Hello,
I’m just back from a trip to Washington DC, so apologies that this newsletter is a little later than usual, I’ve never sent a Monday post before. Some of this was written while I was there, so please excuse the mix of tenses.
I arrived on Wednesday staying just a half-mile from the National Mall, this long avenue between Capitol Hill and the Lincoln Memorial is lined with museums, exhibiting art, culture, history, and science. You never escape the sense that you’re in the capital, my hotel is next door to NASA and I’m looking at the Department of Education from my window.
It is a strange place to be when so much is going on in the world. On Saturday, as I walked past the White House there were rows of reporters speaking to cameras in little green tents lined up on the front lawn, and already some people, I suppose Ukrainian nationals living in the US gathering around the gates. I’ve been watching CNN and MSNB in the hotel and following online on news apps. It is a terrible time, a horrific and appalling decision to invade another country, the Russian President has lost his mind.
I’m thinking about how frightened people are, and how brave and courageous it is to defend your country and resist this fascism. These are the darkest of times.
Stephan
Spaces to Connect
I’m in Washington DC to visit museums and galleries, to see how immersive technologies are being used to display work and tell stories. Essentially this is a trip to help me think about The Global Languages & Cultures Room and the projects that are planned.
My first trip is to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, one of the newest Smithsonian institutions on the National Mall. It is a huge building, shaped in three tiers, and surrounded by a lattice of bronzed steel. There are halls dedicated to the history, starting with an emotional journey through years of slavery, through to emancipation and the birth of the civil rights movement. I learned more about the structure created around the trade of human beings, institutions of accounting, ledgers of ownership, and the design of racist brutality. It is chilling, there is so much sadness and I was grateful for this space to think and take time.
Moving further up the building there are exhibits of great significance; letters, papers, speeches from Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and later Barrack Obama. There are also items, a dress worn by Rosa Parks, a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong, so many personal and treasured artifacts that tell stories of Black artists, political figures, writers, and many more representing sports, education, media, and industry. This is a place that tells stories and celebrates African American culture and how these lives and values are reflected not only in American life but throughout the world.
There are some similar emotional experiences in the National Museum of the American Indian where I spent an afternoon walking through its floors of exhibits. This is a remarkable space where culture is celebrated and history preserved for us to learn from. This history is one of genocide, put frankly where the white race tried to obliterate the indigenous people of the land they colonized. Where they tried to wipe out the culture, remove people from their homes, and silence many languages. Reading through the treaties, each signed and sealed with dripped wax, you wonder why all the pretense, when so thinly veiled was the urge to colonize and kill.
There are exhibits about so-called schools where natives were forced into assimilation schools, where there were strict rules on the use of language and the banning of displays of native culture. There are also stories of resistance, activism, and the bravery of those fighting for recognition and for sovereignty, which continues to this day, more than ever. It’s strange too, to see native people now talked about as great Americans, I’m sure Sitting Bull never saw himself as American. There is a hall dedicated to products, from advertising, sports, and toys with names that are all appropriated from native culture, including Tomahawk missiles hanging from the ceiling, motorbikes and sports cars, Barbie dolls in faux Indian dress. America has profited from this culture for so long, without ever wanting to know anything about an experience, or the lives of people, espousing values of bravery and courage shown in their very fight for survival.
The building is incredible, with long sweeping arcs, spiraling down through a wide central atrium, the galleries are intimate and there are wonderful exhibitions of art and storytelling. Here I found brilliant use of projection, creating beautiful spaces, lined with incredible pieces of sculpture. Preston Singletary’s Raven and the Box of Daylight exhibit tells stories through intricate, delicate glass pieces, sculpted with sand and revealed in light and sound.
Lost and Found
Planet Word is dedicated to language, a converted school with a series of incredible spaces, libraries, and interactive exhibits. I arrived at the same time as a class of school kids and followed them around to enjoy their excitement and exuberance, there was no shhh… in these reading rooms.
There were so many ideas to bring back here that I found myself taking photos and scribbling things down at every turn. The language globe, the library, where books come to life with tiny projections and descriptions, photo booths and sound installations, videos, animations, interactive screens, and many opportunities to write and draw. This museum is a gem.
Feeling parched, I stumbled into the Immigrant Cafe, located on the basement floor of the museum, serving dishes that celebrate their influences in African, Asian, and South American cooking. This is a place that thinks about language as a fluid, ever-changing, and adapting form. It doesn’t separate language from culture but celebrates their union. Oh, I have so much work to do.
Thank you
It’s been a tough week, we’ve been talking as always with the boys about the news and what is happening in Ukraine. I’m very conscious that I have a job to cushion what’s being said in the playground, that we are heading towards a world war because although kids ride these things, these worries creep in and unrest shows in the usual ways, I’m sure you know.
I’m looking at what I can do to help, donate where we can. It’s hard to know where, so I’m going with the International Red Cross and UNHCR who are currently providing support to those in Ukraine fleeing the war, alongside their campaigns in Afghanistan, Venezuela, South Sudan, and Syria.
I do hope that the news improves, but I worry that we long passed the moment of seeing sense, that only pressure from governments and from inside Russia will put an end to this terrible act of aggression.
So, I’m sorry again for being late on this, I traveled back yesterday listening to the news, stories of bravery and great suffering. I was going to write last night but felt my eyes close and woke up in time to make some food for the family and settle in with them for the evening.
I’ll make this a part 1 and follow up with more from DC on Friday. Take care, catch up later.
Great issue! I totally get how you feel. I too have been trying to have conversations with my granddaughter but don't really want to bring the topic of WW III up! What a ridiculous species we are! How can we create so much that is good, only to be the authors of our own destruction, and in so many horrible ways????