Warping Protest: Increasing Inclusion and Widening Access to Art Activism Utilising Textiles
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Britta Fluevog
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest.
In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism.
Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.
Performing Citizenship: Gathering (in the) Movement. The Choreographic Format of Circle Dancing and the Round Dance as a Matrix of Collective Action in the Context of Political Assemblies, Protests and Occupations.
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Liz Rech
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the activist context of ‘movement’, the concept of movement with regard to the ‘moving body’ always involves three aspects: The political movement itself; the real physical, choreographic movement; as well as associated personal movement and connection to shared values. These three dimensions are aspects of a bodily practice, in which the collected bodies are present and vulnerable in assemblies like demonstrations or other acts of resistance in public space. These practices mark the field of study in which the political occurs on and in the ‘between-ness’ of the bodies. The article considers choreographic formats that appear in specific protest contexts: What insights can be discovered with regard to its generation of political dimensions? How can the role of the body and its ‘Response / Ability’ be defined within the context of political ethics? What practices of movement would respond to its necessities?
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This Chapter was published In: Hildebrandt, P., Evert, K., Peters, S., Schaub, M., Wildner, K., Ziemer, G. (Hrsg.): Performing Citizenship – Bodies, Agencies, Limitations. London 2019 (Palgrave). ISBN 978-3-319-97502-3
This open access book discusses how citizenship is performed today, mostly through the optic of the arts, in particular the performing arts, but also from the perspective of a wide range of academic disciplines such as urbanism and media studies, cultural education and postcolonial theory. It is a compendium that includes insights from artistic and activist experimentation. Each chapter investigates a different aspect of citizenship, such as identity and belonging, rights and responsibilities, bodies and materials, agencies and spaces, and limitations and interventions. It rewrites and rethinks the many-layered concept of citizenship by emphasising the performative tensions produced by various uses, occupations, interpretations and framings.
→ Open Acess: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-97502-3
Diary of a Suffragette
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Marijn Brinksma
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This fictional diary is written by a fictional person and consists of factual information. The writings are set up in a chronological timeline. Our goal is to provide insight and information about the steps suffragettes had to take to fight for the right to vote.