Ceasefire

At Chapter, we’re committed to our duties as a civic cultural organisation and as a venue of artistic integrity. We strive to be a place where people can come together, where our complex identities gather, and where we can explore and consider the constellations of the world we share. At the heart of this lies a commitment to creating space for justice and for each other.

We join with voices across civic and cultural spaces, to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and to advocate for the right to freedom and to self-determination. We’ve been thinking about what poet, activist and scholar Fred Moten said: “We must follow the compulsion to talk with one another, to study and think with one another, and to think in regard to the specific question of how we renew and refine our anticolonial practices?”

With this in mind, we invite you to join us in this reflection and to work with us to amplify the role that art and culture can play in convening conversation and world building, in exploring how we can develop a culture of care, and practise safety and dignity with people on shared terms. We will interrogate this in our artistic programme, by inviting connection through the powerful and diverse voices of artists.

In November, we worked with our friends and colleagues at Common Wealth Theatre, Wales and Ashtar Theatre, Palestine to present The Gaza Monologues, a space for reflection and dialogue in which the words and thoughts of Palestinian young people were animated through a series of monologues performed by Cardiff artists.

Since then, we’ve been working behind the scenes to host workshops, training and talks, and we’ll continue to develop our programme to include film screenings with discussions; gatherings for cultural workers to explore rights and responsibilities; explorations of protest including through songs, poems and art; and community conversations on how to navigate difficult discussions, developing political consciousness and the role that the arts can play in this.

If you’d like to talk or suggest an event, in the first instance please get in touch with Arron, our Head of Community Engagement: arron.singh@chapter.org. For news about our programme please visit www.chapter.org or follow us on social media @chapterartscentre.