IMPRENTA, an art, cultural, and social space in the Mac Arthur Park area of Los Angeles, is mounting an artists’ response to the May Day events of 2009. After engaging in a series of conversations and planning sessions around questions of protest, politics, immigrant rights, and our role as artists, we are working on a collaborative project that deals with the history, politics, and semiotics of protest.
We are producing 1000 signs composed of simple black text on a white field that read “I AM A CITIZEN.” These signs will be posted around the city of Los Angeles and distributed during the May Day protests. The signs that circulate during the protest will have text on the back addressed to the person holding the sign. The text will invoke the politics involved in this claim to the “citizen.”