Brett Gregory interviews Professor David Archibald (University of Glasgow), from The Tenementals

BG: Hi, I'm Brett Gregory, and this is Professor David Archibald from the University of Glasgow, founder of the Scottish protest group, The Tenementals.

DA: Brett, it's good to be back in touch. It's been quite a year for The Tenementals; last year we released our first single, Die Moorsoldaten or Peat Bog Soldiers; and, out of the blue, we were contacted by the people who oversee the archives of the concentration camp in which the song was first performed on the 27th of August 1933. The reason the archivists were in touch was because they wanted the song to be placed in the archive that they have about the camp, and they've got an archive about that song because it's been covered by a number of various artists previously. They also said some very moving words about the two versions that we had made –one English, one German. To receive this news was overwhelming

Then we produced another cover, a song by Victor Jara, the Chilean poet and singer, who was murdered during Pinochet’s coup against the elected government in Chile in 1973. We were doing an event at St. Luke's which is a beautiful venue in the East End of Glasgow on the 15th of September last year, almost 50 years to the day when Victor Jara's body was found dumped in a street. He'd been arrested during the coup, he was held in a makeshift prison, and in the prison the guards broke his fingers to stop him playing the guitar. They shot him dead, and they dumped his body. And because we were doing an event which was 50 years and one day after the death or the finding of Victor Jara's body, we wanted to do something which kept his memory alive so we sang ‘Te recuerdo Amanda’. It's a song which is about remembering really, and it's also about people involved in the struggle to build a better world, and sometimes the sacrifices that are involved in that.

Monica Queen is an extraordinary, beautiful, beautiful singer who's maybe known quite well in Glasgow and Scotland. I'm not so sure how well she's known out of Scotland, but her voice is extraordinary, and we asked her if she would sing it, and she was up for it. Our drummer Bob Anderson drums with Monica and her partner, Johnny Smiley, is the mixing maestro on our recordings, so it seemed like a good idea. So that night I said a few words about Victor Jara, and why we were going to sing that song, and then introduced Monica and our guitarist, Simon. She sang it in Spanish, and there were 500 people in the room, and time seemed to stop it.

We wanted to recreate something of that moment. We did that in the spring, but we're very slow and our rhythm is pretty irregular, so we're just bringing out a video now. We went down to the River Clyde, and we shot it. And the original song is about someone remembering, someone goes to a factory, so we went to Glasgow's industrial landscape, and we filmed a little video. We don't want to be overly romantic, but when we listen to the songs of Victor Jara, we think that in some ways he walks with us. Every time Victor HJara's songs are sung it's a blow against the people that would kill the writers, the poets, the dreamers, the people who try and imagine a different world.

The album's called ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’: it's coming out with Strength in Numbers records in November.

The first track we brought out was ‘A Passion Flower’s Lament’, and it's about the men from Glasgow who travelled to Spain, and who died in the Spanish Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. It's written from the perspective of a statue that sits on the banks of the River Clyde which commemorates the members of ‘The International Brigades’. The statue is named after a very famous Spanish communist politician commonly known as ‘La Pasionaria’. It was erected in the 70s and it's become an important part of Glasgow’s cityscape. The Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Revolution, is a contested historical period.

There was a period in that war called ‘The Civil War within the Civil War’ where different leftist groups were, you know, fighting each other, but they weren't just arguing with each other about the contents of their paper, they were shooting each other, and one of the people that was caught up in that was a University of Glasgow student, Bob Smillie, who had fought alongside George Orwell in the Aragon front, and he died in a prison cell in Valencia. He was arrested by the forces on the Republican left. He was in the process of leaving Spain and he was beaten up and died. It's murky, you can't be exact but it's possible, perhaps probable, that he died at the hand of the people who were on the same bloody side as him.

The song asks whether we should be worrying about the difficult aspects of the conflict when, as the song says, ‘Once more the jackboot seeks to recruit’. What do we do about the troubling aspects of anti-fascist history at the moment when the fascists are coming back? The song leaves that open. Perhaps art poses questions rather than answers them, but also what the song seeks to do is to resurrect the revolutionary spirit of Spain, to focus on a moment of revolutionary possibility. If it happened once it can happen again. The Spanish ruling class are fearful of the memory of the Spanish Revolution, precisely because they know that better than anybody else.

