POPArt Presents I WANT [TO DO] MORE

POPArt brings a new interactive piece of Protest in progress to the My Body My Space 2021 festival on your phone.

The My Body My Space: Public Arts festival (MBMS) kicked off the South African arts calendar in January 2021 with a menu of cutting edge work presented by South African and International Artists delivered straight to your phone. The festival, which makes world history as the first arts festival to take place on a dedicated WhatsApp line, features over 70 works by established and emerging artists from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Madagascar, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States of America.

This unique 'festival on your phone', funded by the National Department of Sports, Arts and Culture and the National Arts Council of South Africa, is inspiring artists to find creative ways of presenting their work in an accessible format that takes art to where people are.

POPArt submitted their proposal to MBMS in response to a call for projects speaking specifically to pandemic Human Rights issues with the notion of protest at the core of their proposed project. When it was decided that MBMS2021 was to be hosted on WhatsApp, it was exciting to imagine that an audience could interact, be part of & speak to issues that affect them or that they would like to be part of changing through the platform. Project lead & POPArt Co - founder Hayleigh Evans says, "The arts administrator in me [took] over from the artist. Whatever idea was forming, I was convinced it was not art! Much of the intention & structure of this project was clarified in generous consultations with the MBMS team, who were unsurprisingly the first to assure me that Activism is very much Art! We'd come to the right place!"

"I want [to do] more" has taken shape as an interactive exploration into the possibilities presented by the intersection between ways of protest and the world we are discovering online - using the festival's whats app infrastructure. POPArt sees this project as an opportunity for those who want to do more to call like minded people to them, to open up a conversation that will help us discover mutual exchanges that create real positive impact, short or long term. In short - to put people who want to do more in the same whats app group.

2020 was a record year of protests. Being forced indoors meant that much of the progress achieved by protests in 2020 was achieved online. In contrast to what is known as 'arm-chair activism', the past year seemed to mark a turn where online community organisation flipped the switch from awareness toward action. Bigger than social media, the vast possibilities of the online space gave us new ways of communicating, listening, discussing, sharing & taking collective action.

Police brutality, GBV, threatening economic devastation, corruption of relief funds, shortage of food & multiple other threats to the basic human rights of many South Africans flared in the light of the pandemic. With so much to protest & a growing desire to lift from the noise & the arm-chair, a desire to DO something burnt strong, but the HOW of doing anything useful was not close to clear.

One morning, shortly after restrictions were lowered to level 4, I drove past a scene of a woman pulled over & planting several young trees on a barren stretch of ground alongside the highway. As I drove closer, I could see a sign in the tree that read "I want to do more". There, she had listed her number. The sign was gone only a few hours later. I looked for it because that call had stuck with me all day: I want to do more. I felt a deep sense of resonance. And hope. What if there was a way to do more? What if we made time to do more? What if there was someone out there that wanted to do more with you? What if we could do more together to meet each others needs?

In Amanda Palmer's 'The Art of Asking', she surmises that there are 3 phases in the creative process: Collecting . Connecting . Sharing. This is a really helpful way to understand the approach we have taken in inviting audience participation throughout the festival period: We collect your responses, connect the dots between the responses & then share both ways to DO more, as well as sharing what is being DONE on the festival platform. Mutual aid & Positive peace are two other pieces of theory that shaped some of the thinking & approach of this project. We've called this a social-good experiment.

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