Hidden Door 3 - meetup last night. Exciting stuff.
More and more artists, musicians, film-makers, poets around these parts getting their teeth into scottish economy and politics - how refreshing.
The 3 big taboos for scottish artists today:
1. economics
2. politics
3. religion
these open up whole new energy and vitality for scottish artists to open up imagination, break some chains and cause some trouble in high places
but if scottish artists want to open a whole can of worms, crack open graves and stir a whole stack of hornets nests -
open up scotland's biggie: LAND - who owns it, how they got it, what the effect it has on scottish psyche, self harm, sectarianism, its well documented health and prison stats, and how it does its economics, politics and religion
its friendship broken with its own land ..... its enforced landlessness and exile on its own soil.. its dark adventures with colonialism abroad...
are we artists ready to ask questions, create waves, endanger our own funding, eat the hands that feeds us evn; in scotland recovering from 300 years of involvement in empire - are scots artists in 21st century of every shade and colour ready to revisit these fallow fields that our poets have trod in the 20th and take it further?
or we as a community going to remain in the green mist of exotica, obscurantism and infantilism?
will scottish art cut off from its land and people and their stories, their questions about their land's political and economic realities find its way home? at this time of global economic change and local appetite for its own day of independance - not just merely from wee westminster but independance from empires of the soul and spirit -
the neo-colonialisation baby giants of global rule, spin and control that are already jostling for pole position on the earth
these new monsters are hungry for us - are we ready for em?
if not - 'mon bonnie artists, imaginative resistors and the eternally curious
wake up and shine yer wee light on the land...