Peter Pike or Pink with Sarah Martin

The song is sung beautifully by Jen Cunnion who sings most of the songs on the album, but Jen is not always available so we've worked with other fantastic singers as guest vocalists: Belle and Sebastian’s Sarah Martin has sang live with us a few times, but she also recorded one of the tracks on the album called ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, about the events in Scotland known variously as the 1820 ‘Radical War’, the ‘Radical Rising’ or the ‘Scottish Insurrection’. Therese Martin also sings on the song so there's two Martins on that song. No relation other than they're both great singers. 1820 witnessed a period in Scotland of sustained civil unrest, a general strike, and aborted armed uprising; and it culminated with its leaders sentenced to death while others were deported.

During the lockdown I took a trek up to Sighthill Cemetery where there's a monument dedicated to the men who were executed for their part in the rising. The memorial lists those who were executed but also those who were deported to Australia, and one man's name is listed as Thomas Pike or Pink. I thought, now we don't even know his name, and that that was interesting in the sense that 1820 sits somewhat uncomfortably in the Scottish national consciousness. For some it's too radical, for some it's too nationalist, for some it's a bit murky because the British state was involved. There's a poetic connection with the uncertainty around one of the participants’ names as much as there is around the uncertainty of what that the event is, and what it means. We added our own artistic license to the mix when we tweaked the title a little.

It's the second track in the album, and the album will be released in November. It contains nine tracks. There's two other singles that are likely to come out: ‘The Owl of Minerva’ imagines what the owl associated with Hegel's aphorism, ‘The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk’.  What would it be like if The Owl of Minerva was living in the Finnieston Crane, one of the magnificent titan cranes that sits on the Clyde? In that song she flies over the city, commenting on what she encounters and reflecting on the historical process. And we're also bringing out a single called ‘Universal Alienation: We’re not Rats’ which riffs off a celebrated speech by Jimmy Reid, who was a major trade union figure in Glasgow in the 70s.

Thanks to Glasgow City Heritage Trust who gave us some money which subsidised some of the production costs of the album, we're able to put on a free to enter album launch, so we're going to be having that on the 27th of November in Oran Mor.

And we've started working on Volume II. We've written a few songs, there's a song about hope, there's a song about the city's connections with the anti-apartheid struggle, and other material which is quite close to our hearts which will come out in good time.

We don't have time to focus much on political party leaders; we focus on what we can do, where we are. We need to pressurise them of course in Britain and Scotland and then elsewhere, and perhaps there's no more pressing subject on which to pressurise the leaders of the British State at the minute than on the question of their participation in the genocide in Palestine. We've participated in many of the marches in Glasgow as we could have. We're absolutely alive to the fact that while that event takes place in Palestine, Britain is actively supporting that event, and I think the scale of that event hasn't not really been made clear yet. There was an article recently by Professor Sridhar who's the chair of global Public Health at the University Edinburgh which built on the report in the Lancet which had estimated that the death count in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people, and she extrapolated that methodology, and argued that if the conflict continued until the end of 2024 then the total deaths could be in the region of 335,000, a third of a million people, the killing of one third of 1 million from a population of 2 million. I mean what is the word for that?

So what can we do? Little, we march, we put pressure on our leaders, we bear witness to their participation in genocidal war crimes, and we call them out at every opportunity.

The Tenementals is what I've called a wild research project and some of the band members are academics. It's got one foot in the university but for a project like The Tenementals to have a life, to breathe, it has to move to its own beat. The Tenementals has to run on the logics of a rock band rather than the metricised logics of the neoliberal university. Art has to be accountable to itself rather than the control mechanisms that come with working in higher education, so that's really the only way that The Tenementals can be alive. And I've been working on developing this thinking around the concept of Wild Research. We’re having a symposium on Wild Research, at Stephen Skrynka’s amazing Revelator Wall of Death in September where different artists and academics, filmmakers, writers will come together and discuss the whole the idea of Wild Research.

So my work with The Tenementals since astride my work as an academic. I'll be heading back to Cuba later in the year with my Catalan comrade and colleague Núria Araüna Baro to work on the feminist filmmaking project which we've started -  it's been a busy, busy time.

Thank you, Brett, for taking some of your time out. I know that you, as I said earlier, you've been working on your filmmaking projects, the Kafka short, and working on your own writing, and your blog and so on, and all power to you. We need as many radical voices out there as we can. We all make a modest contribution, but combined those modest contributions hopefully add up to something more, so let countless radical voices bloom.

