ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Making Art in a World on Fire w/ Amber Massie-Blomfield

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

What’s the point of the arts when the world is on fire? To follow the pipeline from creativity to activism and back again, Nadia Idle is joined by Amber Massie-Blomfield, former chief of theatre company Complicité and the author of Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create Better World. They discuss Dan Edelstyn […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined today for this very special microdose by Amber Massey Blumfield to talk about her book. Acts of Resistance, the power of art to create a better world. The hardback is out now and the paperback is out in June 2025. Amber, welcome to the show. Hello, Nadia. How nice to be here. Amber is an arts consultant, producer and non-fiction author. Her most recent role was executive director of internationally renowned theatre company Complicity, where she was recognized on the stage 100 power list in 2024.

During her tenure, she oversaw major projects including drive your plow over the bones of the dead, figures in extinction, the dark is rising, and can I live? She has worked for the Swiss Arts Council, the Barbican, ATC, China Plate, Free Word and Penn International, and many, many more institutions. She was executive director of Camden People's Theatre, from 2014 to 2018,

receiving a special achievement award at 2018's Off-West End Awards in recognition of her work. As an author, she has written 20 theatres to see before you die, which won and was shortlisted for loads of awards. An Act of Resistance is her latest book. What a series of amazing accolades. So, Amber, let's start, if I may, by giving listeners a bit of context about this book from The Blurb,

so they know what we are chatting about. So Act of Resistance is a wide-ranging exploration of art as a form of political activism. It addresses the question, what is the purpose of art in a world on fire? And in this book, Amber considers the work of artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers, alongside collectives, communities and organisations

that have used protest sites as their canvas and spearheaded political movements, With stories drawn from environmentalism, feminism, anti-fascism and other movements, acts of resistance brings together some remarkable acts of creativity that have shifted history on its axis. Very, very ACFM. So very excited to chat to you today, Amber. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. You're very welcome. So perhaps let's start right at the beginning.

I'd be so interested to hear more about what motivated you do to write this book in the first place. Yeah, so as you've kind of gathered from that long bio introduction, I've spent my career really as a theatre producer. I guess this book started to emerge into the world in, I really started thinking about it back in 2016. You don't need reminding of everything that happened in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote, the year of Trump's election part one. And in the wake of that, I was working and, you know, I was running this little studio theatre called Camden People's Theatre, which is an incredible venue, you know, it's a tiny studio theatre in the heart of London where there's this programme of really kind of experimental, politically engaged theatre from artists who are kind of often early career, often kind of operating from the fringes and really engaging quite directly with the big issues of the day. And I absolutely loved that job. You know, in the wake of that real shift in the political landscape,

particularly for, you know, many of us here in the UK, I just started to really ask myself a lot of questions about what was the purpose of what we're all doing there. You know, we'd have sort of 50, 60 people turn up of an evening and come and sit and watch a, you know, a piece of theatre, very well intended, often, you know, brilliantly made. But actually, you know, it was often hard. to feel that there was a direct impact to that work.

And I guess the question I was really asking myself at that point was, does it really matter what we're all doing here? You know, if the world is on fire and if we're facing crises on so many different fronts, can I really justify my life here in this theatre and what I'm doing with this community of artists? And so that was the beginning, really. And it really did start with a very genuine inquiry for myself about, you know, who are the artists through history?

who've kind of brought their art and their creativity to the urgent political issues of their time. How have they kind of used their creativity as a form of resistance? And actually, how has art showed up in the kind of big movements throughout history? So I started just collecting stories, really. And the first one which I'm sure will come to

that I kind of got really preoccupied with was what happened during the Siege of Sarajevo and the kind of arts that flourished during that period. particularly Susan Sontag going and directing a production of waiting for Goddo during the siege. So that was the beginning of it. And yeah, over the next few years, I just started collecting all these extraordinary and inspiring stories. And, you know, it really has been the most powerful and transformational journey for me writing this book, which I hope means that it's, you know, a powerful experience for readers too.

Thank you. That's really lovely. Kind of hear how you came to this book. because often we don't know, like, what people's motivation is. So thank you so much for articulating that. I also wanted to, I was also wondering, like, whether you've written the book with a specific audience in mind while answering that question. Like, who is this book for?

I really started off thinking about my kind of creative artistic community, but as I went along, it became much more about trying to help all of us to recognize our creative capacity. And actually, you know, I think the book went on quite a journey because, you know, I started off imagining that I was going to go and do quite a lot of in-depth field work, go and visit places where arts projects had happened and meet the people who'd been involved in all the rest of it. And then the pandemic hit and that kind of changed the shape of everything. But really what I felt so powerfully during the pandemic was like this very immediate experience of crisis of being in a community of crisis that was quite unlike energy. thing that I'd ever experienced before because of my background and where I'd grown up. And actually just to see the extent to which so many people just reached for art and reached for creativity in that context and all, you know, all these people coming together to form

outdoor community choirs or, you know, start writing poetry or people going out into the streets and, you know, in the street that I lived in, the kids were going out and chalking in the streets and kind of they made this little gallery wall in the street where everyone was making their own artworks and taking them out. And there was this kind of, I don't know, I just felt so heartened by the way in which creativity and art suddenly felt so important to everyone. And I think that just shifted the focal point a little bit.

