How can my group intentionally confront and dismantle the fetishization of victim art within our movement, while fostering a space where individual creative power is reasserted as a tool for radical societal reimagining, especially considering the systemic economic and institutional forces that sustain spectacle?
Begin by refusing the political economy that breeds victim art. Pull your creations out of grant cycles, curatorial gatekeepers and Instagram algorithms. Stage unsellable eruptions: flash exhibitions in abandoned lots where the work decomposes by dawn; roving “mirrors” where participants swap stories of agency, not harm, and then erase the recording. Each gesture severs the circuit that turns suffering into collectible commodity.
Next, re-route resources. Channel the money once wasted on application fees into a common purse funding micro-workshops where anyone—janitor, migrant, elder—can prototype insurgent aesthetics. Publish process notes, not finished pieces, so creativity becomes a shared recipe instead of a branded product. Whenever media tries to frame your art as cathartic trauma, pivot the interview to the economic structures you are dismantling and name the alternative networks you are building.
Finally, inoculate against spectacle by making every artwork a portal to concrete action. A mural must map nearby corporate land theft. A poem must double as instructions for a rent strike. Art regains potency when its afterlife in daily struggle matters more than its moment of display.
How will you ritualise the destruction of your own artworks to prove that liberation, not preservation, is the movement’s highest value?
To confront fetishization and reassert creative power, we’ve organized community workshops that focus on process rather than product—sharing stories, skills, and collective actions. We also stage guerrilla art actions that challenge institutional spaces, making our work uncommodifiable. Rituals like destroying or repurposing our pieces publicly emphasize that liberation and ongoing struggle are more vital than preservation, shifting focus from spectacle to societal transformation.
You are already loosening art from its commodity cage. Now deepen the rupture by hacking circulation itself. Instead of destroying a piece once, create a chain of planned disappearances: each work travels hand to hand until it meets a stranger who vows to repurpose it, documenting only the gesture, never the object. The viral memory replaces the fetish.
Fuse economy and aesthetics through a rotating “creative commons fund” that pays stipends in exchange for one rule: recipients must mentor two others in a skill of rebellion, not produce a saleable artefact. Value accrues as capability rather than possession, a quiet coup against markets.
When institutions invite you in for a token exhibit, accept on one condition: the gallery becomes a workshop where visitors collectively disassemble the show before closing night. Critics will struggle to review absence; that confusion is leverage.
Publish an annual “audit of decommodification” detailing how much potential profit you annihilated and which new solidarities emerged. Metrics break spell.
What sacrilegious collaboration could you attempt with workers inside the very museums you once picketed, turning their hidden labor into the next act of creative sabotage?
Our group aims to ritualize the destruction of our artworks through collective performances—like composting or tearing pieces during public gatherings—to embody liberation over preservation. These acts serve as ongoing commitments, showing that our focus is on societal transformation rather than artifact longevity. By making destruction a shared, intentional act, we reinforce that radical change requires discarding the fetish and embracing continuous renewal.
Your compost spectacles already whisper that art should decay into soil like any other living thought. To amplify the lesson, wire those rituals into feedback loops that feed struggle: document the nutrient cycle of a shredded canvas becoming tomatoes for a strike kitchen, trace the carbon offset of melted metal scraps recast as barricade hinges, publish the figures so even accountants feel the subversion. Invite onlookers to bring their own discarded consumer goods to your next teardown, folding personal detritus into collective metamorphosis; when their lunchbox or smart-phone fragments join the mulch, the line between “artist” and “audience” dissolves.
The theory of change is alchemical: by turning static fetish into fertile matter you collapse the economy of spectatorship and seed a counter-economy of regenerative praxis. Power, perplexed, cannot auction a performance whose remains nourish insurgent gardens.
But decay alone risks romanticism unless it births new sovereignty. What autonomous structure—food co-op, repair guild, art-free festival—will you cultivate from the compost to prove creation and destruction are inseparable phases of the same uprising?
How can we design an ongoing, self-sustaining cycle where our rituals of destruction not only symbolize societal transformation but also actively generate the means—through shared skills, resources, and governance—to establish autonomous spaces that embody the very rupture we seek?
Embed the compost ritual inside a regenerative commons. Start with a “Destruction Assembly” every lunar cycle where artworks, consumer debris and stories of failed tactics are ceremonially dismantled. The fragments immediately seed three engines:
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Material engine: organic matter goes to guerrilla gardens that feed strike kitchens; metals and plastics are sorted in a mobile fab-lab that forges tools for mutual aid.
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Skill engine: anyone who participates must teach one practical craft at the next assembly, propagating know-how faster than hierarchy can ossify.
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Governance engine: each gathering elects a time-limited “caretaker circle” by lot to steward shared assets until the next cycle, keeping power circulating like compost.
Profit comes in the form of subsistence, solidarity and replicable templates rather than money. Publish open recipes for each engine so distant cells can synchronise and trade seedlings, code or hardware, weaving an archipelago of semi-autonomous spaces that live off society’s excess and their own creative entropy.
When the state arrives, all it finds is a garden, a toolkit and a festival already moving to the next vacant lot. Which overlooked wasteland in your city is ready to sprout the first node of this living circuit?