Introducing DisTerrMem with a short poetry film
To introduce the DisTerrMem project to a wider audience as part of the Futures2020 public engagement event, we created a short film featuring a poem by the late American poet, Thomas Lux.
Futures is a unique public engagement event collaboratively curated by the Universities of Bath, Bath Spa, Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth. The event is part of the European Commission’s annual European Researchers' Night, which gives researchers the opportunity to showcase the diversity of science and its impact on citizens’ daily lives and to stimulate interest in research careers – especially among young people.
In 2020, this festival of discovery took place in November and was redesigned and delivered via a range of online platforms due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Researchers from the participating universities worked together to bring research to life in new and exciting ways, staging a host of events ranging from storytelling to panel discussions, comedy, quizzes, social media takeovers and a virtual knowledge fair.
‘The People of the Other Village’
One of DisTerrMem’s four research groups explores the role of cultural practitioners (writers, musicians, visual artists, performers, etc) in managing memories of disputed territories.
Thomas Lux’s poem ‘The People of the Other Village’ was written shortly after the Gulf War. The poem’s voice is that of a narrator whose village is at war with the people of an ‘other’ village. The poem uses cutting wit and dark humour in an alternating line structure that mimics the back and forth nature of reciprocal violence. The refrain "We do this, they do that” is repeated as the conflict continues to escalate over time.
DisTerrMem researchers are exploring how cultural practice can enable those who have been in conflict to express their own trauma while also recognising that those on the other side of the conflict have equally been subject to traumatic experience. Artistic practice can open up a space where alternative futures can be imagined, ‘restorying’ entrenched situations.
View the poetry film:
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