How to kidnap an audience

On breaking the spell of our training as consumers

• Many campaigners decide to calibrate their message - there’s a gap between what they decide to say and what they believe
• The importance of speaking “as if this is the last time” [i.e. say what stirs you]
• What if those of us who go to the theatre, to the openings and exhibitions, to the rooms where art happens – what if we’re so well trained as consumers of culture that even the most powerful work going on in those rooms will struggle to break through, to get past our training, to go from an object of consumption to an experience that might tear us open, shake us, move us, leave us changed?
• Art is invited to help “deliver the message” like a cheaper version of an advertising agency
• The futures worth trying to bring about, she says, are “presently unimaginable futures” - Vanessa
• “For these futures to become imaginable, we would have to become other than who we are: we would have to lose our entitlements, our desires, the things we take for granted, our stories of who we are and where history is headed. And that’s a journey we can go on, a journey we can take people on. But it doesn’t look like assembling a group of us who are going to be, almost by definition, among the beneficiaries of the way the world works today, where we’re asked – in the words of Grist magazine’s climate fiction contest – “to make the story of a better world so irresistible, you want it right now.” Something more costly than that is called for.”
• “I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.” - Martin shaw
• “Look through the archives of archaeology and anthropology, and nowhere will you find humans who don’t have some form of dancing, singing, storytelling, making images, symbols and meaningful objects, woven through their ways of living. The work of culture is not a luxury, it’s where we find and create meaning, and meaning is what makes the difference between going on and giving up when times are hardest.”
• “Encounters that leave us changed, with a chance of becoming the people we’d need to be to bring about those “presently unimaginable futures”. That feels like work worth doing, in a time when the world is on fire.”