In the words of McCaig, this place is ‘something that will go on / being completed forever.’ The process that results in impressions left by places like Achiltibuie is endless. This potential for change within the relationships of even the most ‘abandoned’ places to history, must not be concealed, but respected and defended.

I am a young artist and for the last year I have spent time in Izmir, Calais, and Lesvos trying to gain an understanding of the refugee situation through the process of drawing and painting. A camera can be invasive and intimidating, whereas drawing is a kind of conversation between artist and subject. Esme Mull

Isis

Investigation Competition

Winner:

Isabella Steel

draped loosely across the open doorway. As we waited, we gave pipe-cleaners to the children who gathered excitedly; they made bracelets and pretend glasses. There are no classrooms in Busmantsi. We moved the tables in the cafeteria to face the whiteboard on the end wall; some of the table tops were disconnected from the metal feet on which they now precariously balanced. The wooden seats of many of the chairs were so worn away that only a steel frame remained. During the adults’ lesson, the children sat quietly and coloured; I was given a picture of a bright blue house with pink curtains with grass and flowers in front. There were hills in the background and a warm sun. All migrants to Bulgaria are considered ‘illegally residing foreigners’ upon entry. Busmantsi is one of two detention centres which caters for ‘irregular migrants’. Various violations of immigration regulations lead to this status: ‘illegal entry’ by evading immigration controls at green border crossings, or ‘means of deception’ including forged documents and misinformation about purpose of stay. Undocumented asylum seekers can also be detained. Twenty-three-yearold Khaled* was held in Busmantsi for thirtysix days before deciding to opt for voluntary deportation to his home city of Dohuk, northern Iraq. “Peshmerga forces are very good to stop ISIS,” he assured me, explaining how he hopes to move to Canada. His Canadian mother lives there with his Iraqi father, neither of whom he has seen

Observations from a Refugee Camp

usmantsi detention centre is on the outskirts of a small town thirteen kilometres east of Sofia. It was once a juvenile prison, and high spiked fences still surround the complex. The derelict playground outside is overgrown and littered with rubbish. A stray dog limps across the grass to the shade of a yellow Lada Riva parked on a road which leads seemingly just to the distant mountains. One block is uninhabited — windows broken, paint peeled off, pigeons huddled against the crumbling concrete. The other three blocks are structurally sound but hauntingly brutal: clothes hang from barred windows and immigration police are stationed at every corner. There is a cracked tarmac basketball court where camp residents can spend the only two hours they are allowed outside each day. In midsummer it is often too hot. The accommodation blocks for families and single men are separate, and all interaction prohibited. It is a lifeless place. I was here as a volunteer. We handed in phones and passports to the State Agency for Refugees (SAR) guards on arrival, who unlock the barred gate of the family block. The foyer was busy with people. A downstairs office had been converted into a dormitory, with several bunkbeds crowded in and makeshift curtains 22

for nine years. “Nine years is too long not to see your mother,” he said sadly. Individuals whose asylum applications (and up to three appeals) have been denied can also be deported. At a volunteer meeting, however, I was told of a loophole: persons who neither register for asylum nor opt for voluntary deportation can be detained for up to eighteen months in Bulgaria before being released. Aid workers describe how this complex legislation belies a regard for the vulnerable status of unaccompanied minors. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child outlaws the detention of children. In exceptional cases in Bulgaria children can be detained with their family for up to ten days to “preserve family unity or to guarantee their protection and security”, as outlined in Article 45 of the Law on Asylum and Refugees. Detaining an unaccompanied minor contravenes Article 44 of the Law for Foreigners in Bulgaria. In January 2016 the Office of the Ombudsman reported that 142 children were registered in Busmantsi and Lyubimets detention centres, many of them unaccompanied. An employee at ‘Centre for Legal Aid: Voice of Bulgaria’ (CLA) described how some unaccompanied minors are arbitrarily paired with an adult asylum-seeker during registration at the border meaning that in administrative terms the minor is deemed accompanied and can be lawfully detained. Often neither party knows that this has happened. Sometimes Afghan children are registered with Pakistani men, the source told me. Residents of Busmantsi are locked into their accommodation blocks, within a wider secured complex. They have no phone or internet access, and are isolated from the outside world, friends, and family. Such isolation dehumanises, a central experience of many of the people that I spoke to. Refugees are too often depicted as a homogenous group, but they each have distinct stories and aspirations. Khaled is a photographer. The biographical section of his website reads: “First think I am a photographer; my job is photography and everything is camera”, “Life for Peshmerga, Die fucking ISIS.” Some of his photographs are poignantly political — coiled barbed wire against scorched grass, captioned “Here in Iraq we are not on the face of the land”. A close-up of a

