Films screened from Syria were The End , Prayer, Vanguards, and Soldiers all by the Abou Naddara Film collective, who made the committment of producing one film every Friday about Syria and in support of the revolution there.  With demonstrations filling the streets of Syrian cities and towns every Friday, we are happy that the republic was able to join on the same day with the film screening. From Egypt we had Pulse by Director Bassem Yousri, and The Maspero Massacre – 9/10/11 What Really Happened film which was only completed on the day by Mosireen, a non-profit media center in Egypt. The film was produced (and screened in our event) in support of the International Day In Defence of the Egyptian Revolution and Against Military Trials of Civilians, called on by the The Campaign to End the Military Trials of Civilians in Egypt. Unfortunately, blogger, activist and friend Alaa Abd El Fattah is still in prison, after his detention was renewed for a further 15 days on Saturday.

Make sure to check out Deaborah Pearon‘s and VacuumCleaner‘s digital spaces, and for the citizens who chose to “voice” their views, here are some photos captured by Hydar Dewachi of your statements. If you have missed it, below is a video of his photo projection in the OccuParty accompanied by Roskar Nasan’s beautiful oud.

The CruciBle, our annexed enclave is still waiting for your occupation – so please email, call or come over and make use of it.

Members of the commitee, along with the organization “Support of Lebanese in Detention and Exile” (SOLIDE) have set up a campaign tent in 2005 to pressure the government to act on behalf of those disappeared in both the civil war and in Syrian prisons. A tent that the families of the disappeared have continuously been present in.. and continuously ignored by the authority. Money we are raising will be used to support a digital database of the disappeared.

From a report by a government spy observing William and Dorothy
 Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1797

————————————————–

IN CAMERA

Out walking and you pass it,
In its lonely trance of watching,
A peculiar kind of witnessing,
Authority shivered into a million forms.

How to distil this presence?

This thing with a crick in its neck
Like someone always looking over his shoulder,
This thing that aims all round itself
Instead of a head has grown

An all encompassing gaze.

It thinks it sees, it sees, and thinks
When is a person actually a person?
Perhaps it’s that young man, his careful stroll
Hooded and watchful through the afternoon?

And now he’s all but out of range.

Parkforce! There are frail new trees
And a skyline of antennae.
What difference does it make
To the one who walks through this?

As if through a hall of mirrors.

Chilly receptacle, it never shows its face,
Its surface splits like an insect’s faceted eye
Or like a timid bird of prey declares
‘Our actions are proportionate

We’ll get you if you feel like it’

Being made almost entirely of such words:
‘Proportionate’ ‘Governance’
Recording ‘for training purposes’
The anxious tremor of your voice

How many bits of you are there?

And this vetting procedure
That harbours our darkest desires,
Its wavering attention,
Its careful perplexity –

Believe in it. What else is there?

And another justice secretary’s
‘Non conviction disposals’,
Each one a licence then
To break into your past

It’s what we’ll find, one day, in your saliva
And you? You sit here, wondering
How far your art can take you
Until you’ll disappear like that young man
And later you’ll emerge, as something perfect?

The citizen unharmed

Invisible harm! As if
Each one of us were waiting to be rescued.
Taking a picture of the sky?
But there’s too much sky for a photograph.

Forbidden

And here it comes, the high gaze down at you
From under a peaked cap
Or else a disk containing most of you
A piece of plastic pressed against the flesh

Scaly like a politician’s handshake

Thick animal smell, the burden that is ‘you’.
Meanwhile you thought it was a private art
Since armed in secret
There is the distance your art gives you

However much it dances . . .

John Welch