Taking back the media. The Bristol Cable is a media co-operative shaking up local news with hard-hitting investigative journalism.
“In every single pub up and down the country people will be talking about how crap the media is,” says Alon Aviram, co-founder of The Bristol Cable, “but there aren’t many conversations around what the alternatives are and how we can remodel it.”
From 1993 to 1998, Spanish activist group Lesbianas Se Difunden (LSD) produced and published a collection of texts and visuals called Non-Grata (Snyder 10), using erotic images of the female body and sexual relationships to capture their audiences’ attention. Within these graphic publications would be calls for queer activism, female freedom, anti-capitalist critiques, and the overall necessity for protest (Snyder 10).
As part of an international workshop (10-11 October 2015) with the Center for Artistic Activism, 17 trans activists and artists from 13 European countries developed a creative campaign to mark some of the spaces in Berlin which have symbolic significance for trans people.
Theater as investigative reporting or investigative reporting as theater, however you cut it, Mark Thomas, a British TV actor/comedian and activist has created a fascinating show. It's by him and about him: how he ran stings that put some illegal arms traffickers out of business or in jail and how he was deceived and betrayed by a "comrade" who turned out to be a spy for BAE Systems, the UK's largest aerospace and weapons company.
ŠTO TE NEMA is a public monument created as a response to Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II - the systematic killing of 8,372 Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected safe area of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July of 1995.
In 1982, for documenta 7, Beuys proposed a plan to plant 7000 oaks throughout the city of Kassel, each paired with a basalt stone. The 7000 stones were piled up on the lawn in front of the Museum Fridericianum with the idea that the pile would shrink every time a tree was planted. The project, seen locally as a gesture towards green urban renewal, took five years to complete and has spread to other cities around the world.
In 1998 Portuguese born artist Paula Rego created a series of work entitled Untitled. The Abortion Pastels. Rego created her work in response to a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal, which was very narrowly defeated. Each canvas depicted the image of a woman undergoing an unsafe abortion. When the series was exhibited in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, Rego recalled the whispered secrets of women in the gallery while looking at her artworks.
In 1932, Bennett Cerf, cofounder of Random House Publishing, acquired the rights to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States, believing that the book would be as successful as it had been throughout Europe. But Cerf had a problem. The book was banned in the United States and would be seized as soon as it came off the printing press, which would lose Cerf millions of dollars.
The problem with feminism is that it’s just too familiar. The attention of a jaded public and neophiliac media may have been aroused by #MeToo, with its connotations of youth, sex and celebrity, but for the most part it has drifted recently towards other forms of prejudice, such as transphobia. Unfortunately for women, though, the hoary old problems of discrimination, violence and unpaid labour are still very much with us.
Protests continue at Gorleben nuclear waste storage facility
Demonstrations against the German government's nuclear power policy continued as protesters marched near the Gorleben waste storage site. But one provocative author came up with a racier way to block a nuclear power law.
Protestors near Gorleben
Protests near Gorleben have died down but not stopped
In 2023, it is impossible to be an apolitical artist in Eastern Europe. As war rages on in Ukraine, art serves as a powerful and necessary tool, according the members of the Sunflower Solidary Community Center in Warsaw: Maria Beburia, Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Taras Gembik, Yulia Krivich, Kaja Kusztra, Natalia Sielewicz, and Bogna Stefańska.
Zoo Portraits is a humorous photo series by Barcelona-based photographer Yago Partal that matches animal heads with human bodies. Partal amazingly matches animals to appropriate human bodies and even manages to match their personalities and styles.
Anti-government protests in Russia are taking many different forms, from mass rallies and marches to defiant street art and music.
Just recently, members of a feminist punk group were arrested in Moscow's Red Square after they performed a song ridiculing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The group, which calls itself Pussy Riot, says it's planning more stunts before March's presidential elections.
The Yes Lab collaborated with "Knobotiq" to design an action against UBS, a financial services giant renowned for aiding tax evaders, funding environmental destruction, and getting bailed out by the public.
Filling Stomachs to Open Minds on Immigration
In Sweden, Dinners Melt Cultural Barriers
STOCKHOLM — Last year, when Ebba Akerman, 31, was teaching Swedish to immigrants in the suburbs of this city, she ran into one of her students on the train and asked him whether he enjoyed living in her country.
Just over a decade ago on May 15, 2011, a wave of social outrage began as the Spanish people collectively decided that they had had enough of the corruption, cuts, and inequalities affecting their country.
Fourteen Greenpeace activists have been held for more than 48 hours after trespassing into and occupying a liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal in Zeebrugge, Belgium
Greenpeace Belgium said it was working for their release. Valerie Del Re, director of Greenpeace Belgium, said: “It’s not our activists, but gas companies like Fluxys who are the criminals in this story.
Yoann Bourgeois is a mastermind in performance art who treats dance, acrobatics, and theatricality as practices that delve into fundamental human experiences related to falling and flying. His approach is unique, in which every creation transcends into something more than just a performance but an exploration of life's poetic rhythms.
In 2013, Shell sent out press releases about their upcoming event, the Science Slam, which would aim to “celebrate the company’s responsible oil production” and “showcase ideas for renewable energy by scientists and students.” Essentially, Shell organized this event in the hopes that it would allow the multinational oil company to appear as if it is actually concerned about the environment and finding alternatives to oil.
When Tracey Emin aired her dirty laundry in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, she set a new standard for confessional art. She conceived of the installation, titled My Bed (1998), after a long, bedridden bender following a bad break-up. When Emin finally left her sheets, she examined the mess she’d created.
"Surround Congress”: as soon as we’d heard this, in our minds we were there. To make the Government resign and demand they start a new constituent process seemed like a great idea. We immediately got to work.