BOYCOTT SYDNEY FESTIVAL
A Statement from The Sunday Paper's editors: Matt Chun, Alex Moulis and Yul Scarf.The violent colonisation of Palestine is ongoing. Every inch of so-called Israel has been fabricated upon stolen Palestinian land, torn from Palestinians through horrific massacres, mass displacement, a catastrophe of dispossession and an avalanche of propaganda. A significant aspect of this propaganda is artwashing. The occupation state inserts itself into creative spaces in an attempt to fabricate legitimacy on the world stage.
Meanwhile, on stolen Palestinian land, the Occupation’s professed commitment to creative expression is exposed as fraudulent. The state of Israel frequently attacks Palestinian creative and cultural centres. Palestinian artists are abused, tortured, surveilled, incarcerated, disabled, starved and murdered. Palestinian art, writing and cultural heritage is destroyed or appropriated as a deliberate function of ethnic cleansing.
In May of 2021, the occupation bombed residential neighbourhoods and murdered entire families in besieged Gaza, threatened the homes of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and repeatedly assaulted peaceful worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque. At least 256 Palestinians were massacred. Thousands more were injured, arbitrarily imprisoned and denied essential health infrastructure under Israel’s brutal apartheid regime.
In that same month, even as they watched body after body pulled from the rubble, the Sydney Festival Board approached the Israeli embassy for money. The embassy offered them $20,000. In return, Sydney Festival made the state of Israel a ‘Star Partner’.
In defending this despicable decision, the Board has described Sydney Festival as ‘non-political’. Complicity with an occupation regime is always political.
Sydney Festival is enabling violence.
We call upon all programmed artists, writers and performers to stand in boycott, alongside those who have already withdrawn their creative labour in solidarity.
We call upon all those employed by Sydney Festival in operational or administrative roles to act in boycott. Withdraw your labour in solidarity and don’t cross the picket line.
Likewise, we call upon all patrons to boycott the Festival.
We note that, in referring to the ‘Board’, we provide Sydney Festival with a level of opacity; obscuring the fact that an organisation is composed of individuals, who have names, make decisions, and have agency.
These individuals are: Andrew Cameron, Paddy Carney, Angela Clark, Darren Dale, Kate Dundas, David Kirk, Robert Lang, Benjamin Law and Catriona Noble.
We call upon these individuals to exercise their agency unequivocally. Either reject the state of Israel or resign in solidarity.
Sydney Festival platforms and celebrates the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and claims to respect First Nations connection to lands, waters and communities.
And yet, by partnering with the state of Israel, the deep connection of Palestinians with their homelands is denied.
You cannot support First Nations struggle in one place while legitimising colonial oppression elsewhere.
A note from The Sunday Paper’s Designer, Dennis Grauel:Artwashing works when an eye-catching brandmark for Israel appears in a list of ‘Star Partners’ for an arts festival. Graphic design plays an active role in this partnership.
We should interrogate the design of nation-brands as markers of a colonising agenda. Fruity colours and eccentric shapes form a graphic lexicon for settler states, signalling fraught and tokenistic notions of vibrancy and diversity which appropriate and erase Indigenous cultures.
These state brands accumulate legitimacy when strategically positioned beside the labour of creative people, gaining cultural capital by association. This is how colonial ‘nation-building’ is graphic-designed. It is never apolitical.