WhoseFuture is our Ongoing creative activism billboard campaign.
Since 2020, we’ve taken over billboards in the city, transforming them into a space for our community to question, reflect and create.
We need to make space for young people to shape and own their future. And if that space isn’t given, we’ll take it anyway. This is about reclaiming public space and using it to shout loud and proud for what we believe in.
Whose Future is it? Ours.
#Whosefuture 2020
Racial justice. Access & INclusion. Climate justice. Radical leadership.
PArtners
YEAR
2020
Funded Project: Activism, Campaign, Public Art
TAGS
Young
Creatives
Rediat Abayneh, Shamil Ahmed, Manoel Bolutife Akure, Ozzy Algar, Owain Astles, Leeza Awojobi, Olamiposi Ayorinde, Emma Blake Morsi, Cai Burton, Kiara Corales, Alfie Dwyer, Malizah Fenlon, Maya Gamble, Parys Gardener, Henry Garrett, Josie Gyasi, Asmaa Jama, Greg Keen, Tim Lo Lytc, Rema Mukena, Soloman O-b / Khali Ackford / Joshua James, Nick Ogri, Stacey Olika, Olumide Osinoiki, Yasmin Qureshi, Anna Rathbone, Fatima Safana, Ade Sowemimo, Brook Tate, RTiiiKA, Jasmine Thompson, Bryony Throup, Ella Trudgeon, Amber-Ruth Watson, Courtenay Welcome, Seph Group
From our blog
During a summer of BLM, this campaign felt URGENT. We demanded answers to racism, inclusivity and the climate crisis. This was about leadership and our need for a secure and empowering future.
“As an arts agency, our mission has always been to champion the unheard voices of creative young people and to fight for a fairer society. Recent events have shown us that our work has never been so important. #WhoseFuture is about challenging the status quo, bringing Bristol’s young creative community forward and celebrating a different vision for the future.” – Rosa ter Kuile, #WhoseFuture 2020 Campaign Manager
PRESS
Care & wellbeing
#WhoseFuture 2021
PArtners
Rising Arts Agency Project: Activism, Campaign, Public Art
TAGS
Young Creatives
Abbi Bayliss, Jess Bunyan, Kiara Corales, Sophie Cottle, Tom Dewey, Roseanna Dias, Parys Gardener, Josie Gyasi, Sophia Harari, Joe Hill, Daisy Hvnter, Valentina Paz Huxley, Munhil Imran, Hazel Irons, Euella Jackson, Jade Johnson, Ant Lightfoot, Elinor Lower, Tim Lo Lytc, Sophie Malpas, Maria, Rema Mukena, Stacey Olika, Yasmin Qureshi, Anna Rathbone, RTiiiKA, Scarlett Smyth, Gabriela Sobreira, Brook Tate, Will Taylor, Jasmine Thompson, Bryony Throup, Ella Trudgeon, Lucy Turner, Amber-Ruth Watson, Courtenay Welcome
Building on the 2020 campaign we wanted to showcase what’s coming up in our work again and again: care. How do we care for ourselves in a fundamentally hostile system? How do we care for our communities and each other?
Not just self-care and wellness but with a focus on how social justice, economic equity and community play a roll in how we’re able to care for ourselves and others.
In true Rising style, the #WhoseFuture campaign used young people’s outstanding creative work to amplify their voices across the city, inviting the public to pay attention to what they have to say.
From our blog
Moving billboard experimentation
#Whosefuture 2022
Rising Arts Agency Project: Activism, Poster Campaign, Public Art
TAGS
Young
Creatives
Jesse Cooper, Daisy Hunter, Ant Lightfoot, Alexa Ledecky, Rhona Maguire, Leeza Awojobi, Anna Rathbone, The Rising Team
In 2022 we trialed a new model of art-activism – experimenting with a series of billboards that change and move across the city throughout the year.
Learning from the lessons of previous campaigns, we intentionally decided to take things slower. Our new approach let us really get under the skin of topics that matter to us, embed ourselves in the local community (and not burn out on a short campaign!)
We wanted to have a meaningful dialogue with the city that centres on our values – like rest, care and community.
Our first billboard series was on the corner of Stapleton Road and Easton Way and spanned six weeks from February to April. Over the course of that time, we’d paste up a new word onto the provocation. People could send their answers by scanning the QR code or commenting on our Instagram posts, and the team would go and paste up the answers!
The questions were structured to take people on a journey – reflecting on care, home, rest and protest. How do these concepts make you feel? What’s the embodied, sensory experience of them? What is the link between these concepts?
We organised a “Paste up” event with our community, where people glued their answers to the billboard, listened to music and ate samosas!
Our second billboards on St Luke’s Road, Bedminster next to Victoria Park is up until the 18th of September. The two billboards highlight how the world makes disabled people’s lives difficult – like a pile of tangled fairy lights – but could so easily make them simpler.
We worked with disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill people from our community to develop the billboards with the aim of showing the social model of disability in an accessible way. It was important to them that it inspired individual action over institutional / system action which is much slower. Change starts with how we treat each other NOW.
Our last billboard, we’ve been thinking about how to stay hopeful in a political climate that seems ever more deranged and uncaring. How to remind Bristol that, at the grassroots, there are people who are modelling the change we want to see in the world – as we aim to do at Rising.
So we’ve put up a giant email to Bristol. Our fourth and final billboard went up at the beginning of November on the junction of Rudthorpe Road and Gloucester Road.
“#WhoseFuture is a powerful statement to the city. In order for us to move forward, it is important for us to listen to all the voices in the community – including Bristol’s young people.
We have worked on a number of projects with Rising Arts Agency, including their radical Transforming Leadership programme, BE IT. This campaign is a testament to the insight that our young people have and the power they can bring to city wide conversations.”
– Councillor Asher Craig, Deputy Mayor, Bristol City Council