And it really made the book about saying, actually, you know, art is something that all of us have within our grasp. And, you know, as soon as we start to exercise our artistic creativity, we become artists. And so I want the book really to be for anyone and everyone who feels perhaps in a moment of crisis about the political landscape of the world. And what a sad reality that the themes of the book have become more and more pertinent since 2016. To say, you know, you have these creative tools available to you and kind of a look to the stories from history to find inspiration for what you can do now. I think before we go any further, and in order to bring listeners with us through this conversation,

could we dig a little bit into what you mean by art? What's the catch? What are the different categories of things that you think about when you mean art in this book when art comes up? You're not just talking about paintings and sculptures here, are you? Yeah, it was a really difficult question. I had a lot of arguments with my editors about whether the book should be about the power of the arts or the power of art to create a better world. And we kind of rejected the term the arts because we felt that there was a real sort of a sort of perception of kind of exclusivity around the term the arts. And I guess that that, you know, this sense we have now of what the arts are in kind of Eurocentric cultures is really. really a bit of an invention of the mid-century, you know, I think historically the term art was much more associated with the idea of the artisan. It was kind of much more woven into everyday life.

It was about crafts. It was about how you kind of execute creative processes with a sense of skill and, you know, a certain quality of how you do it. Early in the book, I do kind of address this and this sort of issue of the arts. like there's a bit of a rope around it somehow. And I do, I did, I did start off the project kind of looking at the kind of quite conventionally defined fields of the arts. So the visual arts, theatre, literature, dance, film, so on. But as I kind of got into the project more and more, I became quite interested in how

artists very often themselves have kind of pushed at those boundaries and have pushed at those definitions. And so I kind of went with the artists where they, went and explore, you know, the different context in which an artistic sensibility and a kind of creativity shows up within politics and with, well, particularly within activist movements. And I was really interested in the kind of place of creativity in protest movements as well. So, you know, it goes into the book looks at kind of dancing in the street. It looks at placard making.

It looks at kind of political joke making and that kind of literary project as well. So there is a sort of expanded sense of art making broadly within activism. And I think what's really good about what you've just said there is what's come up for me is, you know, and you spoke previously about, you know, kids chalking, you know, during the pandemic and whatever. And like it feels like it's almost even difficult to use terms like creativity even without there being a connotation of some kind of like ring-fenced space for creatives. But what we mean here is also something, I think what I took from the book is like this real human impetus to produce some kind of art, that creative impulse that comes from the inside out, that you kind of apply some kind of structure on with some kind of medium, which seems to be so central to being human, but like as you outline is often oppressed by like the reality of life under late capitalism, which is something that will come to.

Does that kind of resonate with you as well? Absolutely, it does. And yeah, I think, I mean, I was really keen to sort of, you know, going back to that question you asked about who the book was for, I had quite a strong impulse initially to get into quite a lot of institutional critique and kind of talk about the issues about the big institutions and the kind of power that they hold to say what art is and what isn't and the kind of political complexity around that.

I did actually write quite a bit about that, but I took it out of the book for exactly. the reason I was like, this is of interest to people who are already professionals, but actually that's not what this book is about and who this book is for. And, you know, those examples do exist. You know, there are stories of kind of big projects that are produced professionally by professional artists, but it was quite a deliberate thing to kind of put them alongside, you know, artworks that have come from the grassroots and aren't in the professional space and actually to give those an equal weight felt really important? There are so many lovely vignettes. I mean, I've struggled to think,

what are we going to talk about in the space for this episode? Ken Sarawiwa combating, you know, oil pollution in Nigeria and, you know, women stitching subversive patchworks in Pinochet's Chile and you're blocking of an airport in France. And, you know, you structure the book chapters with these kind of really evocative, you know, one-word titles like The March, the Hill, the Power Station, the Village, the Siege, which I absolutely love because it, really pulled me into like wanting, wanting to read those chapters. But where I'd actually like to start is maybe closer to home about the, is it called the Walthamstow Bank takeover action?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I should say as well, I'm not an academic as your introduction will have highlighted. So this is not intended in any way to be a kind of comprehensive history of sort of change-making art. and I really gave myself permission to kind of like cherry-pick the stories that I just thought were so fascinating and compelling and actually illustrative of a kind of particular approach to art of resistance or art of change-making. And so, yeah, hopefully like all the stories of just really, really cracking stories, you know, that was really important to me.

In Walthamstow, there's a couple called Daniel Edelstein and Hilary Powell. They have got a project called the Power Station. They did also have a previous project called Bank Job, which I think you might be referring to in your notes, which was also a wonderful project. But I've particularly focused on this project called Power Station. It's a live project at the moment. And, you know, anyone can go on their website and engage with it.

And they've got live events happening at their street in Walthamstow where they've got the project happening. They decided to turn their street into a power station, basically. And the way they've gone about this is kind of bringing all their neighbours on board to kind of put, they've done a fundraising project to generate the funds that everyone in their street can have solar panels on their rooftops. It's a brilliant kind of local change-making project. But what I absolutely love about it is Dan and Hillary are both artists.

Hillary is a visual artist, Dan is a filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, and they've kind of approached this entire project as a work of art. So there's kind of creativity woven through every aspect of it. I went and spent a day with them when they were having a sunflower day where they'd invited everyone in their street who's participating in this project to grow sunflowers in their garden. And on the day we were there, they brought them out into the street and there was this whole street was completely full of sunflowers and they were kind of having a festival around it but they'd created this sort of brilliantly striking visual metaphor in the middle of everything which just conveyed so brilliantly what the whole project was about you know it

really was an image of what does it feel like for our relationship with nature to kind of reintegrate into the city space and what does it feel like for a kind of whole community to kind of come together to kind of make this transformation of their their local environment and they've you know they've done loads of other stuff like they recorded a single with the local primary school that i think got into the top 40 and that you know the funds raised from that you know practically kind of fed back into um you know getting the solar panels and all the rest of it and there's just this real integration of the very practical change making that they're doing with a real sense of creativity. And I think what that does, what that creativity does is it

it sort of gives the project its real weight and it kind of helps everyone to recognise the significance of what they're participating in for that community to really recognise something something more profound in their kind of coming together and making something beautiful and transformational together. And at the same time, it makes a, you know, it creates a story that is transferable. You know, this, this project has got an incredible amount of press coverage, which had it been a simple sort of community project where they were coming together to put solar panels on their roofs, I'm not convinced it would have had the same level of impact as this sort of creative, artistic aspect of the story has brought to it.

