Intervention Report

First of all I'd like to apologise for not posting for a while and for not managing to do my final intervention as agreed, for reasons a bit outside of my control. Below I am posting my thoughts/pictures from the intervention/walk  we did jointly in Canary Wharf and which we agreed did not provide sufficient material for a poster. 

As I have mentioned in my email I am still not well, my antibiotics did not work that well and generally I did not feel I could physically manage spending a night without sleep, especially with the other essays providing extra stress.

My planned individual project was to take place in A&E of a hospital, but they have policies regarding visitors who have infections... also question posed itself: how will I justify my presence in a place which monitors its visitors? I will still attempt to do it at some point because I think it is an interesting experience. 

Looking at the other posts I am very impressed by the outcomes, it looks like in each of the situations that you've chosen required serious guts to complete. It seems pretty innocent in its description, but in reality our project had a political motive: it was not simply an  art project, or describing the world at night, or a history project, it had the objective of directly affecting the people who came in contact with the result of our work and as such it was political, or at least it offered the framework for political interaction.


I think for me our project was/is political not only because of the one interventions we did, but because we have worked continuously as a group and have developed a framework of communication/interaction with each other that is pretty powerful. 

If we were a group with an actual political ("revolutionary" or "subversive") aim and we wanted to involve others in it, we would probably use a similar method. 

Substitute our project leaflets/posters for ones that have a subversive/illegal message, substitute the observational practice used to make it, for actual  surveillance whilst trying to 'blend in' into the background, and we have a political cell/ group.

1) we have developed an egalitarian framework  of relating to each other and have worked closely to come up with an idea and a means of implementing it. We have met on average once a week, sometimes even twice. 

2) we have worked to create some kind of group cohesion/understanding/agreement.

3) we have implemented our project separately, but to a tight brief that was agreed on by the group, so we acted as a group, even if separately. 


4) I saw in some of the posts that during the implementation some of us  have felt the need to act in a clandestine manner, trying to be aware of our surroundings whilst also trying to appear inconspicuous (what does it say about our existence as citizens?).

It is quite clear that our project was not a 'social sciences project' in the sense that we did no try to just observe/record people for the sake of 'science', but for the sake of making a direct impact. 

If we were doing an overtly 'social-sciences'  project we'd have clipboards, we'd conduct interviews, and most of all we would not try to engage our 'subjects' in the result of our work. We'd also not feel that we were acting 'like a criminal'. 

I am reading currently about resistance organisations during communism in Poland, and there are numerous parallels with our group.

If we belonged to a group of resistance we'd do exactly what we did in our project.

1) convene quietly in private flats under the guise of intellectual engagements

2) agree on an objective

3) split

4) observe our surroundings carefully/ try to make sure we are safe.

5) implement the objective (distribute leaflets, posters inconspicuously), most likely at night. 

6) try to blend in and appear 'normal'.

So in my opinion apart from performing those external interventions we have also made an intervention into our lives and worked out a way to organise politically. 



Canary Wharf Intervention: 


When we planned to spend the night in Canary Wharf we have assumed that the activity taking place there at night will be more visible.

Our hope was to take photos of people working at night and to make posters based on that and put them there during the day. 

It did not work for various reasons: 

The area was rather empty and vast. 

We have spoken to about 4 people who worked at that time: two of them in depth. 

One was a guy who worked in one of the banks as a manager for the cleaning team: he had an MBA qualification and his shift started around 4 and lasted till 7-8 I think. 

The second person we have spoken to was a security guard (one of a pair, but the second one was a bit more 'guarded': pun intended)
He had a lot to say about the state of the world, housing market and politics. 

Overall  we saw  a 2 or 3 more people there at the time: security guard in the shopping centre, bathroom cleaners, and so on, but taking photos of them, or writing a report about them would have been rather out of place. 

The people who spoke with us had a pretty private chat with us, with the understanding that we were students, I had the strong feeling that if we came back to the location, which was our initial plan, and have posted posters describing our conversation, it would have compromised their position with their employers. 

It made me bitterly aware how people are not free to engage with each other in all spaces equally, that some spaces are corporate and as such they ' have ears'. 

This is a slightly paranoid feeling which was very prominent in both Poland and Germany where I grew up as a child: 
people would not say certain things on the phone, or to each other in certain spaces, and the words would be used: 'walls have ears', meaning we can be overheard. 

The way some of us  have felt during the project shows that the fear of disciplinarian gaze is still with us, strong as ever. 



Photos: