The Role of the Artist is to make Revolution Irresistible
I’m a student here at the School of Art as well as someone trying to do their part for a free Palestine.
I’m a student here at the School of Art as well as someone trying to do their part for a free Palestine. I want to acknowledge that we are here today on the unceded land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. The Ngunnawal and Ngambri, and all the mobs right across this continent, have been telling stories, making art, and caring for the land and each other for thousands of generations before whitefellas came here, and they never ceded their sovereignty. All of us who are settlers have a duty to remember that we are benefiting from the ongoing colonisation of this place every day that we live on stolen land. The fight for a free Palestine, a free West Papua, a free Kanaky, and liberation for all peoples means that us settlers have to work every day to bring down the structures of power that brought us here in the first place. So I acknowledge and I pay my deepest respects to all the old people, who have never stopped fighting for Country, and I particularly pay my respects to those who have taught me and shared their stories with me.
I’ve been a student at this university for five years now, and I’ve watched as university management has broken promise after promise, continually putting corporate interests above the interests of us, the students and staff. The School of Art is not seen as profitable, or in alignment with their strategic plan for innovation and entrepreneurship, so it is continually shafted, in the form of removing after hours access, and taking away our library, removing majors, cutting courses and technical staff, and disestablishing entire workshops. The ANU is trying to make conditions for staff and students here so miserable that we give up, stop trying, stop coming here, and then they can quietly close everything down and divert that money into more important things, like the recently announced ANU Defence Institute.
At the end of last year, myself and three other students from the School of Art went to a meeting with the chief librarian to ask her why she had decided to close our library. It was an incredibly frustrating conversation. She pulled out the full arsenal of gaslighting, changes of subject, deflecting, concerns about OHS, and repeated refusal, over and over again, to answer our questions. This is exactly the same rhetoric that we’ve seen from VC Genevieve Bell and Deputy VC Grady Venville when we’ve confronted them with our demands for the university to disclose and divest from genocide. For the last nearly 100 days, university management has refused to engage with us in good faith and be accountable. Instead, they’ve lied, dodged, tried to change the subject to be about ‘student health and safety,’ while at the same time calling the cops on students.
This university has shown us, over and over again, what it cares about, and it’s not us. It doesn’t care about students and staff, it doesn’t care about creativity or freedom of expression, and it certainly doesn’t care that it is directly financially contributing to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people through its over $1 million dollars of direct investments in weapons companies. It’s much more concerned about keeping its reputation clean, making it look like they’re doing the right thing, while also censoring pro-Palestinian students because one person sent in an email saying that “the Palestinian flag made them feel uncomfortable.” This was a genuine reason given to us, students who had our artworks damaged and stolen, when we asked the School of Art why they had changed their mind and were now refusing to let us hold another exhibition. Let’s be clear, not only is this a massive violation of freedom of speech, which ANU is meant to uphold as an academic institution, it is also deeply, deeply racist towards Palestinian students of this university, who never seem to be considered in conversations about student safety and comfort. I can only imagine that turning up every day to an institution that is actively funding the mass killing of your people, and constantly having to deal with racist fuckwits regurgitating Zionist propaganda, is a little bit more than ‘uncomfortable’.
But I want to tell you all, there’s a reason why the university management is targeting us. It’s because they’re scared of us, and what we represent. All of us are here today because we are working together to try and create a new world, one that’s better than what we’ve got, and art is one of the most crucial ways that we can do that.
Art-making is world-making. It allows us to expand the boundaries of what can be possible, it lets us imagine new futures. I am not the first person to say this. Toni Cade Bambara, the Black filmmaker, writer and activist, said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
To all of you here, I want to say, even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, don’t underestimate your own capacity to create. I often need reminding of this myself, usually when I’m alone. Art-making, world-making aren’t meant to be solitary acts. We are so much stronger together, when we care for each other, learn from each other, and fight for each other, and that’s what we’ll continue to do. We can imagine a world with a free Palestine, a world with Land Back to First Peoples across the globe, and then we can create it.