Creative Resistance

Campaign For Honeybees Kicks Off With Musical Action At Harvard Labs

April 26, 2014 Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Creative Resistance, Harvard, Honeybees

Our campaign for Honey Bees started this week with a nonviolent, but loud action at Harvard University. Scientists at the Micro Robotic Lab at Harvard are creating the ROBOBEE, the honey bee’s proposed drone replacement. We visited there yesterday, directed of course by Savitri D, and we wore the wardrobe and bees she designed. The Queen Bee’s dress, under all the filagree, is from the Paris designer “Chloe” – so you can’t say activism is entirely divorced from fashion (Savitri discovered the glowing thing in a vintage shop in Soho.) The scientists listened to song and sermon. No police showed up. This was a world of pure academic gentility. We must have been like an apparition to them. We were in their building for about 45 minutes, handing out information and conversing after our vocalizing subsided. They simply haven’t thought through what they are doing, as far as we can discern. They are being paid very well to replace a magical animal being killed off by Monsanto and Bayer. They are making possible a factory farm future, with all the birds and bees killed off for not contributing to the eco-system of high profits. “You are preparing us for an unlivable future.” – the choir’s repeated phrase.

Kenya: Artivists Versus The State

April 18, 2014 Alnoor Ladha, www.aljazeera.com Strategize! Arts, Creative Resistance, Finance and the Economy, Poverty

Cross-posted at CreativeResistance.org. Against this calamitous backdrop, we are starting to see hope in the country’s next generation of campaigners, organisers and even artists. These new hybrid cultural activists have been dubbed “artivists” and are continuing the struggles of their predecessors with a new approach. The author MK Assante describes the artivist as someone who “uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression by any medium necessary”. For two weeks in February, I had the privilege of joining almost 200 activists, organisers and artivists in a Nairobi community centre (unnamed for security reasons) for an Artivism Lab.

Bold Nebraska: Black Snake Pipelines Bring Heartland Uprising

April 16, 2014 Tatiana Makovkin, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Creative Resistance, Pipeline, Stop KXL

From CreativeResistance.org: Bold Nebraska is a grass-roots movement of families, farmers, cowboys, Indians and community members standing up to the energy extraction industry, resisting the Keystone Pipeline and protecting the Earth and the People using creative and imaginative tactics. The Website says: “Our state is currently dominated by one political voice– conservative. And it’s not the conservative voice many of us grew up with in our families. The conservative voice in our state is now dominated by far-right ideas and policies that are more about protecting big business, not fighting for our families.” “If you look back in our Nebraska history, you see a diverse set of political beliefs. You see room for all of us to build on each others ideas to get things done. We think there is a role for common-sense government and we need more progressive, independent and moderate voices in our state’s politics. Nebraskans are bold. We are pioneers. We are reformers. We are independent. Bold Nebraska is setting out to change the political landscape and restore political balance.”

Carry It On Tour: Anne Feeney and Evan Greer

April 15, 2014 Anne Feeney and Evan Greer, www.creativeresistance.org Organize! Arts, Creative Resistance

The Carry it On Tour features Anne’s bottomless backpack of hellraising songs, given new energy by Evan’s skillful accompaniment on a veritable arsenal of acoustic instruments. Greer’s catchy and original folk-punk anthems shine with the addition of Anne’s soaring harmony vocals. The two have been touring together for more than a decade — since Evan was just a teenager — and their dynamic stage performance, which ranges from hilarious to serious, will instantly and permanently change the opinion of anyone who has ever thought that political music has to be boring. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Anne Feeney is the granddaughter of an intrepid mineworkers’ organizer, who also used music to carry the message of solidarity to working people. Evan Greer is an LGBTQ parent, organizer, and multi-instrumentalist who writes fearless and dangerously catchy original songs that inspire hope and incite resistance.

