Free Word Centre content

Politics and Olympics

2012-03-19T12:08:45+00:00

Photo by Getty

From Mayday to the close of the Paralympic Games in September, Free Word is hosting Politics and Olympcs: Ideals and Realities. Co-curator Stephen Escritt introduces the exhibition and accompanying programme of events and talks that offer alternative perspectives on the Olympics.

"The re-establishment of the Olympic Games, on a basis and in keeping with the needs of modern life, would bring together, every four years, representatives of the nations of the world, and one is permitted to think that these peaceful, courteous contests constitute the best form of internationalism."
Pierre de Coubertin, January 1894

“No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas...
... No form of advertising or other publicity shall be allowed in and above the stadia, venues and other competition areas, which are considered as part of the Olympic sites. Commercial installations and advertising signs shall not be allowed in the stadia, venues or other sports grounds.”
Olympic Charter Rule 51

This summer Free Word will be hosting alternative perspectives on the Olympics. Throughout the modern era the Games have provided a stage upon which the great political and social stories of the day have been played out – from debates about the participation of women in the early years of the twentieth century, through cold war diplomacy, the politics of race and freedom of speech, to today’s concerns about human rights, regeneration, security and corporate influence.

Between Mayday and the close of the Paralympic Games in September, our exhibition Politics & Olympics: Ideals and Realities will explore how political and commercial pressures have buffeted the ideals and values of the Olympic movement.

The exhibition contains historical and contemporary photographs as well as archive material that span over 100 years. As well as the Free Word Centre in London, the exhibition will be shown concurrently during the summer in the central libraries in Newcastle and Nottingham. It is accompanied by a programme of events - at the Free Word Centre and online - that relate to the issues highlighted in the exhibition. We are welcoming contributors from a wide range of backgrounds including urbanists, freedom of expression campaigners, historians and others.

Photo by AP

Programme highlights

On Wednesday 20th June artist, writer and photographer Alberto Duman, in association with Mute Magazine, will host Regeneration Games. A group of critics and commentators will respond to a collection of videos, objects and documents that question the ‘official story’ of the regeneration of East London.

Incursions and Subversions: Art's response to London's Olympic Dreams, on Thursday 12th July, will see Hilary Powell and Isaac Marrero present creative critical responses to the iconography and language of the forthcoming games from their book The Art of Dissent: London's Olympic State.

A screening of Torch - a new short documentary by Marc Silver and AJ Rivers investigating whether London's Olympics will really fulfill its promise to transform East London - takes place on Friday 6^th August to mark the anniversary of the 2011 London riots.

Photo by Mat Coleman

Further events, screenings and online content will be announced over the coming weeks - including a collaboration with Index on Censorship highlighting the extraordinary legislative restrictions on the use of Olympic-related language, and our partnership with A New Direction’s Headstart programme, which works with young people from the five Olympic boroughs. Keep an eye on the Free Word website and follow @FreeWordCentre on Twitter for updates.

Winners and Losers: Successes and Failures of Olympic Architecture

2012-05-16T11:29:03+00:00

National Stadium Beijing. Source: Peter23.

To preview this Friday's debate about the highs and lows of Olympic Architecture, we asked panellist Tim Abrahams to pick two great successes and two great failures from Games stadiums past and present.

Successes

National Stadium, Beijing, 2008

The Beijing Stadium is hardly an exercise in efficiency. The engineers and architects of the Burj Khalifa managed to build a tower nearly 1km high with half the amount of steel used here. But despite criticism to the contrary, The National Stadium is the product of a unique historic moment and couldn’t have been built at any other time or anywhere else. I would suggest that the National Stadium is primarily and overwhelmingly a monument to the Chinese people, snuck in past the all-seeing eye of the Chinese State.

It is the result of a genuine collaboration between the architects Herzog and de Meuron and the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. The latter has used the idea of repetition throughout his career to convey the idea of the Chinese experience: bicycles stacked in a circle in his early sculptures, and porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2010. Ai grasps the sheer extravagance of scale provided by a population of 1 billion whilst trying to discern the unique within each constituent member. Humanism is easy on a small scale; Ai tests it at the global. It may seem perverse to some Western critics that he should be involved in building a stadium which apparently glorifies the Chinese state apparatus and, as even the Chinese state admits, led to the death of two workers. All that can be said is that Ai Wei Wei and Herzog and de Meuron elected to work within that system and created a work which manages to stand separate from it.

