Hannah Nicklin

I Was Nearly Arrested for Wearing a Scarf

I was asked on Monday by @quietriot_girl to talk to @DAaronovitch about the brief moment when I was threatened with arrest on the day of the March for the Alternative. It was fleeting, and the officer and I were both firm but polite, so I hadn’t really thought about putting something down about it. Especially when compared with wider, more serious betrayals by police officers, the conflation of UKuncut with the Black Bloc, mass arrests for peaceful occupation, and the general media hullabaloo that typically follows such a large protest.

However @kmachin and a couple of others asked me to put this up on my blog, as opposed to Twitlonger, because it’s more easily linkable. So here you go, don’t ever let it be said I don’t pander to public pressure.

I was approached by a sergeant Hanna (pictured right) while I was walking along Oxford street with #anticutsleeds folk after the march (early evening; cold!) and asked to remove my pink scarf covering my mouth and nose under section 60 of the Criminal Justice Act, or I would be arrested. It was quiet, with just a few stragglers walking around. Most of the ‘action’ was then happening about 5 minutes away at Fortnum and Mason. I replied that I thought I couldn’t be required to remove clothing, and he explained that special measures in the CJA which can be signed into effect by a senior officer allow concealing one’s identity to be an arrestable offence. You can (a later google found out) be imprisoned for a maximum of 51 weeks for doing so.

I asked if I could take a picture of his I.D., and he reminded me that I was still wearing my scarf. I remarked that we had a similar name, and removed my scarf. We smiled at each other slightly ironically, and I moved on.

The encounter was brisk, but polite. Why is it notable? If I have nothing to hide, why not show my face? Because our criminal justice system should not require me to prove my innocence – not by what I wear or any other means. Reasonable suspicion, and the burden of proof; semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit – “the necessity of proof always lies with the person who lays charges”* those are the principles by which we consent to be policed.

These powers of removing items that obscure identity were plainly brought in to enable their FIT officers (plenty on the ground) to get clear coverage of everyone – to build up a picture of regular protestors to target. For that same reason I believe the #ukuncut lot were arrested whilst the black bloc were running amok causing much more media-friendly trouble – for their phones (all confiscated); their networks. Continue reading…

Real Life Residues

Recently I’ve been wondering about the sticking power of Twitter. The people I have my eye on who tend to turn before the tide does have been getting itchy feet about it, and whispers about the second dotcom bubble are now even reaching the mainstream media. It’s fair to wonder ‘what happens next’ to companies like Twitter valued as high as they are whilst still making a loss – do they turn to ads, with premium ad-free accounts? Do they make their money out of apps (too much competition)? Or will they just become bloated, too big for conversation (Myspace, and now facebook’s problem)? But… migrating from Twitter? It feels like an surprisingly emotional thing to be thinking about. Twitter has played such a large role in my finally feeling part of an arts and politically active community as well as providing the opportunity to meet and work with some wonderful people, and to make some wonderful friends.

It means a lot to me that limping my bike home to an empty house, shaking slightly, after being hit by a car, I can tweet my shock, and be.. well, cared about (however fleetingly) by above a 50 people. But then I remember that it’s the people, not the medium, that matters. If we all move to what Diaspora or Beluga might turn into – or something else that doesn’t exist yet – the medium may change, but I don’t think the web will stop being social, stop weaving our lives together. I’ll still see the snapshots of @joethedough‘s baby boy growing up confusedly in silly hats, hear about the regular ‘offstage’ characters like @SlunglowAlan‘s cheese-pilfering lodgers, and care about @Andyvglnt’s earnest battle with anxiety and depression mixed with the best new punk and hardcore recommendations this side of the Atlantic.

These thoughts about Twitter, or the form of communication and interception that it has brought to my (our) lives have been bubbling at the surface of my mind particularly because over the past two weeks I’ve been working on a theatre/twitter investigation in Manchester. Catherine Edwards and North West Playwrights brought together three writer/performers, Alex Kelly from Third Angel as a (loosely termed) director, and myself as a tech-ish art specialist to look at the possibilities and challenges of creating ‘theatre’ (performance/drama) on twitter. Or through twitter, perhaps, as it ends IRL, with a performance at DAT Fest in Stoke next weekend under the name of ‘Twitterbug‘. Continue reading…

So, that was #SOTAflash

Another fantastically busy week has been and gone, I’m saving one half of it to talk to you about next week, but I think if you follow me down any particular path of the interwebz, you will have noticed that on Thursday I helped convene the ‘Flash Conference‘ at the heart of the ACE/RSA State of the Arts Conference. The Flash Conference was conceived of by myself, Andy Field, and Laura McDermott out of a reaction our awareness of the general dissatisfaction with last year’s format, with some of the problems of scale often faced by such a large event (i.e., missing any address to the smaller scale), and finally, from my point of view at least, with the language and the questions that the conference was shaped around. That last point is perhaps a little impolitic to say (nor very clearly said, my brain is mush this weekend) but the shift into, for example (what turned out to be entirely rudderless) conversations about art and the Big Society rang rather uncomfortable with me, personally. Partly because of my own politics, but also because it felt like a program that pandered to government, not one that brought all to the same table for what could have been a more valuable conversation.

