Led By Donkeys on Block9 collab: “For one weekend a year the world turns to Glastonbury - it’s a great chance to say something”

Glastonbury is the biggest and best party on the planet. It’s also a place where art and activism collide, and political groundswells cannot be ignored — just take a look at the headlines in the news media for how much attention statements made at Glastonbury shake up the mainstream conversation.

Block9 is an area of Glastonbury that has always leaned into both the party and the political. Its stages are incredible feats of production that are a dream to dance in front of or within, while weaving in powerful themes. The brutalist behemoth Genosys nods towards the poisoning of the planet, the imposing cyborg-styled IICON contains commentary on surveillance culture and post-truth, and NYC Downlow and The Meat Rack temporarily become the best dancefloors in the world each year while empowering values of inclusivity, freedom of expression and support for the LGBTQI+ community. When we asked each of the Block9 co-founders Stephen Gallagher and Gideon Berger to sum up the collective in one word, the former said “fantasmagorical” and the latter said “anti-genocide”, which concisely sums up the spectrum of what they stand for.

A collaboration with Led By Donkeys is a fitting union, and this year the activist and accountability group were invited by Block9 to create an installation in the area. It took the form of a wooden spaceship with a mural of financial and political elites queuing up to enter — brandishing the message: “Send them to Mars while we party on Earth” — alongside a Tesla that had been crushed by a 98-year-old, anti-fascist World War Two veteran driving a tank. We spoke to Led By Donkeys about how the collaboration came together, its message, and why Glastonbury is the perfect place to say it.

How did you get acquainted with Block9 and decide to start working together?

Block9 is an incredible collective, we’ve loved and admired their work for years. Block9 and Led By Donkeys have a pretty similar take on the world and we’ve got to know them a bit over the past year. The things they build are stunning, but often try to say something important.

We’ve got to know them over the past few years working on similar issues, for example Palestine. A couple of months ago we started talking about how we could use the space at Glastonbury to say something about the tech bros who wield enormous power over our lives with zero accountability.

How did the idea for this year's installation formulate and what was the process of it coming to life like?

We’d just done a talk in Suffolk, recreating one of our interventions where we dropped a lettuce banner on Liz Truss. We were sitting around afterwards, slagging off Musk and his mates and someone just said, “If he wants to live on Mars we should send him to Mars, and he can take Bezos and Zuckerberg with him.”

The tech bros say they want to live on a different planet, so we’re going to send them to Mars while we party on Earth. That’s why we’ve built a massive space rocket at Glastonbury, and we’re going to use it to launch Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg into space (well not really, it’s made of plywood, but we can but dream).

Elon Musk and his mates want humans to become an interplanetary species. But they’re dangerously wrong. We don’t need to live on Mars, we need to protect our planet and celebrate the fact that Earth is the only place where humanity can thrive.

There’s room on the rocket for a few more souls so they’re being joined by Trump, Netenyahu and some other people who in recent years have made life on Earth more difficult for the rest of us.

The launch site also contains a Tesla that was recently crushed by a 98-year-old, anti-fascist, World War Two veteran driving a tank.

It takes aim at the oligarch/ruling class — do you think these people are the biggest threat to society currently?

Yes, alongside the populists they fund and often control. We’re losing power over our own lives to this class of weird billionaires. Musk put a quarter of a billion dollars into the Trump campaign then came into government and took an axe to vital social programmes including aid to children in developing countries. The world’s richest man has been beating up on the world’s poorest kids. We’d be better off if the tech bros pissed off to Mars and left us alone to sort out the world’s problems.

Why is it important to have political messaging at an event like Glastonbury, in your view?

For one weekend a year the world turns to Glastonbury and it’s a great chance to say something to a huge audience. This year we’re saying we don’t need to colonise Mars, we need to ensure Earth stays habitable.

Politics sits downstream of culture. We need to change the stories we talk each other if we’re going to have a better world, and Glastonbury is an amazing place to do that.    

Why do you think art and activism go hand in hand effectively?

Brian Eno recently said that at its core art is about feelings — about sparking powerful feelings in people. To an extent, activism is as well. It’s about changing the stories we tell each other, so we can change culture and change politics. The kind of activism we do is often about platforming the kinds of stories we want people to hear and we try to use art to ensure they break through.