Subvertising workshop
Torggata Blad presents Subvertising Norway by artist and activist Hanne Ugelstad.
Thursday October 24th, 2024, 6:00 pm at KREISGalerie, Nürnberg
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”
– Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967
Subvertising, a portmanteau of ´subvert´ and ´advertising´, is a form of civil disobedience that replaces advertising with art. The work is guided by the basic principle that the visual realm in public space belongs to everyone; no one should be able to own it. Public space should be a forum for dialogue, debate and exchange of ideas. Everyone should be free to participate in this, not only companies and organisations that can afford to steal our attention.
In this workshop led by Hanne Ugelstad from Subvertising Norway, you’ll learn about the background behind the protest art movement subvertising, as well as receive practical instruction and advice for subvertising actions.
We’ll give a talk about this form of activism, and the collective Subvertising Norway. After the talk, the practical workshop begins, where the participants are invited to create their own posters and artworks if they want, and continue the conversation.
About:
Subvertising Norway is a not-for-profit collective of artists, activists and designers, dedicated to questioning who has the power and authority to communicate and create meaning in public space, by acts of creative subversion and art-based activism.
We believe stories are the fundamental organising force in society, and the narrative created by outdoor advertisers needs to be challenged. Through our actions, we create a ‘glitch´ in reality illustrating an alternative vision for the use of our shared public spaces. We hope that by acting as though we already exist in that future, and by sharing that vision with the widest possible audience, we help create it.
More information about Subverting:
1
Subvertising, a portmanteau of subvert and advertising, refers to method as well as the aim. It is a form civil disobedience that replaces advertising with art, and ranges from individual actions to coordinated international campaigns.
The most common ways to subvertising (a.ka. adbusting) is either to remove the ads, modify, or replace them. To replace advertisement posters in outdoor adshells with other work is perhaps the most common form of subvertising today, giving everyone the opportunity to work with the scale and visibility of advertising.
Subvertising Norway creates our own posters, and collaborates with artists and activists to help disseminate their ideas. Through paradoxical and iconoclastic interventions we make visible what is made invisible by habit and tradition, inherent in the threads weaving together our cultural consciousness (doxa1).
The need to examine our own systems and structures is apparent, as we are experiencing both an ecological and humanitarian crisis. These issues are linked, caused by capitalism and consumerism, fueling the advertising industry, which in turn is aimed at impacting our culture in such a way that this self-sustaining loop will be protected by one of its victims: human existence. This process has become so robust, it seems we would sooner allow for the destruction of us, rather than dismantling the system created by us; overlooking the basic lesson gained by remembering our own recorded history: societies rise and fall, and culture is a dialectic process, where discourses are negotiated, rewritten, and sometimes lost for posterity.
Within our current capitalistic cultural hegemony, personal property and ownership is made sacred, as something untouchable that can only ever be gained if bought, turning everything into a thing. We share our public space under the guise of equal access, but protect the integrity of objects communicating and reinforcing capitalistic culture, like the outdoor advert, while at the same time disqualifying people from taking up a similar space, if they are unable to justify their presence and activity through proof of payment.
We believe public space should facilitate dialogue, debate and the exchange of ideas. Everyone should be free to participate in this, not only companies and organizations that can afford to rent our attention. We believe in the basic principle that the visual realm in public space belongs to everyone, meaning no one should be able to own it. By acts of creative subversion, we challenge not only that money grants those who have it the right to buy advertising-time and space; we also challenge the idea that the right to earn money to live (needed within capitalism), should somehow take precedence over the right to live. The threat to our existence is no longer a question of failure to thrive, but a failure to imagine, so we attempt to create a glitch in reality, inspiring perhaps a possibility, to pull at one of the threads of the tapestry telling the story of who we are, revealing who we might become.
2
The effects advertising has on us and the biosphere are deeply concerning. Not only do ads encourage and normalize resource-heavy and exploitative consumerism in a time where degrowth is necessary, it makes us miserable on the path to the land we believed we are promised if we only hold on to the right artefacts. Constantly being told that you lack the “right” body, identity or thing (to be momentarily remedied by a purchase), the goal of advertising is not to create a genuine and lasting sense of happiness or fulfillment: that wouldn’t be profitable.
Humans and human society alike organise and understand themselves through stories, and story-telling; making the right to free speech a touchstone not only for a free society, but also a condition for the human salutogenetic2 experience of belonging in a greater context as themselves, uniquely expressed. The seriousness of the ethical problem represented by the fact that a profit-seeking actor can buy the editing-rights to our culture, shaping the available cultural narratives into those that support the creation of more profit for themselves at the expense of us all, can hardly be overstated.
