Tue
24-May-2005

barefoot college

Today I was at SOAS looking at some rooms for a BOND event, and I dropped in on the Brunei Gallery. They've got a really good exhibition at the moment called 'The Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia'.

It's a series of photos capturing life in Tilonia, a small village in the middle of the Rajasthan desert. There they've set up the Barefoot College, according to Ghandian principles of using the knowledge, skills and wisdom found in villages, rather than importing outside skills, to bring about development. The College provides training and education, particularly for practical skills of use in villages. It doesn't hold literacy as necessarily being key to education and learning.

It's all very inspiring. The general idea is to live 'barefoot' - a meaning of the word I have not really explored before. Barefoot here means not so much poor, as living authentically and with a certain sensitivity to your surroundings. It made me resolve to appreciate the joys of physically going barefoot more often. The pictures of people leaving their shoes at the doors of huts before entering pointed out that it is a sign of respect to enter the dwelling barefoot, and I suddenly felt an understanding of the custom in the UK of going barefoot when entering the house. It's something a posh person would never do and I see the value of it much more clearly now.

Tue
15-Mar-2005

bbc green paper

I was just thinking about the recent government Green Paper on the future of the BBC from 2006 to 2016. We are heralding it as a success for internationalism, since after four years or so of campaigning, it will now be part of the BBC's core mission statement to "bring the world to the UK" - that is, to make the UK public aware of international issues and of how people in the rest of the world live their lives. A lot of sweat went into getting that one phrase inshrined in the legislation proposals.

I'm really getting quite into institutions like the BBC - it's such a substantial feature of the British cultural landscape and of huge importance in the overall battles of culture and politics in this country. Yet I wonder if all these core mission statements, guiding values and state watchdogs are the way to do it. Sometimes I wonder if it is all playing into the sterile hands of modern management – the BBC as just another cog in the "cultural industries" that constitute just another political economy described and measured by bureaucrats.

Hopefully not. Let's hope a few institutions remain independent from Tessa Jowell and New Labour, and a few artists retain their integrity. I was thinking as well of around the time when the US invaded Baghdad two years ago, and Iraqi people were looting their museums and burning their National Library, even as American soldiers stood by and watched. Ben Okri wrote at the time that when people begin to tear up their ancient mythic pathways and burn their own past, then you know they have been truly dehumanised.

Fri
21-Nov-2003

the weather project

Having got a book on peculiar substances out of SOAS library, I met up with Matt and Jo (Little Jo) and we went to the Tate Modern to see the new Olafur Eliasson installation in the Turbine Hall. It's pretty astonishing. A huge yellow sun hanging up in the air at the far end of the mist shrouded hall, and a strange monochromatic yellowness pervading everything.

Matt took this cool picture of Jo, where the flash has illuminated the colour in her clothes very starkly and dramatically against the monochromatic background, and a little motion blur in the background heightens the unreal effect that makes her stand out from the scene behind her.