All That is Lost
By Nick Pelling
It is a sad fact of life that today’s heartbreaking news is all too rapidly supplanted by tomorrow’s heartbreaking news. A combination perhaps of compassion fatigue and the sheer relentlessness of bad news tends to give horror a shrivellingly short shelf life. Occasionally it is the job of an artist to drag us back. To make us think and, importantly, feel all over again. To not let us forget. The classic example is probably Picasso’s Guernica; the vast black and white tableaux which still has the power to take us back to 1937, when the Luftwaffe unleashed the first wave of the mass murdering of civilians from the sky.
The Hastings artist, curator and writer Colin Booth is following a similar principle. In conjunction with the Refugee Buddy Project, he has produced a written piece, All that is Lost, and had it applied to the door of the new Refugee Buddy Project café, on the Bexhill Road. A piece of art which takes us back to a cold, black November night
in the middle of the English channel in 2021. To be precise, on 24 November last year, 34 human beings – one an unborn baby – were in a dinghy, fit for a maximum of 20, realising with increasing panic that they were sinking.
In screaming chaos and darkness 32 people drowned. As Colin’s piece says, so disarmingly, they “should have been given safe harbour.” Subsequently, the British and French coastal authorities have played pass the blame parcel. Relatives are still engaged in a legal struggle to find out whose sins of omission were the greater. The legal struggle will doubtless go on for years until almost no one can remember it even happened.
Booth was also instrumental in finding the premises for the new community café. If you go along to that cafe now, you will find that Colin’s words go beyond an anguished lament. On the main large glass window the names of those that died, and their country of origin, have been painstakingly stenciled.
Booth has always been interested in language. The way it can both reveal and hide. The precise names of people somehow reminds us of their humanity. Official language tends to turn people into abstractions. Even the word ‘refugee’ is horribly reductive. They were particular people. One was a seven-year-old girl. Not a seven-year-old ‘problem’ that might be forgotten about in the dark sea or Rwanda. As Booth implies, these were once people with dreams.
The cafe itself is something that Colin initiated, bringing the owner together with the charity. The volunteers have done the rest. In some ways it is part of a vision to bring more cultural life to that part of West St Leonards that can seem a little overlooked. The café is to be a straight commercial venture. But with one twist. Those that can afford to pay can leave the price of a cup or a bite to eat behind the bar, thereby donating a ‘buddy’ drink or snack for those who cannot pay.
The café and the artwork may be small initiatives when set against the enormity of the refugee issue and the sour indifference seeping out of our zombie government. But, sometimes, even in the face of forgetting, it is surely important just to shout out some basic truth. Colin Booth’s work is that necessary shout.
• The Refugee Café will formally open towards the end of August.
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