Visually, the National Stadium is anchored to the city. The structure looks as if it is holding those fleeting moments of sporting triumph to it forever. It cocks a snook at the epoch-defining superlight structure used for the Munich Games in 1972, which evoked the deceitful idea that the Olympics is a circus which can be packed into the back of a trailer at the end of two weeks. The National Stadium is a deliberately permanent monument, even if the object of its monumentality can only be found in the abstraction of its external steel members. Even before the Games it was a tourist destination. The best part of the experience of visiting it – generally there isn’t any sport to watch now – is the passing through the threshold created by the bifurcating, transecting columns of steel, some of which carry loads, others not. Between the exterior and the interior proper there exists an entrancing, middle ground of light, mediated by abstracted forms. Staircases leap up between layers of beams. Quite intentionally, it is like the public area beneath the Eiffel Tower.

Berlin Olympiastadion, 1936

Berlin Olympiastadion. Source: Nikolai Schwerg.

Although it may seem provocative to choose a structure from the Olympics of Nazi Germany, I like the Berlin Olympiastadion for the story it tells. The use of neo-Dorian architecture was part of Hitler’s attempts to cement his regime to a classical heritage: he claimed that the Dorian tribe was of German origin, and so that in adopting its style, the Nazis were returning their country to its ancient roots. But since its construction, the building has been adapted in a fascinating way, which to me is the story of a great Olympic stadium.

Today the stadium itself is one of the rare structures in Berlin that manages to assimilate the Nazi period without either excusing or dramatising it. It’s actually a succession of structures lying one on top of each other: a sedimentation of architectural memory.

Some of the adaptations are clearly symbolic. In the 1950s Hitler’s special box, known as the “Fuhrerlöge”, was truncated. Other changes were born of pragmatism, yet have still achieved a symbolic effect. Before the World Cup in 2006, the stadium was completely renovated. The alterations paid great respect to the original 1930s building, with a new roof that hovers above the original structure on thin posts.

The designers of the new roof, architects Gerkan, Marg & Partners and the engineering firm Krebs & Kiefer, made no attempt to ape the neoclassical language of the original structure. The roof, an undulating membrane of semitransparent glass fibre, proclaims its modernity clearly: it is a delicate, technologically advanced counterpoint to the classical stone of the stadium. Just like the tiered stands, the roof respects the Marathon Gate. It floats above the stubborn stone structure, crowning it. This recent addition is not only a product of improvement in social standards – we can now watch sport without the rain falling on us – but, in its pragmatism and its modernity, the adaptation of the Olympiastadion is an affirmation that German society can live with its past.

Failures

Stadium Australia, Sydney, 2000

Stadium Australia. Source: Adam JWC

While attention is so focused on the future use of London’s Olympic stadium beyond the Games, it is important to consider that there is a precedent for demounting an Olympic stadium. It looked as if the Stadium in Sydney would be a huge success after the event, because so much thought had gone into what the International Olympic Committee calls ‘the legacy phase’. After the Sydney Games in 2000, two wing stands of the 110,000 capacity Olympic stadium were removed as planned, as was the athletics track. A movable seating section was introduced in their place and new roofs were built over the two ends. The reconfiguration reduced the capacity to 83,500 for the rectangular field and 82,500 for the oval field at a total cost of around £50m.

Since the stadium has been demounted, though, it has struggled to attract large international events. Proving that adapting downwards is always a problem, the stadium now falls between two stools. Before the Olympic Games, the annual Australia versus New Zealand rugby union test twice drew over 107,000 spectators to the Stadium. Yet in 2007, following the reduction in capacity, the game was held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Planners failed to appreciate that building a structure like a stadium fundamentally changes the city and its expectations – previous visions of how a smaller stadium would operate are confounded by the appearance, and then disappearance, of a much bigger one that commercial groups, football clubs and spectators are interested in using.