And what that means is now that there's communities across the country who are taking this project up and replicating it themselves and they're kind of holding a community around that. So I just absolutely love this kind of art making woven into something very practical. I talk about Tanya Brigera's idea of useful art. She's a Mexican artist who talks about wanting art that doesn't portray the thing, but is the thing and I'm really inspired by a community of artists who's kind of going actually art can have a real real tangible direct impact

art doesn't need to sort of sit sit to the side and kind of comment on what's happening or portray what's happening it can be what's happening it can be the change making so yeah I'm trying to think through like what are the different elements that would make an action like this in a local community possible and for there to be people that would come to a point to be able to trust that creativity and kind of overcome all of the various different barriers that late capitalism creates in terms of being able to trust other people like so that's why I'm wondering like actually does it take certain personalities to you know to kick things off and but then I was also struck by

what you said about the importance of approaching something like an art project. And I wonder whether there's something there, that there are various different endeavours that if we're approached, in fact, like an art project, rather than, you know, some kind of like technical endeavour, there perhaps it would open people's minds like in the process. This is just me riffing off what you're saying. So I wonder if you have any thoughts, all your thoughts on that. Yeah, it's a really interesting observation and actually they're doing this project and they're making a documentary at the same time. So their idea was to kind of make a film telling the story of how they would kind of bring their community together to make this solar power station. And Daniel spoke about how they initially had imagined kind of turning the whole of Walthamstow into a solar power station.

But then he was kind of thinking about the whole story through the frame of a kind of. of good kind of hero's journey narrative that would make a good kind of basis for the film. And so they had to come up with a challenge for themselves, which was like almost too difficult, but like just within their grasp that they could achieve it. And of course, if like, you know, if they started off going, right, we're going to get a solar panel, you know, solar panels on every roof in Walthamstow, like, A, it would be incredibly difficult for them to achieve. And B, it would kind of take some of the sort of human scale out of it that sort of made it a good story to tell. So it just is really interesting to me that they kind of came to this project through the lens of

we want this to be a good kind of entertaining, well-made piece of drama, and we've got to set up the conditions for that to happen. And I think there's something then about what does the kind of a lens of the artist bring into that kind of change-making space. When I speak to artists, I think they kind of very often sort of see the world through the frame of whatever their particular artistic discipline is. I really come from theatre and I think theatre is fundamentally always about what does it mean to get a group of people in a room together and like get them to sit down and think about one story or one idea over a prolonged period of time in the present. You've got to

to have it right now, you know, you've got to engage with it right now, right here. Those kind of elements of presence and kind of collective presence are so present for me in always how I think about and see the world. And, you know, I think for writers, there's always this thing about, you know, language and how does language shape our relationship with the world and all the rest of it. So I think there's something about, you know, I'm kind of riffing on this a bit, but just, you know, different artistic disciplines and different artistic perspectives. bring a kind of different view to the world and a different way of thinking about our way of seeing

and understanding and shaping the world. And leaning into that is really powerful. I tend to think in terms of like, what are the set of obstacles here? Because I have a lot of belief in human beings as being like creative and collective in terms of wanting to do things together. And I tend to think, okay, well, today in the UK,

for example, which is where we are, like, what are the obstacles? And I'm thinking about, you know, councils being strapped for cash and, you know, effectively, I'm sure there are so many initiatives and possibilities out there that have not been able to get the funding or basically have come up against, like, local, either legislation or rules of what you're able to do. And I kind of wonder, I'm wondering about, like, whether the kind of artistic approach helps is less or more of a threat in a way. And I think probably the answer is I don't know what do you think of that. Yeah. I mean, I think that it's, you know, I think one of the

the real great tragedies of the system we live within is kind of our lost ability to kind of be in community with each other and how hard we find it to kind of, well, no, I shouldn't say we. How hard many of us find it to kind of build relationships with our neighbours and so. on. For some people, the answer to that absolutely can be art. For other people, you know, the idea of getting involved in an art project would make their toes curl. And I think, you know, it's really about sort of having a multiplicity of different approaches to tackling this problem. But I think for me, there's something about art kind of like recognizing what art can really do and what it can bring to a movement of change. There's such a set of skills you can develop

through a lot of kind of artistic creative participation about how to be in community. I mean, I'm very engaged with the climate movement. That's my sort of principal area of interest. And one thing I think about a lot, I was talking to a woman who runs a kind of dance theatre company for young teenagers. And it's principally young men in a very rural part area on Exmoor on the kind of of West Somerset Coast, which is very remote and kind of deprived rural area. And we were talking about how isolated, how many of those young men are,

how much time they spend on their social media platforms and so on, but like how few opportunities there are really to kind of meet other young people and engage and all the rest of it. And in that context, the idea of kind of coming together and like making a show together is the most brilliant training in how to be in community with each other because you know you have to set aside your ego you know you have to work together to overcome challenges like opening night is going to happen whether you like it or not

