Afghanistan’s alternative culture: Skateboards, graffiti and motorbikes – Truthloader

Posted by Admin on Apr 23, 2015 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Travis Beard is an Australian filmmaker, musician and event organizer extraordinaire who has been living in Kabul in Afghanistan for the past seven years. Since 2006 Travis has been helping to revolutionize youth culture in the city introducing thousands of young Afghans to skateboard, graffiti, and modern music festivals for the very first time. We spoke to Travis to find out more.

“So I first came here in 2001 just as the Americans were entering in from the north. I came in from the south and did some reporting on the refugee crisis and then I came back in 2006 obviously I had a bug, I had the bug. I came back to teach photojournalism at an NGO here. I did that for two years, halfway through that I started in an organisation called ‘Skateistan’ who bought the first skateboards to Kabul and taught the first kids how to ride skateboards and that turned into it’s own NGO that’s still running today. Also in that time I started the first motorcycle club in Afghanistan the Kabul Nights MC and a bunch of foreigners and Afghan’s used to ride around the provinces on motorcycles touring and checking out the country.”

How do you feel as an Afghan going in with a bunch of foreigners?
Well to me, it’s quite hard. If they found out I’m working with refugee, they’re going to cut my head off.”

“Wall-ords was a project we started in 2010. It was initially funded by Oxfam and it was meant to be on the theme of cost of war so we did a stencil campaign around the city. And it became so popular that we got funded a second time to do an actual graffiti workshop where we bought in a graffiti artist from England. His name was Chew and he taught a bunch of graphic designers, contemporary artists, how to use spray cans for the first time ever in this country. Then there’s my band White City which is the first expat band in Afghanistan.

And then lastly there is the festival, Sound Central Music Festival. We came through in 2011 and we did the first modern music festival in something like 35 years. We had eight bands play to a crowd of about 500 young Afghan youths and it was really successful and obviously we got amazing coverage which was kind of a historical event. Obviously the next year we wanted to do it again bigger and better. And last year 2012, we did a three day festival. We had 24 performers and we expanded from just doing music to doing alternative art and this year we’re doing that again. We’ve seen this all in the west and we’ve grown up with it, and we’re quite used to it, we don’t even realise how special it is. And then you come to a country like this which has an amazing, unique historical culture but there’s no modern culture, there’s no pop culture, there’s no alternative culture, and we kind of just want to show the local Afghan’s that there’s something else out there that they can be doing with their time.

When we do do festivals we stop at the time of prayer so that the locals don’t get annoyed with the volume of the music. We don’t do public performances anywhere near mosques or religious areas. We respect security protocols in the city. We’ve had a kind of to reinvent the festival model in a sense. Because our festivals also dry – there’s no alcohol.

In regards to the social environment for Afghan’s, it is quite hard. There’s not a lot of places where Afghan’s can meet and socialise and especially different genders. I mean I get Afghans asking me if they can come over with their girlfriend and hang out at my house. An Afghan can’t go to the movies with his girlfriend, an Afghan can’t sit in a cafe and have a coffee with his girlfriend.
It’s a new youth environment and you know obviously they’re breaking rules very slowly and very precautionary. 3G’s just coming to the country and internet speeds are getting better, kids are getting smartphones, YouTube is just the most amazing platform for them. They can actually search for all this kind of pop culture outside of their normal surrounding.

The frustrations in Afghanistan in regards to being involved in the music scene is that, because there is so little of musicians here in the modern music genre and because we’ve been helping them out for so long now they’re kind of spoilt, they’ve had everything given to them on a silver platter. We’ve given them the equipment, the venue, the promotion and they haven’t had to work for it. I think it’s going to be quite interesting the next couple of years as we sort of slowly pull away and we hand over the baton to the local Afghans and they have to sort of move forward without us.”

Let us know what you think in the comments below and if you’d like to see more videos like this hit that subscribe button.