Reminder of the ongoing aims of my practice:
- create, stimulate, encourage change, spur people to action
- change the way people think, add complexity, nuance and depth to people’s understanding of the world and the way it works
- critique communication practices within activism, and possibly probe and suggest alternative forms of activism?
- platform and amplify marginalised voices
- “forge more attentive and open structures to provide opportunities for others to be heard” (Lupton on De Bretteville)
Expanding on the Parliament Action, and Reformulation as activism.
At the time of the first tutorial I was coming up to my first ever trial. In November 2020 I scaled the Houses of Parliament to hang a giant letter from a group called Africans Rising to the government and people of the UK, asking for an honest acknowledgement and apology for the true human cost of slavery and colonialism, and debt cancellation and reparations for Africa (among other things). At the time of this action we were doing the Unit 1 “formulate” brief, and considering how processes of reformulation (transforming, scaling, recontextualising) changes the meaning or interpretation of existing material. This letter was written by activists on the African continent and transferred to us as a word document. We were asked how we could help deliver this letter, this message, to the people and leaders of the UK, i.e. the government and the Queen. We considered a range of approaches, all of which meant considering how the new form and context would impact the communication. In the end, we decided on a handmade banner, 7m x 12m (possibly the biggest banner we’ve ever made in the art factory) to be hung from the Houses of Parliament. Parliament was the only appropriate target (as I recently argued in court) because it placed the letter’s appeal firmly in the context of politics: and the solutions to these issues are political. The banner was handmade, in seven 1.5m strips, that were then sewn together. We had to project the letter onto the fabric from a 12m distance, again, doing this in strips, taking care to get the angles right and not distort it. A small team worked on this over many days, using paint markers to trace the outlines of the letters (for a total of 500 words) and then taking it over to the painting table to colour the letterforms in. Afterwards the strips were sewn together, another multi-person job, as the volume of fabric was simply huge by this point, and needed a second person to help pass it through the sewing machine. Hand-making it was partly an issue of cost, and partly one of values. It took a huge amount of labour, care and collaboration—working practices I explored a lot last term—and which I believe contribute to the meaning of the end product: the process is the medium. It was an act of devotion, solidarity and allyship, as we pledged our time, labour and care to support the Africans Rising cause, and it was an action that has forged a great relationship between us. Extinction Rebellion actively works in this way, hand-painting, -printing and -making all its visual materials, because those aesthetics of craft and care and DIY culture communicate some of the vital values of the movement: empathy, resourcefulness and passion.
Collaborative making is something that happens very naturally in activism, as Evan Nicole Brown explores in her Futuress article, “An Accidental Game of Telephone”, which unearths how a group of women designed the Black Panther logo. It was not a conscious collaborative project, nor even a conscious design project – like so much activist design, it happened on the fly, in brief moments, stolen between other aspects of organising a movement. Lowndes County’s existing white supremacist ruling party used as a white rooster as its symbol. Jennifer Lawson says, “I recall that John Hulett [a local organizer and activist] then said: ‘What we need is a mean black cat to run that white rooster out of this county.’” Ruth Howard Chambers, a SNCC member, sent a rough sketch of a panther to the LCFO team in Alabama, and Dorothy Zellner was asked to tidy it up and turn it into a logo. Jennifer Lawson adapted it for use in pamphlets and printed material, and years later Lisa Lyons was hired to adapt the logo for the Oakland, California chapter. As such it was adapted and iterated, its form shifting somewhat with each different use, only finally becoming solidified in posterity (though many different versions of it were operative at the time). None of these women sought credit or celebration, or sought to claim ownership over the design. Its collaborative history is written into the many versions that proliferate over time, but the strength and courage of the image is never lost.