The success of Stadium Australia has been scuppered by its own attempts to please a notionally smaller sporting audience following the Games. It has also been challenged for smaller games by the better run and more established Sydney Football Stadium, now known as the Allianz Stadium, with a capacity of just over 40,000. Home to premier rugby league, rugby union and Australian Rules football teams, the Allianz has flourished while Stadium Australia struggles.

The Montreal Stadium, 1976

Montreal Olympic Stadium. Source: Taxiarchos228.

Jean Drapeau, Mayor of Montreal, and Roger Tallibert, the French architect of the stadium, constantly compared the endeavour building of this structure to that of the Parthenon and the Pyramids. As such, it deserves to be heralded not just on its own terms but as the first of a particular kind of Grand Projet that defined the late 20th century – formally and structurally extravagant, and more legible as a gesture than as a building. It is more Calatrava than Calatrava, the result of Tallibert and Drapeau’s out-of-control ambitions.

Structurally the building is incredible: a megastructure which combines pool, inclined tower, stadium and velodrome in one. To a visitor, it possesses a certain romantic sense of ambition, thwarted in part and attained in others, of a kind peculiar to Olympic cities. But locally the building is utterly despised: not just because of the cost, but also the fact that it wasn’t completed on time, and was therefore a failure before the Games even began. As such it has poisoned for the citizens of Montreal the Games’ already dubious legacy.

The Greatest Possible Distance

2012-05-11T13:46:22+00:00

London Olympic Clock via Quick79.

At precisely 7.30 – 10.30PM [British Summer Time] on July 27th 2012, the moment of the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games, Neville Gabie intends to be as far away as possible.

Having been artist in residence for the Olympic Delivery Authority until December last year, Gabie has become disillusioned with the sponsored enthusiasm around the Games, and is creating a new work he hopes will challenge the official narrative of 'The People's Games'. As Gabie asks on his website, "Has sport simply sold itself to the highest bidder, politics regeneration and the corporate giants?"

To help answer that question, Gabie is planning to chart the greatest possible distance from the opening ceremony in July, and is inviting your suggestions as to what that distance might be. "Distance could most obviously be thought of as a physical distance of miles, of remoteness and of silence," he writes, "however, a social or economic distance might be as valuable a gauge." Taking suggestions from the general public, he hopes to articulate the greatest possible distance from the Games during the opening ceremony, to travel there and to document the experience. He has also committed to exhibiting the work within a year's time.

As our own Politics and Olympics exhibition and its programme of events run in the Free Word Centre over the summer, we are delighted to be helping Neville Gabie in his search for suggestions. Some of the best will be profiled here on the Free Word site, along with his reflections on the development of the project and his documentation of the final experience.

The final destination will be selected on the 8th of June by "an independent panel of artists, cultural thinkers and members of the East London Community". To make your suggestion, email the man himself at neville@nevillegabie.com You can also let us know what you think of the project - find us on Facebook or @freewordcentre on Twitter.

What is the greatest possible distance from the Olympic Games? Gabie has already received a variety of suggestions - we've picked out some of our favourites below, and will be adding more as they come in.

Suggestions:

"After due deliberation I suggest you go to the original Games site in Greece. The moral distance between it and the current Olympics is as great as can be imagined. And at present being in Greece would have a resonance of its own."

- John

"The Lat/Long location of the Olympic stadium is at 51.538336 degrees North and -0.016512 degrees East. So, the position diametrically opposite on the earth’s surface (Antipodal Point) is 51.538336 degrees South and +0.016512 degrees East. As I’m sure you are aware, this is in the wilds of nowhere in the middle of the Southern Ocean! If you could find a suitable ship or aeroplane, this could possibly be the place to be."

- Peter

"I suggest the Carpenters Road estate which as I am sure you know is right next door to the site but is under threat from the redevelopment of the area. Plus residents have not seen much change to their well being. So near and yet so far..."

