Each week we’ll be calling back to an example of creative activism from our website Actipedia – an open-access, user-generated database of creative activism. This week we’d like to highlight this really powerful piece of arts activism by Public Movement, a Tel Aviv based ‘performative research body’. In 2012 they created Re-Branding European Muslims to investigate conflict …
Continue reading “Actipedia revisited: Public Movement – ‘Re-Branding European Muslims’ (2012)”
In Creativetime 2012, artist-activist Leónidas Martín from Enmedio Collective in Spain gives different guidelines on how make protest artistic, effective and fun.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell chronicles the remarkable story of the courageous Liberian women who came together to end a bloody civil war and bring peace to their shattered country. Thousands of women — ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts and daughters, both Christian and Muslim — came together to pray for peace and then staged a …
Andrew Boyd describes himself as an “author, activist, and prankster for social change”, involved in campaigns such as Billionaires for Bush or The other 98%. Together with Dave Oswald Mitchell, he recently edited Beautiful Trouble. A toolbox for revolution, a kind of instruction manual for creative activism. We had the chance to ask him some …
It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. …
Continue reading “Protesters Against Wall Street – NYTimes.com”
Letter from prison: Tim DeChristopher speaks The following text appeared in a handwritten letter from Tim DeChristopher addressed to Grist’s Jennifer Prediger. If I had ever doubted the power of words, Judge Benson made their importance all too clear at my sentencing last month. When he sentenced me to two years in prison plus three …
Here is an interesting article from Waging Nonviolence about Occupy Wall Street. A bit after 10 p.m. on Saturday night in occupied Liberty Plaza, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any …
I love stuff like this because of the metaphors it supplies. I’m not a fighter. I haven’t been in anything close to a fight in 15 years. I’m resistant to the idea of fighting, and fear fantasies where I would need this (knock on wood) though being prepared… blah blah blah. But I like how …
Continue reading “Get Loud, Move Quickly, and Shifting Focus”
By Sarah Amsler Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) via the Huffington Post Under what might now need to be termed comparatively normal circumstances, I have often agonised over helping my students understand the practical significance of critical theory. They ask, but what can one actually do with Herbert Marcuse today? In a …
Continue reading “Creative militancy meets militant creativity”
Have No Fear the Community Avengers are Here! As the right wing mob mobilizes to shut down democratic debate on health care reform; as Van Jones is forced from the White House through distortions of the truth and plays on racial and political fears; as the recession deepens – the masked marauders known as the …
apparently I added the wrong video the last time I tried to do this, so let me try again. http://blip.tv/play/gaEW3O5ygpNs Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…
This guy is great. He saw an opportunity and jumped on it, disrupting a corrupt auction, costing major corporations money, and drawing attention to an issue that easily could have been buried under the mountain of year-end top 10 lists and countless other examples of Bush Administration corruption. What started out as a spur of …
Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ’em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the activists …
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win. Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that …
A bid by Bay Area anti-nuclear weapons activists and the New College of California to take over Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been rejected by the U.S. nuclear weapons agency. Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) out of Livermore, New College in San Francisco and two allied groups filed the bid for the Livermore …
Continue reading “LIVERMORE / Anti-nuke activists lose out on bid to run weapons lab”
This is a new video from 23/6.com a political-ish comedy site. The video is about a serious issue, but treats it in a comical-ish way. Which is a fine strategy if done well, but I there’s just not quite enough substance here. All you really get from the video is that there’s a terrorist watch …
Is this art? Is it activistm? Certainly, the power elite are not shaking in their boots over such stunts, but this just viscerally seems right. via: the Independet By Guy Adams in Los Angeles Friday, 27 June 2008 San Francisco Public Utilities Commission The plant that could be renamed the George W Bush Sewage Plant …
Continue reading “San Francisco to vote on naming sewer after George Bush”
Play is one of the earliest and most important activities of mammals; helping adolescents learn the skills they need to survive. Games take the free play of the animal kingdom and apply rules and constraints, which have the ability to teach and develop the values and beliefs of a culture. The chess queen developed as …
Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp – Interview ArtForum, April, 2003 DOUGLAS CRIMP: One of your members, Mark Simpson, is no longer with us. Perhaps we can officially dedicate our remarks here to his memory. When did Mark die? TOM KALIN: Mark died of AIDS on November 10, 1996. DC: Okay, let’s begin with a …
For the past four years, Critical Art Ensemble’s Steve Kurtz has been a martyr in the world of activist art, the victim of overzealous FBI investigatory impropriety. The case against him was utterly absurd, Kafka-esque even. Thankfully,though, the judge saw reason this month and his case was finally dismissed. Now, he has an exhibit entitled …
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