Walking through the show, it’s impossible to miss the trend—virtually all of the innovative, daring pieces of design and art have emerged from left-wing protest groups. The organizers insist this was never the intention, they just couldn’t find any examples from the Right. Grindon told The Daily Beast the realization surprised him, but it seems the Left is more inventive, better at protesting.
“I think, by structure, those movements on the far-right aren’t about creating solidarity, aren’t about creating new worlds. They’re often about preserving at least imagined versions of the world, so they tend [to] not radically experiment with the culture,” he said. “They tend not to have the same level of creativity.”
The most directly successful object in the show is the lock-on, a metal tube with a bolt through the middle that protesters place their arms inside. Versions of the device were first designed in the late 1980s, allowing protesters to chain their arms to each other or around something in a way that the police could not safely dismantle. You can point to areas of forest that are still standing in New Zealand or roads that were not built in Britain because of the stubborn realization of this simple design.
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