An Artsadmin project allowing young people to express their socio-political opinions through processes including performance, discussion and happenings. The project involved a group of 16-25 year olds who met weekly between February and April ’08 to discuss political issues that affect them and their communities. Participants worked with artist Richard DeDomenici and a selection of invited guest lecturers to see how they can actively bring awareness to the issues affecting the group.
How to protest - and survive
A poorly planned boycott is pointless, while a badly worded banner can land you in the cells. In this extract from her new book, Bibi van der Zee explains how to campaign effectively - without falling foul of the law
Bibi van der ZeeThe Guardian,
Thursday June 5 2008
Article historyProtesters take part in a demonstration against the expansion of London's Heathrow airport. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters
Direct actionCampaigns against the over-packaging of food have jolted supermarkets into acknowledging the need for change, while campaigns against the growth in aviation have kept airlines and the emissions in the headlines. In Wales and the west of Ireland, new gas pipelines have been the subject of unwanted attention. Direct action, done well, is probably one of the best ways of raising awareness and even getting a final concession.
Many of these actions have involved breaking the law: criminal damage, harassment, obstructing the highway, aggravated trespass. But direct action does not have to be illegal: it simply involves putting yourself on the line. You could spend your Saturdays outside the local petrol station dressed as a polar bear; that's direct action and it's certainly not against the law. You could, Women's Institute-style, bring back handfuls of packaging to your local supermarket, or stage a die-in in front of a coffee chain. Neither of these should land you in a police cell. Even entering an office or shop to stage a sit-in - as long as you do it peacefully without forcing entry - is not a criminal offence because trespass is a civil matter.
However, it is important to remember that, however well-behaved you are, the police may still arrest you. The shocking truth is that you do not have to do anything illegal in order to be arrested. If you are "making a nuisance of yourself", it is entirely possible that the police will haul you off. Still, you may well feel the risk is worth running. Direct action is cheap, quick and easy to organise. It can be massively embarrassing for the company involved, or for the government. Shame is one of the most potent weapons a protester has.
DemonstratingSlightly different laws apply to demonstrations (static protests on public land) and processions/marches along a planned route.
For demonstrations, the world's your oyster, as long as you're not planning on protesting within the "designated area" around parliament, in which case you'll need police permission. You must, however, make sure you are not obstructing the highway, which is any road or path over which the public has the right to pass. This is a criminal offence under the Highways Act 1980. Make sure the demo remains polite and not threatening in any way, otherwise the protesters could be accused of aggravated trespass under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. If you have more than six vehicles, under the same act, the police can ask you to leave.
If you are organising a march, you will need to begin by letting the police know. You need to give them the names and contact details of the organisers, as well as the date and proposed route, and you should ideally get this to them six clear days before the march. If you fail to comply with police conditions, you face up to three months in prison.
Banners
Misworded banners can get you into trouble. The Public Order Act 1986 prohibits the display of material that could be threatening, abusive or insulting to members of the public, or provoke violence, or cause members of the public to fear violence, or cause harassment, alarm or distress. In 2001 the peace protester Lindis Percy and an evangelical Christian were both charged under this act, the former for defacing an American flag at a US airbase, the latter for displaying a placard reading, "Stop Homosexuality, Stop Immorality, Stop Lesbianism". Percy was cleared, the Christian, a 67-year-old called Harry Hammond, was convicted.
Boycotts
Mark Farmaner, who heads the Burma Campaign, suggests a campaign group "should have something planned every week for the first six months of the boycott: postcards, protests, handing letters to staff as they go into the office". For the campaign to get British American Tobacco out of Burma, he and his colleagues found out the names and home addresses of all the directors and sent press cuttings about the regime to their homes. If you can get some big colourful publicity coup in there too, you're on to a winner: when the Burma Campaign targeted the lingerie-maker Triumph, they had posters of women in barbed-wire bras, which was, Farmaner says, "the only campaign I've ever run which made it into the Sun". And once you get a reputation, just a threat can be enough. MK One, the fashion retailer, agreed to stop sourcing clothes from Burma four hours after Farmaner sent out the press releases. It helps, he points out, if companies actually know they're being targeted. "I get so many things asking me to boycott someone, but not asking me to contact the company and tell them. How are they going to know?"
Letter-writing
Anna Tims, the Guardian's consumer champion, says that it's vital to be polite and reasonable, otherwise you increase the chance that your letter will just be ignored.
"Even I'm tempted to ditch letters from people who are just ranting, so imagine how a company feels."