You can find 'The Tenementals' on Spotify here, and on social media here: @tenementals

50 years ago, in 1972, the great Chilean singer song-writer Victor Jara released one of his final albums, ‘La Población’ . It consists of 9 songs which tell the stories of previously homelesss people, living in a shanty town in Santiago. It became an iconic musical testimony of their struggles to occupy scrubland and build a home – a community – and also featured the recorded voices of these people. And the community is still there today.

In some ways it also is a musical document of the victories and hopes of the popular movements who had elected Salvador Allende in 1970, on a platform of radical social and economic change. After the 1973 military coup, which resulted in the death of Allende and Victor Jara, as well as many thousands of others, all of Victor Jara’s music was banned in Chile. Today his voice rings out louder than ever. They can kill the singer – but not the songs.

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On September 18^th this year, the Victor Jara festival “El Sueño Existe” – the Dream Lives On – will be presenting an evening zoom celebration of the album ‘La Población’, looking at the context, methodology, and the times in which it was created, hearing from the community, and presenting new versions of the songs Victor Jara wrote, performed by a wide variety of singers, musicians and choirs – both in the UK and from Chile. It’ll be an inspiring and uplifting evening – and replaces the cancelled 2021 festival.

The ‘Toma’ – Seizing the Land

The community featured in the album, Herminda de la Victoria, was the result  of a ‘toma’ (or land seizure). By the 1960s large numbers of people were arriving in the city from the countryside, but there was little available housing for them. For years these internal migrants,  in Santiago as elsewhere in Latin America cities, had occupied land and housed themselves as best they could, but the pobladores at Herminda were very organised. Local leaders ensured they were well motivated and could access external support. And as one of the pobladores recounts on one of the album's tracks, when their original site was discovered, they were able switch to an alternative at the last minute.

The Pobladores erected tents and shacks during the night. As with any toma at that time, the police would attempt to evict them, and around 400 police attacked using tear gas, forcing the pobladores into a small part of the land, and cordoning them off. The pobladores managed to hold on, surrounded, with the police initially refusing to let any supplies in. Local radical politicians (including Salvador Allende) supported the toma and the ongoing, eventually successful negotiations.

Why ‘Herminda de la Victoria’ ? Herminda Alvarez Chavez was a baby who died soon after the toma. Some say she was shot or tear-gassed, but most likely she died of illness when there was little medical treatment available. Naming the new community in memory of the baby and the victory of the people helped to unify the group at a difficult time. Her death would not be in vain, their suffering and organisation allowing them to eventually create a home of their own. One of the songs on the album is a lullaby for the dead child, ‘who died before she had a chance to struggle’.

A modern mural within Herminda

After weeks of negotiations, the government agreed to provide land, in another location. The new site lacked water, electricity, sewerage and paved roads. A key feature of the ‘Poblador’ movement : “Build everything ourselves”, comes through in Victor Jara's celebratory song ‘Man the Creator’, in which he sings “With my pure ability, I worked for them as a carpenter, as a plasterer and a bricklayer, as a gas fitter and a lathe-turner.”

Before and especially after Allende’s election as President in 1970, direct action of all kinds flourished in Chile, including many more land seizures that resulted in self-build housing. Herminda was followed by an increasing number of tomas, probably hundreds by 1973.

Uniquely the toma at Herminda was celebrated in song. By 1971 Victor Jara had produced 6 albums, including several songs about the lives of urban and rural workers. In Joan Jara's account, this whole album would be a new departure, providing a voice for the voiceless and marginalised. She describes it as happening by chance when a Poblador said to Victor : “If you're looking for something to sing about, why don't you come to our community, Herminda?” Later Victor Jara wrote: “I had to spend a lot of time researching the struggles of the pobladores, …...with a tape recorder in my hands. How much music there is in these stories, how many books could be written about them!”

Barely a year after its launch, this music, and much more, would be banned in Chile. As someone who was in Santiago at the time of the coup put it : “On the day before the coup, everything was possible. From the day after the coup, nothing was possible”. 

The Población of Herminda de La Victoria survived the terrifying years of the  dictatorship, despite regular military attacks, disappearances, murders of leaders, and the shooting of demonstrators with live bullets, including after a demonstration against Pinochet when he visited the locality in 1988. In Herminda today this history is told through the many murals around the community, educating the new generations about the struggles to create, build and defend the community.

Victor Jara singing for the children of Herminda, in 1972

‘La Población’ will be recounted and celebrated in song and murals, with contemporary and archive film, during the 18^th September zoom event. There will be Spanish interpretation available throughout for Latin American friends.

