Peace Lines

Wednesday August 13


A first tour of the peace lines.

The Peace Lines are walls. Tall, off-white walls with green mesh fences above. Old concrete specked with marker and acrylic and chipped plaster and traces of petrol burns. The Peace lines are high, higher than I'd imagined them; with the upper fencing they are well over twenty-five feet, three storeys in two dimensions.

I spent most of the afternoon around the wall that runs the length of Cupar street on the Shankill side and Bombay street (among others) on the Falls side. The Cupar side of the wall runs along a roadway and gives onto another tall fence. It has a feel of intense desolation, a space severed from its surroundings. On the Falls side, the houses back right up to the wall, it looms. There are steel enclosures built over the rear yards of the closest rows of flats like strange penitentiary solariums.

Tomorrow I am going back, to listen and hopefully to talk, to get a bit of an oral sense of life in the shadow of this incredible piece of martial architecture.

Bombay

Tomorow marks the 39th anniversary of the burning of Bombay street in 1969, the event in Belfast history that is often pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles. The entire block was incinerated in the rioting, along with stretches of the adjacent streets.

I spoke to Patsy Canavan, who still lives on Bombay street where her childhood home was burned when she was 11 years old. She is kindhearted and soft spoken, and has a real love for the place she grew up, a real devotion. She wouldn't ever consider leaving - "they'll take me out in a box". For her the walls are an essential element of protection, the walls mean that she can go on living without fear of violence.

But she also remembers a time, before August 1969, that the family would cross freely through the Shankill Road neighborhoods, shopping, meeting friends, watching the Orange parades. But all that is from another time. Her voice is steady, but little wells of tears surge almost invisible through the reminiscences.

Tomorrow I will make a first trip onto he estates on the Shankill side of the wall. I am apprehensive, unsure.

Cepar

Spent most of the day wandering around the Cupar side of the wall. The estate is much bigger than the estate on the Falls side, more barren. There was a strong wind blowing and the sky held to its staunch greyscale so the sense of bleakness was tangible. And the recording was difficult. Spoke to a woman in a shop selling union jacks and drumsticks, parade stuff. she talked about the parades as a means of remembering, as a way of celebrating, of keeping a voice above the din. Spoke to a Mrs. Taylor, must be into her eighties, and her sense of the troubles almost identical to some stories I heard on the other side - before the walls there was an understanding, but that is gone now, and i hope the walls will stay because they keep us safe. She had a pinning for the past, its simplicity - "we had no money then but we were happy" - but also a resolve, knowing that life is about living, and in that she will keep right on.

Memorium

Made a trip to the wall this morning with my friend and neighbour (in Montreal) Anna-Luisa who was in Ireland for a wedding after two months doing ethno-linguistic fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon. There was a memorial ceremony in rememberance of the Clonard area men and women who have lost their lives in the course of the last forty years' struggle. The sun was out, the crowd was small but tight, names were read out, wreaths were laid, a silence was observed. Hung about a little afterward, listening to the milling crowd, recording, feeling the suspicion and curiosity about this tall blond fellow with the little black buds in his ears. Feeling it wither away. Walked over to the Shankill through the city center (the road gate in the peace wall that is usually open during the week closes on Sunday) and wandered through the mostly deserted streets. Spoke with a group of boys sitting tending their father's homing pigeons. Some seventy birds, tight in their coop, every day let out to fly, and somehow always returning. The kids played up my fascination and I ended the tour with a little cabal of them calling me 'aii, bird man (barhd-mahn)' which quickly devolved in to bird brain and the like. which i tried not to take personally. with limited success. Also met the first person on either side of the wall whom I've heard state unequivocally that there cannot be peace as long as the walls remain standing.

SOUNDING: Crowd lingering after the memorial

Clonard Monastery

Rainy rainy day. Deluge rain. Sat soaking in one of the back rooms at the Clonard Monastery speaking with father Gerry Reynolds and later with Jean Doyle. Father Reynolds has been at the monastery for twenty-five years (only just twenty five, as he would inflect it) and has been an active force in community bridging efforts with protestant parishes. He spoke simply in, with an eloquent calm, about the peace process, about the difficulties of reconcilliation, about the ways that the pain of war is carried through bloodlines. Jean works as a receptionist at the church, having taken leave from work in the private sector, looking for a kind of respite. She grew up in Belfast and has vivid memories of August '69 - of Belfast descending into a fiery choas overnight, of all of the conventions of coexistance dissolving in violence. She has deep wounds associated with the Troubles, friends and family whose lives were bruatally disrupted, or ended outright, by the conflict. But she also has touching stories, stories of unlikely reconcilliation, of finding estranged family members (she has mixed religions in her genealogy) of meeting with Belfast natives outside the country who would have been mortal enemies at home but who easily found common ground in a place removed from the conflict.

Belonging

The rain kept me from the wall today, spent the time working on he prramming of the installation and reading. This from Michael Ignatiefff's book Blood and Belonging:

" When Nationalists claim that national belonging is the overridingly important form of all belonging, they mean there is no other form of belonging that is secure if you do not have a nation to protect you... Belonging by this account is first and foremost protection from violence. Where you belong is where you are safe and where you are safe is where you belong."