and actually in a society where we're going to be increasingly buffeted by you know big shocks and infrastructure failures and you know that in fact that community that I'd been in had just had a power outage for three days where, you know, no one had had had their power because of the big storms that had happened in December. And that is going to become an increasing reality. And actually, if you've worked with other people in your community

to make a show, no one need ever have told you you're doing a kind of like big political project, but you've learnt how to be with each other and you've kind of explored a set of skills that hopefully will prepare you a little bit for facing some of those crises and understanding how to be together, to work together to overcome them. So I think there is a sort of a kind of gentle way into some of this stuff that art can present, which I don't know, more confrontational political activism might just be alienating for certain groups of people and this, you know, this is where art can have a real power. Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, what I was hearing there from

what you're saying is almost like the importance of bodies in a space being in itself like a resistance, like whether it's an outdoor space or whether it's an indoor space. And in a way, like it's crazy to think that like this is what late capitalism has brought us to. But that in itself has become a subversive act because like you're saying, it teaches us parts of our humanity, you know, whether people become conscious of those or not, that our skills are so important to be able to survive, like in a literal sense, but also in a psychological sense. So, so yeah, so thanks, thanks for that articulation. Yeah, I really, that is really, really what I believe. And, you know, when you, you know, I think,

you know, I think so many of our current crises have been fostered by the amount of time we spend on social media and like how, you know, and actually the sort of convenience culture where we're just like losing more and more opportunities to have like, interactions with people who are, you know, might be different from us or might have different perspectives and like even learning how to like sit with an awkward conversation. So much of that is being stripped out of our experience of the world. And I think that's profoundly damaging. And so yeah, that's where I get a bit, you know, that's where I, as a theatre producer, you know, that's why I think theatre is so important because it is a kind of

resistance to that. Yeah, definitely. Good. Okay, so we've got that one down. Fantastic. I'd love us to then move on to this really kind of fantastical example that you bring to us as one of your stories in the book in the chapter, The Siege, about Susan Sontag, who we recently read on ACFM, her notes on camp, because one of the things she did, and maybe you can give us a little bit of an introduction to like where she was, if you know, you know, as part of this story, is put on this play, you know, Beckett's play, waiting for Godot in the middle of the siege in Sarajevo in 1993. It's such an incredible story and I think one that brings up such interesting questions about what is art and what is the role of art. So maybe you can tell us a little bit

about your own story with bringing this story to us. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, just to give a little bit of context, this was, you know, in the 90s, Susan Sontag, who was, you know, coming towards the end of her life at that point, I guess in her 60s, went to Sarajevo during the siege. You know, she's always in her career, and this is kind of what made it such fascinating story to tell, been really kind of curious about art and the purpose of art. and how art met the world. And at the same time, she kind of had this activist streak to her and this kind of engagement with the sort of live political issues of her day. And I suppose Sarajevo just represents this kind of coming together of those aspects of her identity.

So she went to Sarajevo and she was there with this amazing theatre producer called Harris Parsovich, who was in his early 30s at the time. a friend of a friend of mine now he's an incredible human being she was thinking to herself you know what can possibly do to help the people of Sarajevo and he said to come back and direct a theatre production and between them they agreed that waiting for Godo would be the right play for her to come and come and direct so in April 1993 she went back sorry apologies she visited in April 93 for the first time and then she came back in the July of that year and directed this production of waiting for Godo literally in the middle of the siege with you know kind of shells raining down on

the city she was working with a community of some of the really sort of well-known actors in the city and they were kind of coming every day to the theatre where they were rehearsing stepping over the rubble of, you know, the bombed out foyer and coming into the the auditorium working by candlelight. I mean, the actors really quite literally starving and kind of having to lie down in the middle of the rehearsals, you know, because they were feeling so so fatigued and weak through the lack of nutrition. And yet they came, they kept coming and they put on this production of Beckett. And, you know, then they performed it in August.

The theatre was absolutely full every night with, you know, people coming down and sort of avoiding the sniper fire to get there. And I just find it a really extraordinary story because I think we, you know, I think, I'm sorry, I must stop using the word we. I think for many of us, you know, who are involved in arts,

in sort of relatively peace, peaceful societies or peaceful times have this question about, you know, what's the real purpose and power of what I'm doing. And when you look at a community that's very literally under siege with the bombs falling on it that, you know, still feels it's important to come together and make a production of what is a, you know, very esoteric, not avertly political, quite difficult kind of modernist drama and the kind of questions fell away from them. They just accepted that it was important that they were there and they were doing it and they just wanted to carry on with it. So it's a remarkable story and of course in the middle of what was in Sarajevo a burgeoning

of artistic expression during the siege. I mean there was concerts being given. There were an international modern art gallery was started during the siege and all these kind of prominent international artists were kind of pledging their artworks to be sent to Sarajevo for this visual art gallery. So there was this real sense that art was present throughout the whole resistance to the siege. I mean, I'm completely, like, tingling, like just some of those details. I remember reading that in the book. And I think that's a really, like, important context is that it's not like she was going to put on a play and there was no other art. There was like lots of art at the same time as people like being killed, you know, and things being bombed and it being like this complete scenario of like real and actual war.

And it's reminded me of when I was in Tahrir in Egypt in 2011 when I dropped everything and went to be part of the Egyptian uprising. Now, there were people who were being killed, but it wasn't all out war, you know, like with like standardized. weapons kind of yet, but one of the first things that struck me and will always stay with me as in the middle of this uprising with, you know, like thousands and thousands of people coming to the squares, like one of the things that I'd never experienced in Egypt, you know, myself in a public place in this way, was it in a complete explosion of all sorts of forms of artistic expression. And it was really, really stood out to me where I was thinking like, wow, these are people who are here because we're trying to topple, you know, a government.

