Echoes Across the Divide

Echoes Across the Divide

In Memory of Sofia Tussis: Echoes Across the Divide

We mourn the loss of Sofia Tussis, a student journalist and activist who passed away in the weeks before she was to begin a summer internship at Dissent. Here we republish Sofia’s last article for Maas-Media, an online publication she helped co-found while at Maastricht University.

A Single Melody

Forty-one years after the construction of the wall that divides Cyprus?s capital Nicosia into Turkish and Greek halves, citizens from both sides of town gathered at a checkpoint, armed with all sorts of instruments. Children, mothers, fathers, and elders started playing and singing from rooftops next to the wall, then descended toward the Green Line to flood the streets with a single melody combining Turkish and Greek sounds. In the end, the checkpoint officers forbade the two groups from crossing the border and marching alongside one another through Nicosia. ?Art can do what politics cannot,? said one participant?or almost. ?Long Distance Call,? the project initiated by the Dutch organization ?La vie Sur Terre? in 2005, could not possibly tear down the wall. Yet it succeeded in exposing the anachronism of the two communities? segregation by staging a collective musical performance. In the face of Nicosians? longing to finally chant together, the wall seemed a relic of senseless power games.

Shabini?s Dream

Ahmed Shabini moved to Ghent as refugee from Sudan. With a fine arts degree and an interest in modern art, he did not fit the ?African artist? stereotype that most people he encountered were eager to assign to him. As he struggled to find a place to express himself within his new life in Northern European multiethnic suburbia, he stumbled upon Ambrosia?s Tafel?s neighborhood television. The organization gave him a camera to capture his story as he saw it. The outcome of two years? work was Shabini?s Dream, a video memoir of his journey through places, beliefs, and languages. In it, he used different forms of artistic expression to describe his relations to his roots and to his Belgian surroundings. He hopes that, when watching it, his two children will get a sense of who they are and of their history, suspended between two worlds.

Tahrir Square?s Collective Graffiti

In the last two months, Marwa Seoudi spent many days in Tahrir Square. Her job with the Egyptian theater company El Warsha is to stage performances with active audience participation, but the citizens who gathered to oust former president Mubarak apparently did not need her expertise. ?Everybody on that square was an artist,? she said.

People started to come up with sketches and one-act plays. And then, the graffiti, the chants, the songs. One day an F-16 started to fly over us and we did not know what was going to happen. I found a bucket of paint and a brush and in less than two minutes people started to write on the floor, in very big font, ?Leave, coward, we are not leaving the square.? It was so powerful.

THESE ARE but some of the stories that were shared at the International Community Arts Festival held in Rotterdam in late March. The basic ingredients of the community arts recipe are a group of human beings, a common concern, and everyone?s creative participation in finding ways to address it. Long Distance Call?s concert, Ambrosia?s Tafel?s neighborhood television, and Egyptian protesters? spontaneous performances all share a belief in the transformative potential of cooperative creativity, which is the common thread in all manifestations of community art.

The Festival, rather than a community arts? breakthrough, was an encounter for insiders, a moment to get inspired by ideas and personalities from every field and background. There was no press, no neophytes, no passersby. No grand advertisement for a concept that is hard to define and has been at the fringes of the arts and civic activism since the first pioneering projects in the 1960s. Most of the initiatives on the program, whether coming from South Africa, Canada, or Amsterdam, were like siblings separated at birth and oblivious of each other?s existence. It was as if many potential participants were absent: that mass of unaware practicing community artists who have not been initiated to the field?s terminology, but who are equally dedicated to embellishing the public space from the bottom up. Jan Cohen-Cruz, who has been researching the phenomenon for the last two-and-half decades, claimed that there will not be a ?community arts? diploma or ?community artists standards of good practice.? ?It looks like people are beginning to take back community arts for themselves,? was her reaction to Marwa Seoudi?s recollections of Tahrir Square. When the crowd starts to paint, we all become artists.