COMBAT the
H U L L I S F U L L
issue
Combat
the
done,
the
dull,
the
doctrine.
Begin dialogues with others, whether they agree with you or not. By talking ideas are formulated, and opinions are changed. Everyone has an opinion for a reason. None of them are correct, but they’re just as important as the next. Challenge the status quo, and why things are happening how they are. To accept the status quo is to resign yourself to never changing the place around you, especially in a time where the face with which we present ourselves is more important than the substance that is presented. This publication brings together the work of a series of visual artists and writers, all from Hull to discuss ideas about immigration, the movement of people and borders and open free dialogue about the subject.
The sea. To look out into an expanse of the great unknown, and have to cross it. It’s hard to imagine that from the comfort of always having a sofa. Or to be able to look out of large bay windows, sat just behind the telly and decide it looks a little windy out there and to not go out. To instead not have four walls, to be vulnerable to the elements. Everyone is running from something – some of us just don’t need to move to do it. Refugees run from their absolute displacement, their loss of having anything whatsoever. We run from having to give an inch of land up. Countries don’t become full – people move around. It’s the same as the theory of water displacement and Eureka in a bathtub. We just don’t want our way to be threatened. Like every good conservative nation we’ve settled for what we have, and trying to protect that.
Movement of people should be fluid like water, flowing in and out of where people are needed, where people can be safe, and where resources are. Instead it becoame that any one person or group could lay claim to a certain wealth of resources for themselves just because they lived there. This way of thinking is playground politics. It is to live in fear, burdened with anger towards others that have no power whilst more and more is taken away from us, shovelled and squirrelled away into offshore accounts. It isn’t even a question of who’s doing it anymore: we just don’t seem to have the balls to challenge a status quo because it’s easier to blame someone else. Someone else that with any logical thought processes could be reasoned to deserve none of the vitriol, but logical thought processes are too much. It’s too easy to not think. Nay not even think, not question. That’s what we’ve lost – any will to know. It’s all too easy to just be agreeable. To not question the numbers; to not question the reasoning; to not question why we think that. And that is dangerous.
Kicking at the pavement as you pass along it, on top of it, devoid of it but inextricably linked to it. The greyness seems like home and yet so far away - so familiar and at the same time something you know nothing about. How many people’s feet had trodden on this spot? Were you following them directly, were you going where they were going? Slabs divided by a thin darker grey line. Fifty shades of grey: the make up of city life, the mundanity of having nothing and everything to do; no fight to survive but no fight to live. Wasteland filled the outskirts: empty factories with rusting frames, skeletons in the cold industrial air melded so much with paint fumes and oils and grease; peeling away docks giving up and falling desperately into the sea, wooden struts hovering above water holding onto the oxygen that gives them the smallest glimmer of hope; plants desperately cling to corners of brickwork, arching around the agony red - praying that no one will appear with a strimmer and take them away. To
survive.
To
survive.
Where is the hope for us to turn to? There is no answer to society’s problems, just the rotting corpses of the past and others trying to cling on. The fire of the unions is gone, there is no power to the people anymore, it was only as much of a fashion fad as putting flowers in your hair. The ageing hippies are in charge now but they’re not hippies any more: they give people loans they can’t afford but it pays for their own pensions, they make the machinery of war that kill those in far away lands, they press lands into being fracked to dredge out the last drops of whatever we have. What else is there to turn to but hatred devolved from the rags allowing the people safeguarding our lives to write spurious shite for sacks of cash. What do we get from this deal? A pair of tits on the third page. That is the damning indictment of who we are now. It all became too confusing in the eighties to challenge in a meaningful way these threats to our freedom and a balanced society so now we settle with light entertainment instead, and our hardly developed feudalism.
Anger boils deep inside of us and perchance the large dirty white pages have a place to direct it to: the commies, the scroungers and of course those of a different skin colour or belief system. Not, of course, the companies that don’t pay in, the MPs that don’t and won’t answer to anyone in parliament, the businesses that abuse those below them and over work those they employ. Those that are the stranger, the unfamiliar, the other, to us are those that we are lead to detest - because what chance do they have of saying anything back? In a world of tits on the third page, Saturday night TV and the transfer season it hardly seems likely that people will question the true cause of society’s ills - instead accepting the status quo and allowing it to continue. Who would have though that the same people putting tits on page three, making Saturday night TV and bankrolling the transfer season are those same people that want things to stay the way they are. The stranger, the unfamiliar, the other, all of these people are only that because we are lead to think of them in that way. We have more in common with them than we do with those in power: we are all the proleteriat.
V D A
T R E
In our multicultural society contemporary debates around national identity, migration and immigration are often presented in a polarizing fashion. However, the reality is much more complex than the usual media sound-bite or political rhetoric. Multiculturalism is something of great beauty and wealth, we are lucky to live in a society that has migrants from around the world. The movement and mixing of people is something that enriches lives and offers us alternative views and perspectives.
The British Bangla home to over 4000 community’s journe and underrepresen proliferation of outd
In the 1970’s the UK saw a mass community migration of Sylheti people from northern Bangladesh. This influx of new residents brought a new culture, full of colour and warmth.
adeshi population settled in many areas of the UK and Sunderland quickly became 0 Bangladeshi migrants, making up little over 1% of Sunderland’s population. The ey, culture and heritage is an inspiring one, however, the community are often overlooked nted. This is partly due to a lack of communication between communities and the dated stereotypes of the wider Muslim community that is perpetrated by western media.
CONTRIBUTORS: JOSH PELL JACK PELL ALISE TIPSE WES FOSTER KARIM SKALLI JAZZ HARBORD FRANCIS DAVIES HOLLIE DEARING WILL NICHOLSON LUCY CULLINGWORTH
H U L L I S F U L L
( o f
g r e a t
i d e a s )