00:00So my name is Rastko Novakovic and I'm one of the curators of the For Peace exhibition.
00:05So the exhibition really captures a bunch of peace movements or a bunch of movements that are not
00:10traditionally seen as peace movements under the umbrella of For Peace. So anti-war campaigns,
00:16pacifists, feminist anti-militarists, all sorts of campaigns together under one umbrella.
00:22And it's really structured in two galleries upstairs and downstairs around this idea of
00:27looking outwards and looking inwards. So downstairs where we are now looking outwards is a bunch of
00:32campaigns that looked at solidarity internationally across borders with, say, people in the Pacific
00:38or people in Ireland and how they supported them. And they came from different standpoints,
00:44different campaigns. They might have different values or different tactics of doing things,
00:48but they still had some shared principles or shared wishes to express solidarity with people
00:55across borders. And then upstairs, it's looking inwards, really. So at military bases, at Trident,
01:03at all of the infrastructure of the military and whether it's nuclear, whether it's military bases,
01:10whether it's the kind of secrecy around military procedures and so on. So it's a huge
01:18collage of stuff that we've brought together across all the way from World War II all the way to the present day.
01:29And a bunch of these campaigns are still active and running. So we brought together over 130 items,
01:36and that's everything from badges to bolt cutters to jumpers that people have knitted to
01:43magazines that people have printed, to videos that people made back in the eighties, say,
01:51of the Pacific women on tour here in Britain, to cartoons, say, from the Isle of Lewis and the
01:57Keep NATO Out campaign. So all sorts of different things. And some are more ephemeral, some have never
02:02been seen in a gallery context. Some are a way to showcase what is in the Glasgow Women's Library as well.
02:11When we first started this project, and started fundraising for it, it was immediately after
02:17Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And we thought there's a real need to look at how we think about
02:24peace and how we work for peace, and to really unlock some of the historical legacies, but also the
02:31tactics and the different movements that have worked for peace. And obviously in the last three years,
02:39there's been an ever-increased call for militarization, both in this country and in Europe. So it's become
02:49even more timely in many ways. We have campaigns like the Troops Out movement from Ireland, which is
02:55now long gone, but there's a very interesting legacy around British soldiers starting this campaign,
03:05and then being at the forefront of buying themselves out from the military, and then being at the
03:10forefront of looking at how do we support the people of Ireland in their calls for self-determination
03:19and so on, and the brutality of that occupation and the policing, which often comes from a colonial
03:25context. So often those soldiers who were in the Troops Out movement, they have experience of Kenya and
03:32Malaya and so on. The exhibition is really aimed at anyone who's even remotely interested in what we
03:41can do about working for peace. And so it should be welcoming for children, but also people who are
03:51interested in history, people who have experienced this kind of legacy of the Cold War and so on. So
03:59in many ways what we're trying to foster is a kind of intergenerational conversation around how things
04:05were done and how things are being done now. Also that history is not just one thing, you know,
04:12people had conversations and disagreements and sometimes huge splits, but somehow they managed to
04:19work in the same space or work for the same kinds of things. So it's often what we bring together is quite
04:28messy, but in terms of its kind of history and then some of the some of the tensions between them,
04:34but I think it's very interesting to have that all together and have it under this one banner of
04:40campaigns that not necessarily would be put side by side or together. The exhibition four piece is at
04:47the Women's Library and it's running from the 17th of April until the 5th of July.
04:52So I'm Caroline Gorsden and I'm development worker for programming and curating at Classical Women's
04:57Library. The title for peace is important particularly because of the things that are going on globally at
05:03the moment, ongoing, and this is a collaboration with another archive called Mayday Rooms down in London.
05:09It's an archival exhibition that takes things out of our museum and archive store. They're all around peace
05:16activism and that is combined with things from Mayday Rooms. It's really about getting some of these
05:21stories out there as inspiration for things that we're dealing with globally now. It's an ephemera
05:29and archive material so that's things ranging from like kind of posters as you'll see for kind of very
05:36current forms of activism that have started in the 80s. So you can see the the Free Palestine movement
05:42there to kind of journals and photos of protests. We've got we've got an amazing set of bolt cutters
05:50there that are from peace activists that went out to the Nevada desert to protest against nuclear
05:56testing. The campaigns they're looking at are like sort of stemming from kind of women's peace activism
06:01so Greenham Common and the protests to keep nuclear weapons testing out of the UK so that's kind of a sort
06:09of like inward strand. Of course there's lots of photos here about people getting out on the street
06:13or people kind of rowing out to resist submarines and kind of physical protests but also you know
06:20there's another front which is online and you know that there are different ways that people can
06:24participate in protests. The exhibition is for everyone I suppose it's it's in in many ways there'll be
06:30people that visit you know that know a lot about one particular struggle and it's about sort of looking
06:36at that in relation to others for them but there might be people who you know are shocked at things
06:41that are going on now but are completely new to peace activism so it's it's it's for a range of people yeah.
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