What a week! And what a weekend!

We never expected that our week of action – the Global Divestment Mobilisation – would end this way.

After a great week with actions at 3 pension funds, 5 universities, a creative ‘head out of the sand’ action in The Hague and more – on Friday night it was Fossil Free Culture’s turn, artists performed a beautiful and powerful piece: ‘Drop the Shell’.

They made a clear statement of how the Van Gogh museum is poisoned by their sponsorship relation with oil giant Shell. Because of a few drops of syrup – the fake oil – the Van Gogh museum panicked. The police were called in and 9 arrests followed: 7 performers and 2 bystanders. This disproportional response by both the museum and the police led to a lot of media attention in the Netherlands and abroad and many upset reactions from the public and politicians. The Van Gogh museum received a lot of angry phone calls by concerned citizens. Only last Monday were the brave final 4 artivists released from custody. Check out their beautiful videos and the latest updates via the Fossil Free Culture Facebook page.

We adapted our plans for the weekend to the developing situation. The closing action of our week of actions became – instead of a creative water-action – a powerful vigil in solidarity with the arrested artists.

Watch and share this video of our winning week of actions:

The action-week showed not only that our movement here in the Netherlands, but also the international divestment movement, is stronger and more diverse than ever before. With thousands of actions taking place from Brazil to Belgium and Cape Town to Jakarta we demanded that our cities, banks, pension funds, faith groups, universities and museums stand on the right side of history and stop supporting the companies causing the climate crisis.

We can no longer accept that short term profit for a few is prioritized over preventing a climate crisis with catastrophic consequences for every human being on the planet.

That’s why we take action, and we need YOU! Watch and share the video and take a moment to let it sink in that the bigger our movement gets, the bigger the chance that we can turn the tide fast enough to prevent a catastrophic climatecrisis.

If we hadn’t stood together we couldn’t have achieved everything we did.

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