Macro Unit : RadicIRL

Primrose Adam
Aoqi Yuan
Shiming Fu (Dylan)
Jiayi Zheng
Chen Wang (Shaye)
Yanshan Wu
Yiyao Lu
Rui Wang
Chaitanya Tiwari
Stav Perry

Brief

The first week was very slow in establishing an agreed direction based on the ideological difficulties around the topic. Half the group was very against doing it due to either a lack of contextual understanding or an ideological standpoint.

While this happened, I read parts of Making Trouble by Otto van Busch, which I loved, and thought would be an excellent way forward for the group; it mainly talks about different forms of resistance that aren’t violent/confrontational and levels of intervention. I also read part of ‘Against the State, an introduction to Anarchist political theory’, by Crispin Sartwell(2008). Which I think encapsulates much of what people find problematic and feel very outdated; it describes an optimal form of governance without a state, which I cannot imagine living in now, despite it being published in 2008. I also read ‘This is not a drill’ by Extinction Rebellion, 2017, which I thought was heartbreaking and inspiring. It had a great description of a non-hierarchical anarchist cooperative that functions globally but on a local scale, disseminating knowledge to its members/the public from experts, establishing a community as a form of resistance and promoting non-violent direct action.

I interviewed David Foldvari, illustrator and BA illustration course leader at Ravensbourne University, who wrote the BA Character Design course. He told me some of what made writing a course difficult and gave me a lot of great starting points, one being the Mayday rooms and pirate radio. He also asked what happens when governments restrict information.

Having looked at the Mayday Rooms online zine archive, I noticed some significant areas of interest that aligned with the ‘Making trouble’ reading. i.e. living off-grid, community veg/gardens, squats, etc.

When the group reconvened, I noticed several different directions and approaches to the subject matter. We identified Gamification, zines, code languages and non-hierarchical systems for the subject matter.

I contacted the activists I knew in the area to try to organise a zine workshop exploring their personal experiences of being an activist. I also interviewed Adam Remejkis, who organises UAL’s ‘AmaZines’ Wednesday activist Zine workshop. Key findings were that he opened the workshop with a conversation about the topic (i.e., what the world could do without), showed examples of other student work if possible, and then let the workshop progress according to the participants. Natural flows occur, and it can be counter-productive to try to control it too much or overthink it. Zines, in general, besides having a rich history with anarchist politics, are a great low-cost, low-pressure craft that lifts people’s moods and facilitates conversation about heavy subject matters. Workshops allow for a free flow of conversation and non-hierarchical education about different topics selected by the participants, and he has seen it change many people’s minds on various subjects. I asked the students who help run the workshops about the kind of conversation they have at these events, and they said that sometimes some quite sensitive topics do come up and navigating that can be awkward but rewarding.

I then organised and ran a zine-making workshop with the whole group, including local activists I knew, Emma Prince and KJ Howrie. Originally intended as an investigation of what activists experience and what advice they may need help with from the course, I then took the things I learnt from Adam and the zine archive materials from this workshop and developed the idea that delivering a zine making workshops could be an excellent project for our cohort to do to get involved with their local community, open conversations and find their network where they live. It would be a great way of corresponding with students either via post or as a way of documenting their own experiences as an activist, and when sent back to the MA, it could be a knowledge archive for students to come. We would send students a zine workshop toolkit/guide. Students would run workshops, document their experiences and photo/scan/copy their participants’ work, then send this to the other members of the cohort and the MA to be archived and sent to future students.

This workshop, therefore, functioned as a test for both the structure that we would be passing on to our students and as a way of getting some feedback on what political activists struggle with or love about it. I loosely introduced the theme to the participants, asking them to think about a cause/experience they might want to talk about, either positively or negatively. Some participants weren’t activists, so they did not know what to work on and asked for more guidance, at which time I talked to them about what they were interested in, but encouraged them not to put too much pressure on themselves to do the ‘right’ thing. I asked what other people were working on and talked about my work. This opened the political discourse with the activists very nicely, but didn’t necessarily guide the non-political members, who felt slightly awkward talking to strangers. I would introduce people more if I did the workshop again, and encourage members to talk to each other, not just me. I didn’t off-board properly and would also want to do that. We collected all the zines to scan, then I made a collective zine out of all the pages scanned. I also illustrated a guide to creating a particular zine fold as a worksheet to send to the ‘cohort’.

