You can see reports from of our 15 years of projects below and here.
Now it's your turn to take the reins and sort out this mess that we all live in.
Love and rage
xxx
A wild ride across the streets of Hackney.
A Space Hijacker agent posing as a wealthy flat hunter.
An estate agent weaving through the streets plying their trade of gentrification.
An unruly mob of FOXtons HUNTERS chasing them down on horseback (bicycles).
Hackney Foxtons estate agents closed down for the day.
Shoreditch Foxtons under police guard.
"When we demanded an end to wage labour, we didn't just mean the wages!"
From people being forced to stack shelves in Poundland for free, through to office workers pushing their hours later and later, our wages no longer reflect our work.
The casino banks are being bailed out with our money, the corporations dodge their tax, our services are cut and we're forced to work even more for even less.
Space Hijackers & Hedonist International
Limehouse Summit 2012
The Space Hijackers and Hedonist International met for a 3 day summit at the Hijacker HQ in Limehouse. A summit involving kidnapping, sword fighting, drinking, debate, cricket, dressing up, fire, dancing and finally a war declaration.
23 May 2012
Locog: The Unelected body in charge of the 2012 Olympic Games
confirm our status as official Protesters!
We are pleased to announce
that on Wednesday 23th May, we received official recognition
from Locog that we are the "Official Protesters Of The
London 2012 Olympic Games".
In a bold and daring move
Locog
contacted twitter demanding that due to "Brand Affiliation"
Twitter should immediately close our
account. Twitter, the beacon of free speech which so vocally
lent it's support to the Arab Spring did, of course, what
everyone expected and immediately curtailed to the interests
of big money and business. We, The Official Protesters, were
immediately locked out of our account, losing access to thousands
of followers, in a move designed to silence our dissent.
Locog of course realised the
benefit such a move would have to our fledgling campaign,
as within minutes twitter exploded in support of us. No sooner
were we off air than the phones and emails started flooding
in. In a classic case of the Streisand effect, before we knew
it articles were popping up in newspapers and blogs across
the globe:
The
Guardian "Agent Bristly Pioneer also described the logo as
a "social meme" that had become part of the London
landscape. However, despite its ubiquitous presence, he said,
it could not be used by ordinary people. "It's like Voldemort
– you're not allowed to mention it otherwise you'll
invoke the wrath of Locog." http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/may/23/twitter-london-2012-olympic-logo?newsfeed=true
Wired
Magazine "The Space Hijackers, a group of anti-capitalist
activists, launched a spoof "Official" Protesters
of the London Olympic Games site in April. It's intended as
lampooning the fact that the Games seems to have an official
tie-in product of every description -- from chocolate bars
to toothbrushes." http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-05/23/space-hijackers-suspended-over-olympic-protest
The
Drum "Commenting on the move Robin Grant, global managing
director of the agency, said: “I'm shocked Twitter kowtowed
to LOCOG by suspending the @spacehijackers account. It's good
news that they've since relented, but bad news that @spacehijackers
has been forced to remove their parody ‘the Official
Protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games’ branding.
" http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2012/05/24/twitter-criticised-banning-olympics-protest-account
Visits to our official protest
site www.protestlondon2012.com
went through the roof and we saw dozens of twitter users change
their avatar to our Anarchist coloured version of the olympic
logo in support.
Eventually after tense negotiations
twitter allowed us access back to our account, along with
the hundreds of new followers that we had gained.
We would like to thank Locog
and the IOC for this official recognition and look forward
to working with them to facilitate further protest in the
future
Paternoster Square,
home of the London stock exchange sits right next to St Paul's
Cathedral in the heart of financial London. This grand square
with it's public art, benches, restaurants and bars is part
of the life of the city with hundreds and thousands of people
using it every week.
That is, hundreds
of people who are deemed worthy of using it. You see, now
like many other "public" areas of London, Paternoster
Square is in fact privately owned. We've previously done projects
highlighting the negative effect such ownership has on the
life of a city and on freedom of speech, see for example our
No No No outings. Public access is granted by the corporation
who own it, but this access can be withdrawn at any moment.