The first thing to do is work out who you should be writing to. "Find out people's names - that gives your letter more impact," she advises. Follow all the old-fashioned rules of letter-writing rather than doing it email-style (snail mail is better than email, she believes, because "you never really know where those emails go"). So begin your letter Dear so-and so, and put your address at the top and your name clearly at the bottom beneath your signature. Tims says she's astonished at how often people don't follow these basic rules. Keep a copy for yourself and start a log.
It is also worth sending your letter to multiple destinations: find out the name of a couple of directors and cc your complaint to them. In Jasper Griegson's book The Complete Complainer he gives an example of contacting three directors of the same company in this way: one did not respond, one offered a partial refund, and the third offered a full refund.
As for politicians, MPs do pay attention to the letters they receive, and will almost always answer. They even take note of those pre-printed postcards that campaigns ask their supporters to send in, and, according to one parliamentary researcher, start to think about taking some action when they've got a stack that's about a thumbnail's width. There is a wonderful website called Write to Them (
writetothem.com) that takes all the faff out of contacting your MP. You can knock off an email in 10 minutes. Again, keep your letter polite; a rude rant about Palestine will simply be ignored.
The letters page in a newspaper is also a fantastic forum for local and national issues. Bertrand Russell, philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner, wrote hundreds of letters to editors, and it was an angry reader's letter to the Times in 1937 that led to the creation of the 999 service. It's a tribute to their power that, in 2005, Labour press officers in the national office adopted the practice known as "astroturfing" - stimulating grassroots support - by writing model letters for supporters and party members to send to local papers.
Being arrested
The relationship between police and protesters is historically a bit sticky. The police should be more grateful, really: one of the reasons they were brought into being was the public uproar after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when local volunteer yeomanry were sent in to break up a political gathering. Eleven people were killed. After that a police force began to seem like a good idea, although anyone who has seen the police charging on horseback into a march might be feeling a bit confused at this point.
It is vital to know your rights during demos, marches, civil disobedience and direct action. First, it keeps you calmer. Second, it saves you from getting into daft arguments - I met one campaigner who didn't realise the police had the right to take her fingerprints in the police station and ended up having a big row.
So, when can they arrest you?
1) When you have committed, are committing or are about to commit an offence (criminal damage, perhaps, or threatening behaviour, or simply obstructing the highway).
2) When a police officer has reasonable grounds for suspecting that you have committed, are committing or are about to commit an offence.
3) When a police officer has grounds to suspect you are guilty of an offence that he or she has reasonable grounds to suspect has been committed.
Frankly, most things are covered in here, aren't they? The police can always come up with a reason for hauling you away if they want to; they must, however, inform you that they are arresting you as they do it. The police can keep you for up to 36 hours without charging you - 96 hours if authorised by a magistrate. Once under arrest, the police don't need your permission to take fingerprints, photos, oral swabs, saliva or footwear impressions. They can use force if necessary. They do need permission to take a blood sample, a urine sample, a semen sample, a dental impression, a pubic-hair sample or a tissue sample.
· Rebel, Rebel: The Protestor's Handbook, by Bibi van der Zee, is published by Guardian Books at £14.99. To buy a copy for £12.99, visit
guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0845 606 4232.
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Lesson #1: How To Put A Condom On A Country. On the 18th of February 1993, the Bush administration passed a curious amendment to the National Institutes of Health Reauthorization Bill. Known as the Nichols Amendment, this peculiar moment of North American politics placed the US of A at the same level of China, Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, South Korea, Moldavia, Russia, and Saudi Arabia: it closed the borders of the country to seroconverted individuals.
Lesson #2: Even If You Use Them, Sometimes They Break.
Despite having been aware of the North American immigration ban on seroconverted people - was told of it even years before being told of my own seroconversion - I crossed the US border yesterday. Here I declare "I broke America's condom" and it broke as easily as that other one broke 4 years ago. Since that first one broke, breaking borders has a totally different meaning for me, for it has provided me with, let's say, an epiphany. Or, better, since that moment when - maybe because the lub was not enough or maybe because I like it rough - the condom broke and the bodies touched each other in the way they should never have done, since that moment, I was saying, breaking borders provided me with what I am: I am HIV+ and that seems to be, for many, my identity; the Other, the abject, the Jew, the dirty, that shall be kept away of the Land of Plenty, the American Dream.
Lesson #3: The Irony of Modern Times.
So I crossed the US border yesterday at the JFK airport.
Immigration Officer (always with that I-am-the-authority-do-fear-me look on his face): "What's the purpose of your visit to the US?"
Me (smiling): "Holiday."
