21 Jul 2014 | About Index, ArtFreedomWales
Why we are doing this programme
We believe that freedom of artistic expression lies at the heart of artistic practice and the debate about it needs to be kept live and abreast of changes in society.
Index on Censorship’s UK Programme
“Freedom of expression is not self-perpetuating, but needs to be maintained by the constant vigilance of those who care about it.” — Michael Scammell – Index on Censorship Magazine 1972
Support for artistic freedom allows the artist to push boundaries, to say what is not being said, imagine the world differently, act as critic and speak truth to power. Artistic freedom of expression thrives on risk and experimentation, embracing controversy and diversity of opinion and the debate and dialogue triggered by challenging art.
You only have to think of what happens to artists in societies that are unfree for this to be thrown into sharp relief.
But even in countries where freedoms are upheld as a core principle, artistic freedoms are all too easily eroded by social, political and sometimes legal constraints. ArtFreedomWales is part of a wider Index programme that is taking stock of the support for free expression across the arts sector in the UK, and asking is the space for artistic freedom of expression expanding or shrinking?
Last year we held a major conference at the Southbank Centre in London- Taking the Offensive which identified and debated the social, political or legal controls that shape the cultural landscape. Nicholas Serota, Director Tate, gave the key note speech and the conference discussed the triggers for and the prevalence of self-censorship across our cultural organisations and institutions. It also discussed how the sector could come together to reinforce support for artistic freedom in general and when controversy breaks in particular. (Read the report here.) In May, we held a symposium in Belfast exploring these issues in Northern Ireland.
We are currently running a programme called ArtFreedomWales — a series of online events culminating in a day-long conference in the autumn to explore the state of artistic freedom and practice in Wales. Supported by Arts Council Wales, the programme will bring together Welsh artists and activists to discuss the issues and begin mapping a plan for action. Watch the first online event here.
21 Jul 2014 | Brazil, News and features, Religion and Culture
Journalist and author Luiz Reffato (Photo: Companhia das Letras)
While researching Brazil’s legislation called the biographies’ law, Index on Censorship’s Brazil contibutor Simone Marques spoke to award-winning Brazilian author Luiz Ruffato, whose works include acclaimed novel They Were Many Horses.
Index: By defending the idea of controlling of literary works, such as biographies, wouldn’t some Brazilian artists be executing the role of a censor?
Ruffato: This is a paradoxical subject, because these artists live from the public image they built. People do not buy only a song or a film, people also buy the exposition of this artist. And the moment he becomes a public figure he is no longer a private figure. If this person is no longer a private figure, it is possible that he may have his own life scrutinised. I do not see any problem with that. I think anyone can manage their own life the way they feel like. Whoever wants to write a biography about me can keep calm. They will find absolutely nothing that may dishonour my image. But if they did find something, it would be okay, because I am exposing myself, I am living off that, I am somehow using my public image to make money. Therefore I think that when you move into this public world, you must be aware of that.
I believe it is everyone’s right to know who the people that make the history of their country are, and the artists also make the history of a country — with or without a political standpoint, he is contributing or not contributing to thinking about the country. Therefore I believe it is perfectly reasonable that you know who this person is. That is why I am a little bit shocked, because we must defend freedom under any circumstance; and it is not relative freedom, freedom for me is a universal concept.The freedom we have here appears more like a relative freedom.
We are living a very strange period in Brazil, a moment when the issue of intolerance is really present. This is very curious because we had a military dictatorship, we have a political history of intolerance. And it shocks me that in the exact moment when we are exercising the biggest continued period of democracy, we are at the same time living a moment of absolute intolerance. It is not just a matter of biographies. Politically, any criticism of your actions immediately positions you within a certain ideological bias. It is a binary judgment; it is yes or no. Moreover, life is not yes or no, life is often made up of maybes, and that is why I am shocked because this positioning of intolerance does not take us to a good place.
Index: Where do you notice this type of intolerance?
Ruffato: This intolerance occurs at all levels. For example, in the virtual world. It is the place of intolerant practices, because there people exercise their prejudices and their authoritarian world views, I am shocked, it is absurd.
