Flaxart Studios and Queen St Studios are pleased to announce their collaboration on a series of seminars due to take place in Belfast this Autum and Winter. Full program to be announced shortly.


Addressing the contemporary climate of political and economic globalisation, this seminar features a range of artists and activists who engage with and contest processes and sites of exclusion, surveillance and the suspension of human rights under state security practices and corporate imperialism.

Participants will examine artists' activist networks committed to global justice; how activist practices are interrogating the function of institutional racism and the biopolitics of neo-liberal capitalism, and exploring forms of global citizenship. The seminar will feature public actions and more formal academic papers.

With thanks to the Golden Thread Gallery

www.gtgallery.fsnet.co.uk

This seminar examines relationships and tensions between redevelopment, and the city's marginal and abandoned spaces by presenting artists and activists who engage with spaces under transformation and are contesting the formation of urban spaces into non-public, commercial ownership under market-led redevelopment.

Bringing together a range of approaches (subversive and otherwise) and strategies for experiencing the urban everyday and the formation of alternative public spaces, the session will feature a range of approaches from formal presentations to informal city tours and public actions.

Bring warm waterproof clothing, we will be out and about.


This seminar proposes to identify, interrogate and chart the intersection of personal and collective history at play in Belfast as a post conflict society. Numerous subjective and fragmented memories are embedded in the consciousness of effected communities, bound up in a collective trauma of past events. With the passage of time and the dissolution of narrative, the “labour of memory * generates intangible memorials to physcologically harrowing events. This condition is not unique to Belfast and parallels can be drawn in Argentina, Guatemala, Cyprus, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Rwanda, Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa, Israel, Japan and many other countries.

Our specific interest in this vast field deals with the inter-relationship of memory, trauma and counter trauma in relation to place. In living with the traces of the past of physical, physcological and monumental memory and in acknowledging the transmission of oral history from one generation to the other, how do we now negotiate memories, relics, buildings and spaces that hold political and emotional potency. How can many conflicting subjective perspectives simultaneously claim authorship over the construction of a post conflict history?

“The politics of buildings may be mute but they are potent. They supply some of the dream images by which the polis , the group, identify themselves and therefore they cannot be innocent of their own force as political, in the widest, non partisan sense of the term” (Heaney 1989).