Liar, liar, pants on fire!: the aim of my visit was another, really; it was to come to a conference organized by Visual AIDS, the CLAGS, and the Australian Research Council, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The irony of this is that the conference, "AIDS/ART/WORK", was about cultural responses to HIV/AIDS in the US, Australia, and South Africa and so I had to enter a country in which I am not welcomed - crossing its border like a virus crosses the open boundary of a broken condom - so I could discuss issues that have to do with that which makes me persona non grata inside its borders. The ironies of modern times.
Lesson #4: Let's Talk AIDS Seriously.
In 1988, in his book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Douglas Crimp wrote:
"AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualise it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. This assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics of AIDS. If we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyse them and wrest control of them."
AIDS is a political disease like no other in the history of illnesses and death. The only similar disease I can think of - similar, not equal - was the Black Plague that in the 14th Century killed 75 million people worldwide. Also the Black Plague was seen by many as a punishment for one's sins. Here lies the similitude with the representations of HIV as the Gay Plague - the punishment for engaging in unnatural acts such as loving and being loved in return (even if by someone of the same sex, even if only momentarily). This led to a get-together-and-fight: everywhere in America and soon after in the UK, gays, lesbians, and others, people that have been infected/affected by the epidemic, people that got sick of watching their friends die - first of loneliness, then of TB, Pneumonia, etc. - all of those claimed the streets demanding "AIDS Education, not Hysteria!", demanding a shift of the public fundings from gun making to AIDS researching, but mainly demanding the right to exist and be acknowledged as normal members of the population, in what seems to have been the last real global fight for common rights, the last real experience of community in the Western "civilized" countries.
Many things have changed since the 80s. And today, with the shifting of AIDS from death sentence to manageable chronic condition, one looks around and nobody is left on the streets. Nobody fights anymore. Living with HIV became living in silence. Because one doesn't die anymore; because the disease doesn't manifest itself visually on one's body anymore; because one lives with HIV and lives healthy. At least if one has a functioning NHS (UK) or a good health insurance (US).
However this new reality of AIDS as silence brings new problems that are shown by the exponential increase of new infections year after year, especially among young people (me included). So how to address these problems, how to help the HIV- keeping their status and the HIV+ making sense of themselves and of the new, dirty, "wrong" thing they carry inside, running in their veins, forever; a new thing that despite being dirty and "wrong" does not kill them but that nonetheless is there, it's here, it's real, and brings fear, doubt, and anxiety into everyday life.
These questions cannot be addressed by science. That's not its role. These questions must be addressed by the other side of culture, the one capable of dealing with uncertainties and possibilities, with realities that despite being unprovable are also full of truth; that other side of culture is Art. Art can save lives and Art can help us making sense of our lives. Art can kill loneliness.
So what happened to artists working with/on AIDS? Until the mid-90s they were many and had a very important role in the AIDS activism in the US: they helped people understanding that being HIV+ doesn't make you less, less worthy, less trustful, less beautiful, less alive. Many were the HIV+ artists that came out with their work and demanded recognition, something that ended up with the creation, in 1987 of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the "largest ongoing community arts project in the world", a memorial for all those artists that died of AIDS but that still live and fight the disease via their Art.
Richard Sawdon Smith,"Hear no Evil, See no Evil"
Today the reality is different: the AIDS Memorial Quilt grows slower and slower every year and Artistic responses to HIV seem to have become unfashionable, no longer the top of the tops, no longer important. More importantly, no longer sellable. How is it possible that people have decided to pretend that everything is OK now? It is true drugs are better and harm you less; it is true you don't need to die anymore; it is true that you won't probably need someone to care for you. But still.... is it fair? is it fair to be left by your own trying to make sense of yourself now that you know you are not like the others (even if you are!), now that every time you want to pull someone in a bar you have to think about the right moment to tell him/her "I am positive" and pray that his/her reaction will be "that's OK, I always play safe. And I still want to play with you."
So this is the reality today: AIDS Art in the US is disappearing; AIDS Art in the UK doesn't seem to exist (with a few exceptions, one of them, Richard Sawdon Smith, I met at this conference).
While in South Africa the National Gallery has a whole collection of AIDS art by
South African artists, while in the US conferences like this happen and artists are supported by Art and Health organizations (even if you need to lie to the authority so you can cross the border), while in Australia the Government has asked artists (both white and aboriginal) to help preventing AIDS with their work, while all of that happens there, here in the UK silence is the only thing you hear. A loud silence though. A silence that cannot be ignored. A silence that I want to break.
Richard Sawdon Smith, "Simon"
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