“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but bringing them to life. A revolutionary organization must always remember to that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.” (Guy Debord, 1961)
When coming across this quote we realised that maybe not all of our signs allow an equal degree of participation with our audience members. We feel that this quote sums up our piece as a whole as this is what we intend to do so in order to appease this we are considering changing our last sign to encourage that equal degree of participation by maybe making the audience member swap places with us for a while and hold the sign therefore encouraging them to be more involved.
We also have recently found out that our performance will be on the 7th of May which also happens to be election day meaning the streets of Lincoln will be filled with people trying to entice people into voting. We feel this is even better for our piece as people will think our signs are a form of voting advertisement but instead what we will be offering is social interaction to brighten people’s day. By doing so we are not only liberation people from their everyday routine and social norms, we will be liberating them from the hassle of voting and the normal signs that they see on election day. It also then makes our piece a slightly more political piece even if it is in a subtle way as we are saying that people should be stopping more and interacting more with the people around them. When we take part in the ‘changing of the guard’ routine to swap our signs this will also appear highly political as the march will appear to be somewhat of a protest march whilst we hold our large signs and march. To the public eye without reading the signs this act will look like a political protest against the elections, however when reading the signs it is in fact nothing of the sort.

Debord, G. (1961) Pour un jugement révolutionnaire de l’art. Translated from French by Ken Knabb. The Bureau of Public Secrets.