This theme of security is recurrent. The peace lines are now seen as national lines that offer each of the bordering communities their protection. So many of the people that I have spoken to echo this - without the wall how could we ever live with a sense of security? But Ignatieff makes another key point about nationalism, that belonging also means "being recognised and being understood". The walls equally guarantee that there will be a clear understanding, that the dialogues of both sides will not be dilluted through the confusion of inter communication. Here is where the walls stand for acoustic insulation. Our language, our sounding world will remain contained.

In this respect at least I agree with the fellow I met yesterday who said that the walls will never allow for a peace. Reconcile comes from the Greek Kattalage "to exchange" which is derived from Allos "the other". To reconcile is to allow passage freely between ourselves and our other. Theologian David Stevens writes: "We need to tell our stories to each other and listen intently to what we are told".

Cloud Cover

Two more days of recording. Voices of children in the streets, moving hyperchoirs on both estates. An older woman on the Cupar side who has lived in the area for fifty years. A long talk with the gentleman who keeps the homing pigeons (see above). There are threads starting to emerge in the conversations. Both sides have a a growing awareness that the Troubles have now ceaseed to be a hot political issue and are now dominated by economics. There is a wariness about the political leadership, whether Paisley or McGuinesss or Adams or Robinson - a sentiment that the lives that have been most affected by the Troubles have long since been forgotten. Communities on either side now plagued with a whole new gamut of social problems, unemployment, drugs, suicide. Spoke to a woman named Theresa on Bombay Street who has had two sons and a brother take their lives in the last five years. Her sadness was tangible, draped on her like the clouds off the North Sea coast. To ask questions about the future seems almost inapropriate in the face of that kind of desperation, but there is a spirit in the Ulster Irish that knows survival, that knows what living through pain is, that sings still, barely audibe at times, paeans to the sun behind the clouds.

SOUNDINGS: the pigeon loft

Unfoldings

Going to do a final day of recoding today. Throughout the last ten days I have tried not to impose any set intentions on my wanderings along the peacelines. Each day has been given up to its unfolding. I wander through the streets, talk with the people that cross my paths, tell them about myself, listen to their stories, their recollections, their concerns. What emerges from it is a particular impression. A kind of directionless drift through the sounds of the place, and in esssence that is what the aim of the installation will be (yes. directionless drifting as a focused aim. yes). To walk through the space of the Installation will be to inhabit an imaginary space between the Falls and the Shankill, but also grounded by the space that the listener occupies.



SOUNDINGS: Tiernan and Martin

After

The installation goes up tomorrow. In the end it will be something quite close to what I'd originally imagined. It is a transposition, a re-location. Brandon Labelle writes:

"The time of listening is the time of attention, the time for place to come to the fore, as virtual presence, inside the listener's ear. It is also the time for space to become alien, dislocated, foreign, so as to become present, renewed, alive" (Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, 2007)

The aural fragments that I have collected on either side of the wall will be reanimated in another space. The listener's physical immediate will be cohabited by its removed reality, the projected soundscape of these often forgotten streets on the other side of town. To wander through the space of the installation will allow free movement through this foreign world, and the immersion in its presence will slowly grow into a sense of communion, of the fundamentally porous and fleeting nature of sound and of ourselves as beings in a sounding world.

That having been said, the result remains to be heard.

SOUNDINGS: Through the Wall (A short crossfade between two simultaneous recordings made from either side of the wall - Thanks to Florian Hollerwegger)

The installation Process

After two weeks of work recording in the field the process of creating the installation began. Using the newest version of the mscape software I set out to create a sonic transposition of the two estates onto the space of the main lawns in front of the Queen's University buildings.




I began by creating a sort of spatial transposition of the two neighborhoods. Using the two lawns as the spaces of the two estates and the center walkway as a sort of metaphoric wall space, I created a matrix first of ambient recordings (street sounds) and then interspersed the recorded interviews at various points.

The aim was to achieve a sense of moving through the two estates, listening to their characteristic timbres, and along the way encountering the voices of the residents. Two factors are crucial here in creating a realistic experience. The binaural recordings create a realistic spatial sense of the acual acoustic environment and second the sounds are laid out in such a way that a sense of movement is conveyed - as overlapping loci (imagine sonic beacons with concentric circles radiating outward) which fade in and out as the listener approaches the locus.

This gives a sense of moving in and out of the audible range of events and spaces - crossing different acoustic horizons to borrow Barry Truax’s term. Within this matrix of horizons, the interviews exist as fixed sound events: they are triggered by entering a specific area and stop as you leave, resuming where they left off if re-entered. This is a very rough approximation of the kind of engagement that we might have with people in such a space: within a particular (close) range conversation would begin, breaking of as we move away, resuming as we return.

The layout is designed to create a fluid sound-space, a mobile phonographic experience. In this respect, the real substance of the piece is not actually in the sounds themselves but in the fact of their transposition. In transposing the Falls and Shankill soundcapes to an open (un-walled) space, there necessarily emerges some kind of meditation on the nature off the separation. Rather than theorise the results, I would like to open up the discussion to some of the people who participated in the project to comment on their experiences. Feel free to leave comments or send responses by email.