Such a moment occurred
when the Occupy Movement declared their intention to occupy
the London Stock Exchange as part of a global protest against
the Financial Industry. The protesters were locked out and
forced to take over the land adjacent to St Paul's Cathedral,
whilst the people of the London Stock Exchange carried on
about their business of gambling with our futures.
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The government is currently going through a consultancy period
where they are trying to push through an NHS reform bill.
Rumours abound that the Conservative Party are using this
bill to open up the NHS to the private sector as compensation
to private healthcare companies who donated
to the Tory party during their election campaign.
We, the Space Hijackers, have never trusted the government
- regardless which colour tie they happen to be wearing. We’re
particularly distrustful of the ones in the blue ties. While
all this backroom scheming to unpick all of Nye Bevan’s
good work in establishing the world’s largest single-payer
healthcare system was taking place, we thought we'd take the
debate to the streets....
Following on from our previous Private/Public
space projects which have focussed on the gentrification
of London and the erosion of civil liberties that that entails,
the Space Hijackers headed out to the Truman Brewery complex
on Brick Lane to enforce the rules that are implicit, and
perhaps not so implicit in such places. Stopping people from
drinking, smoking, talking, loitering, laughing and even reading
our sign!
UkUncut have recently
been grabbing headlines with their novel take on the recent
Tory Government "Essential Cuts to Public Spending".
Instead of eyeing up our welfare state and deciding which
bits to trim or slash completely in the name of efficiency,
UkUncut have been looking at the tax avoiding Tory friendly
big businesses and pressuring them to pay their fair share.
For their latest action, the Hijackers decided to join in
and bring along our latest tactic "The
Mass Debate".
Billboard
Bustcards
‘Bustcards’
are flyers handed out at demonstrations, to inform protestors
of their legal rights, in the event that should they be arrested
or stopped and searched. They are a response to the police’s
long track-record of abusing their powers.
An idea to produce
giant, billboard-sized bust-cards had been kicking around
Hijacker HQ for some months – initially with the aim
of installing them in places where police traditionally gather
to bully teenagers.
But, the advent
of the demonstration on 26 March – anticipated to be
the biggest since the two million-strong Iraq march in 2003
– saw some interesting developments in the already-pretty-bloody-fascinating
world of protest support and legal monitoring.
MaSAT
(Madrid Street Advertising Takeover) is the second international
street ad takeover project, and the third in a series of civil
disobedience projects intent on changing our expectations
of public behavior in our shared environments.
The Space
Hijackers were one of the many artists and groups asked to
take part in this fantastic project, and so we thought why
not include a message about one of the major bee's in our
bonet of late: public/private property.
Agent Hardcastle told us the news one meeting: "TFL are doing engineering work on the circle line,
for two weeks they are going to turn it back into a circle,
we've got a small window of opportunity for a final bash"
Game
on we thought.
THE
CRUDE AWAKENING
The Police seem to have recently become overly fashion conscious.
Taking photos and notes on what people are wearing at demos
and even raiding protestor’s houses in their desperate
search for style tips.
So at last Saturday's Crude
Awakening the Space Hijackers proudly presented THE
LAUNDRY:
A helpful team of launderette ladies gave people an instant
restyling that the police fashion hounds were not able to
keep up with.
Midnight Cricket is a game where the Space
Hijackers venture into the city, to host Anarchist Vs Capitalist
cricket matches on the streets of the financial centre of
London. After finding a suitable pub, full of bankers and
hedge fund managers, we arrive en mass dressed in our cricket
whites and drink with the suits, striking up conversation
and then challenging them to a match at closing time.
Hot on the heels of
the success of our first outing, we were keen to take
our No NO NO sign back into the city. The sign highlights
the hypocrisy of urban public/private space - where land that
appears public is actually owned by private corporations.
