Self-Organisation Against Injustice
Orgreave (Sheffield) / Treeton (Rotherham)
for Arts Catalyst
Following an invitation as part of Arts Catalyst's Recentring Attention programme, we developed a site specific performance as a method to research contested sites of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’, on the border of Rotherham and Sheffield, and the antifracking sites across Sheffield. We worked with activists from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, and from the anti-fracking community as well as conducting research into extraction and activism from across the globe to devise a performance walk across a post-extraction landscape. We brought together activists from these environmental and coal-mining campaigns to discuss their self-organised tactics, and invited Sheffield artist Damien Fisher to perform his piece Queering Coal on the landscape which we encountered as part of the performance walk.