I contacted Miles Glyn of Extinction Rebellion and interviewed him with Prim and Aoqi. He gave a fascinating first-hand account of how hard it was working in Extinction Rebellion, with the ego being a difficult thing to get around, especially from entitled people. The internet, websites and social media are still the best way of communicating across countries. XR was great because it came at the right time. “There are lots of reasons why it caught fire then. David Attenborough had just come out, and Greta Thunberg” and XR created a “nexus”. But they didn’t know what to do with it when it hit. It was born out of all these little movements that just took off, but also died out similarly after COVID hit. There are so many different causes that need our attention. “It spreads everyone too thin, like you can’t mobilise this easily”. He cites craft/making in a community as a great way to keep optimism. Surprise was the biggest tool for XR when it first started, “the police didn’t know what to do with us in 2019”. He also commented that although it was an anarchistic group, that didn’t mean that there wasn’t any leadership. In the design of XR, there were roles assigned to a few of the members who had experience and then work was delegated to other members; otherwise, it would have been too incohesive and the organisation would have disintegrated.  Brand identity is essential; organisation and clear communication are key in activism. In terms of running workshops with the community, there wasn’t a framework they worked to; things happened naturally; however, it did help people engage with them and learn. Very similar to what Adam Remejkis said, people will engage or not; the more important thing to do is provide the right environment or framework to explore it with you, which happens naturally.

After interviewing Adam, he offered to help our group workshop with some of our ideas and discuss them with other activists, so I arranged this for the group, which only a very few attended. Adam gave us some interesting reference points, and it was great voicing some of the directions the few of us that came were going in. It helped me confirm that I was going in a very different direction than many of the other members in the group, and it helped me bring Prim and Aoqi on board, thankfully. I was very pleased because they had both been super supportive and hard working with the research and in the Miles Glyn interview. Dylan also joined us when his group hadn’t got anywhere with the research they were doing.

Me, Aoqi, Dylan and Prim, then attended a workshop on ‘Working with Urban Communities’ led by Anita Stasser, Phd. Her thesis was ‘Visibilising gentrification-induced displacement: a visual essay on the role of a socially and politically engaged photographic practice in housing activism’(2023). The group mainly consisted of students who wanted to situate their work in communities in fine art or as designers like us. We started by writing a mind map on what we thought community and participation meant, then having a subsequent discussion on why. We spoke about the difficulties, positives, ideals and struggles. One of the main issues in London in recent years is displacement, gentrification, and loss of community through austerity. Artists play a part in this, and have been systematically used to bring about this gentrification that is well documented in the work of …* but artists are also one of the front-line communities fighting for social change. We discussed the ladder of participation in terms of community involvement and some ethical issues around art projects regarding outreach, communicating goals, timelines, respecting other people’s time and sharing outcomes. We spoke of artists who, instead of ‘parachuting’ into a community (Costanza-Chock, 2020) without any relationship to them and deciding what they might need, might build relationships with them face to face, ask them what they actually want from the project, and tailor-make the work to fit their schedules as well as the artists.  

Afterwards, I attended a workshop on philosophy and poetry, which I didn’t think would be related. However, it was centred around Michel Foucault’s panopticon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract, which fit in quite nicely. We read poetry and talked about the texts. We also did an exercise where all participants held a pen on a piece of paper and drew while listening to poetry. It made me reflect that being a part of a collective is always to be coerced in some way, but is it coercion when you wish to work together? However, there are always some saboteurs in the group and self-proclaimed leaders.

After that, we visited the 56a zine archive, spoke to some of the volunteers there about collaborating on something, asking them what they might need from us, and the reception was brusque, saying “You’re not the first LCC students to ask!” effectively closing the conversation. The archive itself was overwhelming and hard to utilise, being a 5ft2 person, and zines jam-packed the shelves in every category you could think of, it was also a tiny space. We looked through likely subjects, but we all felt rather lacklustre after getting so little feedback from the midpoint presentations, not knowing whether we were going in the right direction. I then opted to book LCC’s zine archive instead, in which you could select what topics you needed, which was a lot more helpful in narrowing things down. The zines they selected were beautiful and interesting; most were hand-illustrated or had in-depth essays on various issues. The main thing I took away from them was that they used a lot of different media to build their content. Namely, illustrations, critical essays, correspondence, poetry, song, photos, news reports, and creative graphic design. After speaking with Alaistair, we realised that most of what we did was somewhat lost by our subpar presentation, as it lacked the contextual awareness and didn’t report most of the findings and reflections we had learnt.

I attended a social change zine-making workshop led by Adam Remejkis at Conway Hall, a fascinating library with many great books on left-wing politics, education, etc. I started making zines this time and had some interesting conversations with Adam and the other participants on politics and education, especially around UAL. I then made the A1 posters for the midway exhibition from this zine to displace with the work made in the first workshop.

After considering what Miles Glyn and Adam Remejkis had said about global networks being a lot more effective online, we decided to investigate encrypting websites. Although not fail-proof, the dark web was a way our students could reliably share their community work with their global cohort, without the main issues relating to the brief. I asked for advice from Michael Jon Mizra in Creative Lab. He gave me some interesting info, which I then made an info sheet in the form of a zine (see below). After trying to learn some HTML code and getting feedback, we decided trying to make a working page was too ambitious, so Aoqi made a great wire frame mock-up instead that was far more effective.