man’s face superimposed with the Kurdistan flag is captioned, “My blood is Kurdistan; my country is Kurdistan; my language is Kurdistan; my everything is Kurdistan.” It reminds me of the drawings the children in the camp make of the flags of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Khaled condemns the behaviour of the Bulgarian authorities; interestingly he described the Turkish police as “very good” and said that they treated him as a person. In Busmantsi Khaled told me that he was refused access to a doctor, accused of lying when he said he was ill. “Why would I pretend I was ill?” he lamented in frustration. At Voenna Rampa the guard asked me why I wanted to come and help “these awful dirty people”. Refugees complained about the social workers; some of the children have psychological problems which appear untreated. One boy was temperamental and violent — kicking and biting. The other children mouthed behind his back that he was crazy. A Pakistan man told me how the guards and migration police are paid off by the mafia, showing me scabs on his arms from where the mafia cut him, and explained how they steal belongings and stir trouble by bringing in alcohol. He said that human traffickers were present, their crimes brought to global attention in 2015 when three Bulgarians were arrested in Hungary for the trafficking and death of 71 refugees who suffocated during transportation in a hermeticallysealed truck for refrigerated goods.

... “Nine years is too long not to see your mother” In Busmantsi the absence of sufficient medical care is evident. A primary school teacher from Mosul, Iraq explained how his five-year old daughter has a long-term medical condition for which she is not receiving treatment. Whether treatment would be curative or purely palliative is not clear. “She is sick; very sick,” he said, and cannot talk or walk properly. Her eyes were glazed over and she did not appear to notice the bright balloons the other children played with. Her weak body leans heavily against her father’s chair. Her 23

at all, but economic migrants, and that Slovakia would accept only Christians. An email leaked from the Hungarian national television network asked journalists to avoid showing images of migrant children. Bulgarian television never had the money nor interest to send reporters to Syria, Krastev continued. Amid reports of the evergrowing horror of events in Aleppo, the sheer inequity of the world is being laid bare. Bulgaria offers little in the way of safe refuge. The situation is unsustainable, in humanitarian terms most certainly, but also in relation to hope of future global peace and prosperity.

father explained how with a family of five the process of applying and gaining asylum is slow; until then his daughter will continue to receive insufficient care. These problems are augmented by the language barrier. The English lesson on body parts and injuries proved popular in the women’s class but highlighted the acute difficulty of administering effective medical care in another language. Health is not helped by poor hygiene and sanitation in the camps. There are meat bones and rotting fruit in the corridors; the bathrooms leak and puddles of dirty water cover the floor, residual dirt seared into the grimy walls. Men cook outside on makeshift fires, the dirt ground littered with glass and broken plastic cutlery. In physical terms Voenna Rampa, one of the two open refugee centres in Sofia, is deplorable, despite nominal EU funding for renovation. It is located in a largely derelict industrial zone on the outskirts of Sofia. “Out of sight, out of mind,” a Bulgarian volunteer, teacher and former journalist explained to me. Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, and is the poorest member state, with youth unemployment at 28.4%. Poverty is acutely evident. Ivan Krastev, Chairman at the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, wrote in the International New York Times in September 2015 about “Eastern Europe’s compassion deficit.” He attributed such sentiment in Bulgaria to an incurious insularity, cynicism after communism and liberal reforms, disappointment in the EU after unmet promises of economic prosperity; and fear of “ethnic disappearance”, particularly in the context of the failed integration of the Roma. “What we see,” he wrote “is not a lack of solidarity… but a clash of solidarities: national, ethnic and religious solidarity chafing against our obligations as human beings.” Though generalisations are often misrepresentative, there are broad distinctions in European attitudes to the so-called refugee crisis. In September 2015, 60% of the German public supported its government giving shelter to as many as 800,000 refugees. A similar poll conducted in the Czech Republic revealed that 44% insisted that the government spend not even one additional koruna to help migrants. Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia asserted that 95% of asylum seekers were not refugees

This is an exctract: see full text online * Names changed to protect identity 25

(illustrations by Esme Mull)

