Hannah is an art and action coordinator at Greenpeace UK, where she has worked for the last 15 years. Hannah designs, develops and delivers direct action in collaboration with colleagues and cross-discipline artists and creatives. Harun is an artist and writer based in London, and is currently an associate artist with Greenpeace UK.
Harun: You work as an activist but studied at art college, how does this inform your activism?
Hannah: My practice has always been blended – art and activism together, I’ve never been able to separate them.
Direct action design often means a beautifully designed and printed banner, or commissioning a big spectacular prop to block a climate crime. Visuals layered on work already logistically and strategically thought through. Often this is essential because we know exactly what needs to happen and where. But I’m really interested in what happens when we take a blended approach before we know where exactly we are going. Embedding a strategic artistic lens with creative logistics can conjure imaginative and unexpected tactics with a different potential for change-making.
My work is informed by a wide range of disciplines. Not only visual arts but interactive and immersive theatre-making, performance of all kinds, graphic design. I often start from the space the action will occur, working with site-specific principles. I design an action for a physical space or for the receiver as a gift-making exercise.
“I’m really interested in what happens when we take a blended approach... Embedding a strategic artistic lens with creative logistics can conjure imaginative and unexpected tactics with a different potential for change-making.”
I was recruited into the actions team at Greenpeace on the back of this blended approach. They wanted an action coordinator with a strong creative practice to bring this expertise more centrally into direct action design. So I’ll often talk about rehearsals rather than training, and choreography rather than logistics, as that’s how it makes sense to me – blended into the flow of the process. I’m essentially working in a broader context than art or activism, and always looping the one back together with the other.
Hannah: Harun, what intrigues you about bringing your artistic practice into an activist space?
Harun: There are different scales of activist space. Greenpeace has amassed a capacity that enables a more complex staff structure, research and lobbying than a grassroots organisation. That scaling brings its own difficulties too.
I’m interested in how campaigns are developed internally before they become public. How the change manifested through policy is connected to wider shifts in public consciousness and attitudes.
I originally took non-violent direct action training with Greenpeace in 2019, which was an insight into one aspect of the organisation. Although I knew you and Mel Evans (artist and campaigner) through other projects, the training enabled a more structured engagement with the organisation that led to more dialogue.
Bad Taste is an open call for Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and self-identifying working class artists and activists to devise creative interventions that confront the role of industrial food in the climate crisis. Find out more and apply by 15 January.
Harun: Is there a direct action that particularly stands out to you as both artwork and protest?
Hannah: I was in the art collective, Liberate Tate, before I worked in the actions team at Greenpeace. We made art works in Tate spaces without permission for 6 years from 2010 to 2016 to get them to drop BP sponsorship. We knew they received hardly any money from BP and BP got way more out of the relationship than Tate. So us making work for Tate was a kind of gift to them. We are/were a critical friend of Tate: ‘outside, inside, always on the same side’.
One of our pieces that stands out was a piece called The Gift. We took a decommissioned 16.5m wind turbine blade, cut it in three parts, brought it into the Turbine Hall, installed it there and offered it as a ‘Gift to the Nation’ under the Museums and Galleries Act, 1992. This states that gifts to national cultural institutions must be discussed at board level. The chair of the board at that time was also ex-CEO of BP. So the work – the art – was installation, institutional critique, action, live art and very strategic. They didn’t accept The Gift into the collection, but they did accept the documentation that accompanied it. A few A1 prints of the performance installation, including one wonderful image of a security guard laying himself in front of the biggest part of the blade with a Liberate Tate artist almost cradling his head, and a video documentary of the whole piece from concept and build, to installation logistics and the performance itself.
The tip of the blade was carried with a procession of around 100 artists as a distraction, while we we brought in the biggest part of the blade through the only doors it would fit.
Choreography in interventional pieces is often about encouraging a shared sense of movement, whilst leaving space for the unexpected.
Taking a decommissioned piece of renewable energy into the heart of the power-house-art-institution, chaired by an international oil agency and forcing all of this into a conversation that must legally be had. The authenticity of the right people (artists) speaking truth to power (art institution + oil industry) in a language that everyone speaks (art), is very hard to ignore. And impossible to not overhear. Tate didn’t need to be dirtied up by its relationship with BP. It literally didn’t need BP’s money, which made up less than 0.5% of its annual spend. And after 16 live art performances from Liberate Tate exploring various implications of this, it finally realised that too and dropped BP.
Harun: Could you talk about the aesthetics of protest, how have you seen this change?
