Art as a weapon

South Africa’s diplomatic posture does not have its feet firmly on the ground as it claims to be. While our government presents itself as a steward of noble order, its hidden actions, often obscured from public unveiling, continue to have policies in place that fuel global harm and ecological collapse. 

In the wake of war and fragmentations, it’s no surprise that we see their heightened dance between playing “peace keeper” on the global stage, alongside the disguised maintenance in the haunting of empirical systems with claws deeply entrenched within the stern mandate of genocidal forces.

We refuse the pull toward despair that these unjust times try to drag us into. It is civil society – movements, cultural workers and artists who seek to create bridges of care, conversation, and community in confronting imperialist forces who are adamant to impose illusions of separation amongst us. We choose to make a soft space for hard questions where we can metabolise these experiences on the frontlines of oppression rather than become complicit in these customs of extraction.

We – CAMP, the Community Arts Mobilisation Project, understand what it means to embody performance, holding the complexity of both subject and object in the articulation of violence. We are artists and trouble makers, Cultural Workers. We’re black, queer, feminist, gendered and young individuals working to narrative repair from a position of often being the most vulnerable. 

We call conspirators to gather, to set the field, and to hold the line. We come to build and be built by community, to connect, and to share strategies of resistance and well-informed reason; held in the evolving motion of dialogue that is directed toward collective care. 

enCAMPment will occupy a space for troublemakers at the women’s jail during the #WeThe99 People’s Summit, where we will remind all of why we call this Old Fort Con Hill.

We carry forward the tools of struggle as living instruments of solidarity, taken up in dialogue with social movements and in deep respect for the principles seeded by the Medu Art Ensemble, who declared Art to be a Weapon of Struggle in 1982. We were slaughtered for their resistance by the apartheid regime in a military raid in Gaborone in 1985. 

We situate ourselves within this lineage, continuing the work of making art that is graphic, literary, and reflective of collective memory. Art that archives living time, engages political shifts, and confronts the crumbling stance of the old world order. We will display our works and wares and invite movements to make materials for protest action. These works will be made in the community as part of a series of Cultural Worker Laboratory workshops. 

Narrative repair is a process of other(ing) and underworlding. 

An act of counter propaganda that steps into the gaps where the media have been forced by profit incentives to divest from truth in service of necessary mythologies of objectivity. This refers to the intentional process of identifying, challenging, and transforming dominant cultural stories that perpetuate harm, inequality, and disempowerment. 

We recognise how narratives are vehicles of power, as they shape who is seen as Human, who is believed, and whose suffering matters. 

Narrative repair operates in the material realm of making—in the tactile resistance of wheat-pasted posters peeling on brick walls, in the deliberate rupture of collage that refuses seamless storytelling, in the guerrilla distribution of paper jams that interrupt institutional flows of information. These practices are not just metaphorical interventions but are also physical acts of world-building that challenge the monopoly on meaning-making held by corporate media and state agenda.

The cutting, tearing, and reassembling of existing images creates new adjacencies that expose the constructed nature of dominant narratives. As cultural theorists have long argued, creation makes visible the seams of ideology. When we juxtapose a corporate advertisement with images of environmental devastation, or place archival photographs of resistance movements alongside contemporary struggles, we create dialectical images.

There are moments where historical continuity collapses, and alternative futures become thinkable. 

At CAMP’s Cultural Worker Laboratory we do not just think/ talk, in theory, but invite frontline communities and grassroot movements into union with artists to resource direct actions with affective protest materials, agit-prop and street art to Make Trouble. 

We mediate agency for storytelling and transforming shared narratives that have disrupted marginalised communities’ identity and sense of belonging. This is achieved through the creation and dissemination of counterstories and alternative narratives that challenge dominant, oppressive systems.

Yet even in the plight of global and local atrocities within existence; we must be vigilant about how the work of cultural workers can get misread and co-opted through the frameworks of charity and rescue politics. When cultural work becomes framed as “giving voice to the voiceless” or “helping marginalised communities tell their stories,” it mimics the very power dynamics it claims to challenge. 

With this awareness we emphasise the importance of recognising and amplifying existing agency in communities, in creative expression, and the mappings of memory. This work is labour. Labour demands what cultural organiser Mimi Thi Nguyen terms “the gift of freedom’s debt.” 

Cultural work is an embodied practice, a way of being that requires presence: dedicating the time and energy to show up to community and cross organisational meetings. The consistency in maintaining practices of creation beyond visibility, in our adamant strategies of resistance, the courage to continue; as well as the relationality of building trust through sustained engagement. 

The South African Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Coalition dubs Narrative Repair as their Armed Wing, an embodied creative force, working as a visual intifada through our collaboration for the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine. In conversation with the Energy Embargo, the Cultural Workers Laboratory engaged with collage as praxis, that uses cut and paste; archives and cultural jamming to point out the inconsistencies of a broader narrative.

We demand “NO Coal For Genocide” and make protest materials. We alert the citizens to the policies of some in our government who choose to prioritise fiscal greed over human dignity and commit acts of complicity in the oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide of people in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and Yemen – and locally to communities whose lives are ravaged through daily crises. 

We are joined weekly by YAMUA, part of the broader motherboard of the MACUA (Mining Affected Communities United in Action) where we work to hold space for the realities from frontlines of communities on “sacrifice zones”. These were not distant accounts, but embodied truths that traced the displacement, ecological vulnerabilities and the lives of miners, the dire effects towards mineworker families on the youth, and the enduring violence of extractive capitalism in Stilfontein, Marikana, Mononono, Emalahleni and Khutsong. These are places where land and people are stripped so capital can flow elsewhere. 

Artisanal miners are criminalised while corporate operations proceed with impunity where expired mining licences, and social audits or consultation processes are bypassed. This is the cycle of violence the system reproduces: legalese that legitimises dispossession, administrative procedure that codifies abandonment. 

The extraction of minerals is not discrete from the extraction of life. When coal burns to sustain military occupation abroad, when ports and rails move materials to sites of violence, we are implicated. And this is where CAMP lands to collapse the big words into graphic languages that embrace the complication, root in the mess and compost the s***.