Educate, Agitate,Organise
Education, Education, Education
As the dust settles on two and a half months of turmoil here at BasementArtsProject, brought about by the closure of a dozen local trap houses, we are slowly able to exhale and start pulling the focus back to improvement of the future, rather maintenance of the shoddy present.
It was this that got me thinking about the past, and asking myself “Well, how did I get here?”
Last week I had one of the saddest conversations of recent times. As I was shopping I was approached by a homeless man with whom I have shared a number of brief asides over the last few years. He had, I suspect unwittingly, been part of the aforementioned turmoil, living as he had been doing in a tent at the edge of the land opposite Basement. He asked me if I was a stone mason. I know that he associates me with ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ as he had watched it being created over the course of three years. “No” I responded “I just worked with Keith and John, the actual stone masons, on the project around the corner”.
“It’s nice that… Jacob’s Ladder… it looks really good.” he replied. “It makes a difference… Thanks”.
And with that he shuffled off to help someone with a trolley. This is not the first sign of appreciation that I have had from this person, he has often stood at a distance and listened as I have given talks to groups of students on the land about the making of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. Under the right circumstances I could imagine this person living a contented life of minimal fuss, but society has failed him.
This conversation got me thinking about an encounter with a group of local shopkeepers earlier in the year. In this encounter they had suggested to me that they “did not see how art would help the businesses on Dewsbury Road”.
Unlike the local shopkeepers who do not see the point in art; tent guy gets it, he understands why we do the things we do. For him it is not about what can be extracted from the community in the form of profit, it is about the things that we bring to the table that improve the quality of life and provide an environment in which aspiration can thrive. Business can only thrive when society thrives, otherwise it is a parasitical relationship.
And so, here I am; living in this shotgun shack, in another part of the world, asking myself “where does this highway go? where is that large automobile?” Telling myself “This is not my beautiful house”
How did I get here?