This positioning against the biographies I think is a bias of intolerance, an authoritarian bias. It is as if you are being placed in specific niches all the time, and I refuse to do that. I try to exercise the freedom that fits me by never having truths — not imposing truths. I defend relative truths. As well as believing that freedom is absolute, I believe truth must be relative. There is only absolute freedom where truths are relative. Where there is absolute truth there is no freedom.
In Brazil, we have a very childish thing, something that children also have , that is of closing our eyes and pretending things have disappeared. I think we have this in our society, you know? It is as if we closed our eyes and that problem did not exist anymore. We have never stopped to discuss our political history, which is a history of dictatorships. For example, the end of the Brazilian dictatorship did not happen because there was a revolution: it was an agreement between the politicians and the military that included a wide amnesty, general and unrestricted. In other words, nobody killed nobody, nobody did anything to anyone, let us play forward. Obviously, this deeply marks our society. We are an extremely authoritarian and intolerant society.
We are xenophobic, we are racists, we are sexists, we are homophobic, and this shines well on the internet. And we are hypocrites as well. We are not a bit cordial. We kill: domestic violence in Brazil is among the highest in the world, and this happens inside our homes; urban violence in Brazil is among the highest in the world. No, we are not a bit cordial. We are only cordial when people agree with us. When somebody disagrees with us, our reaction is extremely violent. But the Brazilian does not disagree in front of the person. We are used to give a pat on the back and, when the person leaves, we stick the knife in their back. Nobody admits that they do it. People do things, or do not do things, and do not have the guts to tell you. We do not have the culture of divergence, of debate. When we diverge, we always react in a hidden way, because disagreement is something unacceptable, it is terrible.
Index: If the biographies’s law is approved in the senate, we will have, really, more freedom to publish books about people?
Ruffato: This is another problem. I think that where there is an excess of laws, they are meant to be circumvented. The less laws there are, the better, because then you know where you are going. Brazil is a country of lawyers, so you must make many laws so they contradict each other and have loopholes. Particularly, I assume that the biographer is a decent person, that he is an intellectually honest person. Therefore, when an author writes a biography, he will face the biographee as a fallible and susceptible to making wrong decisions human being. The author should have a very well grounded and contextualized story he is telling. If the author is not an honest, decent person, and if the biographee’s family feel somehow offended by the work, then I think it is absolutely correct that they bring an appeal or a lawsuit to force the author to confirm, correct or retract what was written. This is within the norm. We have to protect the biographee, this is indisputable. I think we have to have a legislation that protects the biographee, but that protects him from libel, slander and infamy, not from writing things that were factual and occurred. Because otherwise we will fall into a very curious situation. For example, an author who wants to tell the life story of a president would have to have the subject or his family authorise the biography: what kind of history will we tell? It is a government biography.
So, how will we tell the history of Brazil? A history where the ills of Brazil cannot be told? A history, for example, where there is no extermination of indigenous. So we run a very serious risk of failing to tell a more decent history, with its contradictions, because history is also not a truth, but it is a narrative, and biographies also help to compose these narratives. I think this is very dangerous.
Our laws are made to be circumvented and are not clear. I think that this [biographies’ law] should not be an issue. They exist, people live, and some people have importance beyond a moment. So, I think that that should not even be a matter of discussion. But as it is, I do not keep calm, things can end up taking an unexpected turn into intolerance. There will always be gaps because the laws are not clear. And it’s a huge pretension for someone to want to take care of their image as if it was something personal, of their own. It is so stupid! You may describe your father, and each sibling will tell the story a different way, no one will even have the same father or mother. It is a silly idea to think that someone can have an authorised biography because that biography tells “the truth”. I am very afraid of societies that have truths. I do not trust them, because a society that has absolute truths must be very sick, there is something very wrong with it.
Index: Have you ever faced any kind of censorship in Brazil?
Ruffato: The book Eles Eram Muitos Cavalos (2001) was adopted in a university of Minas Gerais admission test and later on was “unadopted”. Because the admissions test was of a religious institution, they claimed that there was too much bad language in the book. Yes, the book has some profanity, but they are in a context. There is no curse word just for the sake of being a curse word. It was the only episode about it. And if there was some problem of constraint in a work of mine, I would keep writing anyway. I write for my readers, not to please anyone.
