L’homme armé doibt on doubter.
On a fait partout crier
Que chascun se viegne armer
D’un haubregon de fer.
L’homme armé doibt on doubter.
The armed man should be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man shall arm himself
With a coat of iron mail.
The armed man should be feared.
French song from the mid 15th century
The works of this project are building towards an exhibition: The Armed Man. The process of creating works is slow and considered, influenced by the ongoing, heartbreaking conflicts worldwide as well as by artists and writers who have engaged with peace and the struggle to achieve a just peace, with war, the suffering, destruction and its aftermath.
What is peace? Is peace the absence of war? Is there such a thing as absence of war? How do we talk about peace without dropping into clichés and meaningless symbols?
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
― Auden
War has been the constant companion of the European vision from deep time, and has spread through the colonial expansion project. It has steadily become more brutal, more technical. Borders, although we think of them as a periphery, are in fact a key place of dialogue and negotiation. When negotiations between nation states fail, border walls and war are an indication of this failure.
We stand on the shoulders of giants! The writings of Persian poet, Rumi, the writing of Indian author Arundhati Roy, Spanish artist Francisco Goya, Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), German artist Otto Dix, Der Krieg (The War), German pacifist Ernst Friedrich Krieg dem Kriege (War against War), Australian Noel Counihan War or Peace and East German artist Bernard Heisig Krieg (War)… to name a few. There is a dialogue between image and text.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
― Rumi