- Sue

"Maybe the greatest distance involves drinking or drugging yourself into unconsciousness and sleeping through it? There is a pub called The Cart and Horses in Stratford. Apparently this is the birthplace of Iron Maiden. There is quite a dismal display devoted to the band in the corner of the pub. This is the place I would go to become unconsciously drunk on Olympics day. Here you will find people who are drunker than you have ever imagined drunk people could get, they play air guitar and lurch around the place."

- Charlotte

"Spend the evening with the female Saudi athletes who are not allowed to compete at London 2012 by their own government. Perhaps have a meal with them or do your own kind of opening ceremony with them."

- Sam

PalFest in Gaza

2012-05-10T09:27:44+00:00

Palfest logo

All this week, the Palestinian Festival of Literature has been hosting free public events and conducting workshops with writers, bloggers and activists in the besieged city of Gaza.

Pal Fest is an annual festival that aims to bring together audiences and communities split apart by Israel’s military occupation: “pitting the power of culture against the culture of power”.

Until even as recently as last week, it was still uncertain whether the festival’s organisers and participants would be allowed to cross the border – but at the last minute, the Egyptian government approved their visas, and Pal Fest was allowed through.

In March, Free Word hosted an evening of music and performance poetry to raise funds and awareness for this year’s Pal Fest, and we’re delighted to see the festival breaking tread new ground and continuing its excellent work regenerating cultural ties between Arab countries.

Our partners at English PEN have published this blog from Selma Dabbagh about her journey to Gaza, and Pal Fest have released this video from al Aqsa University made during the festival.

You can find out more about the festival at the Pal Fest blog.

Opening Up the World: an Interview with Literary Translator Michael Henry Heim

2012-05-09T14:38:41+00:00

Our founding partner The Arvon Foundation are launching a literary translation course with the British Centre for Literary Translation. Michael Heim, who will be teaching on the course, sat down with Kate Griffin from the BCLT to talk about the Arvon programme, and about his own extraordinary career in literary translation.

The British Centre for Literary Translation is delighted that in August this year, Michael Henry Heim will be coming to the UK to teach on Opening Up The World, a literary translation workshop at the Arvon Foundation, run in partnership with BCLT.

Michael Heim is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he has taught for more than thirty-five years. He has translated contemporary and classical fiction and drama from the Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Russian, and Serbian/Croatian. His work includes Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal; My Century and Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass, Helping Verbs of the Heart, by Peter Esterházy, Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, and Wonder by Hugo Claus. He has recently published new translations of Chekhov’s plays and Mann’s Death in Venice and is currently working on his first translation from the Chinese.

Michael, from your point of view, what is the idea behind this course?

The languages participants will be translating from are potentially varied (as they are in the Workshop in Literary Translation I have taught at UCLA for the past thirty or thirty-five years), so the focus I envision will be on the English text. We will spend most of our time discussing participants’ translations with a view to establishing certain broad principles of translation that will help them when they go home to work on their own. No one can learn everything there is to know about translation in five days, but I hope the course will provide participants with enough of a taste of what is involved in the process to enable them to determine whether they wish to pursue it.

How did you yourself come to translation?

I take pleasure in reading foreign languages and writing English, and I enjoy providing new reading possibilities for the English-language audience and opening writing possibilities for the English language.

From how many languages do you translate?

I have worked from about ten. Given that I have never stopped learning languages and have been at it for over fifty years, that comes to about one every five years. Sticking to it is what counts.

The most recent one always tends to pose the most challenges, and my most recent is Chinese. But I would go so far as to say that Chinese is the most challenging in absolute terms as well: it is the only non-Western language I have tackled, and its linguistic and cultural assumptions differ so from even the other non-Indo-European language I have translated from, Hungarian.

What relationship do you have with the languages, countries, cultures and literatures you translate?

After French, the first foreign language I studied (a foreign language was required of all high school students), I never undertook the study of a language without a specific motivation in mind. I have therefore had a personal relationship with each of them.

View a short video Michael was asked to make on this subject here.

When I was younger, I visited the countries where the languages were spoken, immersing myself in their cultures, and naturally enough I know those better than the others and can still speak four or five of them at the drop of a hat, but I continue to read in all of them.

What is your methodology for translating? Each time, how do you find the voice?