On the surface, London is a city full of open spaces bustling
with shoppers and tourists. If you scratch beneath it, you
soon discover that this openness is a scam.
If you’re a local
council, selling off land to private developers is an easy
way to raise capital. But the undermining of social liberties
that comes with these sales is unprecedented. Take the construction
of the Olympic village in Stratford for example. It’s
an entirely privately owned complex. Although there will be
public space, shops and entertainment, there will also be
robotic CCTV drones monitoring everyone coming and going –
thousands of cameras watching your every move, a ban on begging,
busking, skateboarding, hoodies, public assembly, protest,
loitering and much much more. Everything that makes our city
so vibrant is drained out of the space and replaced with a
2D image of a city. Unless you're shopping you're not welcome.
This Mayday on the Space Hijackers
took our anti-election battle bus to the streets of London
and the home of government. We've all seen George Galloway
and the other cronies charging around in open top buses trying
to persuade people to vote for them, but we all know the whole
thing is a scam. So we hired our own open top bus, and flew
around London giving out an alternate message - SPOIL
YOUR BALLOT, REJECT THE LOT OF EM!
Space
Hijackers - 1
Police & CPS - 0
All charges have been dropped against the Hijacker
11
In the months leading up
to London's G20 Summit in April 2009, the British press hyped
up police warnings of an impending Summer
Of Rage when public anger would erupt over the government's
bank bailout. The streets would burn and anarchists would
turn the newly unemployed into foot
soldiers of the revolution. Thankfully the police calmed
the situation by saying whatever happened they were 'up
for it'.
Following on from
previous projects where we parodied
the police, the Space Hijackers decided to take our DSEi-busting
tank out for another spin and ridicule the expectations
of violence
from the Police. We would tart her up as a Mad Max-styled
mobile oppression vehicle and don fancy dress on April
Fools Day (the date when the G20 summit and accompanying
demonstrations were taking place). With Ride
of the Valkyries blasting from the sound system, we drove
into the city with our bicycle outriders to thrust the sword
of satire at the State.
What's all this then? It
seems the Police failed to see the humour in a 6-wheeled behemoth
manned by the
laughing cavaliers of anti-capitalism, arrested 11 Hijackers
wearing blue boiler suits and started one
of the most bizarre prosecutions mounted in a British court
in recent years. In an utter waste of taxpayers' money,
we were charged and scheduled for a four day trial facing
charges of impersonating police officers, with the intent
of decieving the public into thinking we were the real fuzz.
We always refuted these
ridiculous claims on the part of the Police and the Crown
Prosecution Service and invited people to look over the past
10 years of our work, which the police were well aware of,
to see that we have a long history of parody, dressing up
and winding up the powers that be.
Thankfully, after finally
seeing sense, the CPS have now decided to drop all charges
against the Space Hijackers and return our vehicle and belongings.
We would like to thank
the Police for this amazing team building exercise they have
put us through. At the cost of tens of thousands of pounds
to the tax payer, the Space Hijackers as a group are now much
more numerous, organised, brave, focussed and optimistic in
what we can get away with. We look forward to their continued,
if slightly fanatically eager interest in our work; getting
our tank back, our compensation and using our new found team
skills, to take our forms of protest up to the next more outrageous
and cunning level.
We can only assume that
the CPS bottled what was heading to be a very very expensive,
complete circus of a trial ending in their inevitable humiliation
at the hands of the Hijackers, Hodge
Jones & Allen Solicitors and our QC.
Michael
Wolkind QC, who was briefed on behalf of all the defendants,
commented " it was a great surprise when Keir Starmer,
the DPP, took time off from the investigation of the death
of Ian Tomlinson, personally to confirm the absurd decision
to pursue this prosecution. His judgement has been exposed
by the late decision to discontinue the case".
In other news, the Space
Hijackers now have a whole free week which we’ve all
booked off work and therefore intend to spend it causing as
much chaos as possible.
