We’ve kicked BP out of Tate – but the work’s not done yet
Mar 21, 2016
Tate’s BP sponsorship is ending. Last Saturday Liberate Tate released a spectacular cloud of confetti through the huge space of Tate’s Turbine Hall to celebrate. In kicking BP out of Tate, the movement for fossil free culture has achieved something that appeared impossible. This post is based on a slideshow we projected inside the Turbine...
6 reasons why #Budget2016 really really shouldn’t subsidise North Sea oil even more
Mar 15, 2016
Osborne is announcing his #Budget2016 on Weds, and there’s lots of pressure from the oil barons for more subsidies and tax cuts. Their income has been hit by the falling oil price, and in all those years of bonanza profits they never thought to save for this rainy day (even though it was predictable given the mostly cyclical...
BP’s sponsorship of Tate is over!
Mar 11, 2016
Today is one of those days when we know we’re winning. It emerged that BP’s sponsorship of art gallery Tate will end within a year. Until this morning we didn’t know whether Tate would be signing a new deal with the oil company, locking it into fossil fuel promotion for a further 5 years. But in a victory for cultural divestment,...
Walking the Line. New Interactive Documentary
Mar 8, 2016
In Italy, Azerbaijan and the UK people are fighting against the devastating impacts of import pipelines and wresting back control over their energy system. In this beautiful documentary we made with Global Motion, Re:common and Counter Balance we meet the people who live alongside the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline and are organising against this gargantuan piece...
2015 – The End of the Eternal Present
Mar 4, 2016
Notes after a conversation with Doreen Massey, which took place ten days before the one-year anniversary of Syriza’s landslide victory of 25th January 2015. We were reflecting on the past year. What an extraordinary set of events has unfolded in those twelve months – the Syriza election, The Green Surge of last Winter, the transformational...
Breaking: The Struggle to Free the Bus: The Twists, the Turns and the Conspiracies
Feb 24, 2016
BREAKING Guest Blog by Ken Henshaw, Social Action, Nigeria The extraordinary behind-the-scenes story of the Bus memorial seizure and the struggle to release it, on the day of the 3rd Hearing to release the memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni 8. Show your support – follow and tweet @GreatOgoni, @Kenn_Henshaw, @S_DouglasCamp. Support the Movement...
Possession – the Boxing Day Floods and the recommoning of the rivers
Jan 13, 2016
We wake in a B&B in Kilnsea, the last village before the shingle bar of Spurn Head that juts out from Holderness in East Yorkshire. All night a South Easterly wind of Force 6, gusting to Force 7, has buffeted the farmhouse. From the windows we can see white horses on the River Humber and...
We will Remember them – those who were hung and those who executed the hanging
Nov 19, 2015
Here again. Standing before the white Portland Stone cenotaph of the Shell Center. A crowd of fifty or more in silent attention as the names of the dead are read out: Saturday Dobee Nordu Eawo Daniel Gbooko Paul Levera Felix Nuate Baribor Bera Barinem Kiobel John Kpuinen Ken Saro-Wiwa The chief mourner is Lazarus Tamana,...
Vigil on 20th anniversary of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Ogoni 9 execution demands Shell clean up in Niger Delta.
Nov 10, 2015
Vigil on 20th anniversary of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Ogoni 9 execution demands Shell clean up in Niger Delta. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, and Platform held a vigil outside the Shell headquarters in London November 10th, 2015 on the 20th year anniversary of the execution Ken Saro-Wiwa. Artists, activists and...
‘Return’ – new poem for the Bus by Sai Murray
Nov 6, 2015
This summer, Platform commissioned Sai Murray – poet, writer, and spoken word supremo – to write a poem about the Bus’s journey to Ogoniland. Sai made some stunning political connections to other struggles, connections in all these years we had not made ourselves. John Ruskin once said “The best response to a work of art...
Release the Bus memorial NOW: Artists, campaigners and others speak out!
Nov 6, 2015
Twenty years ago, on 10th November 1995, the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed, alongside eight colleagues, for crimes they did not commit. They were campaigning against Shell’s exploitation and environmental destruction of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. As a Living Memorial, The Battle Bus, a large-scale mobile interactive steel sculpture...
