May Conversations

across the North Sea

…… began with three cut out figures stuck on ply and proceeded via association and by sending texts and images between Nir Nader and Zuky Serper, who, once through google translate became Furrow and Cliff.

Furrow sent a few lines of Shakespeare

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

 That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Sonnet 53, William Shakespeare

 

 

….then Furrow sent a new introduction to the Communist Manifesto written by Yanis Varoufakis….. and spoke about a newspaper clipping he’d been showing at work all week that he’d like to put up in the window, about a small organised labour victory in the Netherlands and Donald Trump. Furrow described an image of a food cupboard he imagined behind Cliff in the window…… Cliff went ahead and carried out these wishes/directions as best he could. Meanwhile the two of them mused that their friendship was basic, political and emotional and had been since they had met at Cliff’s Kibbutz Gallery exhibition From Revolution Machines to Instruments of War (Tel Aviv, 2002).

 

This photograph of Trump with the metal workers caught my eye more than the success story of a Dutch workers union in the article below. With this newspaper clipping I was trying, as I told you, to persuade my fellow workers to organise together in the hotel where we wash dishes. The image and text in this newspaper page contain the essence of today’s class war. Trump shows off with American metal workers – (carefully selected to demonstrate how diverse they are, especially the Hispanics, whom he fights with the fence erected on the border of Mexico) – to advance a protectionist war he wages against the rest of the world, on behalf of the American Steel and Aluminium industrialists. But in order to decipher all this, act to change and create a world order that benefits workers, their needs and choices, one needs to organise in the work place. My fellow workers refused.

 

Furrow sent a poem;

Diligent and bewildered we got down to work

We are used to manual labour

From the fall of dawn to the end of dusk

 

You brought yours, moving on wheels

I brought mine, all that was left in my pockets

 

Our figures, as it were, filled the  space

Gliding heavily on clumsy wooden tires

Crumbs of hope I took out of my pockets

Longing for benevolent rulers

Longing for true friends

And that which our forefathers have eaten in the dullness of  youth

Left us with sour grapes that will never ripen

Furrow sent a quote;

 

 

a few autobiographical notes about the authors, that may be of importance:

Their parents wandered in Europe during WW2, then emigrated to Palestine

They were born in Israel (Post Palestine) and emigrated to Europe