Serbian activist Serdja Popovic writes in Blueprint for a Revolution that the Otpor! (meaning revolution) clenched fist logo similarly came from a scribble on a piece of paper, and was quickly adapted into something that could be easily and widely spray painted; this was their main recruitment method in the formative days of the movement. They quickly spray-painted 300 fists in one evening, and when the citizens of Belgrade woke up the next day, “this gave people the sense that something large and well-organized was lurking just beneath the surface.” Of course the principles of branding, and the importance of a having a unifying symbol, are well known to us graphic designers, but it’s useful and interesting for me to consider this from an activist and movement-building perspective.
The banner we made was the result of a collective working, editing, designing and making process, between activists in Africa and the UK, something visible in the imperfections of the handprinted lettering (in a variety of hands), in the sections sewn together, in the many names signed on the bottom, and in the number of us it took to get it in place. Despite its many words, the letter was perfectly legible from Westminster Bridge, where many people stopped to look and read, and it is legible in the photos we have of it. The scale of it gave it gravity and importance, as did its new context: the words of this African movement, fighting for justice, peace and dignity, were now set against the backdrop of the grandeur and wealth of the Houses of Parliament, wealth that was built on the profits of colonialism, slavery and empire. It was the best platform we could give these voices, the voices of people whose countries have been exploited for centuries by the people in that building, and the political processes that happen within those walls.
Led By Donkeys project Boris Johnson’s quotes on Donald Trump onto Big Ben.
Ocean Rebellion Project onto the Natural History Museum
In my work with Ocean Rebellion we use mischief, humour and spectacle to get a wide audience on board – people are entertained, and thus intrigued, and willing to engage. We frequently use projections as a way to get our messages out there; projecting onto the target sites makes the message clear, and also undermines the authority and legitimacy of the targets. Projecting something onto the building itself, or else using the site and its architecture in other ways, makes the building part of the protest, something which is especially powerful when the grandeur and pomp of the building seeks to assert authority or respectability. This is partly inspired by Led By Donkeys, whose work emphasises the power of recontextualising even more strongly, since they frequently use pre-existing material that’s already in the public domain. They usually take things that politicians and world leaders have said, and simply reflect it back to them, alongside facts and statistics that reveal their failures, inadequacies or outright lies. They blow their tweets up to billboard size, or project messages about Brexit onto the white cliffs of Dover and videos about Boris Johnson’s hypocrisy onto the Houses of Parliament.
Another fascinating example of recontextualising is The Museum of Neoliberalism curated by Gavin Grindon and Darren Cullen, aka ‘Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives’. A collection of prime examples of neoliberal culture, that may go unnoticed in every day life, where neoliberalism is all around us, but when gathered together and placed alongside one another, paint a clearer picture of the underlying value systems inherent in a neoliberal culture. Added to these are quotes and commentaries from political and social theorists, and satirical responses to neoliberalism by artists and activists. There’s something especially entertaining about it coming together in museum form. A museum suggests legitimacy, as though something is important enough to be worthy of collection and study. It gives the subject matter importance and gravitas, and suggests in this case that it is perhaps worthy of study in order to understand humanity and society. The museum context also suggests something historical, lending perhaps a hopeful optimism to the conversation, as though we are looking back on neoliberalism as an outdated curiosity from a distant future. It perhaps lends the audience the distance to be critical about our present society.
I guess all of these are forms of brandalism, subtervising and hacktivism. They all hijack and play upon existing methods of communicating authority and strength, in order to subvert the dominant modes of communication and the values they espouse. In doing so, all seek to expose the dominant power systems that structure and shape our society, so that they might be recognised for what they are, and challenged. So much of this power is invisible and pervasive.
This analysis has made me more keen to continue to pursue some form of catalogue, collection or archive as a way of projecting and distributing the analysis I have done of the visual communication systems of our present day justice system. Perhaps I would like to find a way to bring in humour to this, though I acknowledge that my material is less innately humorous (or inconsistent or hypocritical) as much of the material dealt with in these examples. However I think it may be possible to use humour to suggest the absurdity that our legal system is more concerned with communicating its authority than its values.