Put the Fun between your legs: or on not pretending to perform politics
“It reminds us of the time when it was still possible for free theatre to try out a loving anarchic social utopias… This is about saying goodbye to representation and is therefore the most radical form of theatre”
Frauke Hartman in The Frankfurter Rundschau, Reviewing: Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination intervention at the International Summer Festival, Kampnagel, Hamburg, 2010.
During the Hamburg Kampnagel Summer Festival 2010, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) spent 10 days putting together a “sound swarm”, working with electronic composers, bike and sound engineers, pirate radio hackers, artists and local anti-gentrification activists. We built a five-channel pirate radio station on a specially constructed double bike which then swarmed through the city together with several hundred other bicycles, all with different ways to receive and playback the radio channels and the sound work created especially for the route (see other essays in the book by those who experienced it).
Not asking for permission from the authorities and reclaiming the public space is a key part of our work and ethics, and therefore of our aesthetics: doing the right thing is beautiful. The sound swarm began in a theatre and ended its free movement when it was blocked by the Hamburg police department, who proceeded to provide some fantastic blue flashing light effects, which heightened the sense of theatre wonderfully. This chapter describes the project that was the prologue to the sound swarm “Put the Fun Between Your Legs: Become the Bike Bloc”, and attempts to illustrate how the Lab of ii likes to balance on the edge between politics and performance (but sometimes falls off!)
“This isn’t a normal travelling theatre company you know.”
Scotland Yard (British Police HQ), describing the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
We had been invited to take part in two shows themed around the UN climate negotiations, COP 15, to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009. This was to be a historical moment: Copenhagen would be the central stage for a global showdown between the world’s governments, all wanting to “save the planet”. Most of the world’s multinational corporations had sensed an opportunity for a crafty bit of greenwash and jumped on the bandwagon. Coca-cola’s new advertising campaign even renamed the city “HOPEnhagen”. The cultural world did not want to be left out, especially as “socially engaged” art was becoming the new darling of the mainstream theatres and museums.
One of the shows was to take place a month before the conference at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol, UK, as part of a series of events, commissioned by the art activist group Platform. The other would be in Copenhagen, part of an exhibition entitled Rethink, involving all of the city’s museums. Our commission was to be at the Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, bang in the city centre just as the COP 15 circus was in town, a fantastic opportunity to merge art and politics.
Meanwhile social movements from around the world, ranging from peasants from the global south to European anti-capitalist, were gearing up to protest at the panoply of false solutions to the crisis, and demand solutions that created climate justice, not more profit and inequalities.
The idea for the project followed the patterns that Lab of ii has practised over the last six years of its existence. Infamous for fermenting mass prayers to consumption in shopping malls, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal-fired power station, we try to inhabit the edge between art and politics, to open spaces where the imaginative poetic spirit of art meets the courage and rebelliousness inherent to activism. By bringing these two worlds together to share creativity and invent new forms of political action, we hope to create new forms of radical culture which are directly democratic and irresistibly pleasurable. We treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection.
We see art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Our work aims not to make art but to shape reality, not to describe our world but to change it. At the heart of our experiments (we don’t call them projects, plays or pieces), lie new ways of relating to each other and organising ourselves: working without hierarchy, using consensus decision making, taking direct action, practising self-management and living ecologically, we refuse to wait for the end of capitalism, but attempt to live in spite of it.
If the Lab of ii has any script at all, it is the book of nature. We take our cue from the energy-efficient, resilient, waste-free and productive nature of ecosystems, we learn more from knowing how a forest grows than any journal of political philosophy can teach us. We mimic the patterns and design principles of the natural world in our life and work. Some call this process Permaculture, an ecological design science that merges ancient indigenous knowledge with contemporary ecological research. At its heart are four interdependent ethics – people care, earth care, fair shares and living within limits – that frame a set of attitudes and principles, each of which encapsulates the complex wisdom of ecosystem design. Some describe Permaculture as “the art of creating beneficial relationships” or as “the science of connections”. In the end, it’s the idea of creating a myriad of forms of sustainable cultures that work with nature not against it.
Our praxis does not produce finished products that need to be toured around the world, but processes that attempt to create new worlds, in the here and now. We try to design beautifully crafted living systems, engineer moments that bring us together with others to create and carry out creative acts of disobedience. Acts that resemble the future we want, acts that say “yes this is the world we want, this is how it feels, looks, tastes, this is how people behave together”. But also “no, we refuse your authority, your greed and violence, we refuse the very roots of your rotten system and we are prepared to struggle hard to preserve life”.
