meredith emery

(2020) tandem bike, steel, vinyl, spray paint

This anti-capitalist vehicle is a modified tandem bike that promotes systems of non-fossil fuel reliant transportation. This bike modification references the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist protest bike project known as the Bike Bloc, an activist work in which discarded bikes were welded into machines of creative resistance. The Bike Bloc was used to help protesters infiltrate the 2009 COP15 Climate Summit by providing a blockade that supported activists on foot.

The tandem bike is second hand, and was repaired to a rideable state with the help of a local bike cooperative. Steel plates with vinyl stickers reading “THE PAIN YOU FEEL IS CAPITALISM DYING” are welded onto three parts of the bike, implicating the bikers, viewers, and the economic system within which we function as complicit in the climate emergency. Simultaneously, the bike embodies a collaborative opportunity to organize against fossil fuel reliant transportation. The bike has been used to make local deliveries and provide personal transportation.