Planet - The Welsh Internationalist

Excerpts from Planet 212

Every Home Must Be Defended

‘I made a garden out of nothing.’Adam Johannes gives an insight into the experiences of Cardiff tenants affected by the bedroom tax, and the work of the Cardiff Against the Bedroom Tax. The article is accompanied by Kieran Cudlip’s photographs of the house and garden of a local resident, as he prepares to leave his home of 27 years.

Decades of Devastation Ahead?

Activist-academic Kelvin Mason highlights recent campaigns against open-cast mining and fracking, and argues that they represent a new era of exploiting Welsh communities.

What’s the Future for the Welsh Economy?

Owen Donovan scrutinises recent proposals for improving economic development in a nation stranded between two governments, and highlights the fundamental ideological differences between them.

Welsh Keywords: Hiraeth

In this issue’s ‘Welsh Keywords’ article, T. Robin Chapman unsentimentally scrutinises the shifting meanings behind ‘hiraeth’ through the centuries: the word ‘has as much to do with the exercise of economic power and political and religious authority as the promptings of the heart’.

Yesterday’s Apocalypse?

Martin Padget takes a chilling and ‘strangely entertaining’ tour of the nuclear missile museum in Sahuarita, Arizona; accompanied by eerie images of the missile complex and gift shop. He reflects on sickening fears about the possibility of a thermonuclear attack from his youth, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe today.

‘A Brick from the Ruins of Babylon’

Mary-Ann Constantine celebrates forty years of Ceredigion Museum and explores the intriguing relationships between people and objects, the local and the national, within museums in Wales.

‘I aspire to a desert-island art’

Experimental harpist Rhodri Davies interviews the artist Ivor Davies about using explosives in art, Welsh internationalism and not developing a marketable ‘style’...

Muscling In, or Being Ourselves? Belly Dance and Orientalism

Claire Houguez interviews belly dancers across Wales and reflects on the visceral joy and cultural dilemmas the dance inspires.

Inhotim, Brazil

In a sequel to their 2004 article ‘Brazil in Two Voices’, Pamela Petro and Marguerite Itamar Harrison explore through text and luscious images the marvels of Brazil’s Inhotim: a vast contemporary art complex and botanic garden.

Dancing on the Steps of the Senedd: Dance, Politics and Belonging

Siriol Joyner on how the proximity of the Welsh Assembly to the National Dance Company Wales building has shaped her recent work, and how dancing within the Welsh landscape is an ‘excavation’ of her identity.

Focus 212

...politics - Helen Pendry
...mucis - Rebecca Edwards
...performance - Kaite O'Reilly

Reviews 212

Daniel Westover reviews R.S. Thomas: Poems to Elsi

Simon Brooks reviews ‘Y Blaid Ffasgaidd yng Nghymru’

R. Gwynedd Parry reviews The Legal History of Wales

Matthew Jarvis reviews The Roaring Boys