European artists widening their horizons in North East
Artists from across Europe spent a month in the North East looking at our books, statues and heritage. DAVID WHETSTONE met two of them at the Lit & Phil, where their artistic responses are on display
PORTUGUESE artist Márcio Carvalho came to Newcastle and was intrigued by the city’s monuments. Dimitris Chimonas leafed through early 20th Century travel books at the Lit & Phil library and found descriptions of his native Cyprus that jarred with what he knew.
“There are photos in these books of landscapes I recognise, and they are described as ‘breathtaking’ and ‘picturesque’ and ‘serene’,” he says, elongating each adjective for dramatic and ironic effect.
“I know my great grandmother brought up nine children under those mountains while trying to make a living from three goats. It wouldn’t have been so picturesque for her.”
His tone is amused rather than bitter, and the same goes for Márcio reflecting on his encounter with the Haymarket monument with its angel on top.
“It’s the memorial for the Boer War… they call it the South African War. Some call it the white man’s war.
“I’ve been exploring the story of this war, the turmoil and scramble that existed in South Africa before and after.
“The story is huge but most people don’t know about it. I didn’t before I came here. It was completely a colonial war. It was British fighting Dutch on African soil.
“Those soldiers from this region went from their homes and families to a different continent… to fight for what?”
Márcio, fascinated by monuments and what he calls “public spaces as an archive”, acknowledges that the Portuguese were also keen colonisers.
He and Dimitris, along with Mónica Rikic from Barcelona, spent a month here as part of Contested Desires, an international programme that invited artists from various countries “to explore and reconsider our shared European colonial heritage and its influence on culture today”.
The artists visited sites on Tyneside and also, hosted by project partner the National Trust, went to Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman forts of Housesteads and Vindolanda, those early symbols of colonisation.
Contested Desires was devised by D6: Culture in Transit, which works internationally with artists from its base in Newcastle’s Charlotte Square, and partners from Italy, Spain,
Cyprus, Portugal and Barbados, and launched in 2019.
Despite Covid disruption, there have been residencies, during which artists talked to local people and heritage professionals, and exhibitions.
The climax of the Newcastle/UK part of Contested Desires is an exhibition at the Lit & Phil where the three artists have crystallised their thoughts and findings into a display of objects, made and found.
This is also where it all began with something of a crash course.
“We had one month to understand the history of the city so were given a tour of the Lit & Phil,” recalls Márcio.
“I was taking notes about coal and trains but it was also like a tour of the history of England.”
“It was like opening this huge treasure box,” agrees Dimitris. “This place is an unbelievable source of information and stories.”
It can be illuminating to see how others see us and how they interpret things whose meaning we take for granted if we notice them at all.
Long before Edward Colston’s likeness was toppled in Bristol, Márcio was looking at the statues and monuments that furnish European cities. Many commemorate colonial and imperial rulers but the hidden stories are important, he believes.
In Newcastle he talked to the council about “re-contextualising” the Boer War memorial commemorating the North East soldiers who died.
“The psychologists and sociologists I’ve worked with say that when you commemorate in this way, you are celebrating, by proxy, the war itself,” he says.
“Shouldn’t we question why these people had to die? We don’t want to tear the monument down. The idea is to open a conversation and these artworks in the Lit & Phil are triggers.”
Márcio’s ‘triggers’ include two large drawings, one showing the Haymarket memorial and the other the statue of Queen Victoria outside Newcastle Cathedral.
The artist was tickled to see two statues of her in a single day after taking a trip to Tynemouth.
Investigating, he found that the Queen had ordered tins of moraleboosting chocolate to be sent to her troops during the Boer War but the manufacturers, being pacifist Quakers, refused payment and were reluctant to brand the product.
One of the surviving chocolate tins is on display at the Lit & Phil.
If no qualms about the rightness of the war are evident in this relic, they are in Márcio’s drawings. His portrayal of the Haymarket memorial shows a tumbling angel and the figure of martyred South African antiapartheid campaigner Steve Biko.
He doesn’t believe in heroes, he says, but suggests those fighting for independence in Portugal’s African colonies helped to topple the dictatorship in his country in 1974, ushering in democracy.
His Queen Victoria drawing of a tumbling monarch is called Mosi-oaTunya (The Smoke Which Thunders), the name given by local people to the waterfall on the Zambezi long before explorer David Livingstone ‘discovered’ it and named it Victoria Falls. The drawing also features Lilian Masediba Ngoyi who campaigned against apartheid and for the emancipation of black women. Dimitri, too, is inspired by things unseen. “I come from a theatre background and mostly do performance work, but my interests are always the before and after… what makes a thing happen and the aftermath.”
He made instant connections between the gushing travel writing of a century ago and what he knows of Cyprus today.
“I come from an island with a very confused cultural identity. We have been invaded and colonised throughout our history. We had the British until 1959 and were invaded by Turkey in 1974 and now we’re still divided and even the part considered to be ours has British army bases. Throughout history we’ve been servants of someone else’s needs and even now we define ourselves through our ability to accommodate others.”
He tells of Aphrodite’s Rock which tourists swim round in the hope of getting pregnant or achieving eternal youth. He and his friends have done it, he says, adding that he didn’t get
pregnant.
But while there are references to Cyprus as Aphrodite’s birthplace in classical mythology, he says it was the British who decided which rock it was. “Now you have to photograph it, visit it, buy a ticket.”
Then there was Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an Italian American soldier who was United States consul in Cyprus from 1865 to 1877.
An amateur archaeologist, he had thousands of antiquities shipped to America where they became the core collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Dimitris says when Cypriots realised Cesnola was paying for old stuff, they carved rocks from their gardens and sold them to him.
“A percentage of the museum’s collection is fake,” he claims. “But because the museum has such power it has become our source of information about our identity.
“It becomes very apparent that knowledge and history are things constructed again and again.”
Dimitris joined the Society of Bookbinders North East, which meets at the Lit & Phil, and made a flipbook containing a single phrase that can only be read with the pages in motion.
The phrase, ‘It is still in the future’, came up repeatedly on the artists’ Lit & Phil tour whenever their guide jumped ahead of herself. “It’s a storytelling mechanism,” says Dimitris.
He also made a curtain out of Rexine, a bookbinding material, cutting out and attaching shapes to represent those ‘serene’ rocks of Cyprus but with bodies falling from them. He called it Someone Else’s Spit.
The fake leather and the use of a curtain to bisect the library seemed the perfect metaphor for something existing between myth and reality.
Work by all three artists, including Mónica Rikic who focuses on technology, can be seen at the Lit & Phil, Westgate Road, until May 21.
Also showing are six films commissioned as part of Contested Desires which was co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme. Find details at www.d6culture.org or www.litandphil.org.uk