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Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6  Repeating History In addition to the similarities between Northern Ireland and Chile, Good Vibrations and No were produced and released in the wake of political shifts to the right in the leadership of both governments. A coalition government led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was established in the UK in 2010, replacing the Labour leadership held since 1997. In Chile also in 2010, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera was elected President, replacing the now dissolved Concertación, or Coalition of Parties for Democracy, voted in after the 1989 general election. While the Conservative government remains in power due to the UK’s firmer shift to the right after the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, Michelle Bachelet of the Chilean Socialist Party, was returned as President in 2014, only for the billionaire Pi ñera to be re-elected in 2018 (Chilean Presidents understandably canno...

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Reconfiguring Time and Place A number of years before the resurgence of Belfast’s live music scene in the early 2000s and the more widespread simultaneous nostalgia for punk, vintage and vinyl that has emerged and grown since, Duncan Campbell’s video installation Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) captures the intensity of the working class youth culture in the 1970s and 1980s that gathered around energetic live music and was fuelled by an ethos of dissent against distension. The video’s title derives from a phrase commonly seen in graffiti in Belfast during the conflict, and is indicative of class tensions between different areas of the city. This same class tension, or more specifically, anger against privilege, emerges in much of the punk lyrics of the time. 1 The images in Campbell’s work consist of photographs from the time held in the Belfast Exposed photographic gallery’s archives. It gives movement to still pho...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3   Part 4 Reframing Violence Just before the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, David Miller pointed out that since the end of World War I in 1918, ‘[t]he guiding light of British policy […] has been to try and push Ireland to the margins of British politics. This was managed quite successfully until 1968, when the North exploded on to television screens around the world. Since then, British policy has been directed to containing the “troubles”’. 1 The constructed concept of the ‘Troubles’ – a term which connotes a containable and manageable group of homogenous events – was coined by the British press in the 1980s and spread into common parlance. All the while, that parallel containment of the conflict in politics and journalism, Miller continues, emphasized the ‘criminality’ of the Irish Republican Army which, as Miller points out, only served to raise the ‘news value’ of the political violence (pp. 2–3). What it also achieved, ...