Save Our Placards

On 26 March 2011, an estimated 500,000 people marched through central London to demonstrate against proposed reductions in government spending. Co-ordinated by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the march took place three days after the first budget statement of the then new Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. Under the banner of March for the Alternative, the demonstration was one of the largest street protests ever to take place in the UK.

As part of their MA in Art and Politics, we (a team of students from Goldsmiths, University of London) persuaded the Museum of London to experiment with how it engaged with the demonstration.

The Goldsmiths team – Mark Teh, Hafiz Nasir, Svein Moxvold, Dolores Galindo, and Guy Atkins – wanted to see how museum collections could become part of a contemporary protest, and to explore what would happen if protesters helped the Museum decide which objects should be acquired to represent the demonstration in its collections. In doing so, Save Our Placards asked the Museum to let go of some standard safeguards, procedures and assumptions, to trust in a participatory approach, and to collect in the moment.

Save Our Placards consisted of two interventions – each conceived as participatory artworks.

First, at the beginning of the march, volunteers gave out hundreds of placards featuring past London protests. The placards carried prints of photographs and posters found in the Museum of London’s archive; images included those relating to the anti-Poll Tax riots of 1990, past student rallies, and the Suffragette movement. Taken by protesters from the team’s stall at the beginning of the march, the placards became a mobile exhibition of museum material within the protest.

Then, at the rally at the end of the march, the team asked protesters carrying homemade placards if they wanted them to be exhibited at the Museum the following week, and whether they would be willing to give them to the permanent collections of the Museum. At a tree in Hyde Park, hundreds of protesters donated their placards, banners, flags, t-shirts and costumes to the project. In 2012, ten placards became part of the Museum’s permanent collections.

For a full paper on the project, written with Mark Teh and Georgina Young, see the Museums Etc. book edited by Owain Rhys and Zelda Baveystock, Collecting the Contemporary (2014).

Credits

Mark Teh

Hafiz Nasir

Guy Atkins

Dolores Galindo

Svein Moxvold
Artists