The crisis is here, let the party begin! April 30, 2009. At first the crisis was just a state of being, a kind of social sadness that paralyzed everything. To break this atmosphere we couldn’t think of anything better than to throw a party. The first thing you need for a party is a good location, so we set out to find a place where social sadness and fear were extremely present. It didn’t take us long to find one: an unemployment office.
I really enjoy the events that we host at The Sanctuaries. They're well planned but not over-planned, so there's space to just be yourself. On Monday, January 19th, we held a wonderful event that celebrated the teachings and life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The turnout was strong!
Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime.
Save Canada is a direct action that began in Ontario in fall 2013. In reaction to TransCanada's public relations tour of townships affected by the Keystone XL pipeline, Save Canada decided to infiltrate the meetings, which were being held as propaganda displays rather than honest conversations with the people.
"Members of the Reclaim Shakespeare Company jumped on stage at the Noël Coward theatre to deliver another surprise anti-BP performance. Just before the second half of a BP-sponsored Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performance of Much Ado About Nothing was due to begin, the three actor-vists performed a short Shakespeare-inspired piece.
If, like me, you spent the days after Trump’s election in a depressed stupor wondering what – if anything – would change, look no further than Good Trouble. Set up by former Dazed editor Rod Stanley, it’s a new collective arts platform dedicated to celebrating the culture of resistance and grassroots activists promoting positive change.
On 6 January 2012, Metrópolis (TVE 2) broadcast "Activismo y Ficción", a report directed by Enmedio members Leónidas Martín and Núria Campabadal. It looks at a series of creative projects that lie somewhere between fiction and social activism.
Valentine Peace Project (VPP) Community Valentine actions started on the streets of Los Angeles with the sharing of thousands of poems on peace and expressions of love given out wrapped around carnations and later Fairtrade roses. Students also made paper flowers to give out with their own written reflections or submissions selected from Valentinepeaceproject.org.
Creative Graffiti at the Urban Culture Festival in Germany
By Loredana Loy
A street art project by by KD Key Detail from Minsk, Belarus--created and featured at the IBUg 2013 Urban Culture Festival in Zwickau, Germany.
The project is entitled "Bon Appetit." Images speak louder than words. Links and photos below.
The Guerrilla Girls tactic was well thought-out and was effective in creating a spectacle to draw attention to the issue at hand, which is the lack of female representation in the museum. Where I think the campaign has some drawbacks is in the actual message on the billboard. The rhetorical and ironic message is subtle and really only reaches those who are privy to the art world and/ or the museum.
“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Mahatma Gandhi
#FUEELESTADO is a project about the lack of social justice and the gross human rights violations in Mexico. It examines the conflict between state power and personal autonomy and responsibility, a conflict that, in Mexico, involves missing persons and unidentified bodies and that can’t be silenced anymore.
We Animals is an ambitious project which documents, through photography, animals in the human environment. Humans are as much animal as the sentient beings we use for food, clothing, research, experimentation, work, entertainment, slavery and companionship. With this as its premise, We Animals aims to break down the barriers that humans have built which allow us to treat nonhuman animals as objects and not as beings with moral significance.
"For those who haven’t seen it, Big Bang Big Boom (2010) is yet another fabulous animated graffiti parable from the Blu
art collective. Their work is endlessly fascinating — animated
creatures sliding seamlessly from walls, through sand, along pipes and
under bridges into stop-motion interaction with beach garbage and
Regardless of one's spiritual ties (or lack thereof) to Christianity, all artistic activists can take a note or two from Jesus's playbook--the actions of "a radical Mediterranean Jewish peasant building a revolutionary movement two millennia ago."1. Jesus: Media Mogul. Jesus was a master of making a scene, ensuring that news would spread. If he was around today, the media wouldn't be able to get enough of him.
Camp Mossandsticks, named after moss and sticks--two of the most rudimentary tools with which one can spark fire--is a site for young women and girls to become resourceful, defiant, and self-sufficient revolutionaries of today. Started on November 6, 2012, the camp hosts workshops to spark the attendees’ inner political flames, challenging them to confront disenfranchisement created by the status quo and to take matters into their own hands.
The Colors Mountain is a collective intervention project that uses a virtual space dedicated to the observation and investigation of alleged ecological crimes , with the goal of using the concept of "reasonable doubt", not only for possible court acquittal but also cause a formal investigation that could lead to a court complaint.
In São Paulo, just like in many other metropolitan regions, public transport is not as effective as it could be. Buses and trains usually run overcrowded, late and on limited hours, so that owning a car increases a lot one’s comfort. But not everybody can afford to have one, so a clear and recurrent class distinction occurs: public transport is mostly used by poor people.
On Tuesday, May 8, in the midst of final exam week, a group of female first-year students performed a public art action at UC Berkeley to call attention to the UC Regents’ privatization of what was once the premier public university in the country.(See photos below)
"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.
Rain of Poems took place over London on Tuesday 26th June 2012 at 9pm. One hundred thousand poems printed on bookmarks by over 300 contemporary poets from 204 countries fell from a helicopter over Jubilee Gardens during Poetry Parnassus as the sun sets.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
Xu Bing, the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist, has brought his “Phoenix” installation to the majestic nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The two phoenixes, both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors of the Cathedral, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night.
"It
was important to me to present the whole story in a way that would
captivate people’s attention and make a memorable statement. Making
quilts seemed an ironic solution. Quilts act as a functional memory, an
historical record of difficult times. It
is during times of hardship that people have traditionally made quilts,
The latest episode in Nicolas Heller's documentary web series "No Your City," as published by Gothamist, features the arguably pretentious, inarguably earnest street performer Kalan Sherrard, who was recently arrested during his peaceful anarchist puppet show. Functioning as a video manifesto for his peculiar ways, the clip is at least compelling.
Through his environmental, social justice organization, Instituto-E, Dr. Oskar Metsavaht, the creative director behind ethical fashion brand, Osklen, joined forces with Rainer Nolvak, founder of international civic sanitation movement, Let's Do it and Umer Pter, head of External Relations and Estonian delegate at the Rio+20 U.N.