The “El Sueño Existe” festival normally happens every summer in Machynlleth, Wales, and draws a fantastic crowd of Latin American exiles, academics, dancers, journalists, singers, activists, musicians – and festival goers – to celebrate Chilean ‘New Song’, and to bring together modern politics and cultures, struggles in Latin America and closer to home, through every conceivable art form – all in a glorious coming together in beautiful West Wales. All information (including 2022 weekend dates), videos of past festivals etc. are on the festival website.

You can watch a short film about the songs, the album and the festival here:

You can listen to the whole original album of La Población (55 mins) on Youtube here:

¡Victor Jara – Presente!  

Mike Quille reviews an involving, stimulating exhibition which encourages the growing appetite for cultural democracy.

The recent appointment of Elisabeth Murdoch to Arts Council England was yet more evidence of the increasing domination of public funding for the arts by corporate and right-wing interests.

There is growing resistance, however, among activists and artists. There are also signs that labour movement leaders are becoming more aware of the importance of cultural activities in the lives of their members – see for example Len McCluskey’s Introduction to the Bread and Roses 2017 Poetry Anthology.

The 2017 Labour manifesto also contained some progressive promises around devolving decision-making, increasing funding and boosting arts education in schools. It was a great improvement on previous manifestos, which had become more and more oriented towards art and culture as merely functional for economic regeneration.

It was flawed, though – see here for a cogent critique by Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt. Debates and discussions on the left are growing, and reports, articles and manifestos are being proposed, based on a much more radical approach to arts and culture. For example, see here for the result of discussions at the Momentum-organised The World Transformed festival in Brighton last September. Events are being planned around the country to present and consult on this manifesto, by the Movement for Cultural Democracy.

One of the features of this movement is a belief that the cultural struggle and the political struggle go hand in hand – that culture, as well as being entertaining and enjoyable, is essentially liberating in a political sense. Cultural activities are fundamentally social and equalising, asserting our common humanity against divisions of class, gender, race and other social divisions engendered by capitalism, especially its neoliberal variant. In this view, culture can inspire, support, and accompany radical change in the real world.

There is no better current example of this belief in the power of art to transform the world than the current ‘Revolt and Revolutions’ exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield. A variety of works, linked in various ways, showcase some of the strands of counter-cultural and anti-establishment movements of recent times, and invite us to join in.

At the entrance to the exhibition, The Internationale, as sung by the artist Susan Philipsz, is broadcast in the open air. It calls us in, resonating across the former coalfields and industrial heartlands of South Yorkshire. The faltering, saddened voice conveys both the sufferings endured by the northern working classes in the last fifty years, and their resilience and continuing determination to redress injustice through political action.

As we go inside the gallery, more music welcomes us. Ruth Ewan’s A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World is a selection of classics of political music and song, updated to include songs for the Trump era, which visitors can choose and listen to.

Ruth Ewan, A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, courtesy the artist and YSP. Photo © Jonty Wilde

Political music is also celebrated by two arpilleras, a kind of Chilean patchwork quilt, illustrating the key ideals of the New Chilean Song Movement. This was a powerful, persuasive cultural movement which accompanied and assisted the rise to power of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in 1970. One of its main supporters was the singer, guitarist and communist Victor Jara, later tortured and killed by the Pinochet regime. Pinochet’s admirers and allies included Margaret Thatcher, responsible for the privatisation of the local Yorkshire steel industry and the British state’s war against the miners and their socialist leaders, in 1984-5.

Arpillera, New Chilean Song, 1980–83, unknown political prisoner, Chile, and an installation view including Helmet Head 1, Henry Moore, cast 1960. Courtesy YSP, photos © Jonty Wilde

Henry Moore was a socialist and the son of a miner, brought up in a household where meetings of the first miners’ union were held. His works have graced the Park for many years, and in this exhibition his bronze sculpture Helmet Head evokes the exterior toughness and interior vulnerability of hardworking, hard-up men and women.

Revolt & Revolutions, installation view, 2017. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist. Courtesy YSP. Photo © Jonty Wilde

There are many more artworks and a particularly vivid display of photographs expressing the punkish, counter-cultural spirit of the seventies. But the outstanding artwork is a 15 minute video of local resident Alison Catherall, still living in Castleford, birthplace of Henry Moore. It tells the story of the region over her lifetime, from the optimism and pride of the fifties and sixties to the Tories’ assault on the working class communities in the seventies, eighties and beyond, and her determination to crusade for a better life, a transformed world for young people through education, culture and heritage.

