Date:	2 - 9 August 2008
Artist:	Hywel Davies, Rabab Ghazoul and Trace: Displaced
Location:	Cardiff

Safle continued their long and fruitful partnership with the
National Eisteddfod this year by commissioning two artists Hywel
Davies and Rabab Ghazoul to create art interventions on the Maes
and supporting Trace: Displaced with their performance structure.

Hywel picked out words in the grass which have meaning in both Welsh and English in the style of a textile sampler while Rabab created a market stall selling holiday T-shirts with “ I LOVE…” various towns in Iraq. Trace: Displaced are used their structure as a focus for performances by six artists and guest writer Tudur Dylan.


RABAB GHAZOUL
Small Medium Large / Man Woman Child

Rabab Ghazoul is a visual artist interested in themes pertaining to home, language, identity and territory. Her work deals with fracture and fragmentation of different kinds, be it dislocation from cultural roots and ‘home’, through to the multiple fractures and literal devastation of ‘homeland’. Working through text, site, video and installation, her practice attempts to bring into focus a series of narratives, both personal and political, private and public. She was born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1970, and has lived in Wales since 1989.

For the Eisteddfod Ghazoul created a T-shirt stall titled “SMALL MEDIUM LARGE / MAN WOMAN CHILD”. The T-shirts on the stall - which were for sale, or could be loaned out and worn for the day - were styled on the universally recognized, iconic “I heart NY” design. Yet here, in place of ‘New York’, the T-shirts make reference to various Iraqi towns and cities that have been the sites of trauma, violence and atrocity over the last 5 years.

Alongside these were displayed another set of T-shirts, featuring texts about the aforementioned cities. These were personal responses to a task that the artist set, which invited people to select an Iraqi city or town, find out something about that place, then email back their response detailing what they found out, and their experience and feelings around the task itself.

"I wanted to discover something about this place that had no reference to war, but in the fifteen minutes I've spent searching I haven't managed it. That is quite sobering, and I feel a sadness for the city because of it.”
(Email respondee)




TRACE:DISPLACED
Gwaith
André Stitt • Beth Greenhalgh • Eddie Ladd • Lee Hassall
Mike Pearson • Phil Babot • Guest: Tudur Dylan

‘Gwaith’ was a site-specific installation and performance made by a collective of Welsh based Artists that reflected the activities cultivated by TRACE install-action in Cardiff. Trace Collective features some of Wales’ foremost experimental art & performance practitioners recognised at an international level.

Group activity took the form of a series of performance interventions on the Eisteddfod field utilising a specially constructed 1:1 scaled replica of the ‘domestic’ TRACE artspace which is situated in an inhabited terrace house in Adamsdown, Cardiff. The public had full access throughout to experience the ‘live’ activity and the resulting installation/evidence and residual traces.

The TRACE artists collective engaged in an ongoing dialogue with this rebuilt environment, navigating it’s physicality and making interventions upon it’s structure. References to locations and conditions in and around Cardiff were displaced and relocated to the ‘Maes’, creating multi-layered investigations through post-colonial scouring.
These interventions explored the accumulation of materials collected from sites around Cardiff – this included the use of text and image applied to the surface of the installation. The performance ‘work’ included the constant process of accumulation and eradication of selected material through layering, erasure and ‘scouring’. Through these processes the Trace Collective consider performance and it’s materials as the physical manifestation of the post-colonial condition.

Simultaneous reportage was be created during the daily activity by Tudur Dylan, supported by ACADEMI.

‘GWAITH’ is the second in a series of 4 collective works by Trace Collective. The first took place at the national Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow in February 2008.



HYWEL DAVIES
The green, green grass of home / Glaswellt gwyrdd fy nghartref

“Growing up on the fringes of East London, my Welsh ancestry felt like something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand there were the rather predictable taunts from my schoolmates, while on the other, JJ, JPR, Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett and co allowed me to clean up several times during the 1970s.

Until now I've never been in a position where I have put my Welshness under the microscope. The influences that come from my Welsh ancestors are important and enduring: sticking to what you believe in; non-conformism (religious and secular); and socialism - though none of these are intrinsically Welsh traits.

The only Welsh I remember hearing from my father (son of a NUR official, from a non-Welsh speaking family in Caersws, Powys), was the time of day and the occasional curse or telling off. My usual creative medium is sound (as a composer and sonic artist). I enjoy very much working in what is essentially an abstract material (it is not 'about' anything, and is completely invisible). This abstract nature that lies at the heart of the medium, means that what music and sound does best is to be something that is perceived ambiguously - affecting each listener differently, it cannot communicate directly.

Thus my work in this medium does not have a an 'aboutness', and I delight in the ambiguity of reaction in those who encounter it.”


Although not a composition or sound piece, Glaswellt gwyrdd fy nghartref (The green, green grass of home) was also about ambiguity – the same thing meaning different things to different people. "Are you thinking in Welsh or English?" could have been another title for this piece. All the words used have a meaning in Welsh and English. The order in which they had been arranged suggests an English usage, however making the piece at the National Eisteddfod allows other outcomes.