Radical Quilting: Contribute To The Drones Quilt Project

April 13, 2014 Staff, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Arts, Creative Resistance, Drones, Wars and Militarism

The Drones Quilt Project is currently on tour across the USA. The exhibit consists of 3 to 5 quilts of 36 blocks, each measuring 66″ x 66″, four information panels measuring 20″ x 30″ each, and a resource/take action handout. We hope to have the exhibit travel the country, so if you are interested in hosting the exhibit in your town, please contact us. Check the website to see when the exhibit is coming to a town near you. The idea for a Drones Quilt came from some women in the UK who started the project as a way to memorialize the victims of U.S. combat drones. We believed that there were lots of anti-drone activists in the U.S. who would like to make our own version of a Drones Quilt, and so the idea traveled across the Atlantic. The idea is to collectively create a piece of artwork which connects the names of activists with those killed. The names humanize the victims and point out the connectivity between human beings. Plans for the American version of the quilt include creating educational materials, photographs and information which together with the quilts will create an exhibit which will travel the country, informing and educating the American public.

In An Era Of Mass Species Die-Off: A Procession Of The Species

April 12, 2014 Staff, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Arts, Creative Resistance, Earth Day to May Day, Environment

From CreativeResistance.org: The Procession of the Species is a joyous, spontaneous artistic pageant where community members celebrate their relationships with each other and with the natural world. Within the activist world it can be written off because one of the demands is “no words”, but the people who founded it are deep activists and present that demand as a challenge to think outside the box. . . The Procession seeks to bridge the arts, the environment, and our local community. As a celebration of art, it involves citizens in a creative process affirming art’s place in the forum of public expression. As a celebration of species, it awakens public sensibilities to the issues surrounding environmental awareness and protection. . . Procession of the species started in Olympia WA and has spread to 69 locations throughout the US and across the globe. See this page to find a POS near you.

“Mercy Killers” Tour Sidesteps Corporate Theater

April 10, 2014 Corporate Crime Reporter, www.corporatecrimereporter.com Create! Arts, Creative Resistance, Health Care

From CreativeResistance.org: Mercy Killers is a remarkable one hour, one man play written and performed by Michael Milligan. It’s about a libertarian car mechanic whose wife gets sick and things quickly go downhill. Mercy Killers takes place in the interrogation room of a police station. Milligan is taking Mercy Killers to community theaters and even smaller community spaces around the country. The audiences are brought to tears. At the end of the play, Milligan engages with the audience and then passes the hat. He averages a couple of hundred dollars — enough to get him to the next town. But Mercy Killers is being kept out of mainstream theater spaces — mostly because of corporate influence. Mercy Killers shows a regular guy driven to the edge by the current medical insurance industrial complex. But the unspoken message of the play is — we need to get rid of private for profit health insurance. Thus the built in conflict with the big theater spaces.

Giant Portrait Shows Drone Operators People Aren’t “Bug Splats”

April 8, 2014 Ashley Feinberg, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Creative Resistance, Drones, Protest

From CreativeResistance.org and #NotABugSplat: where a drone operator’s sitting, one blurry blob of pixels looks almost exactly like the next blurry blob of pixels, which is how the term “bug splat” worked its way into modern military slang as a way of referring to a kill. Now, though, a giant art installation in Pakistan wants to show drone operators that its people are anything but anonymous white blobs—and that that “bug splat” belongs to an actual human being. The giant portrait was installed by an artist collective in the region of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa in Pakistan, an area where drone attacks occur on a fairly regular basis. The next time a drone operator looks down, he or she will be seeing the face of an innocent child instead of clusterings of white, shapeless blobs. And even if the installation gets pulled, the portrait was apparently designed to be big enough to register on satellite imagery, ensuring it at least has some staying power on online mapping systems.

Rebranding The Guggenheim As Labor-Exploiting 1% Museum

April 1, 2014 Staff, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Arts, Creative Resistance, Worker Rights and Jobs

From CreativeResistance.org: Members of Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) joined by the OWS Illuminator occupied the facade of Guggenheim Museum in Uptown Manhattan for over 40 minutes. G.U.L.F. rebranded the Guggenheim’s flagship museum in protest of complicity at the ill-treatment and economic exploitation of migrant workers in Abu Dhabi who are beginning to build the new Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim on Saadiyat (aka ‘Island of Happiness’. G.U.L.F.’s act of messaging solidarity follows recent reports from Human Rights Watch, as well as investigative findings from members of the Gulf Labor Coalition (some of whom overlap with G.U.L.F.) who have just returned from a fact-finding mission in Abu Dhabi where where they visited several worker camps and spoke with workers. They confirmed a reality that is the opposite of happy: multiple labor violations, generated by a system built on human suffering and debt bondage.

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