Boxercise lunch class at Golden Lane

Veronica Franklin Gould, Chief Excutive London Arts Challenge 2012 – a Games-inspired drama workshop involving people with varying degrees of dementia.

Young people excercising at the world’s largest Parkour dedicated facility L.E.A.P, placed in Westminster.

Seeds ready to be sown in Hackney Downs.

Ab Phab Youth Club, for people with and without disabilities, playing Boules in Dagenham.

Georgia from the ‘People’s Record’ project showing her own original Olympic torch from the last London Olympics in 1948.

Mad about Meadows – local volunteers sowing seeds, creating an Olympic Park-inspired meadow in Hackney Downs park.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27556879]

To read more about the conference please click here

See you all tomorrow between 6 and 9 at Elephant & Castle. It will be fab!

[slideshow]

http://www.demotix.com/news/959871/living-shadow-assad-damascus

The jury said: “There is spookiness in these images that results in making the journalistic angle very subtle instead of in your face. Fantastic graphic images and a nice balance between journalism and aesthetics.”

300 people entered the competition and “This Damn Weather” where among the three best. Very pleased with that!

A pair of tired eyes peers over the photo page of my beetroot coloured passport. “Occupation?” he asks me. “Student” I reply.
Next to the custom official hangs a poster showing the Syrian dove caught in mid air, wings spread and proudly carrying an olive branch in its beak, all around it cannons are aiming. Each can- non is branded with one promi- nent news channel logo after the other, CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC. They are all there trying to shoot down the peace dove of the re- gime. Another glance through the passport then my details are thoroughly noted into the sys- tem. First in fluent Arabic, then
in slow shaky capital letters, “TOURIST”, two quick stamps reiterate his verdict. “Welcome to Syria”, he hands back my documents and ges- tures me towards the door.

Syria is a country being swept by a storm that refuses to quieten down and Damascus is the eye of the hurricane. With all tourists long gone the streets are left un- naturally quiet. From walls and rooftops all over town president Bashar Al-Assad and his father Hafez, the leader of the 1970 coup are scouring the city look- ing on from posters and pedes- tals. Here in a city besieged by
secret police and undercover agents the people would never discuss politics openly, instead they refer to old president Hafez as “The Lion King”, this turns Bashar into Simba and the Jack- als are the ones you always fear might be listening in.

Inside the national museum ev- erything is quiet, I’m walking the long empty halls of history cast in clay, iron, silver and gold. A lone guard sits on his footstool surrounded by 10.000 years of history, here are lives lived and lost, battles fought and civiliza- tions crumbled.
Outside in the overgrown garden the last of the evening light throws long shadows of the an- cient stone statues of the ones that were, among them sits one that still is. We talk, he tells me of his life, a good life, well at least it used to be. Things have changed recently.
“It’s because of the weather”, he says, looking me into the eyes. “This damn weather”

There are reports of violent clashes and untimely deaths pouring in from all over the country. These are getting mixed up with whispered rumours and half-truths that are all being fed into a virtual world built of binary
ones and zeroes. In this second reality all information is chopped up, mixed together and handed back to the people in bite sized 140 character packages, easy to consume but hard to digest. The people of Damascus live in a world shaped by another world that in reality doesn’t really ex- ist. The only thing real is the fear, the fear of what will come.

I’m walking through the streets of the old city observing the hopelessness, feeling the ten- sion thick in the air. People look at me like I look at them, here we are all strangers. The act of rais- ing my camera feels like a threat
to shatter this carefully con- structed glass citadel so I tend not to. A street sweeper stops me, he demands to look through my pictures, there is nothing in- criminating there so he nods and lets me go, I hurry down a side street aware of his eyes fol- lowing me.
Looking back I notice anoth- er shadow on my heels, I take a right then a left but he’s still there, our eyes meet and he stops, turns around and gets his phone out, I disappear. My heart is pounding, who was he? I slowly realize that I have become a part of it, this theatre of war.

