LONDON – On Saturday, October 29, hundreds of people gathered for a series of creative actions around the climate crisis to celebrate the work and legacy of David Graeber. Graeber, who died in 2020, was an academic activist and anarchist known for his best-selling books on economic anthropology, including Debt: The First 5000 Years, The Dawn of EverythingAND Damn job. Two years after his death, this weekend’s celebrations marked the opening of the David Graeber Institute, launched to oversee Graeber’s extensive archive of unpublished texts and continue his legacy through projects related to climate change. debt, work and war.
The event took place at the Alexandra Road Estate (nicknamed “Rowley Way”), a residential complex in North West London designed in a low brutalist style by architect Neave Brown. Seventy-five percent of the 520 apartments are used for social housing, while the other 25% are occupied by artists, architects and writers, including Graeber’s widow Nika Dubrovsky.
“We are all here within the generosity, the genius, the originality of this teacher of his generation,” attendee and activist-preacher Reverend Billy Talen told Hyperallergic. “Every page of David’s work, he turns to the reader and looks us in the eye and says, ‘Wait a minute, what’s the point here?’ He is in a conversation with us. We are grateful for his work and feel his presence here tonight.”
The festivities began with a creative action by the Red Rebel Brigade, an “artistic” performance group that raises awareness of environmental issues. Dressed in their red dresses and headdresses, they spread throughout the estate and drew the residents in a great procession, maintaining their characteristic silence as a gesture of pre-emptive mourning for the destruction of the planet. Then came a group of people in carnival costumes, wearing masks and horns and standing or riding on three-wheeled wagons and iron horses. Finally, Talen paraded down the iconic red brick road on Rowley Way along with his Church of Stop Shopping choir.
Performers sang heartfelt songs about human solidarity in the face of impending disaster, followed by speeches from Jamie Kelsey-Fry, organizer of the Global Assembly; James Schneider, co-founder of the left-wing grassroots movement Momentum; ecological economist Steve Keen; and the local residents of Rowley Way.
“One of the main ideas that David was working on near his death was the idea of how we replace production and consumption,” said artist Clive Russell. “He talked about the idea that if we move to a value system of care and freedom, it can actually produce great ideas. We cannot continue to produce and consume because we are obviously doomed if we do.”
The sequence of performances was inspired by David Graeber’s love of the Venetian carnival. After his death in 2020, instead of a funeral, Graeber’s family and friends organized an “Intergalactic Memorial Carnival” with people from over 200 different countries participating virtually.
Among the issues raised Saturday were Graeber’s belief in the importance of community in the face of ecological collapse and his idea that human consciousness exists only in dialogue with others. Several participants cited personal concerns that aligned with Graeber’s pressing research areas. For example, residents of the Alexandra Road Estate are calling for the authorities to install collective solar panels on the building, arguing that the proposed individual gas meters will make it difficult for many residents to pay bills amid cost of living and energy crises. in the UK.
The event also included a poster-making workshop led by Russell, who is part of the design team behind the graphic identity of environmental group Extinction Rebellion. The posters were inspired by activist design of the past fifty years from Paddington Printshop, Extinction Rebellion, Ocean Rebellion and others. Slogans such as “Save a little greed” and “Never was so much owed by so few to so many” were placed on the posters. They were displayed in an exhibition titled APT / ART – CLIMATE EMERGENCY in the community room on Rowley Way.
The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Care and the Museum of Riots. The former hosts a collection of open source social activism posters. Participants were encouraged to print these posters and display them in their homes. People from around the globe – from Italy to China to New Zealand – joined the event in Rowley Way on Zoom to join in the party and show off their satellite exhibits.
The Care Museum was created after Greaber’s death by Dubrovsky as an open platform based on their shared idea that everyone is an artist, which the couple discussed in several co-written texts. Dubrovsky told Hyperallergic that this form of democratized exposure was conceived as an alternative space to the art market.
“We are not trying to reform existing structures, but to build something in parallel that is sustainable and meaningful, based on a different ideology and philosophy,” she said.
Graeber’s book Pirate Enlightenment, which he completed seven years before his death, will be published in January 2023 by Penguin and Farrar Straus & Giroux.