Mapping the Jungle Katherine Pye

(Runner up)

urrounded by mountains of plastic crates in a foggy warehouse courtyard, our volunteer leader painted a fluorescent future in an overcast sky. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In twenty years the world will look back on these events and judge us by how we responded. Do not doubt that you have chosen to stand on the right side of history.â&#x20AC;? The cold Calais drizzle failed to dampen her enthusiasm, which was nothing short of inspirational. But more importantly, she knew exactly where she was going. Yet as I set to work on my first morning as a volunteer in the Calais Jungle, I had never felt so disorientated. More migrants arrived every week, the total exceeding 9,000. Brexit and its fallout had ricocheted into every corner of the camp. The locals in Calais had become increasingly hostile to volunteer efforts and the influx of refugees, with swathes of the town electorate supporting the Front National. Despite these obstacles it remained the job of the volunteers to record each individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s details, giving them a dry foods pack and a blanket, all the while struggling to mend damaged dignity.

... But ultimately, every map failed in its purpose. They were picturesque attempts to freeze a fluid entity. The warehouse is the epicentre of humanitarian action in Calais. Its location was strictly confidential in an effort to stay hidden from those who want refugees out, and the camp and warehouse in cinders. We were sternly warned not to share the address with anybody, and photographs of the warehouse exterior were strictly forbidden. 26

Maps were ubiquitous in the warehouse headquarters where volunteers flocked to work each day. They sprawled out on tables, crept across walls, and were hurriedly pinned down on corkboards. Mapping the Calais Jungle was both an artistic endeavour and a desperate scramble to establish permanency and legitimacy before the police dismantled more lodgings in fresh rounds of evictions. The maps divided the camp into sections: Eritrean, Afghan, Syrian. Every makeshift school, medical centre and community project is reverently plotted in painstaking detail. Still, we were constantly reminded that the Jungle has a spirit of its own: it is a living, moving mass. These maps depict, never dictate. We sought only to navigate the camp, never to control it. But ultimately, every map failed in its purpose. They were picturesque attempts to freeze a fluid entity. They clung limply to doorways and flapped in the wind outside the wood chopping yard: decorative, colourful, but useless. Childish with bubble writing, wonky lines and boxed houses, the snaky roads and round-framed landmarks orientated no-one. The maps neither acknowledged nor combatted the confusion in the camp. All our freehand atlases clarified was that we, the volunteers, were also hopelessly lost. The maps in the Calais warehouse were modest first attempts to come to terms with an ever-changing environment. But this yearning for stability, for durable borders and concrete landmarks spreads to far beyond the Jungle ecosystem. The maps endeavoured to ease a common anxiety, one that we must face as we try to find order in an unexplored, untamed world of mass migration and interconnectivity. One day I spoke to a visiting manager at L’auberge des Migrants, the principal refugee charity in the region. He explained that for too long France had maintained “un équilibre fragile”, an uneasy balance: the French state, he said, didn’t want to make things too comfortable for the migrants, but as a wealthy democracy, were morally obliged to help them all the same. He argued that they failed to follow either policy with any success, and so lurched unsteadily into an unknown future. ‘The refugees are

here to stay, but all the government have assured is that they are here to stay in poverty.’ The outlook is bleak and borders are shifting. The Calais walls, which had stood against English and Spanish invasions since the Middle Ages no longer keep foreigners out but case them in. Across Europe states are becoming shoeboxes: in Macedonia and Hungary fences grow thick and fast in great barbed batches; the Schengen crumbles with every influx and panic turns to partition, lines on maps turn black and rigid. Diverse in religion, language, ethnicity, the refugees in Calais were united by a steely determination to reach the UK. With the recent dismantling of the jungle, their futures are more unclear than ever But we have yet to choose how to welcome them, and their futures depend on our decision. As it stands, we stumble forward without strategy, in violent discord over which path to follow.

‘Nest’ Virginia Russolo

--- “Reality is no longer a given, a natural, familiar environment. The self cut loose from its attachments, must discover meaning where it may - a predicament, evokes at its most nihilistic, that underlines both surrealism and modern ethnography.’” (James Clifford, On Ethnographic Surrealism) ‘Nest’ and the drawings that preceded and surpassed it move in the same direction. This direction is an enjoyment of the academic context set by theorists such as George Bataille and James Clifford in their approach to the instability of ‘Surrealism’ and ‘Ethnography’. The ambiguity of the drawings allows for transfiguration between abstract shapes and artefacts, such as the shrunken heads of the Pitt Rivers Museum. This same fluidity and these same forms are present in the objects placed on the metal sculptures, with the clarity of the vehicular structure heightening their ambiguity. The contrast between the stable and unstable aims to disrupt accepted hierarchies, thus using surrealism to interrogate ethnographic practices.