This is what's trying to go. But like the way that it's being expressed is like this unbelievable, like surge of like collective art which was being produced, which was incredible. And that really got me thinking. And I think we'll come back to that. I think the relationship between, you know, are at these moments. But one of the things that also stood out for me, and I can't remember who said this, was this response during the Sarajevo. example of, you know, being asked by, you know, some kind of official, like, why are you holding a film festival during the siege? And the response that came back was, why are you holding

a siege during our film festival? Which I found deliciously subversive. I absolutely loved that. So, yeah, I'd love to hear more about, you know, some of the things that drew you into that specific Sarajevo example as well. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's Harris Parsovich, who was the producer who invited Sontag to come and he did start the Sarajevo film festival during the siege. And now it's still going and it's, you know, one of the biggest film festivals in Europe. And, you know, that's really wonderful that the kind of legacy of all this kind of burgeoning of the creative life of the city continued in the wake of the siege. But yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's exactly what's so striking to me about it is that I feel like in capitalist societies like the one I live, in, you know, there is this sense often of art kind of being a luxury and something that,

you know, if you can afford the time to go to a gallery or a museum, great, or if you can afford the sort of extortionate tickets to go to a West End show, fantastic, but it's something that's held quite apart from life. And actually, of course, there's been an attack on, you know, arts provision in schools and so on. So it really has felt more and more, you know, removed from everyday life and in that context the discussion about the kind of power and impact of art becomes really quite an academic one and one that like a certain strata of society is kind of preoccupied with and then you kind of look at situations of war and you know i've been very interested in what's happened during the genocide in gaza as well that there has been

you know there's been a huge amount of creativity among people who are you know literally you know, losing their family members day by day in their most nightmarish circumstances. And yet you have the Garza Free Circus, you know, putting on circus performances for children or artists who have, you know, are putting, you know, creating artworks on the walls of the destroyed buildings. And it's almost like, you know, this, this discussion just like about the purpose and power of art just completely falls away. And it's just a given. It's something. that people reach for and, you know, in your example as well, you know, people need it. These sort of moments of profound change or extreme suffering, people really need art and they

need their creative expression. And I find that so moving. And it kind of makes me feel that for those of us in privileged capitalist societies, we don't have the right to kind of let art stay as this kind of preserve of a certain elite within society. We have to fight for it to be part of everyone's lives because it's so important and so valuable to everyone. In a way, almost what that is is the kind of compartmentalising and commodification of art, right?

Which has almost like succeeded within the discourse, you know, in the UK. saying everybody believes this in any way. But this idea that, you know, these things are, I like this idea as something to kind of specifically fight against about it being a luxury. You know, it's like saying, engaging with, you know, the earth or the atmosphere or like other human beings or like animals or whatever is a luxury. I mean, it's just complete bollocks, right? So it's this idea that anything that's not work or that doesn't fit you into some kind of survival strategy. becomes a luxury. And actually what it is, it's the other way around. It's like the way that you cope and survive, but also the way that you actualise yourself as a human being, is through

these things, is through the importance of relationships, is through expression. And expression isn't this thing that is the caveat of some kind of discourse, which is outside yourself, right? And of course, the interesting thing about Britain, I think, is a lot of people experience this, but then there's the kind of discourse on top of it that tells you otherwise. In the same way, you know, I think maybe I was saying this to you previously, this idea that community doesn't exist and, you know, each person is out for themselves and that kind of like dogma. I mean, it's just, you know, Britain would be falling apart if it wasn't for people cooperating at the moment.

Like, it's people helping each other on a kind of community level, which is why, like, anyone's able to survive. So I guess I'm interested in that, and I'm interested in one of the things I like, about your book is it brings forward like over history like these different examples of like where there has been a different like you you can't ignore that there's a different narrative and I think I'm trying to think about those examples and like less like I'm trying to think about those ways of thinking in less extreme examples and trying to think about the comparison between you know, Waltham Stowe and North West London, Northeast London, my apologies, as an example and then like

situation of like quite extreme like siege and war like whether it's sarajeva or whether it's you know you know in Palestine and kind of what we can learn from those examples and and apply them to kind of our lives in the every day you know yeah and I think I just want to add as well I don't you know I don't want to imply that kind of within the capitalist society that I live within now there is a sort of an absence of creative experience kind of across communities all across the country. And I think part of the issue, I mean, it comes back to this thing of the arts again and the kind of recognised institutional art forms that actually, you know,

the arts community has been very, very guilty of sort of, you know, recognising certain forms of artistic expression as proper art and not really talking about or celebrating or shining. a light on how present creativity is throughout community life in this country. I mean, there is a massive, massive amount of amateur theatre companies, for example, in this country. And it just is never, ever really a part of the discussion about theatre as an art form in this country. But I think there's something like 4,000 amateur theatre companies in this country, you know. So it is, you know, creativity is so, so present in our society. And it all, it all

is playing such a big, big part in community building. So I think there is a kind of sort of exactly as you're saying, you know, community really does exist, you know, and perhaps we just don't talk about it as much as we should, or, you know, many of us don't talk about it as much as we should. And I do, you know, I take a, you know, perspective from the climate crisis. And I, really do feel, you know, we're going to face increasing experiences of at least partial collapse of infrastructure and so on in the years ahead. And I think a lot of that sort of latent community identity will come to the fore more and more. And we are inherently social creatures. In fact, humans are one of the most social of all species. It's something that

