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THIS IS THE NIGER DELTA

Went subvertising for the first time in Nigeria yesterday evening, along with Friday Nbani of Lekeh Development Foundation and with the help of some local lads we got two billboards up on disused billboard spaces in Ogoniland We actually got caught by a government official halfway through, who turned up with a squad of tough guys on motorbikes, and it got quite heated, but after a discussion in which a sum of money was mentioned, he allowed his tough guys to assist us in finishing our work.

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HELL BUS BOOK – PREORDER!

I’m close to finishing work on a book that compiles everything I’ve done on the Hell Bus and adjacent anti-Shell projects into a single publication. My hope is that sales of this can help keep the Hell Bus on the road for the foreseeable future. I’ll post a few sample pages below. The book will be ready to ship in the first month of July. But if you preorder now you’ll get some extra free stickers with your copy! The Hell Bus Book Buy Now

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SHELL AGM

A new poster I made about Shell’s attitude towards the climate crisis has made its way onto hundreds of billboards, bus stops and tube carriages ahead of the Shell shareholders AGM next week. Massive thanks to Brandalism and all the tireless install teams who put these up! Will post more photos here soon.

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NIGER DELTA HELL BUS

Presenting the Niger Delta Hell Bus! A collaboration with Lekeh Development Foundation in support of Ogoni climate activists in the Niger Delta. I’m leaving Nigeria today so took a few photos for the road. There’s still things I want to add to the bus, a speaker system on the roof, ladders, and some sort of foldable stage would be great and it need a lot more sirens and lights (so it looks like a real Nigerian bus). Massive thanks to everyone who generously chipped into the crowdfunder to help make this version of the bus a reality, I’ve left the crowdfunder open until the end of the month to try and cover the bus’s running costs and also to fund a Hell t-shirt giveaway to activists out here since the shirts we printed for the march were so popular.

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HELL BUS TOUR

The Hell Bus tour is happening!⁠⁠ It’s been quite an intense logistical nightmare to get this thing on the road and it wouldn’t have been possible without Ad Free Cities and SwitchIt.Green who have essentially organised the entire tour leaving me to worry about what’s actually going on inside the bus and fill up on windscreen-wiper fluid.⁠

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HELL IN THE NIGER DELTA – DOCUMENTARY

I put together a short documentary about my visit to Nigeria for the first Niger Delta climate change conference organised by Lekeh Development Foundation (LEDEF). See my previous post about the trip here. One of the most polluted areas on the planet, the Niger Delta has a life expectancy of just 41 years due to decades of Shell oil spills & constant gas flaring. As part of the conference we visited two Shell oil spill sites in Eleme and K-Dere, Ogoniland, to see first hand some of the horrors that Shell has unleashed on this part of the world for over 65 years. The Eleme spill occurred in June 2023, K-Dere was in 2020, and is still untreated as of August 2023.

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HELL BUS IN LONDON

The Hell Bus blocking the road at Whitecross Street Party last weekend. Massive thanks to @basic.bogan.bitch and @__laurie____loads__ for their help getting the bus resupplied and open on time, and to Gary Seabrook for driving the bus from Bristol! @spellingmistakescostlive on TikTok I’ve brought the bus back to my studio for the next month for some essential repairs before it’s planned UK tour in October. The Hell Bus exhibition was mostly built and bodged together in a mad 2 month rush in 2021 and the heat and cold and vibration of a working bus, plus the thousands of people who have been through it so far means it’s well overdue some fixing up. I also want to add some new exhibits. It’s going to cost a bit of cash and materials so if anyone wants to chip in towards the refit, you can donate some quids at RoyalDutchHell.com or order some Hell merch there too. It all goes towards keeping this thing together and on the road. There are plans in the works to bring the Hell Bus on a UK tour of universities this October. If you work at a university and can help get the bus invited onto campus for a few days please get in touch. For details of future events sign up to my mailing list or check RoyalDutchHell.com

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SHELL IN NIGER DELTA

Yesterday I visited two Shell oil spill sites in the Niger Delta with Ogoni climate activists from Lekeh Development Foundation, local community leaders, and West African climate experts. It might be the saddest and most enraging thing I have ever seen. While there I filmed Ogoni community leaders, activists, students and doctors, explaining the situation and the suffering of these communities, and captured footage of the ecological devastation Shell and other oil companies have brought to their homes. See my story for one of these videos, the rest I need time to edit and upload.

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HELL BUS @ GLASTONBURY 2023

I’m still recovering from the installation of the Hell Bus crashing into a Hell petrol station at @shangrilaglasto this year. It was a couple of months work and all over in 5 days. Haven’t had a chance to pick through the photos and I’m still dealing with Hell Bus admin (my favourite) but here’s a couple of day and night photos to give you an idea what it was like.

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NEWSPAPER PAPER

I’m in the newspaper! Specifically I’m in The Posttraumatic from Spain, edited by the brilliant Octavi Serra who I met at Trashplant Festival last year. Copies or a subscription to the paper are available from The Posttraumatic website. Headline reads: “More of the same”

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HELL BIKE AT ‘THE BIG ONE’

The Hell Bike I designed for Fossil Free London got plenty of action last weekend at The Big One demos outside Parliament. It had a great reaction at the protest and I was really happy to see it in its stationary and marching modes. The banners are retractable depending on what the bike is being used for (and how windy it is). I wanted to make something that is as versatile as possible for all the different types of actions and protests it will be needed on, as it’s not just a straight-up art thing, it actually needs to be useful!As for the Hell Bus I hope to have some news about that in the coming weeks..

