Gaza is being scorched to the ground. What is our responsibility as artists to stop it?

Part I. What’s going on

The war on Gaza, and the wars on Yemen, Sudan, and Congo to name a few, have made the colonial structure of the “art world” and the deep relationships between art money and recycled arms trade funds abundantly clear.

In recent years it’s become hip to fund and acquire works demanding “land back” just so long as that demand is understood as an impossible abstraction. In the last few months, we’ve seen that the joke is on us: collectors are dropping artists, museums are boycotting Palestinians and vocal supporters of Palestine, and openly McCarthyist threats and dismissals in the academy and art management are prevalent. This is likely just the beginning. 

If at one point it seemed possible to hide one’s position on decolonization, or alternatively float by on the guilt money for being part of whatever most recently oppressed group is trending (as long as the work funded is too vague for the meaning to be understood since didacticism is supposedly “bad art”), the veil has been lifted. In the coming weeks and months, we will see absurd charges, laws passed to justify policing language and speaking out about colonialism and root causes, arrests and charges for previously protected forms of protest. It’s already started, in France, a new law makes criticism of Israel punishable by fines and jail time. The domestic terrorism charges launched against protestors and attendees at the US Atlanta’s Cop City earlier this year were a warning to us all.  

Part II. We must Act as Artists

Gazans need our immediate support, solidarity, and action to stop the transport and manufacturing of weapons to kill them and steal their land.   

Many individual artists have withdrawn from and announced boycotting of institutions that support genocide.  This is an important start, but our power will only be realized in our organized collectivity, including our collective refusal to transform their blood money into more money using our art. The boycott of German institutions and funding is a necessary next step.  Can we expand this boycott to the same Art Institutions financed by war and occupation, to name a few, Lincoln Center, the New York MOMA, 

We call on you to continue taking the following actions: 

1. Continue using your platform, voice, body to end the genocide on Gaza. Participate in substantive disruptions of the military supply chain, call your politicians, write, protest, make art for these protests, organize within your unions.
   
2. Indefinite boycott of cultural institutions profiting from genocide war and the destruction of our lands. Help us in listing them. Document any job threats, artists dropped by galleries, or other attacks on Palestinian and de-colonial artists and cultural workers. Share that knowledge, and create rapid response templates to the employers showing that those individuals are not alone.
3. Practice care for one another, like it’s our job. Systematic attempts to silence critical and expressly pro-Palestinian perspectives are already impacting peoples jobs and livelihoods. It is urgent that we deepen our political mutual aid efforts, and our care for one another in all ways, If we are to sustain a movement for collective freedom in the long term.
4. Organize and build alternative collective funding structures to facilitate revolutionary cultural production and art.  Create coops, and join us in our fund. We know that we live in a waged economy and we need money to power our lives, and we also know that there can be no individual solution to this dilemma. The Franz Fanon culture fund is one attempt at such structures. Our fund is composed entirely of our labor, not traditional “funding”.

Part III. Our collective power is infinite. 

Imagine, if we  take our labor from them, and give it to each other, the freedom we might all produce.  We hope you will join us. We invite you to write to us with your interest in participating.