Description
After a long history of cultural sponsorship that started in 1931, Shell and NEMO Science Museum have quietly ended their partnership during lockdown (June 2021). NEMO was the last museum in Amsterdam with ties to Shell.
Creative and powerful actions
The dropped partnership followed after Fossil Free Culture (FFC) announced NEMO as their next target in 2020 and after several actions were staged at the children's science museum. For the announcement, FFC delivered a statement via a visual action and a video to NEMO in June 2020.
In November 2020, nine performers from FFC memorialized each of the Nigerian activists – the Ogoni Nine – who were hanged on this day 25 years ago, for their leadership in the resistance movement against Shell on Ogoni land in Nigeria. They did so in front of the NEMO museum, with a poem projected on the building by Saro-Wiwa, one of the Ogoni Nine. “Dance your anger and your joys / Dance the military guns to silence / Dance oppression and injustice to death / Dance my people / For we have seen tomorrow / And there is an Ogoni star in the sky”.
On Saturday, 5 June 2021, FFC brought about a Shell Effect, an intervention that remembers Shell’s traces of extraction, toxicity, disease, war, and corruption left across communities and territories in a history that spans two centuries of colonial brutality:
'Just as the butterfly effect reveals a world where even the smallest causes may have far-reaching impacts, Shell’s effect cannot be traced in its entirety. ‘Small’ actions in one place, like a cultural institution accepting money from an oil corporation, have violent reverberations elsewhere. NEMO has provided Shell with a platform to clean their public image and build on their social acceptability for 90 years, it has therefore facilitated the damage Shell has inflicted around the globe. Their responsibility must be acknowledged.'
