MANIFESTO

“Our specific concern is the use of certain means and actions and the discovery of new ones, means that are more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and customs, but which must be applied in interrelation with all revolutionary changes”.
Guy Debord. Revolution and counter revolution in Modern Culture 1957.

KISSS believes that the need for artist’s practitioners to engage with the social, political climate is the only way forward for contemporary practice now. Action and activation is NOW. Engagement and collaboration will produce a REVOLUTIONARY new performance form, that engages the strategies of advertising, media campaigns and BBC type exposures and “Channel 5” trash, in a linked event that takes place over a period of months both in the form of a summit and a media circus and exhibition internationally. The Situationist organizational models can be utilized as a relevant trope from which to develop this international performative intervention, KISSS.

We are utilising strategies of political parties, cigarette companies, reality television, high art and trash culture to create a critical mass. We believe that to bring this diverse group of women together will be light hearted and humorous in the way that we engage both in dialogue and with the event itself, without denigrating the seriousness of the multitude of issues surrounding surveillance and suppression in the current political arena. We regard the bringing together of a high profile group of women as a celebratory strategy, rather than an oppositional one. Gayatri Spivak speaks of a ‘practique sauvage’ or wild practice.

This work is in this spirit; it renegotiates ‘feminist’ strategies of intervention. The aim, to highlight the mechanisms of a system, which increasingly asks the individual to report information ranging from potential terrorist risk to fly tipping. “Be vigilant at all times!”
Like Camp David, the summit, a high profile meeting and it’s residues and exhibition potentials will take place in an isolated country retreat to allow for a period of development with some of the group members free from the normal constraints of every day life. It is appropriate that the venue selected for the summit, Woodspring Priory, is an old place for religious retreat, located in the countryside by the sea.