First I “prep” the section of the text I will be working on, that is, I look up the words and cultural references I don’t recognize. Then I can focus on pinpointing the voice you rightfully inquire about. That necessitates first and foremost a close reading of the text, but I sometimes find it useful to read an analogous text in English as I proceed.

What relationship do you have with the author (when living)?

Generally speaking, I avoid consulting with the author: too many questions will shake the author’s faith in the translator. Besides, badgering authors is unfair. They’ve done their work; it’s our turn - and obligation - to do ours. Authors should be creating new works, not fiddling with this or that translator’s insufficiencies. When I have a problem I can’t solve with the standard reference tools, I go to an educated native speaker. Only if the native speaker is baffled do I consider contacting the author. And even then I never ask for a translation of the thorny word or passage, only for an explanation.

Which author or authors’ work have you most enjoyed translating?

Günter Grass, bar none. Immediately after completing a work, he gathers twenty or thirty of his translators, each representing a language, for a several-day, eight-hour-a-day seminar at which he outlines the background for the work and fields questions. Of course not every writer has the clout and funding possibilities of a Nobel Prize winner, but he began the seminars well before he was awarded the prize.

What is the hardest thing you’ve had to translate and why?

Each project has its pitfalls, and few are the projects I’ve begun without wondering, “How can this possibly come across in English?” I was particularly nervous about my first translation from the Chinese (a work in progress) for the reasons I listed above. But as it turns out, I immediately found the narrator’s tone, so in the end, other translations - because of the willed obscurity of their style or the prevalence of, say, word play - have proved more daunting.

What is your view of the current state of translation into the English language? Are you optimistic?

After a boom in the seventies editors fell into a kind of slough of despond, but I believe they are climbing out of it, partly as a result of recent translators’ more pro-active approach.

Michael Heim has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including Fulbright and Guggenheim, and translation prizes, culminating last year in the PEN American Center/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, which is awarded once every three years to a translator “whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of his or her work.” He has also served on translation juries for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN American Center, and the Goethe-Institut.

Michael, how have these fellowships and awards helped you in your career?

They have convinced skeptical university colleagues - especially administrators - that translation has merit.

What kind of support do you think is most helpful in the career of a literary translator? Training, mentoring, fellowships, grants, university courses, or something else entirely?

All of the above. But I would add one more thing: a fruitful relationship with a talented and sympathetic editor.

What advice would you give people starting out in literary translation?

Read, read, read. Read in the language you are translating from, of course, the better to feel at home with its nuances and cultural assumptions. But even more important, read in English, in all varieties of English, from all over the world, and in all periods of English, from Shakespeare and the King James Bible on. Only by reading broadly and deeply can you enrich the choices you have at your disposal when faced with a text to translate.

Michael, thank you very much for your time in answering these questions.

Opening Up The World will run from 27 August until 1 September at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire. Poet, translator and newly appointed editor of Modern Poetry in Translation Sasha Dugdale will be co-tutor, with the distinguished translator Anthea Bell as guest.

The week-long course will focus on the techniques of translation, and participants will be asked to come with an excerpt of their translation into English of an as yet untranslated work of poetry, prose, or drama, from any language.

Places by selection: submit one double-spaced page of translation and the same text in the original to lumbbank@arvonfoundation.org by 29 June 2012.

Chinese Translation in an Hour (But you have to be a kid to do it)

2012-05-08T11:43:56+00:00

Image courtesy of Katorisi via Wikimedia Commons

Nicky Harman was a translator-in-residence at Free Word last year, and took part in many activities to introduce translation to a wider audience whilst here. In this article she reflects on her attempts to introduce school groups to Chinese translation - and the surprises she found along the way.

While I was translator-in-residence at the Free Word Centre at the end of 2011, I was asked to incorporate some translation activities for children. It turns out that that’s easier said than done. I’d never taught children before, and I had no indispensible contacts in local schools either.

To cut a very long story short (and six months must surely be the world’s longest lesson preparation time), I ended up in a secondary school on the southern outskirts of London at some ungodly hour of a January morning, clutching a DVD of Monkey, my head full of ideas about how I was going to get them interested in not just translation in general, but in translating this film in particular.

