April 2021
Blossoming (spring as a time of resistance)
Strong roots of organising can create great and remaining change. The 1st of May 2021, on International Workers Day, will be 50 years ago since Nørrebro locals took action to create Folkets Park. Their actons were as seeds in a space that now has blossomed to become a supportive town square and community house for a heterogeneous community.
In the Lab we are thinking about our own organising and outreach, as we slowly may open the doors of our Lab and invite the spring and some students in. Our Junior Researchers will in this newsletter share some fruits of their labour in the form of blogposts that matured through watering, cross-pollination and careful nurturing in ETHOS Labs fertile activities and context. In the garden of our research community grew this blog post about Playing with “Playing with method” reflecting on what it means to participate as the ETHOS community in an online seminar, and how we can utilise games as an organic part of our research.
Blossoming waves of resistance are rippling across the world, addressing oppressive structures and creating space to nourish and rethink. As we face our moments of crises – conflict, brutality – poetry, art, and creative research may nourish us and shine light on important aspects and other ways of being organised.
Words may provide hope and poets give people their anthems of resistance and their ballads of sorrow. Pablo Neruda was a Nobel laureate whose life and poetry was upheld as the symbol of resistance to dictatorship. He took on the role of activist-writer during Chile’s revolutionary student movement, and after he went to Madrid in 1934 as the Chilean counsel, he wrote 21 poems in response to the war. He lost his penchant for penning melancholic love poems, instead taking on a more urgent tone and cautioning against rising fascism. In I’m Explaining a Few Things, about the Spanish Civil War, he captured the country’s tense and complicated political story.
You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
And the metaphysics laced with poppies?
And the rain that often beat
his words filling them with holes and birds?
I’ll tell you everything that’s happening with me.
I lived in a neighborhood
of Madrid, with church bells,
with clocks, with trees.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because everywhere
geraniums were exploding: it was
a beautiful house
with dogs and little kids.
Federico, you remember,
from under the earth,
do you remember my house with balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Hermano, hermano!
And one morning everything was burning
and ever since then fire,
gunpowder ever since,
and ever since then blood
Bandits with airplanes and with Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars making blessings,
... kept coming from the sky to kill children,
and through the streets the blood of the children
ran simply, like children’s blood.
You will ask why his poetry
doesn’t speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!
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Stay safe out there!
ETHOS Lab
www.ethos.itu.dk
Co-heads of Lab: Marisa Cohn & Rachel Douglas-Jones
Lab Assistant: Luuk Blum
Lab Manager: Merethe Riggelsen Gjørding
