What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?: Bambí Benkö

Whilst we are witnessing an acceleration in the news cycle, the unfolding of genocidal violence, climate disasters, the spread of fascist ideologies, hate speech, the imminent threat of AI, cuts to culture and the arts, and the repression of any form of activism, any action, however small or large, seems to be hurled into the cosmic void, gradually vanishing and evaporating, leaving us with the bitter taste of powerlessness.

What can be done when the scale of the crises we face exceeds the scale of our individual and collective capacities? And how might agency be understood differently when conventional forms of activism begin to feel insufficient—or when the transformations we work towards extend beyond the timescale of an individual life? These are some of the questions that will be tackled this coming Saturday afternoon collectively, at Keilepand.

What can be done when the scale of the crises we face exceeds the scale of our individual and collective capacities? And how might agency be understood differently when conventional forms of activism begin to feel insufficient—or when the transformations we work towards extend beyond the timescale of an individual life? These are some of the questions that will be tackled this coming Saturday afternoon collectively at Keilepand.

“I hope we can also just share our doubts, and the issues we face, and maybe have a more open conversation with the public,” says Bambí Benkö. We met them in Rotterdam for a coffee and asked them some questions about their participation in this year’s Conflux Festival.

Bambí Benkö is a Dutch-Hungarian queer artist, educator and dream worker based in Rotterdam with a focus on participatory performance and political intervention. Among others, they are known for founding the collective Tools for Action. The latter develops new forms of assembly and political action through participatory performances, open-source skill-sharing workshops, and large-scale inflatable sculptures.

“It’s a constellation of artists, activists, educators often working in different configurations of project-making,” explains Bambí. “Our medium is making inflatable sculptures. Social sculptures to create visibility on the streets for different protests or settings. Inflatables can be used as a barricade, as a form of creating direct action. But over time, it also became more elaborate, creating modular forms for protest choreographies. So it really became about developing open-source tools for assembly and creative action.”

The collective, initially founded in Berlin in 2012, today operates from Rotterdam, spanning collaborations across Europe and counting Bambi Benkö, Katherine Ball, Jakub Simcik, Tilly Gifford, Sarah Drain, Pascal Espinosa, and Shailoh Phillips among its core collaborators.

During Tactics for Cultural Resistance, the fifth edition of Conflux, video installations of Tools for Action’s choreographies, along with a reproduction of the inflatable hammer, will be displayed at Katoenhuis.

“The inflatable hammer was built in 2010 in Berlin by Eclectic Electric Collective (predecessor of Tools for Action) and sent in a suitcase to Mexico to protest at the UN climate summit in Cancún. There it was torn to pieces by Mexican police while protesters were heading to the conference complex with it. This was all filmed by a Reuters journalist, and in that moment, it became an icon of the climate protest internationally, as it was distributed through global media platforms,” explained Bambí. The creation of the hammer itself was inspired by a quote by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a constructivist poet from the early Soviet Union, saying that art is not a mirror for society, but the hammer with which to shape it.

One of the main principles guiding Tools for Action is DIT, or better, Do It Together. “We work with double-stick tape, as a kind of very accessible, low-budget technology. We do work on a grand scale, which you can’t do alone. So it is really an exercise in collective imagination: working with these sheets of formless plastic that, once inflated, suddenly become huge, voluminous forms. They are also floating in the air, with this dream-like quality. So, it’s a poetically paradoxical moment: monumental yet fragile, playful yet sometimes blocking, impressive, and latently erotic. So, I also see it as creating these temporary moments of collective dreaming.”

The act of dreaming and creating temples for collective dreams has become a fundamental part of their recent artistic practice, drifting further away from direct action alone, whilst seeking to translate dreams into more sustainable and collective forms of coexistence and communalities, guided by dreams that offer more than just personal introspection. Since 2020, they have been invested in dream work as a collective healing practice and host dream gatherings in collaboration with musicians and producers such as Nikos ten Hoedt, OTION and Laryssa Kim. “We just had our fourth edition of Dream Wide Awake. It was a whole weekend, with two nights of communal dreaming, with almost 160 people sleeping together. With a moment of silence before going to sleep, setting intentions, and again in the morning, coming together to share, but also to reflect on your dreams.”

In response to my question about how their understanding of political engagement and the notion of what it means to do enough has changed over time, they replied that it wasn’t the outcome of a specific reason, but rather the coming together of several reasons, such as personal setbacks, depression, and a general exhaustion from taking part in many actions, against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic. “Over the years I became less dogmatic, and more open to accepting different practices, as all contributing to social change, as a kind of an ecology of transformation. This term, ecology of transformation, I also learnt from Camille Barton, who will be talking at the panel,” they continue explaining. Indeed, Benkö’s activist background traces back to before their artistic practice took an artivist shape. “My first direct action was with Plane Stupid, a precursor to Extinction Rebellion. And we blockaded airports to draw attention to climate change.”

In their earliest practice, they were much more in favour of intervention, but they became more skeptical about whether actions aren’t just a media ripple, only to end up in the realm of oblivion. A crucial question that prompted Bambí to reflect and also sparked discussions amongst other members of ‘Tools for Action’ was “what does it mean to do a flashy direct action for the media, and then go back to our lonely lives architected by capitalism?”

A question to which there does not, after all, seem to be a single answer, laying the foundation for the so-called ecology of transformation. “We need tactics, and Tools for Action was very much always about these tactics. So, a moment of empowerment and visibility, but tactics are also opportunistic, fleeting, and short-term. While for social change you need long-term engagement, and embodiment. So tactics are part of the ecology of transformation; it’s not that we should abandon them, but they need to be integrated within a broader strategy,” replies Bambí.

On how to get there, advocating through cultural practice and supporting this wider ecology, touching upon topics such as grief, rest as resistance, along with spirituality and a culture of care, will be the central thread of the conversation between Camille Sapara Barton (writer, embodiment social designer and author of Tending Grief), Tina Farifteh (Iranian-Dutch visual artist) and Bambí Benkö, scheduled for the panel talk. The panel’s title itself is inspired by a regenerative activism course Benkö joined in Spain, intended to give tools to burned-out activists on how to become more resilient, but also to understand how the practice of responding to urgency can be a way in which capitalism wants to exhaust us.

If you would like to hear more about the practices and the conversation around grief and how rest and a culture of care can become new forms of resistance and activism, join us on Saturday at 15:00 at Keilepand. If you are interested in the inflatable sculptures as barricades and political choreographies, make sure not to miss Conflux’s exhibition programme, hosted at Katoenhuis.

Interview by Mara Noto

Portrait photo by Dani Hefter

For more information about Tools for Action

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