Like dynamic ecosystems, the Lab of ii’s experiments are never static or over, there is never a red curtain falling at the end; we always try to keep the thing that makes theatre so powerful, its liveness, alive.
The idea for Experiment 10: Put the Fun Between Your Legs, Become the Bike Bloc was simple. We had spent a month living in Copenhagen in 2008, in the free town of Christiania during our road trip that became the book/film Paths Through Utopias (Nautilus, 2012). As bike lovers, we were impressed by the multitude of cyclists in the Danish capital but were flummoxed by the number of discarded bikes everywhere. The streets were littered with thousands of old bikes for some reason abandoned by the owners.
Create no waste is one of permaculture’s principles. Imagine how a forest operates: everything is food for everything else, nothing is ever thrown away. Every output of the system is turned into a useful input. Copenhagen’s waste would become the inspiration: why not collect the old bikes and transform them into tools of creative civil disobedience to be used during the actions in Copenhagen?
The project would thus be in three parts: Research, Design and Implementation. In Bristol, we would bring together artists and engineers, welders and bike hackers, activists and bike geeks, and members of the public in a series of free open workshops where we would look at the intrinsic characteristics of bicycles, research how people have pushed bike design to alternative uses beyond pure transport, and begin to design new tools of civil disobedience. Using consensus decision making, we would decide collectively on the best designs, build prototypes and test them. A week later, members of the team would go to Copenhagen and scale up the project, working with activists there, especially the UK climate camp movement.
“We may see the overall meaning of art change profoundly – from being an end to being a means, from holding out a promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating a way of living meaningfully in this one.”
Allan Kaprow. The Real Experiment. 1983. Artforum 12. no 4.
There were 8 weeks to go till the project started. Fliers and publicity had been designed and printed, photos sent for the catalogues, information distributed to the social movements, and workshops held with the UK climate camp to promote the idea. A high energy viral video was launched on social media. “Everything we take for granted: the weekend, gay rights, contraception, the right to strike, to form a union was won by disobedience”, declared a textured male voice as an animated hand drew designs of disobedience techniques. “Every form of rebellion we know was dreamt up and invented by someone somewhere.”
Then one day, the phone rang. It was the curator from Copenhagen.
“Hi John, I’ve been talking to the Danish police.”
“Oh!” I replied, slightly surprised.
“They say that there are laws about what constitutes a ‘bicycle’ in Denmark.”
“Really!”
“Yes.” She began to outline them. “A bicycle may not carry more than three persons, may have no more than four wheels. It can’t exceed a width of 1 metre or be more than 3.5 metres long. There are lots of details; I can send them to you by email. We need to send applications of designs to the police, 2 to 3 weeks beforehand.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “But in the end, we will be using these bicycles in acts of civil disobedience; it doesn’t really matter whether they are legal or not in the first place.”
“What do you mean?” she replied, bemused.
“Well, it is civil disobedience”.
There was a pause.
“You mean you’re going to break the law ?” I could hear the fear in her voice.
I tried to reassure her: “Not necessarily, but the whole point of the project is to build new tools of creative resistance and use them during the Reclaim Power day of action.”
“You mean you’re really going to do it?!” she said, shocked.
The conversation lasted over an hour. She said it would be very difficult for a city-funded museum to be involved in direct action and needed to talk to the lawyers in the Copenhagen municipality to see what they thought.
Even today writing this up, I am still astounded at how the disease of representation is so powerfully embedded in the art world that when a curator invites an art-activist group whose track record is all about creating new forms of creative resistance in public space, she somehow thinks that we are just going to “pretend” to do it. The word civil disobedience was used dozens of times in the project proposal, and our website is filled with images of direct action. Yet somehow, she did not see it.
Perhaps she expected us to build models and prototypes of the machines that would sit quietly in the gallery or at most be cycled around town symbolically. Her imagination of it was more like a fashion show than an act of direct action.
