What’s Going on?
What’s Going On? – Bella’s monthly what’s on guide to political events and radical happenings (because The List and The Skinny don’t). This week we feature a new Neu! Reekie! strand, Counterflows, Leith’s May Day Book Fair, the Glasgow Autonomous Space Book Fair, Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression, and the 4th Antirepression Forum.
Got an event? Send it to us here.
NEU! REEKIE! 2.0 !
Neu! Reekie! launch a new strand to our events on Friday 22nd February at Leith Theatre (Thomas Morton Hall). Michael Pedersen explains: “REMAIN IN LIGHT is a new monthly showcase of experimental/avante garde/dissident/outward looking culture featuring an eclectic shapeshifting mix of poetry, music, spoken word, performance art, dance, visual art, science, film, animation & activism.”
“Not radically different from our shows but more focused on building a cultural dialogue with our denizens. Also breaking the cage of our standard show model and delving into new genres of performance – poetry, music and animation for sure but now with dance and provocations. We’ll be featuring more Euro centred programming and forging alliances with the likes of CinemaAttic. It’s a hugely brimful and bustling line-up for the launch – it will be loud, and quiet and varied as fuck.”
As one of our favourites / a cultural spark on our radar we’d love you there and are offering you a free ticket – there’s a super limited amount of these so please lasso them fast. Look forward to seeing you next Friday. Love Neu! Reekie! x”
Lineup includes:
HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES –
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney and based in Edinburgh. Their poetry collections Tonguit (2015) and The Games (2018) were both shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and Tonguit for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Harry Josephine was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, founded Inky Fingers Spoken Word, and co-directs the performance platform Anatomy. Their poetry has toured North America, Europe and New Zealand, and their participatory theatre has toured widely, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), CrisisArt (Italy) and Tesxt (Romania). Harry Josephines performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian’s best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup in the But Is It Art? category.
‘We Were Always Here: A Queer Words Anthology’ (404 Ink)
is oor first featured publication of 2019 and first ever of this sizzling new strand. Representing WWAH / 404 Ink on the night will be Andrés Ordorica & AR Crow.
ANDRES ORDORICA
is a graduate from The Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. As a writer, he aspires to create liminal worlds filled with characters who are from neither here nor there. His writing can be found in Confluence Medway, The Colour of Madness and The Acentos Review. He has performed his work for Literary Natives and The Courtauld Institute of Art.
AR CROW
is a poet, performer and trainee psychiatrist. They like to explore the spaces in between. I am A Crow.
THEO ROBERTSON
Specially commissioned dance piece, featuring Theo pole dancing. With Eleanor Walker & Anna Otterbeck
HARBINGERS DRUM CREW
Harbingers DC is a UK based loud-ass industrial drum crew: it draws influences from techno, industrial metal, taiko, breakbeats & drumn’bass.
CINEMAATTIC
CinemaAttic specialises in pop-up film screenings, underground events and retrospectives on Spanish & Latin American Cinema. Presented by Alberto & Rafa.
COUNTERFLOWS
Counterflows “a festival of underground experimental and international music” hits Glasgow in April. The line-up looks amazing.
“Counterflows is a four day international festival of radical, diverse and thought-provoking music, presented with warmth, fun and inclusivity across some of Glasgow’s best spaces during 4th-7th of April 2019
Fighting the creeping isolationist agenda and loom of age-old hierarchies, our desire to work locally and internationally – to hold onto and mutually nurture everyone’s capacity to be deeply human, deeply connected and deeply alive – is stronger than ever.
Through live events, clubs, discussions, film screenings and hang-outs – woven through some of the best spaces in Glasgow – Counterflows aims to enact a human flow and provide an inclusive, fun space to engage with important marginal music.”
LEITH’S MAY DAY BOOK FAIR
“Time to SaveTheDate-excited to announce our #MayDayBookFair IS happenin down in Leith as part of #InternationalWorkersDay celebrations in Edinburgh: Art to Environmentalism, books old & new, community groups & events! Suggestions & collaborators welcome”.
Lighthouse Books (collaborators on Bella’s new book!!!) tell all:
“We’re thrilled to bring together Lighthouse – Edinburgh’s Radical Bookshop, Sfbbooks & Elvis Shakespeare for some bookish May Day celebrations!