capitalism doesn't really facilitate, but it's present in us. I want to hold on the idea of like the relationship between capitalism and art for a second here, because one of the things that really struck me when I was reading through the Sarajevo example and I was thinking about, you know, Palestine and that context, like as you made that connection. And when I was reading the book, I was thinking to myself, like, is there a relationship between like war, explicit destruction, death, and the, you know, the breaking through of art, like the necessity of artistic production as a way of surviving as human beings, in contrast to capitalism and art, like this is just my idea here, where perhaps, you know, the explicit nature of war, like creates more a more explicit resistance or, like, like a fertile ground for that self-expression to burst forth, as I'm saying, but under late capitalism, there's kind of like this slow choking, stifling effect on people while

repeating the mantra, you know, that everyone's free and like we have all these like amazing ability to do all these things. And then also all the while like, you know, we were just talking about like people are actually engaging in all sorts of creative expression, but perhaps I guess what I'm getting at, it's not given any value. You know, it's not, the story, the narrative isn't there and it's not attributed to any value in the same way. So I guess I'm trying to think about like, in an, maybe in an explicit sense, like, if war does this, like, does capitalism effectively do, do the opposite? I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that idea? You know, the thing that really strikes me about

what happened in Sarajevo and what's happened in Gaza is this idea. of, and it's something that, you know, the artist, particularly in Sarajevo, spoke about the idea of kind of artistic expression as a kind of defence of their humanity or a defence of civilisation and this sense of in the situation where there is a project essentially of ethnic cleansing, that actually to express yourself artistically, is a form of defence because the kind of act of creative expression is an enactment of humanity and an enactment of human identity. And that is the very thing that the kind of opposing forces are seeking to destroy. So that particularly strikes me about the situation in war that is distinct.

I mean, in terms of capitalism, the question is, what does capitalism do to art? Yes, what does it do to our ability to engage with our artistic selves? Maybe, I'm saying. I'm thinking perhaps on a socio-psychological level, perhaps. Yeah, I mean, that is a really interesting question. I mean, I don't know if I ever got a full answer for it, but I think there's a sense in which there's certainly a kind of instrumentalisation of art within British society, for sure, that I think is, you know,

there's this kind of very clear distinction between a sort of much more commercial form of artistic expression and then you have your kind of subsidised worthy artistic forms where there's an idea that there has to be a social impact and you know artists have to be able to prove the impact that their work is having and to report to that to the arts council and the you know the role the Arts Council has in shaping a cultural landscape that is informed by a certain kind of instrumentalisation. And I probably, you know, perhaps surprisingly mount a bit of a defence of art for art's sake in the book, which I think, you know, most people reading the book probably being a bit surprised by. But I think that there is this sense that I have that art that's

concerned with formal experimentation without any kind of overt political project behind it can be really disruptive and can particularly be disruptive to a culture that needs to kind of instrumentalise and exploit everything. And so these kind of experimental artistic forms can become a kind of zone of resistance within that context. I have a quite fully answered your question but i mean i think that that's an interesting idea for me yeah i think there is you know there's something more profound that you're getting at which is about just our understanding of value isn't it in a capitalist society and the sort of subtle forms of expression and kind of community building that just aren't recognised and valued and we don't

have a language to talk about the meaning and purpose of that. And I suppose that art making that kind of falls outside of, you know, really obviously profit generating music or films or whatever it is gets lost and gets cast into the sort of space of the amateur, you know, I saw someone were sharing something today about community as a preface can often be read as meaning less good, at the same with the term amateur, you know, it can be taken to signal less good and that that is a kind of prime example of exactly the kind of capitalist mindset you're talking about, I think, that we have lost, you know, capitalism is so reduced. in the terms it gives us to talk about value and meaning.

And so that kind of narrowing down of what we're allowed to recognise as art and sort of understand as art happens. But, you know, it's inevitably going to fall apart, isn't it? So other stuff will break through. We'll see. We'll keep pushing. We'll keep pushing. And there is, you know, there's a part, something I look at as well in the book, about the idea of the prefigurative and you know that's an idea that really comes through activism of how you know how do you build the kind of present the sort of future we're

striving towards in the present and how do you start to to manifest that now and again I think that art can have a really powerful role to play in that creative expression of alternatives in the present maybe that brings us to joy maybe it does bring us to joy maybe it does bring us to joy, but I'm going to be a cynic for a minute before we come on to joy. I've got one. So, so, like, I've, you know, I was involved in certain, like, Reclaim the Streets' actions, and, you know, I love all of the kind of public-facing extinction rebellion, like, kind of performances, in a sense.

So, like, that's where I'm coming from. And I absolutely love these kind of, like, disruptive big actions. But I wonder if I've been doing this for too long. basically to get to the point where I feel like I don't have faith, or perhaps I've lost faith, that that sort of kind of performance, art activism can actually affect change beyond, as you were mentioning, giving a voice to the alternative and giving us community and creating that culture in which like the opposition or the resistance can inhabit and nurturing us to be able. to resist. So I know that it can do that. And this speaks to your idea at the top of the book,

which I love, about allowing collectives to recognize themselves through producing art, which you were just talking about. So I feel like I've lost faith that those sort of actions can specifically affect change, not I believe that they create community and that's important and they give us culture and resistance and nurture us. But I wonder if you believe that art in that kind of performative sense can actually lead to change today. Yeah, I mean, I guess I started off the book really thinking I was going to find projects that sort of did have a very, very direct political impact and I, you know, you know, projects that, you know, clearly made a tangible political change. And actually I was inspired by Rebecca Solnit's book, Hope in the Dark, where she

looks at various activist movements that really have driven tangible political change. You know, I found some of those stories. There are stories in the book, for example, the Ukamau Group in Bolivia and this film they made called The Blood of the Condole, which, you know, was based on a really terrible true story about the US Peace Corps in Bolivia, forcibly sterilising indigenous women without their consent. They made a fictional film about this and it led to the US Peace Court in Bolivia

being expelled from Bolivia. There are stories like this really of, you know, an artwork being created, a single artwork having very direct political impact. I guess my understanding of how political change happened evolved and I think exactly, you know, on the same front with those big political movements that you mentioned and reclaim the streets and Extinction Rebellion and so on, I think that they, no action or no strand of activity can single-handedly, you know, transform the politics of a country.

