The tall ships will be in Belfast July 2nd to 5th for the start of a race that will take them to Norway and then to Denmark. The first of about 80 ships have already arrived. The mural above is on the quay-side of the Rotterdam bar. The design, by 16 year-old Daniel Hamilton, is the winner of a Belfast Telegraph competition.
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Englishman Clive Dutton was an urban planner who was best known for work in Birmingham, London (Newham), and Belfast. He produced “The Dutton Report” in 2004 and “The Big Plan” (pdf) (the cover of which is pictured in the mural) in 2013. In them, he proposed and then updated a plan to tackle economic deprivation in west Belfast by the creation of a ‘Gaeltacht Quarter’ or ‘Ceathrú Gaeltachta’. He died on June 8th at the age of 62 and the mural above has been painted in remembrance.
The photograph of Durron reproduced here can be seen at The Guardian. The Big Plan was celebrated with a mural recorded previously.
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This Saturday and Sunday (June 20th and 21st), Belfast Community Circus celebrates its 30th birthday with two days of events and performances in the Cathedral Quarter, including a world record-breaking (hopefully) pie fight. Kev Largey (KVLR) last month placed two “foolish” figures among the acrobats on the front wall of the organization’s Gordon Street headquarters, a lobster having a drink of weasels wearing hats and a rambler with a patched bed-roll and basket of spray-cans. (Also seen in paste-up form outside the Sunflower – see Costume Party.)
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June brings the Belfast Photo Festival (4th-30th), including the work of Mentalgassi, a German trio that wraps street poles and other urban objects with black-and-white images of humans. In Belfast, they have covered the three buoys in the park beside the Art College. For shots of the buoys being covered, see the group’s Fb page.
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13 years after the military prison opened, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is home to various detainees from around the Middle East as well as US service-men and women who (unlike the prisoners) can avail themselves of the fine beaches and the McDonalds, Taco Bell, Subway and other fast-food restaurants. Their living conditions are documented by Debi Cornwall in an exhibition at the Belfast Photo Festival; the images are housed in a shipping container in front of St. Anne’s cathedral. A piece from Alma Haser‘s Cosmic Surgery series can be seen in the centre of the wide shot, below.
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X02655 X02656 X02657 alleged enemy combatants war on terror held without charge trial conviction counting every normal american convenience is now available to personnel “best-kept secret in the military” images already emblazoned on our collective consciousness the orange jumpsuits the barbed wire and explores the fun amidst the tedium in the residential and leisure spaces of prisoners and guards
Union Street paste-ups, opposite the Sunflower, showing (in costume) a lobster with wine-glass, a hiker with a bed-roll, a cow (Moomin?) in admiral’s hat, and an old-west character scanning the horizon with a spyglass.
For another version of the child-with-rose, see Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.
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The history of music is told (from right to left) in a new mural. The gramophone gives way to the cassette and then to the CD and finally the iPod, with a mic and speakers in the middle. The suggestion, presumably, is that life in east Belfast also changes. From Blaze FX, who also did the Teenage Dreams repaint on the other side of the flyover, and local youths from both Short Strand and Newtownards Road.
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“End degrading strip searches in Maghaberry now”. Cogús (Fb) is the RNU’s ‘Republican Prisoner Welfare And Support’ association.
The board is on the Oldpark Road, north Belfast.
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Seamus Heaney took up the pen where his father and grandfather had worked with the spade. A copy of his poem Digging was, along with others, placed on the Alexandra Park “peace” line but has been torn off in favor of the preferred mode of expression of the next generation: the spray can.
For more Heaney as public art, see The Hunting Heart.
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In May 2013 the Executive pledged to remove “peace” lines in ten years – by 2023 (Tele). One step in this process is see-through gates, such as those at Workman Avenue in the image above. There is no change, however, to the fence on the Springfield Road – see the image below. See previously: the new gates in Howard Street.
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Seosamh Mac Coille Collection 