Banner drop with the words of Greta Thunberg by the Kletter Kinder
This COP conference blew up very fast. Originally scheduled for Chile, it was moved to Madrid very late. A lot of reorganizing took place. For one thing, masses of Extinction Rebellion activists from UK who had not planned on going to COP in Chile were able to make the trip to Madrid.
I’ve not been following this issue and this activism here. In Milwaukee, USA, however, there have been important “artivist” actions in solidarity with Voces de la Frontera for immigrant rights, and with Native Americans around water rights and extractive industry. Susan Simensky Bietila has been working with the tribes upstate, and Nicolas Lampert organized “art builds” in Milwaukee with David Solnit. Lampert also participated in the COP 21 in Paris in 2015, which saw some large-scale creative actions.
I was a worker in Solnit and Lampert’s art build, painting color onto screenprinted banners. Production was directed from the top, and it was clear what to do. This was my idea of what might happen in Madrid. Wrong. Meetings to plan “artivism” at CS Seco and CS Tabacalera did not produce any clear plans that I could see. In the end, groups formed with their own projects and turned up at the march to execute them.
There were numerous wall exhibitions at the convergence space, the UGT union building on calle de Hortaleza in central Madrid, between the barrios Chueca and Malasaña. There were more still at the UCM university building given over the social summit, which started the weekend of December 7-8.
I Only Want to Help
Although I knew I would blog, I mainly wanted to help. Finally, dear reader, I make an inadequate reporter. These posts are collages of reports from a sprawling and complex series of events in which multiple groups acted together but apart, with only tactical coordination. My key question has been, “What can I do” to support this activism? In the end it turns out that it is writing.
For a couple of days I ran around the convergence space, putting up some of the great climate justice posters produced by the Just Seeds group, and helping out here and there. Bustling about and seeing what needed doing, I was not unsociable but remained unconnected.
I found the room where the whale was being built, after it was moved from CS Seco. A young bearded man was working on a part of the head, laboriously covering cardboard with newspaper. It seemed impossible that the skeleton could be ready for the Friday march. He was working with a young woman. She told me they were activists from Israel. She was a veteran of lockdown actions. I’m too old for that, I said. An old woman participates in our actions, she said, and the police treat her very nicely. When they all started going limp and flopping around, the police brought wheelchairs to take them away.
Big Heads on the March
In the main artivist room, the Chileans were hard at work. Their contingent was the largest and most present, both in the march and in the social summit that followed. They had started with graphic support for their #ChaoCarbon campaign to scotch the government’s plans for a chain of coal-fired power plants in Chile. This included a kind of coal-power-plant face pasted onto cardboard, and some balloon-based heads of political villains. The power-plant face showed up a lot, including behind Greta Thunberg when she spoke at the COP.
The Chileans had plenty of people, most working on the balloon heads which were laboriously built up. Piles of art gear were strewn about. There was a workshop on making jellyfish. A group of young men were stenciling “Sail to the COP” on dark blue t-shirts. They were from Amsterdam. Another bunch from their group had in fact sailed to the COP, but in Chile. Their boat was in the Caribbean. Perhaps they could go to Miami Art Basel?
The “artivism” that Extinction Rebellion does is more performative direct action. It is planned in secret and executed for maximum publicity. As a result, most of what they did I saw on commercial TV. In an action at the COP itself, XR activists stripped their tops, and painted slogans on their bodies. They covered their nipples with strips of black tape to avoid the recent media blackout of Femin actions.
Spanish TV has covered the COP 25 events fairly well. They valorized Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist who reversed her sailing trip to Chile to make a dramatic appearance in Madrid. She first arrived in Portugal, disembarking from her sailboat, then traveled “secretly” aboard a train to Madrid. “Hello Spanish TV,” she said as she walked along the platform surrounded by media.
Greta Smiles
Later she gave a press conference with other young activists at the Casa Encendida cultural center. Watching her on TV so far, she seems most comfortable with other children (of course), smiling only in their company. She is a very effective speaker, with just the right note of urgency in her young voice.
The march on Friday, December 6 coincided with Fridays for Future, the youth movement that follows Greta Thunberg. The organizers – “Marcha por el Clima de Madrid” – estimated the crowd at 500,000; the government claimed 15,000. It was big, for sure. The route was long, about seven kilometers from Atocha station roundabout to Nuevo Ministerios.
