There’s a fascinating contrast between the recent activities of the actress Rachel Weisz and her artist
There’s a fascinating contrast between the recent activities of the actress Rachel Weisz and her artist sister Minnie. While the Oscar-winner makes her living courtesy of ever-bigger-budget, hi-tech camerawork in movies such as the Mummy series, Minnie has turned to some of the oldest, most rudimentary optical technology. Her latest show features photographs of rooms in the now empty 1854 Great Northern Hotel in London, and in most of the images she has turned the spaces into giant pinhole cameras. Her exhibition, King’s Cross as Camera Obscura, has been mounted as part of this year’s London Architecture Biennale.
Organisers chose the theme of “change”, and one of their examples of this is King’s Cross, which is in the middle of a multi-billion-pound, 20-year, transformation from a grimy and dilapidated confluence of road traffic, sex-workers, and commuters into a shiny, happy, fresh development with new homes, shops, schools, and a range of leisure facilities.
Minnie Weisz is slim and pretty, and full of energy. I did a course in car mechanics and built an engine for a Corsair 2000E. Once I got out of “Dracula’s House” and I ran into the woods. The teacher said, “Slavery was abolished,” and I said, “No, it wasn’t!” I was expelled at 14 because I got a spray can and decorated a wall at school with my poem about how boring school was, and signed it with my initials!I started doing petty crime and was sent to Boreatton Park in Shropshire for about 18 months. Then back to Birmingham.Ward End Hall was very modern and had all the facilities: basketball, an athletics track and long-jump I got expelled for having pornography.
Boys were passing Playboy or something under the table and, as it came to me, the teacher said, “What have you got in your hand?”I went to Broadway Comprehensive I was getting rebellious. The first secondary school I went to was Kennington Boys in South London for one day This was the only boys’ school I went to I hated it. When a girl walked past they went, “Woo – girls, girls!” Between the ages of 10 and 12, there were long periods out of school. Then I went to a series of schools: one school in Stourbridge for a few months maybe, then another in Dudley. At six or seven, I knew my name but couldn’t remember the letters that put it together. I found writing or reading difficult.I went from that school to Deykin Avenue Juniors in Witton, Birmingham. There were people from all over the world! And no one mentioned my colour.
There were no canes; teachers talked to you and would sing along with you. There was poetry on the wall.School started at 9am but I used to ask, “Can I go early?”I was there two years. I’m Irish and Catholic.” When a Pakistani family came, the other kids left me alone. But we made friends with the Pakistani family: sufferers sticking together.I was dyslexic, although, at the time, the word wasn’t used. I remember my twin sister crying on the first day at St Matthias’ in Farm Street, Birmingham It was an all-white school and we were the first black kids I was embarrassed about my sister drawing attention to us It was Church of England and very old-fashioned. There were teachers with big glasses, hair in a bun and canes in their hands.I was bullied a bit.
They used to stand around shouting at me and put the gollywogs that came with marmalade on my desk There were white kids who were bullied too. I recall a boy saying, “I’ll be your friend; before you came, they bullied me. The school I went to for the longest time was my approved school! For domestic reasons, me and my mother moved frequently.
I was at my first primary school for three years. Benjamin Zephaniah, 48, is a writer and musician. He has curated Benjamin’s Britain, the current exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.