The story of Monkey, also known as Journey to the West, is based in fact: in the 7th century AD, a Chinese monk called either Tripitaka (Sanskrit) or Xuanzang (in Chinese) made the long and arduous journey to India in search of the Buddhist classics, which he then took back to China and spent the rest of his life translating. Over the centuries, the story of his journeys evolved into a folk tale where the chief characters became his disciples: a group of unruly animals called Pigsy, Sandy and the eponymous Monkey. The story has never lost its popularity: my DVD was of a cartoon version made in Shanghai in the 1980s.

This first outing with Monkey was to a school where Chinese is taught up to GCSE exam level. They knew all about Monkey and some of them had even seen it performed in London. I introduced the historical background of the real Tripitaka/Xuanzang and then played a short clip with the Chinese subtitles. We practiced some easy characters and spoken phrases, and I ended by re-playing it with the English subtitles so they could read the bits they’d missed. It was a piece of cake, really: they were great kids who all loved my favourite cartoon film.

And then, last week, I was in at the deep end. I did two classes using the same clip at a comprehensive school near my home in Weymouth, Dorset: far, far away from the multi-cultural city lights of London. The kids, 14-year-olds, knew no Chinese, although one group were studying German and the other class were learning Spanish. None of them had even heard of the Monkey story either.

I did my historical introduction to the story, and was pleased when they spotted the characters for ‘two’ and ‘three’ from the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra as soon as I showed them the character for ‘one’. Then, before I played the clip, I fed them the line that much translation is inspired guesswork and that, by the end of an hour, they’d be able to understand it with a bit of help from me, and be able to ‘translate’ too.

I was certainly impressed at how accurate their guessing was. But getting them to describe Monkey, Sandy, Pigsy and Xuanzang with a choice adjective or two was a little sticky. I expected ‘wily’, ‘cheeky’, ‘greedy’ or ‘naïve’. But what I got from one kid in the first class (the only one prepared to venture an opinion) was ‘weird’ – and he was talking about the whole cartoon.

Monkey obviously hadn’t been a hit. But on the other hand, at the end of an hour, the very same class had learned and could repeat without prompting nearly a dozen words and phrases culled from the film, even with the right tones. The second class took to Chinese with enthusiasm, making connections with the film Karate Kid, the martial arts lessons they’d done and the menus they’d seen at their local Chinese restaurant. It’s too bad that the school is not about to teach Chinese. They would definitely have had some takers.
I’m down to do this session again in London soon, with a bunch of teachers of Chinese. I hope they’ll be as receptive as these students have been!

Photos from the Politics & Olympics exhibition launch

2012-05-03T14:45:08+00:00

Image: Frances Baker

The Politics & Olympics exhibition opened its doors to the public for the first time on tuesday 1st of May, and the launch party was a great success. Bringing together images and stories that interrogate how the ideals of the modern Olympic movement have been buffeted by the political realities of international community, the exhibition is presented to the general public from 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday until September. Admission is free.

These photos of the launch event were taken by Frances Baker, a young photographer working with Headstart, a year-long leadership programme that helps 15-25 year olds learn about, and shape the culture of their city.

Podcast: Why We Love to Hate Villains

2012-05-03T09:39:32+00:00

Image from Shakespeare's Globe

Frances Wood, curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library, hosts a talk exploring two internationally renowned 'villains' - the First Quin Emperor of China, and Richard III. In the context of William Shakespeare's Richard III's Mandarin translation for the Globe to Globe festival, this lecture sets out to investigate what makes villains so appealing.

This lecture was delivered on Sunday 29th April 2012 at Shakespeare's Globe: a Free Word Translators-in-Residence event and part of the Globe's Shakespeare Found in Translation series. You can learn more about the Globe's series of translation lectures and their Globe to Globe series at their website - the season includes lectures on Polish, Serbian, Mexican Spanish, British Sign Language, Yoruba and Hebrew language translations and performances of Shakespeare's plays. the season continues until the end of May.

