Episode 11 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Rabab from Gentle/Radical.
We couldn't pick one pull quote, so here are two!
"Conversation and dialogue is probably the bedrock of how I...
Episode 11 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Rabab from Gentle/Radical.
We couldn't pick one pull quote, so here are two!
"Conversation and dialogue is probably the bedrock of how I understand the work, how I understand organising, how I understand cultural work"
- Rabab
and
"Cultural praxis, for me, has to embody our principles that we must do more than just talk about stuff and make it look good and sound good"
- Rabab
Show notes, links
Gentle/Radical website, Twitter and Instagram. The project mentioned towards the end of the episode was Doorstep Revolution.
And a few things mentioned in the episode:
The Out of the Spiritual Closet report, by Movement Strategy Centre.
Audre Lorde
Emergent Strategy, by adrienne marie brown
Transcript
Ali: This is Resist + Renew.
Kat: A UK-based podcast about social movements.
Sami: What we're fighting for, why, and how it all happens.
Ali: The hosts of the show are:
Kat: Me Kat,
Sami: Me, Sami,
Ali: and me, Ali,
Sami: I'm recording this now baby
Ali: Shit it's a podcast.
*Laughter*
Kat: Welcome to the Resist and Renew podcast. And today we're really excited to have Rabab Ghazoul talking to us from Gentle Radical. And welcome Rabab.
Rabab: Thanks. Hi.
Kat: And so just to give you a little bit of an introduction before we dive into the questions, Rabab Ghazou is a socially engaged visual artist, activist and founder director of Cardiff based organisation, Gentle Radical, centering, social justice, healing, justice, decolonial practice and non extractivist engagement, Gentle Radicall work to curate collaborate and build projects that seek to make the marginal our mainstream, born in Mosul, Iraq, living permanently in the UK, from the age of 10. And in Wales for the last 27 years, Rabab is deeply engaged in ideas of place, colonial coloniality, connectivity and the disporic experience. So glad to have you here revived. That's great. And so yeah, the first question, can you tell us a little bit about the context that you're organising in and why you choose to do the work that you're doing?
Rabab: Yeah, I can. First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be with you both. So yeah, I, I suppose we are organising, Gentle Radical is based in Cardiff, and I've been in Cardiff since 1993. I came to Wales as a student, actually. And I stayed. And I think that happens for a lot of people that come here, and then they, they sort of end up a lot of people end up in Cardiff. And so on a personal level, just, I suppose before I talk about maybe, how we're organising why we're organising here and why I choose to continue being here. I think I almost came here by default. So I was in Aberystwyth as a student, as an undergrad and then moved to Cardiff to work in the arts or to start trying to work in the arts. And I ended up sort of staying like a lot of people. But I think at a certain point, I had a real realisation or a kind of recognition in myself that I was consciously making a choice to stay in Wales. And I realised that was because there was a certain consciousness around the colonial that I felt was deeper, more alive. Of course, it would be as because of Wales’ own history and experience of colonialism for the last well, it's it's, it's England's first colony. And so I felt that as someone who is someone who's living out of a diasporic experience, or someone who, whose homeland is not easy to get back to who in many ways, I've not been, apart from a moment in 2016, I hadn't been back to Iraq since I was 10. So there's so much bound up in those, those dislocations, those disconnections, that the sense of the losses that you're constantly sort of navigating and negotiating. And the and I suppose the, the new places, the new spaces, the new person you become the person you have become the person you've been evolving into is, I felt somehow that alongside my interest in the work and the interest ...
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