Virginia Russolo 45

“People

say Venice is sinking, but it isn’t really. When the city was first built, the islands making up its different areas were raised up on wooden poles which became as hard as concrete to hold it up. It’s only if the water level rises above the tops of the poles that we’ll be in trouble.” I am sitting in a square in the San Marco area of Venice with Mariacaterina Miozzi, Venetian architect and my Airbnb host. Nearby is the rust-red building that my family and I are staying in. Nestled by the Accademia Bridge, the apartment was once owned by Mariacaterina’s grandmother and is now a lucrative side business for the Miozzi family—its central location and balcony overlooking the Grand Canal means the apartment is fully booked on the site until September 2017. We are talking about Venice because it’s my first time visiting the city, and Mariacaterina wants to inform me of its mythic history. She leans conspiratorially over her Aperol spritz. “They say there’s a whole forest under Venice.” Venice is not as it seems, and nor is the work of the Venetian architect. Not long after arriving in the city, this job title began to strike me as paradoxical; I was intrigued by how it could be possible to be an architect in Venice where there are no new developments and little space to build anything. The image Mariacaterina gives me of a submerged natural world underneath the city seems even more striking when I compare it to the urban forest of buildings above. Grand, tall, shuttered and carved, they tower over waterways and walkways, connected by spindly bridges. I’m not sure if the rhythmic splashes I can hear are the sounds of visitors’ feet slapping the ancient flagstones, or of the water beneath us roiling upwards to hit the concrete. There is something haunting and unnatural about a city that rises out of the sea. Mariacaterina tells me it is difficult to find work as an architect in Venice: the buildings of the city itself have remained mostly unchanged since the Byzantine era in the fourteenth century, and now, many are crumbling with age. For every tourist trap like Piazza San Marco, with its edifices of gleaming white marble, there are areas like the old Jewish quarter, marked by emptiness, grandness, and silence. These areas feel like the ‘real’ Venice. The stucco plasterwork, immense rooms, and hanging tapestries are remnants of not just another life but another place, where cavernous ground floors are reception rooms for the delivery of silks, spices, and other exotic goods from abroad. Now, with these dilapidated buildings no longer fit for purpose, architects must find a solution for the empty spaces. The nature of a city that is already entirely built means a Venetian architect is more a restorer than a designer. The Italian government’s new green initiative—its aim for all new buildings to pollute as little as possible, or not at all—means some of the most important work Mariacaterina does is green renovation of existing buildings, introducing modern plumbing and adding wall insulation. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly creative endeavor, but Mariacaterina tells me that isn’t the point. “As an architect working on an old building, you have a lot of responsibility. Using the wrong materials can destroy the history of the building… you should know why it was built, how it was built. You should respect it.” A sense of respect for the ancient and sacred pervades the city as a whole—there is little graffiti, and not much in the way of litter. When I ask Mariacaterina who was born and grew up in Venice if she still takes photos of her surroundings, she smiles and admits: “Of course!” The answer to the question of why there are no new developments in Venice is apparently more complex than a simple lack of space. The most recent building in Venice, the Calatrava Bridge, was finished six years ago and is the newest building here for a decade. Built to connect the islands to the train station, this bridge had a definite purpose and functionality, so why was it so unpopular with Venetian residents? “It was so expensive to build. It was disruptive. The people who live in the city didn’t want it.”

