Galleries Bridge 1 very small from alastair on Vimeo. |
Augustine Parade B&W smaller from alastair on Vimeo. |
'At least 60 runners took part in a race in a rebel-held neighbourhood of Aleppo on Tuesday in honour of the victims of a group execution whose bodies were reportedly discovered in the city’s Queiq River in January 2013.
The race for the “Martyrs of the River Massacre” was organised by local media agency Nseem Syria Radio and an Aleppo-based sports and youth group.
In a video posted by the Aleppo Media Centre, children cheer as the runners – young men and women in bright green shirts – sprint down a rubble-strewn street past flattened cars and bombed-out houses in the Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood.
“We are showing the world that we are playing sports in the most dangerous city in the world,” says a man in a red pullover, who appears to be the race’s organiser. “It’s also to relieve people from the stress of the continuous strikes and crimes committed by the regime.”
Another organiser says: “We are proving to the world that we, as free athletes in Aleppo, are resisting despite everything that is going on.”
Much of Aleppo, Syria’s largest and once most prosperous city, has been destroyed during fighting between Syrian government forces and rebels who pushed into the city’s northern neighbourhood in July 2012.
The struggle for the city, which is divided roughly in half between the two sides, is locked in stalemate with food and fresh water in short supply, and only around one million residents remaining out of Aleppo's pre-war population of 2.5 million.'
www.middleeasteye.net/news/Syria-aleppo-race-1381744496
Orwa interview trimmed 2 from alastair on Vimeo.
Aimless Motion 11.11.18
I was handed a basic, nameless city map, told the small green square on it was my start point, and then left to run the route marked by a line that looked a bit like a squashed butterfly. The only hint was 'remember that it's Armistice Day', when people are supposed to think of those involved in wars, past and present.
The map seemed to bear no resemblance to Bristol. I rotated it, looked around, tried to second guess. Was it a map of the city as it looked in 1918? Or during the Blitz? Nope, the harbour – shimmering just beside my start point - remained unchanged through both of those, but I couldn't see it anywhere on my map. There was nothing for it but to pick a direction and start running. The route clearly went out one way, looped up and round and then returned to its start point via a little kink back and forth. That kink could have been the bridge a hundred yards away, so over it I went. Then left, the harbour on my left, then sort of north, imagining in my head that my GPS track would roughly resemble the squashed butterfly on the map. As I panted my way up a hill, I remembered there was a war memorial at the top, among the yew trees where a bombed church once stood. Maybe that's the little bump on the map's mysterious line? Round the bump I went.
Further on, I noticed a triangle on the map. Maybe that's Bristol's three-sided roady bit known as The Triangle? The map line went past it; so did I. The further I ran, the more I realised that my brain was doing something weird: casually overlaying the rational with the non-rational. Pretending to myself that I was creating a route that was like the one on the map, whilst also knowing that my route was increasingly haphazard.
Despite the mounting evidence that my map had nothing to do with the actual city, I kept trying to follow it. Kept looking for correlation, for sense. I went past the cathedral, the green outside it covered in tiny poppies on crosses, like a miniature red graveyard. I crouched and took a photo,
blood thumping in my ears. I remembered another war memorial, in the city centre, and made a bee-line for it. Saluted some soldiers, who clearly weren't sure if I was taking the piss. I wasn't. By this point I' abandoned rational routing, and was just going with the Armistice thing, the only clue I had. It was a strange experience: to simultaneously follow and not follow a map; to recognise and simultaneously ignore the fact that my map was of somewhere else; to know where I was, but also to know that my route wasn't right – assuming that any route is right. A bit like navigating life.
Soon I was curving back towards the start point. Stopping. Stretching. Checking the drawing I'd made on my phone screen using satellites as crayons. It looked nothing like the mapped route. Which, I later discover, is not surprising. My map was of the city of Sana'a, in the Yemen – one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world, a UNESCO world heritage site, and the target of recent Saudi-led airstrikes. Weapons proudly made in Bristol. The sunlight dappled the ground. Canon boomed out a commemorative salute. I'd only run a little
over 4 miles. Half an hour out of my life. Days later, I'm still thinking about it.
This human fox hunt is a pursuit run that tookplace on the site of what has been a royal hunting forest (Kings Wood) used by royalty and the aristocracy for leisure purposes. The area then became a working class mining community. The fox's challenge was to run to each of the following coal shaft sites, leaving traces as he ran without being caught by the pursuing pack of runners;
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