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Everyone Does It: Direct Action and Everyday Strategies of Survival
February 14 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm GMT
MayDay Rooms will be giving an archival workshop called Everyone Does It: Direct Action and Everyday Strategies of Survival as part of the conference on 14th Febuary. Keep an eye out for more details soon.
Conference blurb:
‘Pray… / For Boudin, blown to pieces’, wrote TS Eliot about the anarchist killed in 1894 when a bomb he was carrying detonated accidentally in Greenwich Park. Martial Bourdin’s intentions that cold winter’s morning have always been unclear: was he really trying to blow up the Observatory or Prime Meridian line in the name of revolutionary anarchism? ‘It would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics’, joked Joseph Conrad in his fictional account of the event – ‘an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad’.
Incomprehensible, inexplicable, unthinkable, mad: these are the clichés often used to describe direct action in the media, where ideological gestures always also appear as oddly aesthetic forms of symbolism and spectacle. Now, from museums and galleries to sport and infrastructure, from performance art to strikes and sabotage, groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have put direct action front and centre of contemporary political engagement.
This event takes the 130th anniversary of the ‘Greenwich Bomb Outrage’ as an opportunity to bring organisers, activists, scholars and artists together to consider the past, present and possible futures of direct action.
Find out more here