Between 1995 and 2017 the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin brought in $35 billion USD in revenue for Purdue Pharma, most of which went directly into the hands of the Sackler family.
"Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves may have recounted it. They are compiled with found audio that evidences their final moments.
Between A Rock And A Hard Place is a project consisting of a cleaning performance, a film and a big event on August 18, 2012. From the material recorded on this day, a film and a vinyl record will be made.
On April 30th NYU in conjunction with Free University held liberation lab in Washington Square Park from 11 30 Am until roughly 5 or 6pm. The day was very festive and full of amazing talks, performances, installations and discussions. I even got to participate in this day via our final project in the creative activist course.
A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.
As the Yippies prepared for protests at 1968 Democratic National Convention, Yippie Paul Krassner rattled Chicago leaders by suggesting that the Yippies were planning to put LSD in the city water supply. As Abbie Hoffman said at the Chicago Seven trial: "I read in the paper the day before that they had 2,000 troops surrounding the reservoirs in order to protect against the Yippie plot to dump LSD in the drinking water.
On 27th January 2013, the participatory project titled 175 hectares has run through the streets of the city of Trento (Italy). All the community has traced a line of white chalk that measures 6.3 km and the area included was 175 hectares: the exact surface area of the extermination camp of Birkenau (Auschwitz II, Poland).
Kanami Kusakima, also known as the woman who dances in Washington Square Park with the long black hair and the paint, was happy to allow the Mayor's Office of NYC use her image as a promotional tool for a "post-coivd" New York. Yet, she has had multiple encounters with police who want to shut her performance down.
In March 2013 we started a grassroots boycott movement against Coca-Cola for exploiting legal loopholes to kill off container deposit recycling in the Northern Territory. We simply used the same successful strategy as the ANZ Out of Order action, putting out of order signs on Coca Cola vending machines and posting the photos on social media.
QUESTION: Year after year, decade after decade, you alert the legal authorities to cruelty violations and suffering animals in peril, yet nothing ever happens. You know for a fact there are thousands of screaming and suffering hens inside a factory farm and you know the authorities will once again turn a blind eye, so what do you do?
To some, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) might appear to be but a ragged bunch of activists sporting false noses, a smudge of grease paint, camouflage pants and bad wigs. And those people may be right. But it is also a highly disciplined army of professional clowns, a militia of authentic fools, a battalion of true buffoons.
In early 2016, I began paying attention to reports about the incredible number of unarmed black people being killed by the police. The posts on social media deeply disturbed me, but one in particular brought me to tears: the killing of Alton Sterling in my hometown Baton Rouge, La. This could have happened to any of my family members who still live in the area. I felt furious, hurt and hopeless.
Shine, written by Stoneman Douglas students Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña in response to the tragic shooting at their school on February 14, 2018 to inspire unity, hope, and change. MSD alum Brittani Kagan collaborated with students and faculty to create this music video to honor the victims and the school.
In December – as many around the globe were preparing for the holidays – Sama, a former attorney, remained hunkered down in her house in Kabul, Afghanistan, trying to comprehend how her world had changed.
It was 1967, and sentiment against the Vietnam War was in the air nationwide. The counterculture was flourishing on the heels of the Summer of Love. Organizers from Mobe — the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam — initially called for a massive march on Washington.
A collective resistance movement dedicated to reasserting communal ownership of common spaces, Reclaim the Streets staged its first action on Camden High Street in 1995, when activists closed the road to vehicle traffic to make way for a street party. Combining the tactics of non-violent direct action with 90's UK rave culture, organizers kept the location secret until the last moment to preempt police interception.
"Cat House for Dogs," said an ad in the Village Voice, "featuring a savory selection of hot bitches..." Along with this ad, a press release was sent to the media saying that if your dog graduated from obedience school, if it was his birthday, or if he was just horny, for $50 you could get your dog sexually gratified. This was not a breeding service, but purely a sexual pleasure service.
Matthew “Levee” Chavez sits at a table in New York City’s Union Square, sporting a thrift store suit and tie, holding a sign that reads “Subway Therapy.” This act of social practice, which started as an invitation for conversation, went viral after he set up shop at the subway the day after the 2016 presidential election. He wrote “Express Yourself” on a Post-It and stuck it to the tiled wall.
ARTS/CULTURE
FOKAL is the hub in Haiti where locals and international visitors from all walks of life -- artists, writers, citizens, activists-- come together to discuss the most pressing nation- and community-building issues, enjoy cutting edge artistic expressions, and share their ideas.
We are sitting at a dhaba – a roadside tea-shop in Pakistan often frequented by lower-to-middle income men. At our table: four women and camera crew. The reporter from ‘one of the most globally viewed’ [read: western], mainstream British outlets looks me in the eye: “So, how safe do you feel at the moment? We were just surrounded by a group of little boys [because of the cameras], do you think the situation can ever turn on you?"
Renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera surprised a Bogota audience in September when she lined up three people directly involved in the Colombian conflict for a chat. The real performance however, started when a waitress emerged with a tray of neatly organised lines of cocaine, and began offering them to members of the audience.
Luzinterruptus turns their art activism towards the overabundance of dog doo littering the city’s streets.
The studio inflated 500 poop-scoopin' plastic bags and placed a lightbulb inside each one.
Installation lasted nine hours.
In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher, along with his church group, was protesting outside a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction of 116 parcels of public land in Utah's red rock country. Tim decided to take his protest inside and disrupt the auction itself. Instead, at the door, he was offered a bidder's paddle — which, after a split second of hesitation, he accepted.