Welcome,
This website functions as both the documentation and the manifestation of a project by artist Anne-Jan Reijn and filmmaker Bas Voorwinde. Through this website we collect images associated with the symbols of activism of the past decennia. We collect these by asking every visitor to contribute by going to the next page and freely associate on the wall of images that we have selected.
This method seeks to show how people think in images. Besides that, the collected image-stories can become a window into the societal conciousness. In this project, it is a window into to the conciousness and surving ideas on activism.
It also seeks to challenge the webvisitors and eventual viewers of the results: In what way does the language of images influence our thinking? And how well do the symbols of activism (still) envoke a sense of engagement and action?
We started this project in the spring of 2010. It is still ongoing, but has already had several showings; the most important in the Paradiso, in Amsterdam on Liberation day 2011. At expositions, we collect images on-site, the image-stories are shown in the form of slideshows and an audiovisual-work is projected (see video above). Through the use of sounds the images are boldly placed back in the context of activism, to confront the viewer with the value of his own contribution and the original symbols in the current context.
- Go to the wall of images
- Select an image that envokes any reaction/association/emotion with you
- Think of an image to represent your reaction/association/emotion to this image
- use any source to find an image, for instance: go to google image (image.google.com), find and temporarily save it
- come back to the wall and click “choose file”, find your image
- then click “upload image”
Thank you for your contribution!
note: you can do it as many times as you want. You can, however not replace your own image. After 5 images, the original symbol is put back
In selecting the original symbols we used the following definition of activism:
Activism is the actively pursuing of social, political or economical goals by organisations or individuals outside of the political institutions, like parliament. Activism is the push for specific change, not the taking over of powerstructures, like independence movements or opposition parties seek to do.
We then went through the most well known activist movements of the past decennia and have selected those symbols which have survived their original movements, or have becme popular symbols in themselves. Thus, we came to a selection of 28 images.
