Wild Fire: Art as Activism

Inspired by the success of several projects within York University's Masters in Environmental Studies program, Wild Fire: Art as Activism was born in the flames of activism past and present. While many of the contributors are students, they are also activists, and were not content to let their stories sit on the library shelves. Instead, the individual projects were brought together into a collective statement about how art can be activism.

As editor Deborah Barndt explains in her introduction, the essays in Wild Fire challenge conventional understanding of art, activism, and academia. By exploring the many ways in which academically-informed art can create activism, and how intellectual activists create art, the essays highlight the overlaps between these disciplines. The text seeks to prove how definitions of what constitutes art should be reconsidered. The authors argue against the commodification of art, and question "the elitism and individualism of conventional art practices, and the internalized oppression that most of us suffer from when we say 'I can't draw.'" By showing a range of ways in which ordinary people produce art in a variety of ways, Wild Fire seeks to show the accessibility of art...

...The diverse assortment of subject matter throughout the text leads the reader in many directions: topically, mentally and emotionally. The approachable narrative created by Barndt, however, weaves the chapters together, as does the authors' energy and idealism.

It is not the final products of the authors' efforts that are investigated in this text, but the processes of and reflections on each project that is of interest. Many of the essays begin with questions that are never wholly answered. While this might generally invite criticism, in the case of a text about processes, unanswered questions are thought-provoking, and encourage readers to search for the answers themselves. Barndt puts out a call to arms, saying "We challenge you, the reader, to reconsider how art, activism, and academics are framed and practiced. We also ask you to rethink their interrelationship."

Wild Fire illustrates that people in academia can lend their strengths to artistic and activist pursuits successfully, but it also encourages academics to consider using artistic and activist philosophies to fire up their own work.

I was first drawn to this book by its title, Wild Fire, and then by its electrifying cover, with orange flames licking the night sky. It engaged my passions before I had read another word: my longing for more irreverent activism, my growing thirst for more creative forms of political practice.

Wild Fire: Art as Activism comes out of the tradition of popular education, and describes itself as seeking to "reframe art as activism," when it "ignites people's creativity, recovers repressed histories, builds community and strengthens social movements," As such, it is broader in scope than much labour activism, or even some approaches to labour arts and culture. But there is much common ground, particularly for those with a social union vision.

Wild Fire offers tools for engaging many hot issues that are central to labour renewal, including the biggies like youth, war, racism, sexism, and xenophobia... .

The emphasis in these essays is on the creative processes that have been used to do this work, whether it's storytelling, poetry writing, making zines, doing street theatre, puppetry, drumming, chanting, community radio, drawing, painting, doing graffiti, or guerilla gardening — to name a few.

There are 17 well-written and engaging essays, most including black and white images. ...There is a mix of activist and academic styles and vocabularies...

So, who is the audience for this book? Barndt writes: "Wildfire: Art As Activism speaks to new activists, artists, eductors, students, and community workers who are daily crossing borders, blurring boundaries, dissolving dichotomies and embracing contradictions. We hope it will inspire both critical and creative response, deeper reflection and bolder action. And that it will ignite many other sparks that will spread like wild fire."

She doesn't mention labour in this list, but I think there are many labour sisters — and some brothers too — who get it: who see the dynamism and hopefulness of this vision, and its vital importance for labour... .

Can academics go beyond their prescribed roles as researchers? At the environmental studies program at York University, some academics are indeed shifting their identities and blurring the boundaries between art, activism and academia. Wild Fire brings together 17 essays by contributors from the program.

Through their stories of community projects, the contributors demonstrate how art can be an effective tool for promoting social change. Art here encompasses many mediums, including jamming, mural painting, street performance, interventionist art and radio shows. As they confront stereotypes about academics, activists and artists, the authors question and attempt to reshape their roles as facilitators.

A valuable resource to community workers, Wild Fire shows us what art, activism and academia can offer each other, and challenges us to reconsider how these are practised.

The title of this anthology of mainly young activist women from an academic discipline intrigued me right away. I often think of art & activism, sometimes connected, sometimes separate. But Art as Activism implies a relationship of deeper integration. The twenty-one contributors have been graduate students of the editor; in this anthology they express their creativity as activism — a process that reaches out to the community to participate in social transformation. In her introduction the editor, Deborah Barndt of the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, reflects on the conventional understandings of art, activism and academia and writes, "We question the elitism and individualism of conventional art practices ... We question how art has become increasingly separate from daily life, and even more commodified as a consumer good in the global marketplace. Similarly, we question a narrow understanding of activism that frames mass protests as the primary mode of political action. How we think, converse, write, draw, sing, move can unveil power relations and transform knowledge production ad everyday actions."