We tried to find a compromise that involved the museum drawing up a contract clearly stating that it was not liable for any “illegal” activity that might ensue from their exhibition. Then another email arrived. The curator had realised that it would be absurd to write a contract that would be neutral enough for all parties, us artists, the social movements we were working with, the municipality and the police, happy. And so, the commission was cancelled. “I wanted very much to include you in the exhibition, and I hoped to find a solution, but… I don’t think your project should be limited and cut in every way to fit into a contract. It was like cutting a big colourful bird to fit into a small grey cave.” So with a little over a month to go, we had lost the “grey cave” of the art museum, but now had no space to welcome the hundreds of people that were going to turn up in Copenhagen and collectively build the Bike Bloc.
“Basically, what I have to say here is simple: when people talk about politics in an artistic frame, they’re lying.”
Brian Holmes, Liars Poker.
The Lab of ii has always had a complicated position on the edge of art and activism, between subculture and mainstream, theatre and street. We have always loved edges. It is on the edge that creativity comes alive. The point where a forest meets meadowland or the sea slaps against the shore is the most dynamic parts of an ecosystem. It’s in those slithers of space that a multitude of different species builds beneficial relationships, and the engine of evolution moves fastest. Nearly everything we take for granted in society began as an experiment on the margins, the edgelands. For this reason, we try to have one foot in the imagination of the art world and the other in the courage and commitment of the political world, for we believe that when artists and activists share the worlds, magic can happen.
The curator never accepted that her decision was a political one; she said it was simply practical. But we saw it as political in every way, as an act of aesthetic censorship. The world of art was compromising our autonomy and creativity to stay safe and neutral. She claimed that she had exhibited political art for over a decade. Still, to us, it seemed her ‘political’ art was only a free autonomous space if it never challenged the laws of the real world; artists were free to express themselves as long as it was via a controllable conceptual gesture in the gilded cage of the art world.
In a time of violent social and ecological crisis, we think that staying safe is no longer an option. We feel strongly that, in this day and age, we are all going to have to accept that comfortable positions have become unsustainable. In the face of the combined threats of climate change, mounting authoritarianism and economic instability, it simply is no longer possible to remain neutral. As Paolo Freire so powerfully stated, “being neutral is to side with the oppressor”.
Every time an artist “represents” the problem, makes political plays or pictures, and does nothing to affect the root causes of this crisis, they are simply pretending to do politics, they are proposing symbols to make themselves feel better, strategies to promote their careers and polish their egos. They are wearing a disguise that enables them to strut on the catwalk of “cutting edge culture”, claiming to be makers of contemporary culture. But the culture they are making is built on piles of bones, on deserts and disappearing forests, on seas that can no longer sustain life, on the waste of things that enslave us. The desperate beauty of their art simply masks the barbarity of the present. But the present is where the future is born. This is why we see responsibility for the present as the only serious responsibility for the future. This is why we wish to confront reality with our work. This is why we embody what Henry David Thoreau calls: “the duty of civil disobedience.”
“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go and unbuild walls.”
Shevek from Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974.
The story of what happened next with the Bike Bloc is much longer than will fit into this chapter. The Bristol design process involved over 50 people and came up with some great prototypes. Interestingly, during a public debate, the director of the Arnolfini gallery admitted that hosting the Bike Bloc designs was fine but if the actual actions had taken place in his own city, and not hundreds of kilometres away in Copenhagen, he probably would not have commissioned us.
Weeks later, in Copenhagen, The Candy Factory, an ex-squat turned into an open cultural centre welcomed us. Several hundred people worked in the freezing December snow, stripping hundreds of bikes, welding and making beautiful machines of resistance, training ourselves in new forms of street action cycle choreography, and generally working in a colourful collective frenzy. Despite police raids on the space and confiscation of some of the best machines, and despite the pre-emptive arrest of over 2000 people (all these arrests were later to be seen as illegal by Danish courts), the Bike Bloc took to the streets on the day of action.
Over 250 people swarmed around the conference centre to distract the police forces. The tactic helped the rebel delegates from inside the UN conference to break out and meet activists from outside that had broken into the security area, so as to say clearly state that the negotiations were utterly skewed by the power given to corporate lobbyists and the bullying attitude of most over-industrialised countries. They called for a society based on solidarity, mutual aid, respect for each other and the nature that feeds and carries us.
Despite all the walls erected to stop us, that snowy day, we had become the Bike Bloc and half a year later its seeds would sprout in a new form in Hamburg.
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. London. Autumn 2011
John Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux’s new book/film “Paths Through Utopias” will be published in German by Nautilus in spring 2012.
