Emergency signs - "Troubled Images", an exhibition of political posters in Northern Ireland.

If I had to stress anything about "Troubled Images" it would be the stylistic harmony and coherence of this montage by the Linen Hall Library that DAE is showing in Donostia until the 16th. "Troubled Images" is a selection of seventy political posters with their relevant comprehensive explanatory card, produced in the North of Ireland during the last four decades. Seventy posters that in their natural setting, the street, could never possibly have imagined that they would lie next to one another in the restrained atmosphere of San Telmo museum.

This has been the spirit of the Linen Hall Library since at the start of the troubles it began to gather together the more than 3,000 political propaganda items that are included in the collection: to collect all the different views of the socio-political reality of Northern Ireland and conserve them for posterity. In San Telmo messages as conflicting as the appeal of the unionist government for cooperation from the people ("Your finger on the dial can take the finger off the trigger" and the consistent republican rejoinder ("Loose-talk costs lives") are lined up on the same wall. So, one of the achievements of these "troubled images" is that they show how documentation can establish the objective distance needed to allow us to analyse our own conflicts.

Of all the possible formats used in political propaganda (prisoners' letters, television campaigns, cups, bibs... many of them collected on the CD-Rom that accompanies the exhibition), the political poster has undoubtedly been the most effective in a territorialized context like North Ireland. Because the poster -stuck on, handled, torn off, buried under others...- is not only to be found in the street, the place where things happen, but is also responsible for marking off territories, and demarcating borders in an area that is already riddled with signs of its own.

The troubles began at the end of the 60's at the same time as enormous popular protest movements (May 68, The Prague Spring, Black Power, protests against the Vietnam war...). It also did so with the spread of new systems for reproducing cheap simple images. These two factors soon made their presence felt in the avalanche of posters, stickers and banners that began to inundate North Ireland.

So, many of the iconographies they used were taken from posters they had seen elsewhere. If the Republicans were especially inspired by the Paris of May 68 in logos such as the one in "Free Speech in Ireland", the Unionists looked elsewhere, such as in the logo of Solidarnosç from Poland that they used in "Solidarity". Furthermore, new techniques made it possible to reproduce posters in two or three colours that were simple, forceful and, viewed from a contemporary perspective, extremely attractive. Other techniques allowed text and photography to be combined: the photograph of a Bobby Sands who would continue to smile even after his death is a lasting image of the 80's.

However, these posters have a variety of origins (from election campaigns, campaigns by prisoners, from the British army and police...) and were also based on other sources: pre-first world war Irish and British symbols, the strokes used in traditional caricatures, the typography of headlines in the British press... Despite their stylistic unity, there is a very clear difference between the Republican and Unionist posters in "Troubled Images". It is not just the recourse to the meaning of colours (the colours of the Irish tricolour and of the Union Jack) and maps (the North of Ireland as part of Ireland or as a growth stuck to the island next-door) which exposes these differences. It is also that while the Republican posters generally show greater concern for innovation, the Unionist posters are less sophisticated and more traditional.

Maybe that's why two unionist posters are the ones that most attract our attention. In the first of these, the oldest one in the exhibition, Ian Paisley harangues the masses with the Union Jack in the background. "For God and For Ulster" is the text on this two-coloured poster (black and phosphorescent orange) that will remind a Basque public of Carlism. The other poster, "Vote DUP. Smash Sinn Féin" from 1984, recalls something quite different: British punk posters. Punk turned ineptitude into style. It was based on images that had been used before but were fresh and striking and which featured a kind of ineptitude that was not deliberate. The thing is that anyone, even the most inept, knows that the medium is the message. This is where the power of the posters in "Troubled Images" lies: these are urgent images for difficult times.

print text