Images from the Politics and Olympics exhibition

2012-05-01T13:40:39+00:00

Martyn Routledge Image from the book ‘Olympics: A snapshot history of the Olympic Games’, available from www.openthebook.com with £1 going towards The Prostate Cancer Charity.

Today we launch 'Politics and Olympics: Ideals and Realities', an exhibition of images from throughout the history of the modern Olympic Games. Despite setting out in its charter to separate itself from the politics of the day, commercial and political pressures have persistently left their mark on the Games throughout the history of the modern Olympic movement.

As we unveil the exhibition in the main space at the Free Word Centre, we’re pleased to offer a selection of the images and stories from the programme here.

The Olympic Kebab shop and owner, London, circa 2009–10

Following London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Games, many local businesses embraced the Olympics by incorporating the word into their business name.

However, the IOC requires host nations to legally enshrine protection of the word ‘Olympic’ and other associated words from unofficial commercial use. Accordingly the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act (2006) was passed, and many East London businesses were asked to desist from using Olympic language to protect the exclusivity of official sponsors such as McDonald’s.

Local resident and artist Martyn Routledge started noticing these new Olympic businesses while cycling to work through the East End, and he decided to document them. Open Agency has recently published a collection of Routledge’s photographs. Most of these businesses have now abandoned their Olympic names following pressure from the London Games organisers.

Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz’s bras d’honneur salute, 1980 Moscow Olympics

Associated Press

The 1980 Moscow Olympics took place against the backdrop of the Solidarity movement in Poland as well as the American-led boycott.

In front of a hostile Russian crowd rooting for Soviet athlete Konstantin Volkov, the Polish pole-vaulter Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz set a new world record with a vault at 5.78m. After the jump he turned to the Moscow crowd and made a rude bras d’honneur salute, further provoking the Soviets. The salute became one of the most memorable images of the 1980 Games and immediately travelled around the world, except, ironically, to the Soviet Union and Poland. Signifying Polish resentment of Soviet influence, the gesture became immediately known as Kozakiewicz’s gesture (gest Kozakiewicza).

After the Olympics, the Soviet ambassador to Poland requested that Kozakiewicz should be stripped of his medal as he had “insulted the Soviet people”. The Polish government responded officially that the gesture was due to an involuntary muscle spasm caused by his physical exertion.

Opening ceremony of the 1980 Olympic Games at the Lenin Stadium, Moscow, USSR

Tony Duffy/Getty Images

The opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Games at the Central Lenin Stadium constituted one of the most overt political set pieces in Olympic history.

In the stadium’s eastern stands 4,500 trained athletes created more than 150 live mosaics. Each participant had a set of coloured flags, caps, detachable shirt fronts and painted panels in order to form the mosaics.

The 1980 Moscow Games were the first Games to take place in a socialist country.

Depiction of the Danish Gymnastics team, Illustrated London News, July 1908

The British Library Board

At the 1908 London Olympics, there was no medal event in women’s gymnastics, but a number of displays were staged. This one, by a team of Danish women, was a highlight of the Games, and attracted a huge amount of media attention.

The tone suggested that the women were there purely as a spectacle for the audience. The early role of female athletes solely as entertainers is evident in the manner the event was promoted and reported, typified in this montage from the Illustrated London News. Other newspapers, notably the Daily Mirror, pictured the gymnasts in ways that verged on the voyeuristic.

The month before the 1908 London Games opened, 300,000 people attended the “Women’s Sunday” rally in Hyde Park organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members were known as Suffragettes.

‘Tibet Bulletholes’, part of Free Tibet’s campaign against China, 2008

Euro RSCGZ Zuerich/Free Tibet

Free Tibet is an organisation campaigning for the rights and freedoms of the Tibetan people. During the build up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, numerous organisations, including Amnesty International, launched similar campaigns to expose China’s routine and widespread use of torture and other human rights abuses in both China and Tibet. Many of them subverted official Olympic branding, or used sports-based images of torture and execution, for political or satirical purposes. However, while these protests raised awareness globally, no countries boycotted the Olympics.

The IOC discussed the political implications of Beijing holding the Olympics throughout the bid stage and beyond. Their line was that hosting the Games could help to liberalise China, and that the attention of the world’s media would lead to human rights improvements.