We joined the march over an hour after its formal beginning time. As we walked we tired, and the march itself staggered greatly, with huge gaps opening up. At one point, the procession split. As we walked back I saw the CGT, the anarchist union. Malena said yes, the CNT, the other anarchist union, had been on the other street!, although I hadn’t seen them. (Weirdly, these unions split in the 1980s.)
As we passed a highway bridge along the route, a banner drop happened. It was @KletterKinder, the climbing kids, proclaiming Greta Thunberg’s words – “How dare you?!”
“How Dare You?!”
We arrived near the head of the march where a giant screen had been mounted. We could barely glimpse it, but heard the later words of Greta Thunberg clearly, her urgent voice, then the low rumble of Javier Bardem, the most prominent Spanish celebrity to back the cause. Although many saw and heard the speakers, most would arrive long after the formal presentations had finished. They heard the music; we left before.
Since the march started so late the sun set, and much of the route was dim-to-dark. The photos I made were poor. Many marchers had anticipated the darkness, and a number of banners and signs were lit with light-strips. The “medusas” – jellyfish carried on sticks – were all lit up as well. I’d seen the workshop in the art space, but the group made them somewhere else, so I can’t report how they did them. (Lots of plastic, surely.) A jolly feminist contingent carried most of these, and it was an impressive array.
All the music made a strong impact as the march dragged on. We saw a big drum corps from Galicia – a brass marching band – a lone piper with a drummer, and the occasional kid with a drum. A small group of women parked themselves where the road divided, and sang choral songs, old left classics. Many stopped to join them, and spirits were lifted.
“We’re Fucked”
We turned and walked back along the route of the march, seeing the later arrivals. The giant balloon globe with a burning fuse of Greenpeace – a tall walking puppet which interacted with the people around it, creating a mobile performative environment – of course the big-head Chilean politicians, cabezudos – and a swinging crowd of the Extinction Rebels, the XR group, hundreds of them, carrying flags on sticks, with a banner slogan “We’re fucked”.
One bunch of them cried out against Trump – “Es un fracaso! Eres un payaso!” (In unpoetic English: “It’s a disaster! You’re a clown!”)
The most ambitious and wildly energetic of all was the Sound Swarm, organized by Enmedio collective. These black clad performers, carrying round green signs backed with black-and-white images of extinct animals and human skulls, ran, leaped, and lay down in the street as they made various sustained sounds and noises.
These veteran artivists proclaimed the Sound Swarm to be “a participatory orchestra of loudspeakers, a noisy swarm of angry bees agitating everything in its path. An acoustic and visual experiment that, if successful, should help us occupy our bodies, rediscover the shape of our skulls and re-inhabit our skeleton’s skeleton, while giving a shout-out to endangered species and the sacred art of life itself.”
As we walked past the end of the march, a dozen garbage trucks and street sweepers were moving in to sweep up – nothing. The march was abnormally clean.
Oh, the whale! It seems that it made it onto the streets after all, on Sunday, although I didn’t hear about it.
“Art in Action in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Sculptures created to bring awareness about the need for water protection and the explosive crude fracked oil brought by rail through the center of the city.” 2018.
By Susan Simensky Bietila (gated site; few free articles allowed)
https://www.thenation.com/article/art-in-action-in-milwaukee-wisconsin/
Activist Art at COP 21 Climate Conference Paris 2015
by Nicolas Lampert
https://justseeds.org/activist-art-at-cop-21-climate-conference-paris-2015/
#ChaoCarbon campaign
Artists have played an important role in this campaign against coal power in Chile.
http://www.chilesustentable.net
Kate Brown, “‘All Culture Is Going to Trash as Soon as the Food Runs Out’: Why Extinction Rebellion’s Climate Activists Are Targeting Art Basel Miami Beach”, December 3, 2019
https://news.artnet.com/market/extinction-rebellion-art-basel-miami-beach-1718208
Enmedio collective's Sound Swarm
http://www.enmedio.info/en/sound-swarm-enjambre-sonoro/
The whale on Sunday
“El movimiento Extinction Rebellion marcha en Madrid por ‘los océanos muertos’”
https://www.elespanol.com/ciencia/20191208/movimiento-extinction-rebellion-marcha-madrid-oceanos-muertos/450455302_0.html
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