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What does it mean to be a second generation Greek-Australian? How clear is your sense of identity and of belonging? … Continue Reading
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What does it mean to be a second generation Greek-Australian? How clear is your sense of identity and of belonging? … Continue Reading
What does it mean to a life to be born two years before a revolution that will rip your country apart?
Ali Alizadeh was born in Tehran in 1976. He grew up with the love of literature and strong Marxist ideologies of his immediate family, while a Revolution went horribly wrong across wider Iran.
The young Ali grew into a belief that language had power. This was until his family left Iran and moved to Australia—leaving Ali wrestling with his identity and wondering whether his new language still had power.
Today Ali Alizadeh is a highly respected writer, poet, critic and lecturer at Monash University, with an expanding body of work which already includes 5 poetry collections, a novel, a work of non-fiction and a collection of short stories.
Ali’s voice is clear and uncompromising and he treasures the strengths and failures of language in equal measure. … Continue Reading
RN’s Michael Shirrefs is talking to Ishan Khosla who returned to India from the US five years ago and quickly realised that the rapid rise of the Indian Tiger economy was coming at a cost. In the headlong rush to be a big global player, India was at great risk of losing its unique design traditions.
As India’s huge metropolises become ever more infatuated with the gloss and mystique of global design trends, alarm bells have sounded amongst many who see a downside. With a very wealthy new Indian middle-class being seduced by the power of ‘the global’, a vast number of distinctive local design skills and knowledge systems are being ignored or marginalised. This has prompted a counter-push from high-profile designers and commentators, aiming to elevate the profile of the myriad, rich design traditions across India’s length and breadth.
Ishan Khosla is one of those who believes that, for this to work, new designers must be decentralised and trained closer to these sources of India’s material and aesthetic identity — only then will these materials and artisan skills gain high status in the eyes of a domestic audience and thus be proudly promoted on that global stage.
Sangam means confluence and refers to the meeting of the 3 rivers—Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati, which is used here as a metaphor for the artisan, designer and user.
First broadcast on By Design, ABC RN, on 17-7-2013
Also broadcast on The Arts Hour, BBC World Service, on 3-8-2013
Ishan Khosla — Indian designer, based in Delhi, and Head of Visual Communication at the Sushant School of Design
Michael Shirrefs
© 2013 — Michael Shirrefs & ABC RN
On Creative Instinct this week, a celebration of the work of the late Antoni Tàpies, who sadly died on 6 February 2012 at the age of 88, within days of the first broadcast of this feature.
He’s considered to be one of the greatest Catalan artists, and was a very important creative voice in 20th century Europe. But while he is widely known and recognised throughout Europe and America, Antoni Tàpies is little known in Australia. Born in Barcelona in 1923, Tàpies links modern Spain with a very deep and very old tradition of Catalan philosophy and mysticism. His works have the textures and markings that reflect his physical world of Barcelona, with all the traces and echoes of the terrible violence of civil war and the repression that went with decades of brutal dictatorship under Franco.
But Tàpies brings a much wider mix of avant-garde innovation and cross-cultural philosophy to his paintings, sculptures, installations and graphic works—making him a powerful visual voice.
To listen to the program, click here …
Broadcast on Creative Instinct, ABC RN, on 4-02-2012
© 2012, Michael Shirrefs & ABC RN
© 2010, Michael Shirrefs
An extraordinary gift of books, made by the Government of France to the City of Melbourne, has recently been rediscovered at the State Library of Victoria. The gift was an act of cultural generosity to mark the beginning of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880-81, probably the largest annual event of the global calendar—and what a gift it was!
There were in excess of 150 books, some of them very large, and in them the people of Melbourne saw Paris spread out in all its glory. Alongside maps, images and tales of old Paris were descriptions of a very new city—a very modern city. By 1880, Paris had reinvented itself as the very picture of modernity, having become the most advanced metropolis in the world. In fact these books were something of a template for the creation of a state-of-the-art city. For example, there were detailed plans of the world’s first fully-enclosed sewerage system and water supply, connected to every property in Paris.
But against this futuristic flourish sat another book, and this massive volume was possibly the most important in the collection. It was called l’Atlas des anciens plans de Paris, and it was a spectacular set of reproductions of old maps of Paris. These maps were the most vivid account of where Paris had come from. They told the story of its journey, from a small Roman settlement on the Seine, to becoming the grand European centre of palaces, gardens and high-culture.
The hidden story behind these maps is that they are testament to a city recovering from the debris and destruction of both the Franco-Prussian War and the fiery domestic battles of the Communes. Barely ten years before the creation of these books and the subsequent gift to Melbourne, Paris had suffered terrible damage. As a result, l’Atlas des anciens plans de Paris is a precious document that represents both the survival of one of Europe’s greatest cities, and a fierce determination to hang onto the memory of how the French capital came into being.
See also: Adventures with an Atlas
© 2010 Michael Shirrefs
Nathalie Abi-Ezzi spent the first eleven years of her life in Lebanon before her family moved to England in 1983. It’s these early years of her life that provide the impetus for her novel A Girl Made of Dust. It’s a story of a young girl, Ruba, who tries to hold her family together through sheer force of will as war and indiscriminate violence creep closer.
The moving voice of American short-story writer ZZ Packer, whose understated observations of human nature have the power to get under a reader’s radar. Packer’s stories, in her collection titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, are set across a range of black communities in the US. Yet these stories defy colour, race, religion and gender, stripping away layers until what’s left are small, fragile human moments that are jarringly familiar and poignantly slight.
On Books & Writing this week, Shantaram—an epic novel, based on what happened when Gregory David Roberts found that ‘doing time’ for armed robbery was too much. He fled Australia, fell into the arms of India and began a vast journey of body and soul.
Greg Roberts spoke to Michael Shirrefs about his love of Bombay, about his time living and working in the Bombay slums and about the chaos of Bollywood and the violent orderliness of the Mumbai ‘mafia’.
In Shantaram, Greg Roberts manages to deliver both a riveting tale of an extreme life, as well as a modern allegory of the universal search for clarity, all told against this boisterous and colourful backdrop of Indian splendour.