A roughly-constructed hut within the grounds of the Peace & Friendship Olympic Stadium, Piraeus, Athens, 2010

Newsbeast

Athens prepared for the 2004 Olympics with numerous improvements to transport infrastructure and buildings, including the renovation of the existing Olympic facilities and the construction of a new Olympic Village. All these works were undertaken at considerable expense to Greek tax payers and predated the country’s present financial troubles.

The authorities moved homeless immigrants to other areas and cleared the city of the large numbers of stray cats and dogs. Today, this clearance operation appears to have been in vain. Most of the 2004 venues are in disrepair. The state-of-the-art Press Centre has been abandoned to graffiti, vandalism, weeds and litter, leading many to question the notion of ‘legacy’ that is now at the heart of the modern Olympics.

Monumental Ambitions: the Architecture of the Olympics

2012-04-30T11:28:26+00:00

The Panathinaiko Stadium, Athens

The first modern Olympic Games was as much an act of architectural restoration as it was a sporting event. Held in the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, the ad hoc Games was an excuse to finally complete the restoration of a treasured piece of ancient Greek architecture and in so doing make solid the Greek national revival. Architecture is of course the most socially engaged of arts, but from the very beginning, architecture for the Olympics has always had a particularly clear purpose and intention.

We are used to understanding the trade fairs of the 19th century as overtly political events in which rival nations outdid each other by showing off their material wealth. In many ways, the Olympics grew out of the international trade fairs and exposition movement which had been so powerful a tool of international trade and industrial development in the 19th Century. It should be remembered that the subsequent events, the 1900 Paris Olympics, the 1904 St. Louis Olympics and the 1908 London Olympics were all subsumed into trade fairs.

Berlin Olympic Stadium. Source: Times

Architecture was used in increasingly sophisticated ways. The pre-eminence of neo-classical architecture in the Berlin games stressed the Nazis’ links to the classical past and thereby their racial hegemony in Europe. After the war, neo-classicism was largely debunked, and increasingly sophisticated means of using architecture were used. The Tokyo Olympics in 1964 coincided with the rise to prominence of the Metabolist movement, in which a group of Japanese architects were attempting to articulate an architecture both national and modern: expressing both the dynamism of Japan’s technology and the timeless forms of its traditional building style.

From 1972 onwards it became common for the Olympic stadiums to be designed and constructed in dialogue with each other. For example, the Munich stadium with its light, tensile structure roof was created in deliberate opposition to the severe neo-classicism of the Berlin stadium of 1936, thereby signifying the emergence of a new Germany. At times, the building of the stadium has created moments of hubris and in so doing highlighted political weaknesses. Rather than marking the emergence of Montreal as an international city of huge importance, the building of the Olympic stadium there in 1976 signified the city’s decline. Indeed, given its mismanagement and spiralling costs, it actually contributed to it.

Munich Olympia Stadium at Dusk. Image: Matthias Prinke

The architecture of the event has always highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of the Olympic movement. The stadiums have grown more expensive and spectacular as the event has grown ever more popular to global TV audiences. And yet the original intention of the Olympic movement was to encourage mass participation in the kind of individual athletic pursuits it gave a platform to. The stadiums after the Olympics are testimony to the failure of this ambition. Frequently they are given over to other tenants who find the stadium only partially suitable for their purposes. Tenancies change frequently. One or two are even empty, whilst the effect on the rest of the city is open to huge debate. Did the 1992 Olympics change the structure of Barcelona or merely the perception of it?

Why do cities bid for the Olympics? What do the stadiums, monuments and swimming pools that they leave behind tell us about the cities and societies that built them? On the 18th of May, the Free Word Centre will host a discussion between writers and architects brought together try and find answers to some of these questions. Chaired by Rowan Moore (The Observer), panellists Hugh Pearman (The Sunday Times, editor of the RIBA Journal), Anna Minton (author Ground Control), Douglas Murphy (Architecture Correspondent, Icon), and myself will discuss what happens when national pomp, Olympic idealism and monumental ambitions become glass, concrete and steel. Join us to find out more.