LAST month, the Victoria and Albert museum hosted the London Design Festival, which examined “how design can shape a space, bring people together and foster rituals, through a series of installations exploring global cultures across the museum.”

The installation Barricade and Beacon, presented by the V&A and RIBA in collaboration with Studio Bark, explored the intersection between architecture and activism and centred around Extinction Rebellion’s creative and thought-provoking designs and photography. At its heart were two of the bamboo “tensegrity” (a portmanteau of tension and integrity) towers specifically designed to thwart arrests, made by architect Julian Maynard Smith and engineer Morgan Trowland.

Maynard Smith described the thinking behind them: “We started using Bamboo tripods [in 2019]. We put a structure up in Oxford Circus – three tripods with a tripod on top. But I never found the tripod a very elegant structure and the police can just drive a forklift up to it and arrest the activists. With the tensegrity towers, you can be right in the middle of them and the police can't get to you. In the frame of XR you want to take over a space as long as possible — and make it difficult for the police to take you away.”

They were notably used to block the Murdoch printing presses in 2020. Ingenious and highly effective, they demonstrate the power of creativity in gaining the upper hand during protests.

During the opening event, a curator demonstrated how to assemble “lock-on” boxes,  designed to prevent easy removal of devices used by activists to attach themselves to each other, the possession of which is now deemed illegal following the Public Order act of 2023.

Shrewdly, these had a dual purpose, also acting as structural building blocks. During the 2019 rebellion, after the police had confiscated the original staging, they were quickly used to construct new staging within minutes of the police’s departure.

To add to this stash of artefacts, the V&A has 18 other works related to the Extinction Rebellion Arts Group in its archive alongside a Leonardo sketch for the Mona Lisa and Ming dynasty ceramics.

Nevertheless, while the Festival, of which this exhibit is part, sought to promote London “as a design capital on the global stage” and XR’s ability to promote positive change as a “vibrant” contributor to the cultural zeitgeist, climate activists are concurrently receiving record sentences for peaceful protest.

A striking example of this dichotomy — the clash between culture and law — occurred in 1994 when artist Mark Bridger entered a gallery and splattered black ink onto Damien Hirst's pickled sheep sculpture creating a new piece called Black Sheep. This bold act became a paradigm in itself, inspiring Hirst to further explore the concept of black sheep in his formaldehyde series.

Bridger’s words in court were prophetic: “Art is there for creation of awareness, and I added to whatever it was meant to say... It’s about life and death.”

Such acts, though seen as crimes, fit within a long history where transgressive art challenges dominant views of order.

Movements like the Situationists International, founded by Guy Debord in 1957, Fluxus and Neo-Dada (all now very much part of the canon) all embraced vandalism as a modus operandi where the artist’s role was no longer confined to creating objects but became a vehicle for societal change.

A modern-day inheritor of this tradition is Banksy, who critiques political corruption and capitalism through site-specific street art which combines social critique with dark humour through vandalism. In danger of arrest if discovered, his work reaches millions and is also valued as a cultural touchstone. 

A comparable dichotomy might be seen when applied to climate activists.

The irony lies in the fact that although within the hallowed halls of royal patronage climate activism is celebrated as part of the broader timeline of democratic progress, according to the previous government's legislation, XR is considered a threat to democracy. This view is bolstered by the oil-funded Walney report on “political violence and disruption” which aims to suppress dissent by labelling XR activists extremists, claiming that, as proponents of citizens’ assemblies, they are "fundamentally rooted" in anarchism. 

So we see XR founder Roger Hallam serving a five-year sentence for attending a Zoom discussion about a protest while he and co-founder Gail Bradbrook are feted in the Independent’s “Climate 100 List 2024” of the world’s foremost environmentalists. And we see Kate Raworth championed by Princess Anne in her introduction to Raworth’s keynote speech on her case for “Donut” economics to the Royal Society of Arts soon after presenting a version of the same speech as a member of XR at its 2020 October Rebellion.

Politics and social movements researcher Lucie Hunter makes sense of the contradictions: “Similar to the [artistic] avant-gardes, climate activist movements also believe in the possibility of change and society’s agency in bringing it about... Because of the urgency of the task at hand, their message needs to be shared with the wider public. And in what better place to start this conversation, than in one of the most prominent agenda-setting cultural spaces: the museums.” 

The exalting of XR’s contribution to public life by the V&A is moving the dial from outrage to understanding, but the law needs to catch up.

Incapable of seeing which way the wind blows, the agencies of government are blind to the inevitability of the time-honoured Hegelian dialectic in which Hegel posits a three-stage vision of historical progress: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: when the existing order (thesis) is confronted by a new historical development or opposing force (antithesis), resulting in synthesis, an improvement over the former state of affairs. 

The XR protests showcased at the V&A are far more than mere stunts. When the law is unjust, such actions rise above criminality and demonstrate the essential symbiosis between art and activism. The tug of war between Justice that has jettisoned its blindfold for blinkers, and the traditions of the Enlightenment, is a battle for democracy. 

Having pursued a career in education, Tom Hardy has worked with the XR media and messaging team since 2018