A FREE one-day festival of ideas, celebrating community and working class voices on everything from the Arts to Environmentalism!
May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, takes place on May First and celebrations unfold throughout the week to include the Edinburgh May Day march 2019 on Saturday 4th and a number of worker and community led events you can follow at the Edinburgh and Lothians May Day page.
Our May Day Book Fair will include book stalls with new and second-hand books on all subjects for all ages with a rich offering of left and progressive publishing! We’ll also be hosting panel events and performances on topics as varied as women’s labour, the gig economy, climate change and gentrification. If you’re lucky there might even be some live music and poetry!
Details & full program to be announced in April.
The event will be completely free to attend, but our venue and staff costs come to over £500 so anything you can chip in would be much appreciated! Pop your name & MAY DAY BOOK FAIR in the notes and we’ll list all supporters in the program.
If you are a community or activist group operating in Leith and you’d like to have a stall or stand, shoot an email at [email protected], and if you’re organisation or group is interested in fielding a speaker on any of the above topics do let us know too!”
This event will operate under the Lighthouse Safe Spaces policy which you can read here.
GLASGOW AUTONOMOUS SPACE BOOK FAIR
The Glasgow Autonomous Space Book Fair looks epic with workshops, talks, zines, good food and kids activities.
Programme includes: Sisters UnCut/Ubuntu Women Shelter; Books by Broads, Red and Black Song Club, Activist Printmaking; Writers 4 Utopia; Shy Radicals, Clydeside IWW, Chav Solidarity and much more.
GAS say: “The idea is for the book fair is to reflect the ethos of GAS, fighting capitalism and other forms of oppression, non-hierarchical organising, and the diversity of the people and organisations who use GAS, but also about things unique to Glasgow. We want to get away from some of the habitual things you get at anarchist/radical type book fairs that have made them not very diverse in the past.”
@habeuscoitus
A.K. Press
Anarchist Federation
Aye-Aye Books
Books By Broads
Chav Solidarity
Community Badge Making
Couriers Network + IWW
Go Vegan Scotland
Hex Distro
Moral Decay Distro
Not Your Fault
Radical Transfeminism Zine
Shy Radicals
Sisters UnCut
Spirit of Revolt Archive
Stories for Strangers
Unity Centre
Writers 4 Utopia Zines
Zarf Poetry
+ more to be confirmed.
Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression
Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression
An evening with Aziz Choudry and Eveline Lubbers
Saturday, March 9, 2019 at 4 PM – 6 PM
The Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh, 17 West Montgomery Pl, EH7 5HA Edinburgh
Join us for an evening of discussion with Aziz Choudry and Eveline Lubbers, editor of and contributor to Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression respectively. We will hear about the surveillance, harassment and infiltration directed against activists, organisations and movements, and what we can learn from this.
Copies of Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression will be available for purchase at the event.
Aziz Choudry is Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University and an activist with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal.
He is author of many books including Learning Activism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Just Work?: Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today (Pluto, 2015) and Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements – History’s Schools (Routledge, 2018).
Eveline Lubbers is an activist investigator and involved with the Undercover Research Group.
She is the author of Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark: Corporate and police spying on activists (Pluto, 2012) and Battling Big Business: Countering greenwash, front groups and other forms of corporate deception (Green Books, 2012).’
MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU
The 4th Antirepression Forum will be held on the 23rd of February. This time will be centered around the Spanish dictatorship, covering the anti-francoist struggle and the cases of stolen babies, to its heritage in the current days, with representatives of Altsasukoak Aske.
As usual, the forum will be followed by a gig to raise funds for anti-repression groups! Not to be missed, see you there!
VENUE: Old College (University of Edinburgh), lecture theatre 1264. South Bridge EH8 9YL
SCREENING AND TALKS:
11am The Dark Figure / La Cifra Negra (Dcoumentary)
12:30 Talk by Anti-francoist militant in the 70´s
13:30 Break
14:15 Edinburgh in Protest
14:30 Stolen babies in Spain: Talk by association´s president of Todos los niños robados son también mis niños.
15:30 In defence of political prisioners in Altsasu: Talk by Altsasukoak Aske.
16:30 Questions and answers. End 5pm
This is a CHILDREN friendly event! See you all there
At night we will be hosting an benefit gig to raise fund for anti repression collectives. More details here.
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Got an event? Send it to us here.