The Influencers

"Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and advertising have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production?" Maybe we can find an answer to this question by Chantal Mouffe while digging deeper on The Influencers leitmotiv and philosophy. Despite its small dimension, this is one of the most expected festivals every year in Barcelona. Initiated in 2004, its focus on non-conventional art and guerilla communication allows to show to the public communication experiments and radical activism at the very heart of the information society. Creators Bani Brusadin and Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG) have a long background on net-art, usually subverting public media, and achieved notoriety with their unauthorized Nike campaign. With The Influencers, they move in the thin line between provocation and legality.

This year the festival started even before the artists landed in Barcelona, with Inside Out Barcelona, a collaborative large-scale project that allows anybody with a camera to send a portrait, get it printed in large format and share it with the whole town, transforming personal identities into collective messages, ideas, projects, and battles. This activity is part of a global project by and photograffeur JR with the main idea of transforming messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Barcelona inhabitants started sending their portraits a few months before the festival started and on Saturday morning, the collective action with JR took place at the Center of Contemporary Culture's main court. The portraits are still there, close to MACBA and beside Chillida's mural: a perfect place for a personal manifesto.

For this edition, activists, graffiti artists, and media-hackers – among others – formed the line-up of "agent provocateurs". Russian political art collective Voina were the opening speakers, and created a local extension of their famous Voina Wanted! action, which took place in New York earlier this year.

The second day was full of transgression with guests like Reverend Billy and Savitri D, who made an action occupying an office bank in Barcelona with his Church of Stop Shopping, "praying" and asking the bank to stop investing in CO2 emitting coal-fired power plants. Also present were the Biotic Baking Brigade, a network of militant bakers that uses pies as a creative tool to change the world, and F.A.T. co-founder Evan Roth, a social technologies, pop culture and digital mass subcultures tinkerer. Roth presented the F.A.T. Lab fake Google car and social hacking in Berlin, as well as a research on capturing the process of graffiti in different places, pointing out that "graffiti taxonomy is a collection of tags in different cities". The Parisian street-artist JR described his beginnings, taking art outside the museums for people that cannot attend exhibitions. He explained how "people didn't go to see my exhibition in Clichy Monfermeil, so I pasted it in the streets of Paris". One of JR's most recent works is the Face2Face project, an illegal project on the Separation wall between Israel and Palestine.

The third and last day started with Constant Dullaart, a visual artist who ironically explores new modes of imagining and using the Internet as a medium. Then, an interesting talk by Jill Magid drove us to the very heart of surveillance systems, with her astonishing investigations into secrecy, intimacy and invisibility. Projects as Article 12 / The Spy Project Commission with the Dutch Secret Service (AIVD) or Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy have been done in the diffuse limits of legality.

Church of Stop Shopping's Reverent Billy, the first speaker to be invited two years in a row for the festival, gave the final performance with his well known anti-capitalistic message. This year, focusing on the global occupying actions that started spontaneously a year ago, he proposed to "occupy God!" singing "we are the 99%". Now, here in Barcelona, we're still enjoying the messages... and more than enjoying, thinking and reflecting on how our small actions can cause big change in our world. Ethel Baraona Pohl (@ethel_baraona)

The Influencers
A festival of non-conventional art, communication guerrilla, radical entertainment
Centro de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona – CCCB
Barcelona
9, 10 and 11 February