Index: If you could write a biography today, within this context of censorship? Who would?
Ruffato: I would like to do a biography, yes, but of a person who probably will not cause any problems, someone who has been very biographed, which is Machado de Assis. Just to change the focus, there are already many biographies of him. My theory is that he would not have written what he wrote had he not been who he was. He was a person who had a look from the bottom up. It was this gaze that I think determines the type of literature that he wrote. But I’m very interested in writing a fake biography. When you tell someone else’s story, you are telling your own story, as psychoanalysis says. I want to radicalize it, though, creating a character whose biography I would write. It is not a novel. It is a fake biography, in which I would tell the story of the character with many witnesses, with hundreds of interviews, many documents read, but it was all fake. Maybe I get to be sued: it would be an authorized biography “unauthorized”.
This article was published on July 17, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
21 Jul 2014 | About Index, ArtFreedomWales, Events, News and features
Index on Censorship’s ArtFreedomWales launched on Friday with the first online conversation about artistic freedom of expression in Wales with playwright Tim Price, singer, actor, writer Lisa Jen, poet and writer Kathryn Gray and visual artist Leah Crossley – though unfortunately we lost Crossley’s connection early on.
The live-broadcast, hosted by Julia Farrington (Associate Arts Producer Index) opened on the question: “How free do you feel to express yourself as an artist in Wales?”.
Price kicked off by talking about the constraints posed by the Welsh language. “We are a bilingual nation, but we [artists] are not all bilingual…There is a whole element of Welsh experience that isn’t available to me because I don’t speak Welsh.
Gray agreed, “language barrier blocks expression and collective understanding of our differences and similarities. This is disabling for the arts in Wales.”
Jen, whose first language is Welsh, moves comfortably between the two – singing in Welsh, writing plays in English – as this seems the most natural way to express herself. But there are massive problems “when you try and do things bilingually like run a workshop in Welsh, and bilingualise it – then it’s impossible. English always oppresses the Welsh”.
Our next broadcast in Welsh in August 1st, will look specifically at the opportunities for and obstacles to expression for artists working in Welsh.
Price also stressed that for most people access to opportunities to express themselves through the arts is the greatest obstacle of all. The panellists all agreed that this was as much to do with a “collective low self-esteem across the country” or as Jen put it: “Whether you are a Welsh language speaker or not, we are a flipping insecure nation.” Price said that the most common problem he finds when he runs writing workshops “is that many people believe that no one can possibly be interested in what we have to say.” The legacy of being England’s oldest colony and Westminster’s failure to invest in infrastructure, were cited as contributory causes.
Other obstacles discussed included self-censorship – how cultural institutions and the subsidy culture influence what is sayable, the imbalance between the considerable support for poets and the lack of support for playwrights who want to make the big step into the professional arena. Gray also pointed to the Welsh media’s lack of critical engagement on an artistic or political level that “would help people to understand the regime we are living under”.
There were strong positives too – the support for emerging artists, a great DIY culture amongst fellow artists at grassroots level, new cultural infrastructure – and the acknowledgement that Wales was an exciting place to be an artist now. Jen: “We have freedom to do whatever we want but few playwrights are making big, political work with a big massive voice.” She went on to say that there is no shortage of issues for Welsh artists to make work about but “we are playing safe. I am sick of seeing safe work that doesn’t tell me anything. I want to feel scared, feel danger.” Gary agreed, “Art should be about smashing things up. May things come from the ruins.”
But is there an appetite for more courageous, challenging work amongst the audience? The panellists agreed that the audience in Wales is innately conservative – the fact that Radio Cymru said that Jen’s music was not suitable for daytime listening is evidence of this – has to be taken into account. As Price said “We are a nation under siege from England, so culture remains about preserving and sustaining what we have.”
Follow and participate in the discussions @artfreedomwales.
Find out more about Index’s UK arts programme.
This article was posted on July 21, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
