But because the Camera Club exhibition is on all day throughout the course of the festival, and usually for a few days longer, it means I have been able to enjoy their work at my leisure.
This year the exhibition moved from the dedicated Red Barn/Artscetera gallery space in Rosemary Street, which has sadly now closed, to the eclectic community space that is 2 Royal Avenue. I must confess that I was sceptical of this, having seen a couple of exhibitions there that were lost in this multipurpose space. But I shouldn’t have worried ... The creative curation of the exhibition by Cormac and his team, the combination of it with the “Peace Loom” (more on that next) under the same roof, and the welcoming attitude of the team at 2 Royal Avenue made this the most effective photo exhibition to date, with a footfall of over 6000 people over the course of the festival (and even more if you count those who came during half-term the week after the festival when the exhibition remained open).
Under the banner of our encompassing theme of “Home?” Cormac and his colleagues produced a wonderful collection of photographs exploring the environmental theme of “Caring for our Common Home”, responding to the challenges of Laudato Si’, the influential papal encyclical issued by Pope Francis 10 years ago. This was also the focus of our broadcast service and keynote address, by Dr. Lorna Gold, the newly appointed Executive Director of the global Laudato Si’ Movement, and when Lorna visited the exhibition on the Monday she expressed a desire to make it more widely known, possibly taking it with her to some global events. We will see if that happens, but it has already been booked for various dates and places across Belfast in the coming year, and plans are afoot regarding the possibility of turning it into a book.
Sally and I, when visiting a gallery or exhibition, often play a game where we pick 3 items each. One which we wouldn’t have about us... One which we really like but wouldn’t necessarily want on our walls at home... and one which (if we could afford it) we would part with money to own. For this exhibition, for both of us, there were no pictures that fitted into the former category, but there were a few, detailing the disturbing degradation of our environment, that definitely fitted into the second category. However there were so many that we would happily have walked away with, reminding us again that when God first looked at his creation before we started messing it up, he said “This is very good...”
The close up shot of a native Irish honeybee was especially beautiful, and a poignant reminder of an undergraduate project I was involved with in Edinburgh over a third of a century ago, when we were first hearing stories of the collapse of bee populations.
But my favourite was the clasped hands holding a clod of earth and a plant, which I took to be parsley. I liked it for a number of reasons, not least because it made me laugh, as it is a clever pastiche of a various pieces of environmental clip-art which feature hands holding a globe with a tree growing from it.
Laughter features largely in the development of the 4 Corners Festival. Although we deal with some very serious subjects, I have often said that we seem to laugh our way through 8 months of planning meetings and somehow a festival comes out at the end of it all...
But it also speaks to me of the idea of collaboration with which I began, in this case collaboration in care of our common home. As individuals, families and even local churches or projects like the 4 Corners Festival, we may not feel that anything we do can really make a difference in the face of the environmental catastrophe heading our way, but if we each play our part, even if it is just planting parsley (or trees, as we do with our partners in the Belfast Hills Partnership, in an effort to make 4 Corners a carbon neutral festival), then, together we can take better care of our common home. I’ll come back to that in future posts on what Lorna Gold had to say, and about Knockbreda Community Garden, but it also applies to the other serious issues we touched on in this and previous festivals: homelessness, peace and reconciliation, domestic abuse, racism... all these things will only be properly addressed when we each do our own small bit, but also work with others in different corners and sectors of our city, and indeed, world.
As I suggested in a recent post there are too many today who believe that the major problems we face can only be addressed by a strong man (and 99 times out of 100 it is a “man”), but I believe that history has shown that what endures is the product of teamwork and collaboration, where, despite our many differences, we collaborate for the common good.
Selah
ps. I should also note here that Westcourt Camera Club are also hosting a competition for Edmund Rice schools on the subject of “Care for our common home.” See here for details.
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