VISUAL INTIFADA
NARRATIVE REPAIR
Narrative repair is a counter/ anti-propaganda strategy that uses the basic tools of artists to mediate the collapse of a free and fair media industry that has been captured and subverted by monopoly capital who serve master narratives that oppress, dominate, silence, and marginalise the most vulnerable in society.
We re-mediate the media – sharing newspaper headlines, texts, screenshots off the internet – onto the streets to be reshared, remediated, reanimated as a living archive.
Narrative repair is a process of unmaking, unmasking, and underworlding.
Otherworlding.
As VISUAL INTIFADA we take action, an armed wing for social movements, a tool where people can sharpen themselves.
We serve as a bridge and a digital no man’s land to protect the identities of all participants.
We leverage the attention economy by intervening in public spaces, on the walls and in the streets.
We invite a broad cross section of artists, activists and the general public to come and work with us as an anonymous collective.
We work with social movements to develop counter propaganda strategies that engage evolving audiences in new contexts in high visibility and low risk ways – making agit prop, from stickers to wheatpaste & street art murals that shift eyelines and recode public spaces.
Documenting is crucial part of the project – not only for the visibility and security of participants, but also because of the project’s archival impulse; to create an accessible counter-archive for activists and artists alike to make use of.
We began working for narrative repair on public walls in streets of Johannesburg, our first engagements coinciding with Oct 7 – wheatpasting screenshots from Al Jazeera “Oct 7 was a prison break”; and two from Haaretz “Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat” and “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”.
On 14 October 2024, 19-year-old Palestinian Shaban al-Dalou burned to death in a hospital bed in Gaza following an Israeli attack on the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
Because it was recorded on video, his death gained international attention.
Four days earlier, Annalena Baerbock, who was Germany’s foreign minister at the time, gave a speech in the Bundestag marking the anniversary of 7 October.
In it, she said, “Self-defence, of course, means not only attacking terrorists, but destroying them”.
She continued, “If Hamas terrorists want to entrench themselves behind people or schools, then that puts us in a very difficult position. … Then even civilian locations can lose their protected status — because terrorists are abusing them. That is Germany’s view. That is what Israel’s security means to us.”
As we worked on the wall we called the Occupied Palestine Wall we built a community for action but also attracted the attention of what appeared to a zionist graffiti artists who would regularly deface our work.
It stared with tags reading “Fuck Palestine”; “If you <3 Gaza so much buy a house there”; “Please go to Gaza” and “You’re not pals with any stinians” and the typical black marks of fascist censorship.
We returned, carefully repairing the texts with markers and fine line work. “If you <3 Gaza so much buy a house there – but they bombed all the houses”
We continued to care for the space, never stooping to their level – never reacting, only responding.
Each act of love drew a violent response, escalating week by week until the graffiti artist, who we eventually identified as Myza started spraying spurting cocks and star of davids, over every act of love, an act of sexual and religious violence, a toxic mix of vile masculinities, anti-semitism and islamophobia.
We painted sigils of protection on the wall, from Hineni, to Hamsa, and the Seal of Solomon, hoping that using ancient symbols of Jewish mysticism we could protect our peace, and bring an end to the escalation.
Ultimately we approached friends in the graffiti industry – a council of sorts, to call him in.
And we occupied the whole wall to address our own Palestine – the Stilfontein Massacre.
STILFONTEIN IS NOW
In November 2024 we began to support the Stilfontein Solidarity Committee and the Khuma community-led rescue operation to save hundreds of artisanal miners trapped underground for months by a police siege – Operation Vala Umgodi – “Plug the hole”.
At the start of the operation, in August 2024, the SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE SERVICE (NOT FUNERAL SERVICE) closed the tunnels used to facilitate the delivery of food, water and medication to the miners in the shafts to “smoke them out”.
At least 109 people were deliberately and with malice starved and dehydrated to death by our democratically elected Government.
What we understand as human rights in this country has come through the struggle of workers who have over centuries of class struggle insisted that the value of their labour must come with fundamental human rights.
There is no Free South Africa without Mine Workers.
Haunted by Marikana, our first draft of the Stilftontein poster reads Remember Stilfontein, with the sigil of a skull wearing a miner’s hat.
Coming into relation, we asked that our proposed poster be shared with the community.
We heard back, the community was uneasy.
All their efforts were aimed at preventing another Marikana.
What does it mean to come into community, to serve?
We went back into our archive and pulled out the photograph of the Stilfontein statue and amended the tag line to Stilfontein is Now.
The finalised poster is shared within the Stilfontein community first on whatsapp and then printed by Zinzi Tom, sister of one of the missing mineworkers and displayed in Khuma, the township where most of the miners trapped in Shaft 10 and 11 had lived.
Later we worked with Mining Affected Communities at the MAC SUMMIT where they produced their own works to metabolise their experiences and carried the works into a protest action.
We continue to work in solidarity with these frontline communities.
Art is a tool for social change.
For many artists, particularly Black artists, art counters a history of invisibility, reshapes public sentiment and repairs narratives.
We choose to fight our battles as artists, with words, and aesthetics as our weapons.
In the context of rising global apartheid, militarised policing, fascism, racism and xenophobia let us all refuse siege mentalities, collective punishment, dehumanising narratives, the use of starvation as a weapon of enforcement and war, and the brutalisation of the many for profit of the few.
Visual Intifada stands with the people most affected by poisoning of lands, and the stripping of natural resources and the denial of basic human rights for the profit of global elites.
Let us raise our concept of humanity to mean all humans of all races, genders, classes, abilities and across geographies.
