By Brett Davidson, Center for Artistic Activism Board Member
I first got in touch with the Center for Artistic Activism after I read about them on a news site somewhere. My job was to support our grantees of the Open Society Public Health Program in media advocacy. We and our grantees were grappling with the problem that the approaches activists were using to change laws, policies and practices were not really working. One was the idea, entrenched in human rights circles at the time (it has changed since Trump came to power), that you just have to give people the facts, or ‘create awareness’, and they will see the logic and change. We and our grantees were giving facts like crazy, doing more and more research into facts, and nothing was changing (surprise surprise). Then there were the protest marches, the ‘die-ins’ and so on – tactics folks like ACT-UP and others had used to great effect, but had been copied and repeated so much they had become theatre. For example, at international Aids conferences, there would always be march, and a die-in among the Pharma stalls, and it was rinse and repeat – a ritual that no longer had impact.
The Center for Artistic Activism offered a methodology for helping us break out of that – we knew what the problem was but didn’t always have the ideas about what to do differently. The Center for Artistic Activism’s creative exercises, like the one where activists are asked to imagine impossible tactics, introduced a sense of play and helped us all break out of well ingrained habits. We soon realized this was not enough, however, and so along with Center for Artistic Activism introduced a practical component of having workshop participants plan and carry out a creative action – so combining the theory and the practice, and then the follow up with small grants and support after people had returned home and were back in their home contexts — all of this helped create a huge change.
The second problem we had was how to help activists – who had become specialists in their fields – speak beyond the choir, to reach new potential supporters. How to for example, help access to medicines activists, well-versed in the jargon and fine print related to trade and patent laws, build a wider following, and help lay people understand what was going on, start to care, and get involved.
The Center for Artistic Activism helped with all of this.
For example by forbidding the patent policy wonks from using words – making them act out their message.
For example by showing LGBTQ activists in Macedonia that joy, and a utopian vision, can inspire and bring more new people in, than anger can.
The impact was in the newspaper headlines at the Durban Aids conference in 2016, the array of creative actions sex workers undertook at that conference and the way they continued to develop new and innovative actions on their own.
The way the Macedonian LGBTQ activists were awed by the number of people who came, and stayed, at their action in the public park in Skopje, and how they talked afterwards about seeing the value of moving beyond only anger.
The way, years after the workshop we funded, access to medicines activists worked with the Center for Artistic Activism to plan new campaigns related to Free the Vaccine during Covid. The way my colleagues at OSF also started to engage and work with and fund the Center for Artistic Activism, as they saw the impact and the potential — especially after Trump was elected and everybody started to talk about the limitations of facts and the truth, we already had a track record with the Center for Artistic Activism and could offer practical, workable alternatives.
About the Author Brett Davidson is a Center for Artistic Activism board member, founder of Wingseed, and Narrative Lead at the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS). A former journalist during South Africa’s democratic transition, Brett now works globally with foundations and nonprofits to harness narrative, listening, and storytelling for social justice.
Read Brett’s Substack: On the Wind
Want to partner with the Center for Artistic Activism? Work with us!