I’m being a little careful with my language here (‘careful’ for me, anyway), and that’s because, entirely to the conference organisers’ credit, when we approached them with our idea to run a companion conference in a nearby pub they actually invited us into the conference itself. Though, as Lyn Gardner put it we were slightly “banished upstairs” – the fact that we were there at all was brilliant, not because we ourselves wanted to talk to the top table types, but because it enabled us to bring so many other voices to that top table – people who couldn’t afford the travel or the ticket price; artists, students, performers and makers for whom the conference really did not feel like a welcome place; or single parents without childcare. I hope that the great deal of interaction that we enabled showed the organisers, and indeed any organisers of any event, quite how much people are dying to have a two-way conversation rather than a one-way panel-driven selection of monologues.

Over 4 days the flashconference.co.uk site had 1273 individual visits from 27 countries, 52 videos, images, texts and sounds were submitted to the blog, 1827 tweets were exchanged, with the majority of that activity falling on the day of the conference. We were inundated not just with contributions, but also thanks, for allowing people who had felt excluded to sound in on the debate. Certainly this was not a perfect format, but it was hopefully a spark, a small static shock. Our industry deserves such large-scale spaces for discussion, but they will only begin to be truly discursive when they speak to the whole of the arts ecosystem, and from a place in not above the world that we all live in. Continue reading…

Mashup

Image from the artsagainstcuts blog

“We live within networks of messages, signs, information, and knowledge which produce our experience of ourselves, society, and all that we consider real. And, as power produces its subjects, so it gives birth to antagonists and the forms of resistance with which it is irreducibly implicated.” p.119 Sadie Plant The Most Radical Gesture

I haven’t spoken much about the protests against the cuts on here, I have been at a few, which you will have seen if you follow me on Twitter or Audioboo. But I haven’t felt like I’ve quite been able to marshall my thoughts to communicate them to you. But I have been there; I have seen people beaten to the ground, I have see the police charge on me, I have thankfully thus far avoided being kettled due to a combination of being dressed smart, luck, and sense of when people are suddenly pelting in the opposite direction. I have walked dazed bleeding people to taxis with directions and a tenner to the nearest hospital because (apparently) Police medics are only technically there to look after police. I have seen cold, frightened young people, stand together with parents, with older people, with disabled people, and be driven back like animals, penned, and deprived of food, toilets, water, liberty. And I have seen those people burn things to keep warm, seen hands raised and voices cry ‘don’t push us back, we’ve nowhere else to go’. I have seen angry angry people, some of whom aren’t even old enough to vote, raise the only voice they know will be heard; in violent action. And then I see what the media sees, because kettling is such a brilliant way to make sure all the photographers and the protesters are in the same place. So they smash a window, poke a princess. Violence is decried, the protesters dismissed. Despite the fact that that violence was not against humans, but symbols of the blind privilege of the ruling elite.

And I believe in parliament, I do believe that the majority of people there are there because they want to fight for the world which they think is best, and that the best way they can do so in small, measured wades through sticky, muggy, heavy beaurocracy. But I also believe that the mainstream media has hamstrung our politicians and society to the point that only the thickest skins make it. And thick skins get used to not hearing things in order to exist. So they don’t hear the cries of the people trapped just metres from their workplace.

“[the kettle] is also a media strategy which seeks to concentrate the spectacle of violent protest into a defined space precisely for the media. Thus the physical terrain of the kettled site is marshalled to produce violent spectacle for media consumption. It is a type of siege that lets the police appear under attack. The kettle thus needs to be understood as a form of media strategy deployed by the police to delegitimize protests and re-symbolize legitimate protest as unlawful ‘riot’. The kettle attempts to cast opposition protests as such as radical, violent and in need of police repression, whose brutality is legitimated by this same spectacle of student violence that the kettle aims to facilitate.” Rory Rowan on the brilliant Critical Legal Thinking

And I also believe that the mainstream media has made us believe that politicians are not people, and politics is complicated; and made politicians believe that people don’t understand politics, and just aren’t interested.

Continue reading…