I increasingly felt that my project was about recognising the role that art complacent, within collective movements of change making that sort of come from many, many different directions at once. And that, you know, there is this idea, I think, you know, I was inspired by the French writer called Edward Louis, who talked about the role that art played for him as a young man in realizing that there was a community of other young queer people like him and he grew up in a community where he didn't really have that community around.

him and then through watching films and sort of discovering queer culture he realised that he was kind of part of a collective and a movement. And he talked about this idea of latent collectives that art can help them to recognise themselves in a way. And

I talk in the book about the power of Billy Holliday's strange fruit in the civil rights movement and how that song, it's political but it's not a rallying cry. It's a you know, I'm sure your listeners will know it,

but it's a very poetic kind of aesthetic expression of an account of a lynching. Incredible song, incredible, intense. And like you said, like, it's not a rally and cry. It's a different kind of, a lot more pensive and intense. Yeah, amazing. Sorry, don't interrupt you, go on. No, no, absolutely. And the kind of images that she creates in that song

and this kind of sense of the song being quite beautiful is so jarring and uncomfortable. And it's such a powerful and important song, I think, for the civil rights movement. It became so central to that movement in terms of that movement, sort of, for many people, you know, many, many people have talked about that song being such an important moment for them

in kind of drawing them into the movement and recognising a kind of connection with a sort of broader, a broader movement. So yes, just this sense of art being a way of weaving communities and collectives together, I think is really powerful and important. And I really tried to get away by the end of the book from this quite individualistic idea of one, artist or one author being able to create change on their own terms. And I guess what the book is really driving for is for artists to become more closely woven with the sort of big movements of our time and to get closer to activists

and bring their creativity to the kind of front line of the big movements of our time. That's great. Thank you. And it brings me directly on to something that I've noticed in the book, which is that I felt like when I was reading, you were using art and activism at some point almost interchangeably. And I just wondered, like, have you come to the point where you no longer make a distinction between them in a sense? Yeah. I mean, I guess that art can be activism can be art, but they're not necessarily, you know, Art isn't necessarily activism and activism isn't necessarily art. And I guess for me, when art becomes activism is when there is this real agenda of making change.

Intention. Is it about intention? Does the intention matter? Yeah, the intention matters. And, you know, not all of the examples of creative expression in the book are activism. you know, they can be part of a project of resistance or world building without necessarily being activism, I think I should say. But I think when, you know, when art is activism, it really is about that intention. I think there is inevitably something oppositional about it and something that kind of comes from the outside. You know, I had someone who leads a major arts organisation the other day talking about institutional activism and how they're kind of trying to make change from the inside, from their leadership position. And it sort of slightly, I mean, it'd be interesting to hear what you think,

whether you really can be an activist at the same time as being the leader of an organisation. but I really feel like there's something inherent in activism that, you know, it has to come from a place that's a little bit removed from the kind of centre of power that's being confronted. I would agree with that. I would agree with that offhand, yeah. Yeah, so I think there's something about the kind of positionality

of where the art is coming from. Yeah, and again, with activism, I mean, I guess it's really about recognizing the moment with it, the moments within activism where there is this burgeoning of creativity. One of my favourite examples, you know, I have been quite involved in a lot of the Palestine protests and there is an amazing collective called Pulse for Palestine. And they are on all the marches and they're just like incredible like musicians and they're just, you know, they will be on the march for two or three hours just keeping up this level of kind of energy and kind of musical performance the whole time. And when you kind of catch up with them on the protest, like that is absolutely the best place to be because everyone is like dancing, joining in with the singing.

And we're all there for this kind of, you know, there couldn't be a more serious reason to be there and there couldn't be a greater weight to what we're all doing. And somehow within that context, the music that they bring and the kind of rhythm and the musicality that they have with them transforms the energy and allows those who are there to kind of recognise something very beautiful about that shared presence, which of course is there within the protest movement already. But I think there is a real power to the kind of art and creativity in that moment in transforming the energy of, you know, and helping everyone to recognise why they're there together. Completely. I'm so happy you brought that up. I mean, I find it, I still find it really hard to go on a demo and not play samba.

I've been playing samba for like 20-something years and I've got a wrist, a damaged wrist so I just can't play percussion like I used to, you know, for a really, really long time. And I just find it really difficult in the UK to like be on a demonstration and not be part of a collective playing music. And I think that brings us on to perhaps, one of the central themes that, you know, maybe I'd like us to end on this fantastic chat that we've had, which is, you know, an area that we mentioned briefly before I went on to

the cynical side, which is something that you're interested in. I'm interested in the ACFM universe is interested in, which is joy and like the importance of joy and the focus on joy as being a form of resistance kind of in itself in late capitalism. So, you know, we talked about the importance of like just now music and the effect of music and rhythm and collectivity like in a demonstration on something really serious but I wondered if there were other things that you wanted to say about joy or the relationship between joy and art and resistance that in terms of your thinking about the book and kind of where you are politically more generally. Joy is a form of resistance I absolutely believe in.

