Cultural Hijack : Rethinking Intervention

Cultural Hijack explores our unforeseen encounters with creative action in the sites and situations of the urban everyday. These interventions and disruptions of habitual behaviours and perceptions by the anomalous and the out-of-place challenge us in radical ways to rethink our relationship to the urban environment. Cultural Hijack positions the artist as narrator, revealing the thinking behind interventions as well as the process of their creation and reception, to expose the ways in which the city becomes the playground, stage and instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions and overtly political actions.

Cultural Hijack aims to enrich our understanding of the creative process, highlighting artists’ development of new weapons in the arsenal of critical resistance, expanding and emancipating the spaces of artistic and cultural production. The interventionist becomes a catalyst for a ‘user-generated’ city, whose tactical procedures are reinventing the way art is encountered and experienced. Together they form an emergent culture of appropriations of city infrastructure: acts of infiltration, subversion and reclamation that generate individual and collective empowerment within the city.

In this book Jump Ship Rat have brought together personal testimonies and original interviews, from bgl, Alan Dunn, Nina Edge, Gelitin, Peter McCaughey, Tatzu Nishi, Michael Rakowitz, Krzysztof Wodiczko and others, to provide unique insight into the work and the life of the interventionist artist.

Cultural Hijack is a book of ideas about reclaiming our right to the city. We invite you to rummage through this creative toolbox as inspiration for a do-it-yourself urbanism.

Ben Parry is an artist and curator based in London. He co directs arts organisation Jump Ship Rat and has initiated numerous projects and interventions in the public realm. He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in the faculty of creative and cultural industries, University of West Scotland. His work explores tactical and informal urbanism; appropriations and interim uses of the unclaimed and overlooked.

Sally Medlyn is a creative cultural planner and producer who has worked with Jump Ship Rat since 2005.

Myriam Tahir lives and works in Paris. As co-director of Jump Ship Rat since 2000, she has run independent art spaces, curated provocative international exhibitions and commissioned temporary interventions in public space.