Art as Protest, Cooking as Resistance: Everyday Life in Taipei’s Housing Rights Movement

• Main Author: Lily Wei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cultural Studies Association 2018-12-01
• Series: Lateral
• Subjects: art; housing rights; participatory; protest; taipei; taiwan; urban renewal
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.25158/L7.2.6

From 2010 to 2013, during the height of Taiwan’s housing rights movement, Participatory Art became instrumental in defending the right to the city. In this housing rights movement, artists, students, residents, and other professionals united to challenge neoliberal urban development. Two protest art projects in Taipei, Operation Little Barbarossa and Cooking at the Front Line, illustrate the interdisciplinary, trans-social strata collaboration. The artworks responded to encroachment on land and estate by the Taipei City government and real estate developers. The art forms employed included performance art, dance, writing, sculpture, graffiti, graphic design, and photography. Through everyday acts, such as cooking and driving, the two works lent voice and visibility to marginalized residents. The language and imagery of these protest gestures produced a theatricality that was at once jovial, amiable, critical, and contentious. The coexisting confrontational and convivial tones also encapsulate Taipei’s housing rights movement, in which the Taiwan Alliance for Victims of Urban Renewal exercised a central role. This article integrates findings from archival analysis, interviews, participation observation, and site visits. The content considers the relationship among Participatory Art, social activism, urban planning, and neoliberalism. The author also draws connections between the visual and cultural aspects of the featured Participatory Art. The text concludes that Operation Little Barbarossa and Cooking at the Front Line offer a broader and richer interpretation of Participatory Art. They demonstrate diverse adaptations and multiple approaches to facilitating socially-minded, collaborative art. They also confirm Participatory Art’s ability to agitate problematic dynamics in the (re)construction of global cities.