Politics and arts: how media and visual communication can bring about social and political change

Community tapestry-making facilitates dialogue and channels political thinking through the Guernica iconography of Picasso

Nicola Ashmore’s research uses collaborative activist art practice through the act of making to demystify artistic practices and processes, and to foster solidarity and socio-political engagement. Using film, exhibition and public engagement activities, she has investigated how the historically and culturally specific moment of war and conflict at Guernica is translated to a different experience through the collective community-based remaking of Picasso’s Guernica in UK, South Africa, Mauritius, Syria, Canada, America, Iraq and Afghanistan. 

A Guernica banner remaking project was initiated from the University of Brighton by Dr Louise Purbrick in 2012. She involved 12 artists and activists from Brighton, Nicola Ashmore among them, and held 14 public collaborative sewings in England and India. The subsequent Guernica Remakings have combined research and practice to build a global collective of remakers. This has significantly expanded the geographical reach and scale of its impact across diverse communities and organisations. Nicola Ashmore has initiated further cultural iterations across three countries (UK, South Africa, Mauritius,) involving nine individual artists and four artist collectives.

Each installation of the Guernica Remakings Exhibition responds to its location by incorporating contextual materials and inviting local artist and public responses to the work. The remaking process with the Keiskamma Art Project in South Africa has enabled the sharing of lived experiences, particularly in relation to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Collaborating in Mauritius with charity Future Hope and Savina Tarsitano of Kids Guernica, Nicola Ashmore enabled 50 children from disadvantaged families in Port Louis to explore their visions of the future and promote a message of peace over conflict, through the production of their own Kids Guernica (2019). The collaborative art making process and its later display in Japan helped facilitate dialogue between different cultures.

Nicola Ashmore's research on remakings of the 'Guernica' image for social and political empowerment can be found on a pdf document, Guernica Remakings, detailing the work.

Nicola Ashmore works with communities in South Africa, India and Mauritius as well as the United Kingdom to understand how the iconic Guernica painting is used to empower communities through collaborative remakings. [Image above and top, Keiskamma Guernica 2015. Courtesy Nicola Ashmore.] 

Creative retreats and workshops engage communities in transformative co-creation for climate engagement

Julie Doyle has interrogated the visual as a critical representational practice in climate communication and activism. She has shown how media, visual culture and science have representationally shaped climate knowledge and action, rendering climate change as a distant future through the separation of humans and culture from nature. Julie Doyle has contended that cultural and visual communication about climate change, through media, arts and activism, can present more nuanced understandings of human-environmental relations that link climate change to the cultural politics of the everyday. 

Her research collaborations with UK arts charity ONCA, for example, have expanded its vocabulary around climate agency and efficacy, and helped develop holistic approaches to climate education. Partnering with ONCA and the University of Vienna, Julie Doyle set up a transformative climate learning retreat in St Gilgen, Austria, to engage young people in co-creating climate communications. The multidimensional retreat combined climate science information with participatory workshops on climate communications research and embodied reflections.  Forging a collective identity, the young people established themselves as the ‘St Gilgen Climate Collective’, the legacy of which continues to sustain their climate activism and influence local government thinking. 

Julie Doyle’s research has also influenced the communication practices of international environmental NGO Greenpeace. Following an invitation to present the research to Greenpeace UK, Former Deputy Head of Greenpeace UK Campaigns, stated that ‘Doyle’s presentation at Greenpeace UK initiated an internal discussion about how we best talk about climate change and what images we use when we do so’. Doyle’s research helped its Programme Director to shift ownership of their communications to a more participatory and democratic mode.

Julie Doyle, together with arts charity ONCA, has developed creative participatory workshops bringing communities together to reconsider climate activism. Image: participants at the climate communications retreat in St Gilgen, Austria, co-organised with the University of Vienna.

Artists explore collective modes of protest and evolve a shared aesthetic

Addressing a key gap in social movement studies, Olu Jenzen has written extensively on the role of aesthetics and the visual in social activism. Within the AHRC funded project 'The Aesthetics of protest: Visual culture and communication in Turkey', led by Professor Aidan McGarry, Olu Jenzen’s social media research demonstrated how Gezi Park protestors in Turkey used visual and performative forms of communication to communicate their messages, mobilise supporters and shape the movement’s identity. The research not only evidenced emerging new forms of visual rhetoric and modes of protest against state suppression but also identified how the movement aimed for social transformation via prefigurative enactments of new ways of relating to others in society. 

These practices were documented and disseminated in visual forms and activist artists were commissioned by the project to respond to the research findings by exploring collective modes of protest, being and ways of life. This mobilised the artists’ collective to solidify their identity in art practice providing an enduring mode of visual and other forms of political expression beyond protest action and artist collectives continue to have particular significance in contemporary Turkey.

These groups of artists challenged the notion of individualism, and explored cultural forms linked to the ‘Gezi spirit’ - the communal and pluralist ethos of the social movement - beyond the effervescent uprising of protest, and were able to gain a foothold in the national art festival scene that they hadn’t previously held.

Olu Jenzen’s social media research demonstrated how Gezi Park protestors in Turkey used visual and performative forms of communication to communicate their messages, mobilise supporters and shape the movement’s identity.

The projects described here exemplify a strand of research from the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics and the researchers have highlighted contemporary concerns about war, conflict, climate change, the HIV/AIDS crisis, displaced people, and peace movements. Bringing academic understanding to opportunities among activists, artists and community groups, their research has facilitated socio-cultural and emotional engagements, deployed creative ‘making’ methods of visual arts, including speculative storytelling, and participatory play,  and has empowered marginalised voices within their communities.