The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London's Olympic State

The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State brings together a body of work that has emerged in response to the arrival of the Olympics in East London. Artists, writers, film makers, academics, photographers and activists intervene in the dominant discourse, language and images of regeneration and the Games. The book examines both the political economy of the mega-event and the silenced history of Lower Lea valley, making a powerful case against the politics of erasure and the corporatisation of urban space. Issues of land grab, displacement, military urbanism and exceptional measures of legal protection are explored through essays, images, poetry, fiction and installations. “This book is a monument to dissent. Not a celebration, not a commemoration of past events, but a monument – it preserves, for the eyes and ears of the future, the enduring vibration of a series of dissenting percepts and affects, landscapes and faces, visions and becomings. We have brought together a collection of works that shake up the cartography of the sensible and the thinkable enacted by the Olympics. The contributors gathered in this volume have refused their role as recipients and spectators of the Olympic-led transformation and acted in myriad ways – subtle, militant, analytical, passionate – upon the arrival of the Olympic machine in the East End of London. In doing so, they have challenged a key element in the production of consensus around the Games: the division between those who may speak and those who may not, between that which can be discussed and that which cannot. This is a book made of words that were not meant to be heard, images that were not supposed to be seen – a slit in the consensual space of London 2012.” Excerpt from “Introduction: Intervening in London 2012″, by the editors.