We are still living in a cold war based mentality that dictates that art is made by trained professionals, art is not political, art is not related to community and art for social change is propaganda, so this book is a very welcome addition to our new awareness that everything is political and everything is connected. Barndt makes it clear that there are many modes and mediums of artistic expression, but most important for her in their relationship to the context in which they are produced and how they are presented to the community. Her important questions that we can recall and ask ourselves are "the why and for whom of artmaking."

The answers that lie in these diverse essays are richly expressive of many issues, many places, many contexts and forms of art as activism. It is impossible to do justice to every contribution in a review; I choose a few favourites, another reader may choose others that offer some connection or insight with special significance for her.

There are good lessons to be learned from the first essay by Leah Burns who writes about her work with 'at risk youth' in Toronto. She is willing to reveal her own self-doubts and to acknowledge her position of privilege and power to the youth with humour from the beginning when she has to answer the question, "Seriously, are you really an artist?" When the group is asked to make a mural for a food organization that wants it to look 'professional' and the staff suggests she can fix it up if it isn't, she uses the opportunity to explore power dynamics with the youth. She sees her participation as an ongoing cultural conversation that others also participate in the determining of process and the finished work. When she writes about humour, she says it is based on interaction and cannot be done alone and that humour can be a way of connecting divergent to a collective consciousness of taken-for-granted knowledge.

I liked Heather Chetwynd's essay on voice because so often the most obvious way people are oppressed is to silence them and rob them of their own voices. We speak in the name of children, old people, those who lack languages skills so often, never stopping to think we are stealing their rights of self-expression. Chetwynd writes about her experiences in exploring voices — from singing and chanting to progressing to the realization that "when we raise our voices, we challenge our perception of weakness, challenging those who have power over us and claiming our own power." Song is the sound of social resistance through which many groups have expressed their stories, their history and their power.

Salmon Tales: Eco-art Activism, really affected me as a west coast person who grew up with neighbours who dip netted and rack dried salmon on the banks of the Fraser River. Penner, Mack and Bensted started with co-creating banners about salmon for a festival. They wanted to stimulate awareness of salmon-human relationships rather than salmon as a food commodity. The project "has now shifted towards community art, activism and education in a community context ... we argue that visual art allows us to see and experience the world in a radically different way. It also allows us to focus on why salmon matter." The banners illustrated in this book show how salmon as well as people have been colonized and that colonization of "the worlds above and below water" are connected and equally important. What began as an academic project has moved into the community, changing and growing and reclaiming community through stories and discussion as well as visual art. I hope it comes to Victoria soon and politicians who love 'fish-farming' go to see it.

Oona Padgham has contributed an essay & interview on Arts in Detention: Creating Connections with Immigrant Women Detainees. Not a subject most us know or want to know much about. Padgham says we detain thousands of people in Canada who have committed no crime, in jails and hotels that are converted to jails. Families are separated; the children usually stay with their mothers in waiting process that may last months and end in deportation or residence in Canada. Padgham belongs to a group, No One is Illegal, which organizes in solidarity with immigrants of all status. This group started an arts group project with women and children in detention and in this essay Padgham tells the project story with three other women who worked with the detainees. Sima Zerehi says that art production is a way of communication for people who cannot always connect in a common language; Farrah Miranda says art gives the women a chance "to do something that is actually human." The project includes women and children expressing their anxiety, fears and hopes but it also allowed for some of the women to start their own art projects. The political nature of the art workers and the group they belong was not hidden. Jean McDonald said the project reveal the needs of women detainees — some end up there because they reported a sexual assault or domestic abuse — showing the urgent need for a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy for human service workers.

The project gave the women the opportunity to meet and work with one another, to distract them from their painful reality and uncertain future. Children could play together and women could share childcare. The art was integrated into the context of No One is Illegal's community work and it was exhibited publicly as an outreach and educational action, but also to show powerful creativity of people we repress to our larger society.

Padgham writes that, "The art itself is an outlet for frustration and pain, but also an opportunity to express hope for the future and joy in life."

Wild Fire is a valuable and inspiring contribution to the culture of creative social transformation; a place where activists, artists, academics participate together in the struggle for a justice and peace.

The collection of essays in Wild Fire: Art as Activism highlights collaborative, art-based practices used to stimulate a wide range of social and environmental education. The modes of expression profiled in the book are diverse: storytelling, chatting, poetry, zines, street theatre, guerrilla theatre, masks, puppetry, drums, meditational chanting, protest singing, community radio, drawing, painting, murals, homemade postcards, textile art, sewing, weaving, photo stories, photo therapy, adbusting and more. However, more than the art form, it is the context surrounding the stories that holds the reader. We learn of facilitators building group identity, consciousness-raising and addressing issues of social dislocation and environmental fragmentation. Among the 17 essays, numerous stories vibrate with optimism. They provide important examples of transformative education at work. Despite the numerous tensions present in alternative art and popular education practices, the potency of this book lies in the fact that such activities provide different models of how community education can work.