Liberate Tate: Collected Works 2010
Notes
Archive of the work by the art activist collective exploring the role of creative intervention in social change
Keywords
Similar items
Crossed Paths – Scots Pine
Miranda Whall’s performance practice employs crawling as a tool that enables her to embody, inhabit and understand a place and its narratives from a four-legged rather than two-legged perspective. So far she has crawled through mountains, woodland, rivers, seaside promenades, tidal mudflats an island and urban centres. On Saturday 6th November 2021 she crawled with a 6-year-old potted Scots Pine on her back through the centre of Glasgow – from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers-by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and Miranda silently and determinedly made their way through heavy rain and high winds to reach their destination. The intention of Miranda’s heroic/tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism is an expression of her grief, despair and outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed and an insistence that non-human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates.
Miranda’s hope is that crawling to the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference carrying a tree, that was equal in size to her body, might inspire human beings to re-think and re-align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. She believes that we all literally need to get down from our human centric, two-legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice – that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human made catastrophe.
Crossed Paths – Scots Pine premiered as part of LADA Screens and was available to watch online from 4 July until 4 August 2022.
This video was screened as part of Land, Material, Memory at Tate Britain on Saturday 28 February 2026.
COMMUCRACY NOW!
The world’s biggest and only autistic green Drag Queen, Oozing Gloop is back and inspiring people to re-imagine the structures that govern their lives. Defying usual understanding of meaning and belonging, this world to come is run via a new economy of government – Commucracy! (But what the fuck is Commucracy? Read the manifesto.)
Follow Oozing Gloop on this epic trip, where you’ll find psychoactive solutions for psychopathetic citizens trapped behind the very screens that are there to help them communicate. From the highest to the lowest Oozing Gloop will seek to link the universal to the particular to revive the democratic impulse and pose the communist hypothesis.
Commucracy Now! is a companion piece to Glooptopia!, Oozing Gloop’s latest theatre show, and is a direct challenge to the notion that people with Autism “struggle with social imagination”, and also to the simple fact it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We have a wealth of apocalyptic omens, disaster movies and critique; but zero 21st century post-capital-culture. Oozing Gloop defies this with revolutionary zeal and determination to open radical new spheres of imagination and fantasy! Just as we got through that, we can get through this!
This video was screened as part of Land, Material, Memory at Tate Britain on Saturday 28 February 2026.
ouTcasT
ouTcasT (2018) is a performance for The Rising, a programme from ]performance s p a c e [ in Folkestone, Kent.
The documentation was screened by LADA for Land, Material, Memory at Tate Britain.
We Walk the Path
A visual diary zine of the Chines photographer SickGirl’s (@eeriesickgirl) Exile Route between 25 Dec 2023 and 16 Nov 2024.
كلنا تفاحة وصنّارتين (We are all an Apple and Two Hooks)
A collection of poems and drawings self-published by political theatre maker Maya at an important period during their life and inspired much of their later work.
The Hologram
The Hologram is a feminist health militia that produces networks where we can practice skills like trust, communication, and cooperation that will help us outlast capitalism.
Things That Go Through Your Mind When Falling
Making performance works for four decades, British experimental theatre collective Forced Entertainment has become globally renowned for its singular aesthetic and audacious events, melding narrative fragments with strange acts, broken poetry, audience provocations, and comcial failure. With its low-fi theatre, intimate text-based works, and epic durational spectacles, the group has profoundly influenced the international performance scene, evoking and testing the politics of contemporary life.
BACK LASH
Research Highlights: Documenting and understanding experiences of backlash currently being received against LGBTQIA+ cultural programming and/or creatives in the UK’s cultural sector from 2020-2025.
Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization
The Bolivian scholar and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a pre-eminent Latin American intellectual, world renowned for her work in postcolonial and subaltern studies. She has long maintained that we must acknowledge how colonial structures of domination continue to affect indigenous identities and cultures. Even in contexts where diversity and the value of indigenous cultures have been officially recognized, “internal colonialism” operates as a structure that shapes mental categories and social practices.
This book considers this persistent colonial structure by examining artistic and popular practices of apprehending and resisting it, arguing that in Andean cultures there is a sustained practice of insubordinate image production and use. Combining this visual history with other instances of political resistance, the book offers an alternative narrative to the history of Latin American decolonisation. This narrative challenges the common conception that mestizaje (race-mixing) and hybridity are liberatory formations, offering instead a new theorisation of the complex racial configurations produced by colonialism and its afterlives.
Given Rivera Cusicanqui’s vital contribution to critical epistemologies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to everyone concerned with the key questions of critical theory today.
Foreverism
What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.
In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.
Planetary Politics
The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the decline of the nation-state that is the source of the great nationalist uprising of our time.
We need a new planetary vision that is able to reclaim and liberate our world, starting today and engaging each of us. This is the task of philosophy as much as it is of politics, of theory as it is of activism. Connecting with a new generation taking to the streets across the globe, this book tells the story of the ever-closer union of our world, from the age of empire to the climate crisis, and presents a plea and a roadmap to step beyond the mental and material boundaries of our nations.
A sampler.
This book is a sampler of Quarantine’s work since we started in November 1998. Every word and image is from our archive. Some of the material originated with us, the rest was written or spoken with us, the rest was written or spoken by others. The pages may seem disparate, contradictory even; they are fragments of over 20 years, more projects, many voices.
We’ve realised over the years that our work is a form of portraiture. This sampler is a kind of self-portrait of Quarantine.
