STAGE 2

As mentioned before, the live coverage of the war is interrupted at some point. Here I decided to introduce Simon Armitage’s 'It could be you' poem from The Universal Home Doctor (2002). A poem that simulates the announcements of the National Lottery results. This time I included my own recitation,  so  I translated the poem into Catalan and recorded myself in Xàtiva Street, Valencia, Spain. I appear on screen playing the role of a journalist who announces the winning numbers and the ticket holders of the National Lottery results.

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However, when I started to work on the translation of the poem, I thought that removing some locations named in the poem and adding new ones (from around the world) would be interesting. I realised the cities Armitage names in the poem are important either by their industry factories or because of the strategic location of their harbour. I really liked Simon’s idea, but I found the locations named in the poem too alien to me, just focused on the United Kingdom. So I decided to introduce different locations from around the world. Not random locations, but cities and areas which unfortunately had suffered similar threats caused by human action; either war, murders or nature damages that human action has provoked.

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Here there is the list of the added locations. You can see a collection of pictures at the bottom of the page from the different locations:

1. Belfast: this location is left equal as a representation of the 1968 Northern Ireland conflicts.

2. Sirte: I decided the poem should include the Libyan Civil war. Sirte was the final major stronghold of Gadaffi loyalists in the Libyan Civil War. In 2011 Gadaffi was killed there and the city was left almost completely in ruins, with most of its buildings being destroyed or damaged. That implied the loss of many lives and for some people it meant they had to migrate in search of a new home.

3. Langosteira: one of the Galician coastlines which endured the disaster of the Prestige in 2002 and suffered a huge ecological impact among others.

4. Olympiapark (1972 Olympic Games, Munich): great attack to the Israeli Olympic team: the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took eleven Israeli Olympic team members hostage and killed them along with a German police officer.