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 in the complex, nuanced landscapes of coloniality, Wales felt like I could speak to those things in an in a, in a, in a way that there was, how can I describe it, like there was kinship around that there was a more immediate, does that make sense to kind of kinship around that, of course, from a different context and a different perspective, than I felt that there was in England and these are huge generalisations to make as if, like, you know, like, England is a phenomenally diverse place. And many of its cities, some of the most diverse in the world, so like, but somehow this sense of being to the side, being being at a tangent to the centre, and I think probably that is a very live experience for me as someone who is never quite knows you don't, you know, it's hard to talk about myself as being Iraqi because I've not been there for so long. And actually, Iraq has changed, like the Iraq I grew up in, was not the Iraq that even remotely exists any longer not just because like many of the places in our childhood have changed and don't exist, but as we know, the history of Iraq because the catastrophic history of the last 30 years or so. So that sense of like, how do you own being of a place when that place wouldn't recognise you any longer when to go back to that place, you go back as a tourist, like, we know that so I think, and at the same time not being British, whilst knowing I sound British, I'm a product of British culture not being Welsh. So I think being in this in between space, felt like there was space to explore that more here in Wales. And because I think Wales is also in between. and Wales’ own relationship to coloniality is highly complex. Of course, it's been colonised, but it is also a beneficiary and a recipient of the wider European colonial project, you know, so it's, it's a white, it's a small but still white majority nation, that is a small nation in Europe, and there is there are huge responsibilities, radical responsibilities around Wales’ experience, in a way on the coattails of Empire, you know, so I feel like this felt like a rich place to be and a complex place to be. And I think complexity, I like I like complexity a lot. I feel happy in amongst contradiction and complexity.

Rabab: And then as far as Gentle Radical was concerned, I think I it came out of the fact that there wasn't any need to move, there wasn't any need to leave. This is where I live, it's where I've made my home. And I suppose there what what Gentle Radical is interested in doing is really working in a hyper local way. So hyper locality. And this idea of what does it mean to remain in one place? And what does it mean to remain in one place for a very, very, very long time? A little bit like adrienne marie brown, in emergent strategy, she talks about like, and building instead of mile wide inch deep movements, how do we build, like, inch wide mile deep? So I've been in Cardiff, I don't know, I sort of set up Gentle Radical in 2016. So I've been in Cardiff, maybe anywhere over 20 years, maybe 25 years, 23 years. So I felt like, I felt like that was the right moment to set up an organisation. I felt like I needed to live that much. I needed to know this place that much, I needed to make mistakes enough. And of course, I didn't stop making mistakes, but I needed to really be ready to once this work begins, it needs to keep going deeper. So I felt I had a deep commitment to place. And in a very specific sense, we're based in Riverside, it's an area I've lived in for 23 years myself, it's very, it's a very diverse part of the city. It's not an affluent part of the city, there's a lot of different, huge richness and huge need. So the idea of what does it mean, to construct projects, and to organise and to use culture and cultural praxis? Not for two years, or five years or 10 years, but like until I'm dead and beyond? And then who's going to come after? And then after them? So how do we really pull elastically our sense of the work that we want to do with with people and community?

Rabab: The other sorry, the other thing to say, I suppose about Cardiff and Wales is, particularly in Cardiff, I think we are in very close proximity to seats of power. Because we're tiny because we're 2 million people. So you can, you can go and speak to the First Minister, I mean, it's possible you can absolutely have conversations with people who are at the Assembly or at Welsh Government. And I think that gives Wales a very different kind of relationship to its political structures. In other words, they're not as hierarchical. There's less density and bureaucracy to get through. Of course, it's there, but not anything like to the extent of it is in England. And I think that creates sort of possibilities, it creates possibilities of disruption, greater fluidity greater dialogue. So for example, some of the really I think they're groundbreaking. I think there's there's there's definitely space for these bits of legislation or policy to be more groundbreaking. But if I think of the future generations commission and legislation around future generations, those kinds of developments within the political arena are really, so for me that in Wales, there's a, there's the possibility for quite radical thinking and the possibility for that to impact in quite deep ways, because because of the scale, because of our scale is small enough to not be hindered by much more cumbersome, historical, deadweight. So I kind of personally, people laugh when I say this, but I really feel like I'm excited to say, I feel like the small nations will be the global leaders of the future, basically. So it seems exciting to be in places like Wales.

Sami: I think I think that's really interesting. I think they're a question that comes up for me, which is, as somebody who is not as familiar as, with yourself, or with gentle radical as an organisation, you use this term cultural praxis, and which I've seen before, but I'll be honest,