Abstract
Belfast, in Northern Ireland, is a paradigmatic for a divided city. Contested memories about its contemporary history shape the city fabric. In this chapter I examine the street art that affords Belfast’s walls a voice to tell the history of the city and its inhabitants in terms of sectarian divisions: murals represent and shape a sense of “autochthony” in the contending communities, which tends to be reinforced by the growing industry of conflict tourism. In this logic, the murals fix antagonistic historical narratives: they institute the past and the present in terms of an irreconcilable divide. In turn, this jeopardizes the possibilities of a joined future, and the possibility murals might have to become rather spaces of negotiation and connection across the sectarian divides.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion on colonial and decolonial forms of street art see the chapters of Gisela Latorre, Jayne Howell, Rana Jarbou, and Matthew Ryan Smith in this volume.
- 2.
In this chapter I assume murals in Belfast are a form of street art in as much as they express the identity and historical claims of both contending communities. In this volume, for more detailed discussion about the definition of street art as a form of resistance see the chapters of Jayne Howell and Vlad Glaveanu; for the explicit connection of street art with democracy see the chapters of Robert Innis and Cecilia Nielsen.
- 3.
The first Peace Wall to come down did so in February 2016, on Belfast’s Crumlin Road. During September 2017 another emblematic wall was dismantled, the one dividing Springfield Avenue and Springhill Road. However, there are several of them still standing in the city.
- 4.
While approximately 35–40% of the Northern Irish population lives in segregated neighborhoods (Hewstone et al., 2004), the levels of segregation in Belfast are strikingly higher: according to Mary O’Hara (2004) an estimated 98% of the social housing is segregated, which has evident repercussions for the levels of schooling segregation and segregated levels of access to the job market.
- 5.
Two-thirds of Belfast citizens were estimated to live in segregated streets in the 1960s, a figure that raised to four-fifths in the 1980s (Patterson, 2004) and has remained steady despite the peace process initiated more than twenty years ago with the 1994 ceasefire agreements. Based on data from the 2001 census, it is clear that, while the majority of Protestant areas are dominant in the eastern side of River Lagan, the Catholic areas remain concentrated on the south-west sides (CAIN, 2010; Hughes, Campbell, Hewstone, & Cairns, 2007).
- 6.
The number of peace lines in the city is contested. While in 2012 the Department of Justice identifies forty-seven (Byrne & Gormle-Heenan, 2014), the Belfast Interface project identified ninety-nine. What is clear, though, is the high prevalence of peace lines located in the most vulnerable working-class areas of North Belfast (Jarman, 2012).
- 7.
All photographs were taken by the author during fieldwork in Belfast in 2009, funded by a Marie Curie postdoctoral research at Edinburgh University.
- 8.
For instance, the flag and emblems act of 1954 made it explicitly offensive to interfere with the public display of the Union Jack flag (Jarman, 1997).
- 9.
Most tours are the result of conflict transformation projects that are heavily subsidized by the state and/or other interested partners. There have been three inter-Irish peace programs funded by the European Union, to the tune of €1.3 billion. Large parts of these investments aim to set a path for conflict transformation, strengthening dialogue and reconciliation through empowerment and recognition measures, intra-community confidence, and inter-community dialogue and understanding (Graham & Nash, 2006). The fourth program, Peace IV, is a crossborder initiative, funding activities between 2014–2020 in the border regions between Northern Ireland and Ireland. The whole programme is worth €270 million (Haase & Azevedo, 2016).
- 10.
For a discussion on the role the peace lines play in reproducing the conflict despite the modeled peace political process, see Byrne & Gormle-Heenan (2014).
- 11.
John Urry (2002) has described the key elements of the tourist gaze, all present in Belfast’s conflict tourism : a leisure activity underpinned by a working industry, a specific set of movements allowed for specific groups of peoples, a specific selection of places to be gazed upon because of what they anticipate, and, finally, a gaze that is continuously constructed through signs taken as token of their culture/place.
- 12.
- 13.
This occurs not only in Belfast. Across the world we are witnessing the branding of political identities, vulnerability, and historical conflicts as a commodified form of “identity as difference” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009).
- 14.
In May 2014 the government published the document “Together Building a United Community”, where it laid out a strategy to reduce and remove all the peace lines by 2023 (Byrne & Gormle-Heenan, 2014)
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Vicherat Mattar, D. (2017). Speaking Walls: Contentious Memories in Belfast’s Murals. In: Awad, S., Wagoner, B. (eds) Street Art of Resistance. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63330-5_8
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