I think it needs to be really, really interrogated and kind of held alongside, you know, held up to the light as an idea because I think there is a very easy kind of, you know, particularly when you look at, you know, the state we're in now with the election of Trump and all the rest of it, there could be a sense of retreating from direct political engagement. Is it toxic positivity? Is that what you, is that where you're getting into that kind of like? Like, yeah, the kind of we can't affect change on the bit. We can't be militant. We can't affect change on, you know, in any kind of scalable level. So like let's do self-care and take care of our individual selves and our families. That's the thing that you're objecting to, I presume, like me. Okay, just, yeah, I thought we would be on the same page for this one.

Yeah, and I, there's, I, at the end of the book, I write about an amazing artist activist called Jay Jordan. And they are based at the Zad in France, which is the, this incredible place where, you know, just outside Nantes in Brittany, there was a project to build a new airport on this site and, you know, listen carefully because maybe this is what should be happening at Heathrow. And in fact, I believe, you know, lots of people are doing some activity along these lines. But basically, in 2009, there was a climate camp there. So climate camp is a sort of precursor to the Extinction Rebellion movement where people went and set up, groups of activists went and set up camp in sort of contested spaces from a climate point of view and

stayed there over several days and kind of did a number of actions, kind of had a sort of collective gathering sort of mini festival there at the same time. So there was a climate camp in 2009 at this site in Brittany and it's a really interesting place. It's a site of about 4,000 acres and the government was in the process of kind of evicting the sort of farming community that had been there for many, many generations. It was a community of kind of peasant farmers of a type that, you know, that, that nature of farming I think doesn't really exist in the UK because of the history of the enclosures and all the rest of it.

You know, these farmers who had lived there for generations and generations were being evicted. On the last night of the climate camp, they came and they said to the protesters who were there, some of them were still living on the site. And they said, if you really want to fight for this land, you kind of have to stay and you have to fall in love with it. And you have to make it your home. And so a group of those protesters decided to stay. And they moved into some of the farmhouses that had been evicted. they also started kind of building their own structures and, you know, buildings that they were

going to live in. And they really had this idea of, we want to live as if the airport will never happen. And what that meant was building the, the infrastructure they were going to live in with a kind of quality of care and attention and creativity. There's this very sort of medieval kind of sense of the artisan, you know, they made all these barns with beautiful engravings on them. And yeah, this farming community came together with this community of activists and their roles kind of started to become very slippery. The activists kind of were really getting involved with all the farming and the farmers kind of became more and more involved in activism.

And they stayed there and they built this incredible community there. And, you know, however many years later, 20, no, 15 years later, they're still there. That sort of paints quite a rosy picture over the years. There were like a number of attempts of very violent evictions by the police. You know, a lot of the activists in that community had very traumatic experiences facing the police. But I think in 2017, the French government announced the cancellation of the airport being built there. And so actually to come back to your point about,

can these kind of movements really have an impact? It's such a brilliant story because they did, you know, that airport which would have been there, isn't there. And visiting Jay, you know, it was so moving, walking around with them and they were sort of looking at this, you know, pocket of woodland and saying, this is where the luggage carousel would have been or, you know, going and looking at a field and saying,

you know, this is where the runway would have been. And so it's a really beautiful story of, of a real impact. The reason why I brought it up, I'm sorry, that was very long-winded, but it's a great story. And Jay really talks about the yes and the no of political resistance,

and I think that's such a important idea when you're thinking about joy. It's about how do you find these moments within projects of political resistance where you can you know, start to build a sense of the world that you want to see and the world that you're moving towards. And, you know, certainly for that community in the Zad,

they've spent a lot of time, think, you know, through creativity and through artistic expression, kind of creating these moments of shared joy and particularly shared ritual as well. You know, they've got fantastic stories about, on the spring equinox, the whole community coming together and creating a huge, huge puppet of a newt which about 100 people could get underneath

and having this great long procession through the Zad and so on. And so these moments of kind of joy in creative expression are so important, and they consider that the kind of yes of political resistance. But they also say it must always sit alongside the no, and there's a real risk of losing sight of what is being fought for and it's really easy to kind of slip into this enjoyment of the alternative that you're creating

and kind of shut yourself off from the reality of the political landscape we're operating in and so they talk about the yes always has to be married to the know and there always has to be this live relationship with the live project of activism and change making. And that is a really important idea for me to hold on to. And I think particularly important for artists actually because I think art making is often a joy and often a pleasure. And there is a risk of artists seducing themselves into thinking that they're, doing something important without really interrogating that political impact. So the yes and the no side by side. And on that fantastic note, acts of resistance, the power of art to create a better

world is out now in hardback and the paperback is out in June 2025. We will put a link to the book in the show notes. So before we go, a note to listeners. I would like to demystify how this microdose came to be. It happened because Amber reached out. We connected, we had a conversation about what she does, and we thought a chat would be a good fit for ACFM. And I so, so rarely get contacted by women, ACFM listeners. And I know there are so many of you out there doing great projects.

So women especially, please do email me at Not Alone in the World, one, two, three, at gmail.com. That's not alone in the world, one, two, three at gmail.com, if you would like to connect with us at ACFM. And with that, Amber Massey, Blumfield, thank you so much for coming into ACFM and talking to me.

It's been a pleasure to chat to you today about the purpose of art in a world on fire. Thank you. Too far out.