Hannah: I’m particularly enjoying the comeback of “the banner”, specifically the yellow ripstop banner with black bold text. Which is kind of ironic because we’ve spent some years at Greenpeace trying not to do these banners.
When I arrived in the team, there was a sense that media fatigue had set in in the UK. Journalists were no longer interested in traditional Greenpeace activism, like a climber locked to something holding a yellow banner. We had to radically change our approach to action design. This shift is what has led Greenpeace to make these spectacular and theatrical actions that compel the viewer (both the public and any corporate/political target) to observe and even engage. We referenced The Yes Men for many years in brainstorms for their smart and satirical spoofs. We tried to think of impossible things.
Bringing in artists and makers of all kinds has been key. My first project in the role was Aurora; a huge double-decker bus sized polar bear puppet, which was part bear and part ship, for the Save the Arctic campaign, a creative collaboration with Christopher Kelly. I’ve also collaborated a lot with Coney, so much so that I’m a trustee for them now. Their blend of interactive theatre is a perfect fit for lots of what we do: charming and disarming, creating playful interactive experiences to spark change.
“We referenced The Yes Men for many years in brainstorms for their smart and satirical spoofs. We tried to think of impossible things. Bringing in artists and makers of all kinds has been key. ”
But yes, we’ve come almost full circle back to the banner, back to an old school activist aesthetic. Its return to fashion probably has a lot to do with Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. They’ve become ubiquitous with mass actions, hundreds of people and banners being incredibly disruptive. And think what you like about them, they’ve certainly galvanised a whole new generation into activism and speaking truth to power. For Greenpeace, in my opinion, we use this sort of banner-based activism best when it’s a very rapid response, something nimble. Like the time these two awesome women from our politics team had quite simply had enough and heckled Liz Truss at the Tory Party Conference – and having a backup banner went viral (which incidentally we always do!)
Hannah: We like to think of activism as ordinary people doing extraordinary things. What we are moving towards now – particularly with Bad Taste, our current open call for artists and activists to make interventions that confront the role of industrial food in the climate crisis – is trying to make that accessible for more people. Exploring the different ways a wider cross section of people can take action. And potentially growing the field of art-activism.
Hannah: I’m also very interested in what will come from your residency on Bad Taste, do you have a sense of where you might take that?
Harun: I am interested in where and how embedding myself in an organisation can lead, without predetermining an outcome. The work of the Artist Placement Group is a great precedent for this. I’m coming to the end of a residency with the V&A Dundee as designer-in-residence, so I definitely want to explore further with you the notion of ‘action design’ as a bridge between these experiences. Finally, over the last two years I’ve been gathering questions from a network of artists, theorists, activists, scientists, gardeners and so on, under the title Environmental Justice Questions. I’ll be exploring contexts to activate the questions in different civic spaces and exhibition contexts.
Harun: On the walls of Greenpeace UK office is an aerial photograph of an action in Paris we both admired, what makes it so strong for you?
Hannah: Ah I love that piece. You’re referring to Greenpeace France turning the Arc de Triomphe into a huge sun.
I love the participatory nature of this – it literally couldn’t have happened without the movement of people in Paris. The activists poured paint off the back of bicycles at dawn on the penultimate day of the UN Climate Summit. They relied on traffic to spread it around the roundabout and down the streets coming off it to form rays of a sun; the symbol of solar energy. They had a real job of making up the right paint, something that would be a good strong yellow but wouldn’t damage the environment. I heard something about them staying up all night constantly stirring it. This piece was repeated in several different countries, working through the global network of Greenpeace. It’s a work that can be replicated and strengthened through repetition.
When I first saw this image, I was really happy that Greenpeace France had decided that they didn’t need a banner because the image of the sun in the city – solar power – was strong enough without explanation. It turns out that the team was interrupted before it could drop the banner. If you look closely at the image you can see there’s something going on in the centre, on the Arc de Triomphe itself. A small splash of hi-vis yellow. There’s a climb team there trying to unfurl a banner. I don’t know what it was going to say, but I think it’s perfect without.
Harun: Thanks Hannah. There’s something potent about the unfurled banner, the state interruption of a physical action, that unintentionally creates a space and pause for the viewer to invent their own wording.
Apply for Bad Taste
Bad Taste is an open call for Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and self-identifying working class artists and activists to devise creative interventions that confront the role of industrial food in the climate crisis. Find out more and apply by 15 January.
Guest authors and interviewees work with us to share their personal experiences and perspectives, but views in guest articles and interviews aren’t necessarily those of Greenpeace.
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