“We could hear the sirens night and day & day and night. After the third day, everything suddenly went quiet. Eleven of my friends jumped off the boat, they couldn’t handle the waiting, and they decided to swim for the shore. One by one we saw them disappear in the waves. They got eaten by the sea”. This tells Babacar Diops.

The up to 800 kilometers (500 miles) across the ocean takes place in small fishing boats packed with up to 90 migrants in each. The Spanish NGO “Organization for Human Rights in Andalusia” estimates that up to a thousand people died last year in their attempt to cross the sea.

Babacar Diops’s pale palms turn towards the sky. His eyes stands out like cracked china. Through the last year and a half, Babacar has seen fifteen of his friends die of hunger, deceases or drowning. First time was after four days in a small fishing boat riding a rough sea towards the Canary Islands. When the Spanish coastguard stopped the boat, Babacar couldn’t speak anymore.

“I was in the hospital for three days before I regained conscience. I was almost dead”. Four of the other 64 passengers never woke again.

For one week he was lying in a hospital bed, looking out of the window. Looking at Europe living it’s life, smelling the foreign country and listening to the sounds of another world. Then he was sent back home.

The police took him to the plane, the plane took him to Mauritania and Mauritania took him to jail. In his backpack he had €500, donated by the Spanish Red Cross. After 10 days in custody, he was given back to the streets. Both the backpack and the money had disappeared in the police storage.

One year after his first attempt, Babacar found himself mashed together with 73 other hopeful migrants in the bottom of a small wooden boat again trying for Europe. This time didn’t go as well as the first. They quickly lost their bearings and were left drifting the open sea for eight days in the hands of the North Atlantic currents before they by chance finally saw the coastline of Spain. But the coastguard were again blocking their way to the beaches of Las Palmas.

“The police threw us bundles of food and water, but they didn’t want to touch us. They only wanted to make sure we didn’t get any further”.

It took three days before desperation took over. Eleven of Babacar’s friends jumped overboard. They all drowned. After that the survivors where brought ashore. Two days later, they were back on a boat. This time they were going in the opposite direction. In Mauritania the police were waiting. The sentence was doubled, 20 days in the local internment camp nicknamed “Guantanamo”.

Today, only six months after he last looked death in the eyes, he’s again scouting the sea. Looking for the next boat there might take him to Europe.

“Clandestinos” living in an abandoned fish processing factory.

Senegalese migrant preparing for the Muslim midday prayer in Nouadhibou’s shanty town.

Nigerian migrant women have opened a small shop where they sow and sell their textiles in order to save money for the trip. The ticket can cost up to 1500 Euro.

28 migrants share a small four-room concrete house. Everybody shares the small amount of food that they can amass. The walls are full of pictures showing the latest European pop stars and footballers.

Tidiane Dialleo is 24 years old and from Senegal. He has been living in Nouadhibou for four years now, trying to save up enough money to buy a seat in one of the many small illegal boats crossing the 800 kilometer stretch to The Canary Islands. His only wish is to go to Europe and start a new life. As he says “I don´t know the life in Europe, I don´t know the people or the kindness. Maybe there, I can be a big man”.

The only Catholic Church in the Muslim country of Mauritania has become the meeting place for the migrants, both Christians and Muslims. The Church provides education and courses in how to survive in Europe and tries to train migrants in different occupations, such as cooking and computer skills.

Tidiane is attending an English language exam, his only hope to survive in Europe, is to speak one or more of the European languages. The Catholic Church offers courses in English and Spanish.

The many migrants make it difficult to get a job. Often the migrants are stuck with the most dangerous jobs with the lowest wages. Here old shipwrecks are cut up and sold as scrap.

The beaches are filled with trash and packs of wild dogs roaming, living on the waste from the fishing boats.

Mauritania has sold many of its fishing quotas to richer nations, so the coastline is full of industry trawlers from China, Russia and Europe. As a fisher complains, “before the sea was full of squids and fish, now the only thing we catch is water”.

The gap between the city and the sea is a wasteland used for garbage disposal and housing for the poorest.