The streets of the city seem locked in a state of stasis. The glorious façades of the buildings lining the Grand Canal show signs of wear and tear. Dark runs of damp streak down their intricate ivory faces. With the architecture of Venice in seemingly perpetual decline, there appears to be a more general sense of disillusionment with the city. The permanent population of Venice has been falling steadily since the ’60s, peaking at over 160,000 inhabitants in 1931 before falling to fewer than 60,000 today. Consequently, many of the stunning buildings which flank the sidestreets and canals lie derelict, unsuitable for use other than for housing temporary art installations. By contrast, tourists flood the city all year round. It is estimated that Venice has over 2.5 million tourist ‘presences’ a year, this word indicating not only the tourists who stay overnight in Venice, but those who visit for only a day. According to Mariacaterina, for the residents, it is the peculiar lifestyle Venice demands that is driving people away. While the floating city is world-renowned for its otherworldly beauty, the aspects of it tourists find so charming about it are precisely what drive its permanent population crazy: the achingly slow vaporetto, the impossibility of cars, the expense of living in a city which is primarily a tourist destination, one which is priced accordingly. Further to this, the houses and apartments which aren’t in states of uninhabitable neglect are unaffordable for the majority of Venetians. Renting an apartment of 30 square metres in an unrenovated building costs in the region of €700 per month. As a result, Venetians are deserting in droves for towns just outside the city limits which offer bigger and cheaper houses, roads for cars, supermarkets, and schools. Venice itself might not be going anywhere, but its citizens are deserting the outmoded city in their thousands. This combination of low population and uninhabited houses, coupled with booming tourism, risks turning Venice into a kind of museum or, to imagine a less kind analogy, a mausoleum. The more I talk to Mariacaterina, the more restoration seems like a viable solution to the city’s problems. Repurposing grand buildings as affordable, modern housing could be what it takes to dissuade Venetians from leaving. After all, art and architecture are at Venice’s core. The Biennale, a festival which celebrates all forms of art and design, takes the form of temporary installation exhibitions dispersed throughout the city from May to October. The theme for this year’s Architecture Biennale was “Beyond The Front”, for which entrants were required to compose a handwritten letter detailing their personal struggles as architects practicing in their country and culture. In his introduction to the exhibition, Biennale President Paolo Baratta describes architecture as “the most political of the arts,” a truth embodied by the festival. Every year, the Biennale brings a dying city back to life. Venice becomes an installation space, somewhere for art to live in the absence of a permanent home. In this topsy-turvy world, where boats are the only transport and ancient palaces lie unused, Mariacaterina’s work as an architect-come-restorer is attempting to reverse this state of entropy. It would be too tragic, and too easy, to condemn the once great trading port to a slow death by tourists and an exodus of residents, homes reduced to empty shells on the waterfront. By restoring existing buildings back to their former glory, she hopes to revitalise Venice as a living space, for humans as well as for art. “I think I can work without destroying [the original building]. I want to make it more beautiful and I just want to reflect the history of the city.” I tell her I think Venice’s mesmeric beauty more than makes up for its lack of functionality, but Mariacaterina, who is not a tourist, is firm in her reply. “Being beautiful isn’t enough. It must be beautiful and work. There needs to be balance. It has to be both.”

Plane â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 2016 Porcelain Becca Thornton

‘DO U REMEMBER?’

Isis 500 Words

For this term’s 500 word competition we called for responses to this picture, taken from inside a bombed-out sniper’s nest in Mostar, Bosnia. We received a wide range of excellent entries from students across the UK, who chose to write about such diverse topics as sex, taste, memory, and violence. The winner and shortlist are published here. They were chosen by our panel of judges, who this term included: JEREMY TREGLOWN Literary historian and ex-editor of the Times Literary Supplement

ARAMINTA WHITLEY Literary agent at LAW STEPHEN GLOVER Co-founder of the Independent JEAN-PAUL MULOT Ex-editor of Le Figaro MAX PORTER Prize-winning author and editorial director at Granta Books

Bloodletting

Winner: Anna Lewis

– Stephen Glover

“Menacing, original, and daring” “This tiny story has so many stories within it, its central character so much imaginative power, and the twist at the end is darkly convincing”

– Jeremy Treglown “A great twist on the theme of power corrupts”

– Araminta Whitley

Loose Messages

Lauren Collee (Runner up)

“This is a deft, controlled and surprising piece of work. If it was page one of an author’s book I would certainly read on… it doesn’t matter whether this is poetry or prose, a fragment or a whole, it sings its own song on the page”

– Max Porter “Some wonderful imagery. Harsh places revealed with a lyrical voice”

– Araminta Whitley

Sunk Costs

Benjamin Davies

“Interestingly unobvious scenario… the idea at the end, that the binoculars-man sees himself as ‘keeping an eye on the corner’, suggests something about him that might be developed”

– Jeremy Treglown

CN: Rape

Something sweeter than tears

Ella Sackville-Adjei

“There’s intense feeling in the piece, between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ and also about what has happened. Emotionally, in fact, it seemed to me the most powerful of the shortlisted entries”

– Jeremy Treglown

Wasp

Tom Ball

“This is obviously a horrid piece of writing, brilliantly done. Its unpleasant surprise lands very well … worrying and excellent” – Max Porter