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Academic and activist Rebecca Hillman talked about collaborations between theatre makers
and trade unions, how it can be used to challenge oppressive structures, and how art can be
used as a political tool.
This was a theme taken up by Dave Smith of Blacklisted, who spoke of ‘propaganda by the
deed,’ and the campaign to expose the recent blacklisting of union activists in the
construction industry which had been supported by various art forms from documentary
film to song.
Peter Marcuse from the artists’ collective Brandalism discussed their campaign against the
corporate control of outdoor adverting – how it pollutes our minds. Advertisements were
taken down and replaced with different images by this art collective.
After a call for graphic artists to attend AA meetings (Advertisers Anonymous), intrigued
designers turned up, keen to take on the toxicity of consumerism and adopt the manifesto
‘Advertising shits in your head. When asked about the legality of the campaign, Peter’s
answer was.
‘They didn’t ask if they could put their images in our faces, so we didn’t ask them if we could
take them down.’
‘What got you going?’ I asked him later.
"We were motivated by the dominance of commercial images in our cities, and the idea that
those with the most amount of money can display their messages in front of us without our
consent. Advertising regularly re-asserts problematic cultural values that appeal to our
sense of status, individualism, wealth and power - rather than socially beneficial values like
equality, community and solidarity…Confronting the advertising industry means
organizing…. and challenging one of a key drivers of neoliberal consumer capitalism."
Another ‘artivist’ was Theresa Easton of the Artists’ Union of England, talking about her work
with communities engaged in activism – a hidden art force putting the paper images into a
campaign, notably the Durham Teaching Assistants strike, when their employers tried to cut
their pay by 23%. Did those employers really expect them to lose £5k a year?
Sean Dey of Reel News was involved too – showing his film of highly energised protests,
mostly women, at the Durham demonstrations of November 2016, and eighty picket lines of
newly empowered workers. You don’t get that back in the bottle so easily.
Reel News is a video activists collective who know how to use social media well, how,
paradoxically, to use it to build that old fashioned idea of getting people in a room talking
together.
Art in education was a big theme of the GFTU event. Poet Jess Green – all staccato
movement and Kate Tempest intensity - expressed through her performance, the imperative
of education – Latin - educare - to lead out – about the folly of excessive testing of children
and the pointless bureaucracy imposed on young teachers. ‘Let kids be kids not a national
average statistic.’
Banner Theatre, who have been working with trade unions since the early 1970s, did a great
performance and music piece on the recent Chicago teachers strike, and the formation of
Coalition of Radical Educators (CORE) a group that transformed their sluggish union into a