Protest objects: bricolage, performance and counter-archaeology

ABSTRACT

In this article we analyse the Occupy Democracy demonstration that took place in Parliament Square in the autumn of 2014 and the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum 2014–15. We develop a counter-archaeological analysis of these events on the one hand through reflection on previous archaeological studies of protest sites and the new heritage paradigm and on the other through an exploration of bricolage and performance to unpack the complex materialities of these assemblages of people, places and objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupy
• heritage
• protest
• display
• bricolage
• performance

Acknowledgements

Tremlett’s research at the Occupy Democracy protest was generously funded by the Norwegian Research Council and was conducted as part of an international and inter-disciplinary research project led by Professor Jone Salomonsen at the University of Oslo called ‘Re-Assembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource’. For more information see http://www.tf.uio.no/english/research/projects/redo/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Anna Feigenbaum (2014) details a trial around Occupy Fort Meyers in America where the court ruled that while ‘fake sleeping’ was ‘an acceptable mode of communicative protest…real sleeping was not’ (Feigenbaum 2014, 19). The Fort Meyers camp had been established in the city’s park and the ruling meant that, while protest with a tent in the park was legal, actually using the tent for the purposes of sleeping was not.

2. Activists describe pre-figurative politics as a form of political association, action or structuring that anticipates the kind of society that they want to create (see Graeber 2013).

3. Many of the speeches and discussions were livestreamed and recorded by activists themselves and can be accessed at http://occupydemocracy.org.uk/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council under Grant [220715/F10].

Notes on contributors

Katy Soar

Dr. Katy Soar, PhD, is a lecturer in classical archaeology at the University of Winchester. Her research focuses on the history of archaeology, Minoan Crete and the archaeology of performance, archaeology and photography, and archaeological excavation and discourse in the popular imagination.

Paul-François Tremlett

Dr. Paul-François Tremlett, PhD, is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University. His current research interests include the conjunction of religion and politics and he has recently been conducting research on the Occupy movement in London and Hong Kong