Our friend href="http://www.mydadsstripclub.com">Ange Taggart sent us this terriffic href="http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news431.htm">report from href="http://www.schnews.org.uk/index.html">SchNEWS. She writes - “Not
quite the standard of the Wooster featured artists but as a collective action of
civil disobedience this is impressive”:

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Subvert Central

Last Friday 500 people descended on the Paris metro
armed with pots of glue, spray cans and colourful determination. More invaded
the Brussel’s metro with their own buckets of ideas. In Paris they split into
groups of 40, radically repainting vulgar, buy-buy-buy advertising boards,
transforming them with brushstrokes from private spaces for profits into public
spaces of resistance. In Paris and Brussels subvertised advert boards screamed
“No Adverts!”, “Advertising Kills”, “The Street is Ours”, “Advertising is
Hazardous to Your Mental Health.” In the end, 130 stations were reclaimed and
repainted in Paris while 7 were visited in Brussels. All 40 adbusters arrested
were quickly released back into a subvertised Paris.

These actions of
mass redecoration were called by Stop Pub (‘Stop Ads’) and other collectives in
France. The aim was to ‘reconquer public space’ in the face of mass
privatisation, repressive neo-liberal states and a life drowned in empty,
consumerist adverts. “Everything is seen as a commodity”, said one ticketless
adbuster, Gilles, “We don’t want to be visually polluted.” And to the hundreds
of students, workers, artists, mums, dads and skaters that took part in these
actions, the links between bigger adverts, less social rights and more cops was
all too obvious. So the adbusters went calmly and non-violently from station to
station, peacefully going about their decoration of vulgar car and clothes ads
while chatting with the public and handing out info on the reasons for their
actions. Metro passengers largely supported the actions, found them funny and in
a few cases they even got their hands dirty doing some redecorating
themselves.

This Thursday yet another action is planned. In the light
of all this success, 16 organisations jumped on the adbusting train this week in
France with Attac, Greenpeace and others starting a campaign against
advertising. Why not bring this colourful train to a station near you? href="http://www.bap.propagande.org">www.bap.propagande.org

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For
photos see: href="http://paris.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=9453">http://paris.indy
media.org/article.php3?id_article=9453