Parade, Innenstadtaktionen, Bühnenprogramm im Ravensberger Park am Samstag, den 5. Juni 2010
City FacesThe face of a city can mean many different things to many different people, but in most cases, amongst the buildings, shops, bars, cars, trucks, smoke and grime and general hubbub of life in the city is usually a human face in the back of one‘s mind. For some it is a happy smiling face but, I‘m sure for most, it is something quite disturbing. A starving childs face can represent cities in countries throughout Africa, Asia or South America, whilst the image of a contented child is an advertising illusion. We are governed by images and impressions placed into our minds which inevitably become our living reality, they shape the way we think, and what we do. Of course, there were much stranger times, or at least, times strange to us now. Alongside the triumphal victory parades enjoyed by Roman Generals was an alternative parade of ridicule, where the hero was pelted with rotten eggs and insulted with jibes. One had to take the rough with the smooth. In the early days of European Carnivals, monastic monks engaged in six months of bacchanalian excess, worshipping donkeys, molesting nuns, blaspheming, getting drunk, singing and dancing and so long as lenten observance was made, official decency and authoritarian respect returned, a balance could be established. What we experience today, is an imbalance of that decent and proper authority. The communal marketplace laughter described by Rabelais is now forever lost, replaced with a fear of terror. Powerful police states unable to arrest the corruption in our global financial systems. There was a time when the concept of Democracy was brand new, and the intellect of the human species rose to meet the call. We are not about to go backward and we should rise to the challenge. The City faces are ones we draw, and paint, and sculpt and digitalise and film and use, they are our faces. City faces are those behind our City masks.
Paul McLaren, Art Director, Shademakers