Entrenchments 2015 was a month-long creative conversation focused on translating conflict into art based at Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington from 30 March to 30 April. It featured Canadian and New Zealand illustrators Julian Peters and Sarah Laing responding to WWI war diaries, letters, and poetry as well as contemporary works by Poet Laureate Vincent O’Sullivan, Witi Ihimaera, and Patricia Grace.

Prejudice, antagonism, territorial disputes, and war often result from a profound lack of understanding and respect for differences in language, traditions, religion, faith, and politics. Despite globalisation, the inability to communicate across language barriers is detrimental to peace, harmony, and creativity. Entrenchments 2015 aimed to promote cultural understanding and global peace through radical acts of cross-disciplinary, multi-ethnic creative translation.

Events from the creative trenches included: Daily Despatches, visual interpretations of the daily Gallipoli tweets of Lt.Col William G Malone performed on large glass panels and captured in video and still images; workshops for students creatively translating Canadian John McCrae’s WWI poem In Flanders Fields; opportunities to watch and talk with the artist at #joinjulian tweet-disclosed locations around Wellington; and the World’s Longest Zine-making fest. Entrenchments 2015 culminated in an exhibition and launch at Wai-te-ata Press. The exhibition ran until 15 June 2015 and featured the final Daily Dispatch drawn as a triptych by Peters.

Entrenchments 2015 was hosted by Wai-te-ata Press and the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation in partnership with the Canadian High Commission.

About the artists

Based in Montreal, Canada, Julian Peters is a multilingual artist and illustrator specialising in translating poetry into comic art and graphic novel genres. His work has been published widely and exhibited internationally. His haunting interpretations of the writing of WWI Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti are featured on his website

Wellington-based Sarah Laing is a novelist, short story writer, cartoonist, illustrator and book designer. Widely published and travelled, she has received numerous awards, including most recently the 2013 University of Auckland’s Michael King Writers’ Centre writer-in-residence where she worked on Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir (VUP, 2016).