We love you @groningermuseum, but you need to break up with gas. No more Groninger Museum funded by Groningen misery. This is an intervention by your friends from across the Netherlands and Groningen.
Fossil Free Culture, 28/1/22 at the Groninger Museum in Groningen.
Image by @climate_action_photography
The Groninger Museum claims to be a cultural foundation within which the connections between visitors are strengthened. In sharp contrast to this noble sentiment, the museum provides ongoing reputational services to Gasunie and GasTerra, corporations that are responsible for destroying the foundations of many buildings in the Groningen area when extracting gas. In an attempt to clean up their image, Gasunie and Gasterra continuously make financial contributions to the Groninger Museum. By supporting the Museum, these fossil fuel companies try to paint themselves as caring for the community of Groningen, but they cannot sweep under the carpet their complicity in breaking up the ground beneath it.
As a frontline community, Groningen has experienced more than a thousand earthquakes in the last 40 years, due to the rupturing effects of fossil fuel extraction. This practice has damaged houses, farms, and churches that are home to over 170,000 people of the region. In the wake of this rumbling, local communities have been left in a perpetual state of uncertainty and fear. The Groninger Museum, too, has already felt these tremors. Fossil fuel companies have shaken the foundations of this province for long enough, now it is time for a different kind of rumble.
By presenting a false image of cultural patronage for these companies, the Museum helps them hide their destructive effects. Time to flip the night to day, and bring what was previously buried in the shadowed backroom of the board right up to the surface of the Museum. Let’s paint the true picture there for everyone to see: as long as the Groninger Museum keeps accepting fossil fuel sponsorship, it betrays its visitors.
Image by @climate_action_photography
#FossilFreeGroningen #breakupwithgas #thisisanintervention
[image description]A photo of the front of a yellow building with an image projected of a crack and the words “It is the sound of your world collapsing” which is the Groninger Museum.