Fighting against the DSEi
Arms Fair in East London
Every two years,
the worlds largest arms fair happens in the Docklands in East
London. Supported by the UK government, Clarion Events invite
delegates from across the world to peruse the latest advances
in the technology of death.
This year the Hilton Hotel
on Park Lane held a cushy little dinner for a selection of
the most reprehensible nasty little men in the world. For
some reason they wanted to keep the whole affair quiet? We
thought we'd help them out with some advertising for it.
The City. A concrete monolith to avarice,
greed, and sloth. Nature is dulled and forced to obey an urban
rigidity. Rivers are suppressed, plants are pruned and bound
to grow in ways that please planners. The suppression parallels
the City’s workers, stunned and cultivated human bots
conditioned to believe they are individual despite the uniformity.
Operation Ivy League is an attempt to sow
the seeds of dissent within the strict architecture and culture
of the City of London.
Once again the Hijackers
took on the dirty capitalists in a match for the city! Once
again we won, and once again there were more bare breasts,
broken bodies and drunken fools than you can shake a stick
at.
The Space Hijackers teamed up with a various
other troublemakers in order to lead a funeral procession
through the East End marking the spread of Starbucks and other
unwelcome multinationals.
Culminating in the closing down of the
Starbucks In Whitechapel, this was a day for protecting our
local community from the beasts of global unfair-trade.
Mayday
09 - GUILTY A
CELEBRATION OF THE POLICE STATE
THERE IS NO PLACE FOR FREEDOM IN AN AGE
OF TERROR! GIVE UP THE FIGHT AND CELEBRATE OUR STATUS AS HAPPY
PRISONERS. HOW MANY MORE MUST DIE BEFORE WE LEARN TO DO AS
WE'RE TOLD?
In response to the massive over-zealous
police operation around the G20 which saw peaceful protestors
beaten, an innocent man killed and thousands put under illegal
detention in a kettle, the hijackers decided to return to
the scene of the crime and highlight our police state. Around
400 people turned up to revel and critique our state with
the street party going on until night.
In
the light of the police's conduct at the G20 demonstrations,
where arbitrary detention, assault and eventually murder seemed
to be not simply the actions of a few 'bad apples', but rather
institutional policy. We were glad to see that someone had
decided to make their recruitment adverts rather more honest.
The Miss University
London competition has been coming under flak ever since the
two men who came up with the idea launched it. Billed as "empowering"
and "educational" the competition asks female university
students to parade around infront of a panel before being
judged on who has the best genes. Gender and Social stereotypes
are re-affirmed, one lucky girl gets to live the dream for
the night the rest go home in tears. This is then called entertainment.
Agent Koshka decided she
had had enough and suggested the Hijackers get busy coming
up with a plan to compliment the feminist protest and variety
of other actions going on. In true Hijacker style we came
up with a tongue in cheek exaggeration of the contest, sending
a group of mainly male agents to go down and offend everyone.
Ever get the feeling that
all of life seems to now be controlled in a web of corporations,
social networking, government control and money? Why should
peoples social interactions be forced into the non-choice
between online networking sites, corporate sponsored events,
government regulated drinking establishments or pop culture
driven night clubs? We're fed up to the eyeballs with it.
If I want to play in my city, I don't want to be spoon fed
database targeted advertising campaigns, be monitored as a
focus group or be judged in comparison to this months glossy
style bibles.
The Greenwich foot tunnel
Pirate Party had been an idea brewing in our collective conscience
for some time. The government have now banned drinking on
the tube trains, and have been actively clamping down on any
non licensed events for years. In an age where Facebook is
seen as a social life something has to be done!
The powers
that be decided to make a big song and dance about the official
olympic torch being handed over from Beijing to London. Even
organising a 1948 themed street party in Hoxton to mark the
occassion. The Hijackers decided to roll up in our tank to
join in the celebrations, oh and to mark the official handover
from the Free Tibet campaign to the Free Hackney Campaign.
We managed
to make quite an entrance, crashing straight into a security
vehicle as we arrived, then pulling out our FREE HACKNEY banners.
