"The earth moved for me in Santiago last week. Pottering about my hotel room, I suddenly felt the floor shudder and reverberate. I even had a fantasy of filing a story to match the famously boring headline once concocted by Claud Cockburn for the Times: Small Earthquake in Chile. While the tremor left me mildly shaken, it had its metaphorical uses. Later that day, a Chilean dramatist told me it symbolised the fragility of democracy in his country. For me the tremor came to represent, rather more optimistically, the signs of artistic upheaval I saw in my short stay."(Guardian unlimited arts features |On with the show |Michael Billington reports )

:: note :: . . . artistic optimism felt from south to north . . . please stand up for artists . . .