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OVERTAKEN BY REALITY: SATIRE INSIDE A DYSTOPIA

Between the Pope auctioning off his autographed Lamborghini for charity, Lockheed Martin bidding to run NHS GP surgeries, and the FBI’s social media tributes to Martin Luther King Jr, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that satire is dead. And maybe it is. As an artist who uses satire in my work I’ve been overtaken by reality more than once, and sometimes wondered if maybe I’m not making jokes, but accidentally producing comically malevolent ideas that could actually be used by the bastards who run the place.

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HELL BUS @ LIVERPOOL

I recently returned from Liverpool where the Hell Bus was featured at The World Transformed for 4 days in the centre of town. The reaction to the bus was fantastic and I was delighted to be able to show Jeremy Corbyn around too. We had a chat about nuclear weapons, the daily mail and solar powered tanks. He really liked my Don’t Believe Everything Billionaires Tell You image which I made during the 2019 election so I gave him a sticker of it and a Mini Daily Mail lol. Massive thanks to Beth and Chris (Silent-K) for putting me up while I was in town!

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CARBON CAPTURE AT THE SCIENCE MUSEUM – BROUGHT TO YOU BY SHELL

Some impromptu new exhibits appeared today as part of the Shell-sponsored carbon capture exhibition at the Science Museum, London. ⁠ I thought it was weird that an exhibition about carbon capture, paid for by an oil company, didn’t once mention that 81% of all the carbon *ever* captured by this technology has been used by oil companies and pumped back into oil wells to help extract more oil. Seems like a significant omission (ok yes we can call it a ‘carbon omission’) Also thought it was weird that the exhibition didn’t mention that oil corporations are some of the biggest investors in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. No doubt because of how useful it is to them in getting more oil out of the ground, while being able to pass it off as a ‘green technology’ for tax breaks and marketing purposes. But now at least, for a time, the Science Museum exhibition does mention those things, as well featuring a great new idea about a super useful product to turn all that captured carbon into.

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HELL BUS @ GLASTONBURY

Glastonbury was absolutely incredible, thanks to everyone who called into the Hell Bus in Shangri-La. A massive thanks to everyone at Shangri-La for having me, and to my amazing Hell Bus hard party/work crew: @thetwopack, @kestra.laurent.dances.the.bug, @pineapple_king___ and @hannahslogic. It was hard to get any photos inside the bus when it was full as when it got full it was very full and the queue was out the door. I’d say around two thousand people crammed through this thing over 5 days altho I suspect more than that. The response was amazing and ran the gammut from “is this by Shell?” to “Its fucking boss that innit!” and “that was the most randomest thing ever” to “it’s an astonishing piece of work”. But overall it was super positive and I couldn’t have asked for a better crowd and a better reaction. All that work paid off and now we know it works and doesn’t fall apart when countless numbers of smashed people smash through it.

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HELL COMPLETE

I’ve just about recovered from the Hell Bus deadline and journey to and from Glasgow. It was an extremely stressful, frenetic and expensive project but it was also incredible fun and pretty exhilarating to be working on a large-scale exhibition again, (the biggest, and definitely the most complicated I’ve ever done) after the non-year of 2020. I absolutely love a deadline. There’s nothing like the fear of letting people down and making a prize tit of yourself to get you out of bed in the morning. The response to the exhibition was amazing, which I’m sure had nothing to do with the fact I was sitting at the end of the bus grinning and prodding at visitors as they left. The enthusiasm of the response encouraged me as to the viability of properly touring the bus in the new year. (If you run an event that could host the bus in spring/summer 2022 get in touch!)

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HELL BUS AT SHELL HQ

I brought the Hell Bus down to Shell HQ today with Joe Lycett. Parked it outside for almost an hour while the staff inside went into a self-imposed lockdown. The bus was being filmed for a new documentary Joe is making about Shell’s greenwashing PR, which will be out later this month. More details when I have them! The bus will be going to Glasgow for COP26 at the end of the month, and the exhibition inside is still under construction. I’m posting regular updates of my DIY nightmares over on my Instagram story.

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HELL BUS CROWDFUNDER

For the last month I’ve been working on a new anti-Shell exhibition that I’ve been hoping to install inside a single-decker biodiesel powered bus to bring up to the COP26 environmental conference in Glasgow in November and some other events on the way, including the Lakes International Comic Festival. Unfortunately, this morning I just found out one of the main sources of funding has been cancelled for unrelated reasons, so I’m launching a last-minute crowdfunder to try and still make this happen.

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EXTINCTION REBELLION AT THE HELL CENTRE

Shout out to everyone at the Extinction Rebellion protests today, in particular to the guy who super glued himself to the door at the Shell HQ with a copy of the anti-Shell logo I designed for my #burnthefuture project. It was also part of a banner they hung from the front of the building (see below). Very happy with that! If any activists ever need print quality files of my work for protests just get in touch.

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