 |
|
|
| |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Students in Design Art help silk-screen posters for the summit protest.
Wearing one of the 3,500 masks that were silk-screened in Quebec City is Brian Holmes of the French graphic activists group Ne Pas Plier. The mask is a cotton bandana with another image on the reverse, of the same mouth, gagged. The face belongs to Design Art secretary Sophie Généreux.
Women protesters used brassieres to decorate the massive chain-link fence around the site of the leaders' summit. Photos courtesy of Lydia Sharman |
by Barbara Black A group of graphic artists from Europe used Concordia’s Design Art facilities to launch their protest last weekend in Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas. Lydia Sharman, chair of the Design Art Department, would have taken part in the protest anyway -- “I strongly object to multinational corporations being able to sue governments” -- but her contacts with a group of activist artists in Europe led to a creative project that provided posters, masks and a strong presence at the tumultuous weekend event. The contacts followed a meeting Sharman had with Tony Credland of Reclaim the Streets in London last summer. The artists, particularly those associated with a group in France called Ne pas plier (“Do not bend”), also had strong links with the Université du Québec à Montréal. About 20 came to Canada for the protest at the summit, and some of those visited Montreal first. In the Visual Arts Building’s
Print Media Studio, they silk-screened posters, and designed a cotton
mask that was produced in Quebec City in time to be handed out at the
protest. The mask showed a photo of the lower half of a smiling face on
one side, and the face with the mouth gagged on the other. The model was
Design Art secretary Sophie Généreux.. The graphic artists, who are from England, France, Spain and Yugoslavia, are back at Concordia this week to give workshops to interested students before they go home. They will return in late October to attend a conference Dr. Sharman and other Design Art faculty members and students are organizing, called Declarations of [inter]dependence and the im]media]cy of design. It will bring together designers,
artists, educators and activists “to explore the public sphere as
a space of democratic voice and citizenship with an emphasis on graphic
agitation, manifestos, interventions, alternative modes of public address,
and culture jamming,” to quote its Web site, at http://design.concordia.ca/declaration/
|
|
