Art and Action as Cultural Creation

The Oxygen Collective is always looking for new ways break the mold of conventional political organizing and engage in culturally creative collaborations to reach new audiences. For our last tour, we combined resources with a cutting edge crew of artists, electronic musicians and performers for a two-week road show exploring the fertile fusion of arts and activism. Our goal was to bring messages of inspired resistance and personal empowerment into a contagious environment of dance and avant-garde music.

We used our biodiesel bus to transport dj Lorin of Bassnectar along with two amazing performance art troupes from the San Francisco Bay Area, El Circo and Apsara on a wild adventure from Southern Oregon to British Colombia and back. We created a number of media to infuse into events, including a glossy, alternative culture resource directory/hand out for club-goers to bring home and explore the next day. Images of the Siskiyou forests and the civil disobedience campaign to save them projected on giant screens to packed venues at each stop.

In Vancouver, we brought our traveling circus to a rally protesting the Global Summit on Paper and Forests and added a carnival flare with stilt walkers holding signs that read ?Community Forests- Yes! Industrial Logging-No!? The spectacle we created was printed in color on the cover of a Vancouver weekly paper after we left.

We opened and deepened many relationships on this journey that we look forward to nurturing into future cooperative projects. The trip was full of a rich, ongoing dialog about where art, personal expression and political activism overlap- and how best to encourage people to take meaningful action without alienating others who are not interested.

Perspectives were broadened and some minds were changed in the direction of getting involved in proactive causes- and most of all we received solid affirmation that there is an electric and influential potential in the combination of personal liberation, community celebration and creative resistance to war, social injustice and ecological destruction.

Photos by Joshua Brott (joshuabrott.com)

Posted by laurel at July 14, 2005 04:01 PM | Category(s): o2 Friends & Family