A celebration and exploration of Belfast’s most famous textile, the “linen biennale”, runs until October (web). The Linen Hall library also runs a tour of the “linen quarter” on Thursdays.
Visual Waste’s (ig) Great Victoria Street mural includes various linen quarter buildings: the Grand Opera House, the Europa hotel, and Inst., alongside the H&W cranes and the Titanic museum.
On this day in 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect (except territories managed by the East India Company), marking the beginning of the end for slavery in the British empire. Enslaved children below the age of six were freed; while enslave adults were designated as apprentices for a period of four or six years; 5% of British GDP went towards reimbursing owners (Independent | WP).
This made it safe for Frederick Douglass – “1818-1895, abolitionist and human rights campaigner” – to tour in Ireland and Britain when the success of his (first) auto-biography, Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, might have allowed and encouraged his owner to re-capture him. Douglass had “illegally” escaped slavery in September, 1838, become a preacher in 1839, and by 1843, had joined a six-months-long speaking tour of the United States. (WP)
His tour of Ireland and Britain lasted two years and included speeches given in First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street and at the Assembly Rooms in Waring Street. In a letter to William Garrison he wrote, “Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.” And when leaving for Britain in January 1846 he wrote, “I shall always remember the people of Belfast, and the kind friends I now see around me, and wherever else I feel myself to be a stranger, I will remember I have a home in Belfast.”
Douglass returned to the US in 1847, where millions were still enslaved (until the 13th Amendment of 1865). In an 1857 address concerning Jamaica and the West Indies, Douglass said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” (CUNY)
The piece was sculpted by Alan Beattie Herriot and Hector Guest (BBC) with funding from Belfast City Council and the Department For Communities (BelTel), and stands in Lombard Street. Douglass is presented as a 27-year-old; the old mural on Divis Street and the current mural on Northumberland Street portray him in later years.
Douglass carries a watch in his waistcoat pocket: “I could hardly indulge in the hope of someday owning a watch, yet in those hope-killing days of my slave life I did think I might somewhere in the dim and shadowy future, find myself the happy owner of a watch … a sign of wealth and respectability.”
See also: Olaudah Equiano, who toured in Ireland in 1791-1792, and, for Mary Ann McCracken, The World Affords No Enjoyment Equal To That Of Promoting The Happiness Of Others. “”In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women … Our doctrine is that ‘Right is of no sex’.” At Douglass’s farewell breakfast in January 1846, a Belfast Ladies Anti-Slavery Society was formed. Mary Ann McCracken was a founding member.”
How’s about ye?! FGB (ig), Leo Boyd (ig), and KVLR (ig) added three pieces at the end of April to what is now the “Belfast Stories” construction hoarding. FGB’s piece, shown above, was inspired by the fact that the northern branch of North Street was called “Goose Lane” (tw) at the time of (Chichester’s) Belfast Castle, as herders headed through the north gate (see the map at Lennon Wylie). There is a “Goose Lane” plaque on just the other side of Royal Avenue; it is included below.
“One of the earliest streets in the city, North Street was known as Goose Lane, along which geese were driven to feed on the fields outside the town. That 17th century street consisted of single-storey houses and the old city wall bisected it at what is now Royal Avenue – Belfast City Council.”
In Raimondi’s Adam And Eve, an engraving from c. 1512, Adam offers Eve two small apples while a human-headed serpent looks on (Met). (The town in the background is from Raimondi, but the car in the middle is Boyd’s.)
In Leo Boyd’s reworking, all the heads have been turned into surveillance cameras – including the snake in the tree, the private parts have been covered by “Fig. 1” and “Fig. 2”, and the forbidden fruit is now a heart emoji, which in this instance has literally been cut out of the print. Our surveillance culture (inlcuding “social” media) perhaps makes emotional connection more difficult and more dangerous than ever – we are ashamed to appear naked.
The paste-up is on the hoarding in Donegall Quay, below a ring of surveillance cameras. Belfast is the 100th-most surveilled city in the world, per capita (CEOWorld).
For information about the production of the piece, and images that include the heart that has been torn out, see Leo Boyd Prints.
Three stickers of resistance in Belfast’s city centre: above, communistparty.ie confirms Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s inevitable failure; below, under-paid, over-worked, and mis-treated hospitality workers are encouraged to “give the goss on your boss”; next below, an old sticker calling for Northern Ireland to follow the Republic in adopting abortion leglislation (parliament.uk) – “not the church, not the state, we must choose our fate – #thenorthisnow [Image.ie]” (as well as a commercial sticker by the singer A.N.J.A.); finally below, from Sailortown, stickers from the IWW or wobblies (“one big union.ie“) and the United Tech & Allied Workers (“the past we inherit, the future we build”).
A couple of Leo Boyd (ig) paste-ups of his PSNIce-Cream land-rover (previously a mural in Kent St) are peeling off the pole in North Street, perhaps in part because of the recent warm temperatures.
Extramural Activity 