Understanding the value of stories, ideas, the deeply human creative force, and perhaps the most important act of rebellion there is – laughter, expressing presence and a sense of playfulness, subvertising provides us with a method that empowers both civic and personal agency, by compromising the adverts ability to re-create the conditions justifying its own existence, effectively turning its purpose for being against itself3.
3
“This then,” writes Paolo Freire, “is the greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well”4. The science telling us that we are headed for a dire situation concerning our habitat, have been urging us to change our ways for years, leaving a great number of people either in despair in their current existence, or worried for their future, leaving us with the conclusion that facts and knowledge is important, but not always enough.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, is a saying in organizational psychology; letting us in on how tacit knowledge, patterns we can’t or won’t name, will potentially leave us helpless to deal with issues we don’t have the language to confront.
Capitalistic culture, enmeshed in its own ways of seeing, seems to have lost sight of the fact that sometimes, seeing is not enough to believe, but rather: sometimes you have to believe in the possibility before you are able to see what already is, gently echoing the Thomas-theorem, stating that if we define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. The human condition leaves us believing erroneously that we know that which we believe; but when we say we know something, we are in reality expressing to what degree our worldview and identity is based on that conviction.
Confronting systems of power, their regulatory and defensive structures put in place to protect the integrity of that system, will impose sanctions on the disruptive individual questioning the beliefs necessary to uphold its existence. Within capitalism, these sanctions are in one way or another, aimed at your ability to earn and own money.
4
The existence of advertisements are completely dependent on human attention, commodifying parts of our consciousness, extracting data from us to make this process even more effective and profitable, without sharing any of that wealth with the human resource (i.e. you and me) that is mined. This is the character of capitalism that we tend to negate when it comes to seeing our selves as the resource someone is using for their own profit. Self-objectifying is painful.
Try telling someone that we don’t actually need advertisements, we can in fact get rid of it right this moment, and see what happens. Try telling yourself that, and pay (pun intended) attention to what your thoughts are. Maybe you’ll worry how you will know what is available now; as if the need to shop dissipates with the extinction of the ad industry. (Would it?) Considering just how extensive the ad industry is, adding on retail businesses, all the people working with production, transport, administration, and so on, we start to feel concern is for people’s jobs, the economy, and the ability to provide for themselves and their loved ones. Because we are still trapped in the thinking that we need money to stay alive.
Because in this society, going broke means going hungry. As if plants aren’t growing on this planet without the incentive of money. As if human creativity is contingent on cash. As if solidarity can be bought, or integrity can be sold.
It is the power of an idea that we rely on, the unfamiliar thread that pulls you. And that is as old and as radical as it is human.
5
Subvertising is a praxis, “with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed”5, ongoing, with results yet to be imagined. Sometimes what inspires you to begin is a reminder that you are not alone; and what keeps you moving is the promise you are hoping to leave someone with. We connect, when we take to our streets, expressing commitment to each other, taking down messages telling you “you need (to be) more”, hopefully leaving you with the idea that you are capable, ok and enough.
The impact of your actions can never fully be known, and that’s probably just as much a curse as it is a blessing6. Subvertising Norway is a collective inspired by others. Our actions and methods are learnt, shared to us by people who received these lessons from someone else. Subvertising may be illegal, but believing our actions are morally justified considering the potentially detrimental consequences of capitalism’s current trajectory, many of us are open about them.
We hold workshops teaching the method, providing community. We speak at conferences as well as less formal events sharing this idea, empowering others to interact with and take direct actions in their own surroundings. We are reaching out even more now to schools and other social institutions, in hopes of nurturing the skill of critical reflection, through the very concrete experience of interacting materially with a cultural phenomenon (the ad) usually kept off limits and protected by money (i.e. power). And we hope that this breach can be almost like the little boy pointing at the emperor’s new clothes, removing not only the fabric that kept us from seeing, but showing us all it was never even there.
1 to borrow Pierre Bordieu’s use of the phrase
2 referencing to Aaron Antonovsky’s understanding of “sence of coherence” as an important factor in wellbeing
3 Dismantling the advertising city: Subvertising and the urban commons to come – Thomas Dekeyser, 2020 (sagepub.com) accessed 26.2.2021
4 Pedagogy of the oppressed, Paolo Freire (1970, p. 18)
5 Pedagogy of the oppressed, Paolo Freire (1970, p. 99)
6 The best we can hope for is to act true to our values as often as we’re able.