COP 21 Questionnaire: Mel Evans

Mel Evans / Liberate Tate / Art Not Oil, Apr 14, 2016

 

1. How were you involved in art activism during the COP21?

I am part of the art collective Liberate Tate and the Art Not Oil network in the UK. Having spent October 2014 at the Blue Mountain Center finishing my book Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts, I spent a few days in NYC the same month meeting with Beka Economopoulous and others from Not An Alternative to discuss opportunities for international collaboration around the opposition to oil sponsorship of the arts. We felt that the Paris climate summit would be an important moment to raise the pressure on global cultural institutions to end their oil sponsorship deals, especially because the Louvre has contracts with Total and Eni. I reccied the gallery for the interventions early in 2015. We also saw it as a prime opportunity to gather together artists and activists involved in the growing movement around arts, oil and climate change to come together and share learnings and creative strategies. I drew together the co-ordinating group, in which key roles were shared out non-hierarchically

Over the course of the following year we met regularly on Skype with five people from the US, Canada, the UK and Norway to plan a strategy meeting for 10-15 participating groups, represented by 20-30 artists and activists, and to prepare for a creative intervention at the Louvre during the COP21 talks. These events took place from the 5th-10th December 2015—the gathering on the 5th-6th, and the performance intervention on the 9th. Alongside 9 others I was arrested for my role in the performance intervention at the Louvre, and I took this film inside the jail in Paris.

2. What did you or your organization/collective accomplish during COP21? And how do you measure the success of that accomplishment?

The gathering consolidated the emerging Fossil Free Culture international movement. While Art Not Oil has been active in the UK since 2005, and Liberate Tate has raised the profile of the debate around oil sponsorship since 2010, there had been no international gathering of the large number of active groups until now. The feeling at the event was hugely positive. Participating groups included: The Natural History Museum, Occupy Museums, G.U.L.F., The Illuminator, Liberate Tate, Platform, Art Not Oil, BP Or Not BP?, Science Unstained, PCS Union, Stopp Oljesponnsing Av Norsk Kulturliv, and people active in campaigns in Australia, Brazil, Canada and France. It brought together people who hadn't met before but had been inspired by each other's work, in a sufficiently intimate context for deep conversations, genuine learnings and reflections to be shared, and a sense of common purpose to be built where useful.

The performance intervention involved around 300-500 people in the run up and on the day. The making-space we set up provided an accessible opportunity for activists in Paris to participate in protests around the talks to come together and get involved. The two-pronged inside/outside approach on the day not only epitomised the philosophy behind much of the Fossil Free Culture campaign—to address oil sponorship as active agents in the creation of culture and public space as well as mounting outside questions on the institution—it also made the event effective by disrupting the norm inside the museum with the oil spill performance, while at the same time providing an accessible performance protest outside with the black umbrellas. The event was covered widely in the media, especially following the arrest of ten performers. This was the first time that to our knowledge performers have been held in jail following a performance intervention inside a gallery around oil sponsorship. The action manifests the growing commitment and determination of the movement to see broader changes on the whole issue, which has since resulted in Tate discontinuing its sponsorship with BP.

3. How did you respond to the limitations put in place by the French government during the “state of emergency”? How did these limitations affect the actions you took part in or planned?

The planning group held a series of meetings to discuss how to amend our plans in a way that would be sensitive to the experiences of Parisians without stifling protest. For us, we felt that we needed to be especially careful since the focus of our activity—the Louvre—is a national monument. We concluded that the most important thing was to make the event planning public, so the museum and public knew what to expect, and to communicate the inside intervention to staff and public present as soon as it had begun, in French wherever possible. So we went ahead with our intentions, informed by the changed conditions.

4. What was the goal of art activism during the COP21? What role might it play in the broader context of the growing prevalence of government-imposed “states of emergency” during key times of convergence?

The goal of our performance intervention was to pressure the Louvre first and the global art museum second to act on concerns around climate change and end oil sponsorship deals, and to provide a stage for the global climate movement to visually present itself.

To be honest, it’s complicated because since we decided to go ahead with our activities where others groups didn't, we possibly got more attention than we might have otherwise, including from the police, which increased the media interest. The key learning I think is that creative activism always involves responding in a nuanced and sensitive way to the architecture of different public spaces, considering the participation of artists and activists in a careful and thoughtful way, and allowing an in-depth creative process to yield unexpected creative solutions. So whereas in some activist contexts a limitation can lead to a shutting down of ideas and plans, art activism tends towards an eternally new creative response. Where authorities want to shut down public opportunity for resistance, art activism may hold the key to resourcefully finding ever new spaces and tactics to build effective political power.

5. What alliances did you build? And were any across divisions of race, class, and gender? Did you form alliances with NGOs, Indigenous activists, or other organizations beyond your own?

I built alliances with artists in the groups mentioned above, which are made up of people of different age / race / gender / class. I co-ordinated with Sue Dhaliwal from the UK Tar Sands Network so that the Indigenous Environmental Network came to the Louvre planning session and participated in the intervention on the day, adding a spectacular red line into the piece alongside the black umbrellas. I made friends with activists from the US, UK, Canada and Croatia in the jail.

6. What are the lessons of COP21, and where do we go from here?

The movement approach to COP21 was hugely different than COP15. In the year before Copenhagen I was involved in producing a grassroots newspaper Deal or No Deal that sought to question the level of expectation being drummed up by NGOs about the possible outcomes of that set of talks. Despite questions raised, peoples' expectations were high, and the disappointment affected the climate movement in many difficult ways. Since that time we've found ways to re-root and broaden the approach to the issues. The approach to Paris was very different, summed up by the idea of the Road Through Paris—the importance of plans and activities in 2016 and getting on with the task at hand rather than urging governments to act. That informed our whole approach to the movement gathering around the talks, to use it as an opportunity to make ourselves stronger and push the global art museum harder to change, and that's exactly what we did. From here, we continue in that spirit, to push for wider change by tackling specific and significant points of intervention. As we watch various cultural institutions end oil sponsorship deals, and the divestment movement gain massive wins, we can see that process of shifting culture away from fossil fuels has truly begun.