She tells her lifestory, from the optimism and pride when she was young in the fifties and sixties, to the Tories’ assault on local steelworking and mining communities in the seventies, eighties and beyond. Her voice rises and becomes impassioned as she talks about her continuing militant determination to crusade for a transformed world – a better life for young people through education, culture and heritage.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, FF Gaiden-Legacy, 2017 (film still). Courtesy YSP and Castleford Heritage Trust

This moving oral history of suffering and struggle is illustrated by film of a female avatar, taken from the video game Grand Auto Theft 5, striding through deserted pit galleries, up and down the hilly landscape, by day and by night and through all weathers. The local and particular story of suffering, endurance and resilience becomes universal, an artistic tribute to both local and global working class communities – particularly the experience and struggles of women to keep those communities alive.

This focus on art which comes from the experiences of the many, and is addressed to the many, is carried through not only in the curating of the exhibition – there are several exhibits inviting public participation – but in the events organised around it. For example, on February 20^th, the evening of the UN Day for Social Justice, YSP are running a talk on ‘Do You Want to Change the World’ on the relevance of art and culture to the political transformation of society.

Helen Pheby is the senior curator at YSP responsible for the grounded, varied and interlinked themes running through this excellent exhibition. I asked her for some insights into her approach, to share with readers of Culture Matters. This is what she said:

'The inspiration for Revolt and Revolutions came from working with Henry Moore's family and foundation on a previous major exhibition and learning how radical he had been, not just as an artist, but also through his commitment to social justice.

I was conscious that we don't seem to be hearing much good news at the moment and wanted to share works by artists who are trying to make a difference, or who are giving a voice to people in our communities committed to positive change.

My hope was that this small show might be a catalyst, raise spirits and hopes a little, and suggest ways we can all have power. The public response has been very positive, with record visitor numbers in the gallery and people making pledges to make a difference. Our associated events, such as inviting people to change the world, are proving popular, suggesting a real appetite for people to get involved.

Helen’s hopes have surely been realised. By showing and promoting the power of art to change the world, through the exhibition itself and the activities, talks and discussions that run alongside it, Yorkshire Sculpture Park are encouraging the appetite for cultural democracy which is emerging from the labour movement.

Finally, Matt Abbott, the poet, has written this poem to accompany the exhibition. It's best listened to on the link, but here's the text as well:

Revolt and Revolutions

by Matt Abbott

Placard, pin badge, denim, leather.
Fist clenched tight at the end of your tether.
Minds in the margins all come together
the Revolution will not start itself.

When the turn of a phrase is the twist of a knife
and a movement swims at the tide of the strife,
a slingshot points at the status quo
the choir sings a resounding “NO!”:
change, is a product of protest.

Give a soapbox to a voice
that can’t be heard amongst the crowd.
There’s a rebel with a cause,
there’s a dream that’s not allowed.
There’s a sub-group that’s been silenced,
a door that’s slamming shut.
An establishment that works to keep you structured
in a rut.

Where optimism sits with solidarity and strength.
For justice and equality, we’ll go to any length.
Apathy is acceptance. Acceptance never improves.
So stand up, and be counted: we’ve got goalposts to move.

Grab a megaphone, and articulate your grievances.
Strum guitars, paint banners, leave writing on the wall…
In the shadows, is where you’ll find allegiances.
We might be tiny individuals, but together, we’re tall.

Give power to the vulnerable; a voice to the unheard.
Don’t allow the privileged to take the final word.
March longer, sing louder, fight for what is right.
Acclimatise to darkness, and you’ll never seek light.

Revolt, reject, and rejoice in your dreams.
Protest is always more potent than it seems.
Be it beret wearing ‘Ban the Bomb’ or mohawk wearing punk;
others pinched nostrils but we shouted when it stunk.

Revolt and Revolution: come and join the number.
because nothing serves injustice like society in slumber.
Music and colour. Peace signs and love.
There are far more below than there are sat above.

It takes an awful lot of raindrops to form a monsoon.
And this station has a glitch: it’s time to retune.
Do not succumb to victimhood, or silence, or stealth,
because the Revolution will not start itself.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, is open 10am till 5pm and the exhibition, which is on till 15 April, is free. You can also visit this exhibition at the same time.