nb: this has been kept as a text record of the festival, we will be uploading as video parts of the festival soon.

Saturday 14 November

10.30/10.50am Coffee and tea/Introduction

11am The Bitter Victory of Creative Politics

(Panel organized by The Cultural Resistance Research Network)

The aestheticised tactics and approaches of creative politics have become a central part of contemporary social movements, as this exhibition is testament. The Creative Resistance Research Network will host an open, collective discussion and reflection on the recent history of creative politics. As well as looking at the ongoing question of the tensions between art and activist institutions and how contemporary collectives deal with this, we will be reflecting on some recent creative political campaigns to discuss what worked and what didn’t.
Crucially, we want to ask how we assess efficacy like this for creative campaigns. How do we measure success?

Anja Kanngieser: Everything for everyone, and for free: collective appropriation in Germany, 2001-2008.

Anja Kanngieser will discuss the German creative political group Umsonst, and the collective appropriation campaigns that took place from 2001-2008. She will introduce some of the most dynamic of these actions, and explain how and why they happened. She will also reflect on some of the problems the campaigners ran into, and look at how they tried to deal with these.

Stevphen Shukaitis & Erika Biddle: Art Strikes & the Creativity of Refusal

Stevphen Shukaitis & Erika Biddle will discuss the history and iterations of the art strike (1977-1980, 1990-1993, and the current call for one) and the potential it creates for collective exodus from the capitalist domination of artistic production. When collective creativity and recombination have become integral to the workings of post-Fordist capitalism, perhaps the art strike offers ideas for reconsidering the labour of subversion and sabotage in the social factory.

Gavin Grindon: The Invention of Creative Politics

Gavin Grindon will discuss the prehistory of some of the creative forms of resistance showcased in the exhibition. Where did these approaches come from? How did they develop? He will discuss the emergence of creative politics since the 1960s in groups such as the Provos, Creative Autonomy and the Orange Alternative and their combination of political and aesthetic forms, and show rare archive footage of these groups.

1pm Lunch

2pm Graphic Agitation and Sign Wars

Artist/Designer activists talk practical, a series of project show and tells from:

Cactus Network Will discuss a range of spoof newspapers produced for a number of different mobilisations for Reclaim the Streets and the ‘Gift of the Masks’ project produced for the Free Trade of the Americas Summit protests in Quebec.

Jonathan Barnbrook will talk about his and former colleague Pedro Inhoue’s graphic design work for Adbusters magazine

kennardphillipps is a collaboration between artists/activists Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillips, working since 2002 to produce art in response to the invasion of Iraq. It has evolved to confront power and war across the globe. The work is made for the street, the gallery, the web, newspapers & magazines, and to lead workshops that develop peoples’ skills and help them express their thoughts on what’s happening in the world through visual means. This presentation will include montage work reactions to the War on Terror, including work on the Israeli Seperation Wall, for Banky’s 2007 Santa’s Ghetto in the West Bank, Palestine

5pm FILM: THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE

This film, shot by 100 amateur camera operators, tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organization summit being held there. Vowing to oppose, among other faults, the WTO’s power to arbitrally overrule nations’ environmental, social and labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, protestors from all around came out in force to make their views known and stop the summit. Against them is a brutal police force and a hostile media as well as the stain of a minority of destructively overzealous comrades. Against all odds, the protesters bravely faced fierce opposition to take back the rightful democratic power that the political and corporate elite of the world is determined to deny the people of the world.

7pm Go to the Pub…

Sunday 15 November

10.30/11am Coffee and Tea

11am: I’m a Photographer, not a Terrorist, Bringing Home the Real News

Panel to be confirmed

This panel looks at the impact of digital photographic tools on reporting events, particularly post-G20 and how the State is trying to criminalise image taking, and the ways photographers are getting organised to resist this. This will be interspersed with photo shows and film clips from the archives of some of the key movements photographers and filmmakers.

12am: Indymedia Vs Social Media: After 10yrs of Indymedia, What’s Next?

Panel: Indymedia London

The indymedia London collective will be giving a basic outline the revolutionary aspect of open publishing and internet activism over the past 10 years, and contrasting this with the rise of inherent capitalistic models of social media tools (flickr,facebook,twitter) and their uses in protest  (G20/Climate Camp) talking through the risks and relation to the enclosure of the internet as a public space.

1pm Lunch

2pm Whose Streets? Our Streets! The City and the Revolution of everyday life, the world and everything…

Owen Hatherley, Space Hijackers, Noel Douglas

Neo-Liberalism has taken the urban space for it’s own, privatisation and commodification have turned city centres into branded corporate monocultures divorced from their surroundings. Architecture critic Owen Hatherely will reflect on these changes and set the stage for a range of speakers who will look at how different forms of creative resistance have challenged corporate space as part of the decades broader social and political movements.

5pm FILM: ANOTHER WORLD IS ON IT’S WAY -Best of the decade

A celebration of resistance, video highlights of the decade from the Reel News archives

The festival is free, but to judge numbers we’d like you to register by dropping an email to us at show@signsofrevolt.net