From Nazca Lines to the Mona Lisa, a history of unique climate protest

Imagine walking up to arguably the most famous painting in the world — Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa —and finding her face smeared with cake. This is what horrified visitors to the Louvre Museum in Paris encountered in May this year. The incident was part of a series of similar defacement of famous art objects in the run up to the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) under way at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

In recent weeks, climate activists have taken to defacing famous paintings in London, Paris, The Hague and Berlin, with mashed potatoes, tomato soup, and red paint. Activists threw mashed potatoes at Claude Monet's world-famous painting Haystack" at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam near Berlin. Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers in London's National Gallery was attacked with a can of soup by activists from Just Stop Oil. Attackers also targeted Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring at The Hague, and a dinosaur skeleton in the Natural History Museum in Berlin.

Thankfully, none of the paintings was really damaged, being covered with plastic or glass. However, many art scholars have pointed out that the class coverings themselves are often very old and add layers of meaning to a painting or artwork's historicity.

The protests, meanwhile, do reveal the anger and frustration activists feel, especially with the decision of Egyptian authorities and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to allocate a designated “protest hub” at COP27.

The purpose-built area for protesters has been placed near a highway and away from the conference centre, the Guardian reported. Images of the designated protest area show a row of white-painted cabins between a row of palm trees and a car park. It was unclear whether protesters will be permitted to spread out among the vast open landscape or be forced to crowd next to the cabins to find relief from the desert sun, the newspaper reported.

This is a deviation from the previous summits, which allowed the wider public to engage on climate issues, and has brought heavy accusations on the authorities for trying to contain and curb free speech and peaceful protests.

Unique protests centered at and around COP conferences are not new and have had a long history.

In another series of protests, activists have taken to blocking airport runways and painting on airplanes, protesting against COP 27’s “greenwashing of air transport”. 

In the Netherlands, activists demonstrated by breaching a runway at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and cycling across the tarmac. Others sat in front of parked private jets or chained themselves to the aircraft to physically prevent the jets from taking off.

The demonstrations have also spread across London’s Heathrow, Jeju in South Korea, and eight different Swedish airports. These are part of a nearly five-year-long series of protests designed to object to aviation industry pollution and its greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2014, protesting COP 20 at Lima, Peru, Greenpeace activists had entered a strictly prohibited area beside the Hummingbird Geoglyph, one amongst the famous Nazca lines, and laid down big yellow cloth letters reading “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable.”

The activists later apologised to the people of Peru, after the Peruvian Ministry of Culture accused them of defacing a national cultural treasure. 

The Nazca Lines are a group of pre-Columbian geoglyphs etched into desert sands. Covering an area of nearly 1,000 sq km, there are about 300 different figures, including animals and plants, and preserved carefully by the Peruvian authorities from weathering erosion.

In 2018, the Greenpeace London headquarters was itself put under siege by activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR), who demand that the former organisation’s approach is too slow and climate actions need to be fast tracked. 

XR has also been involved in several “mass arrests” and, most notably, a mass "die-in" protest in 2019. More than a thousand activists laid down pretending they were lifeless under the blue whale in the foyer of the Natural History Museum in London, England, on April 22, 2019.

The group has rapidly risen to the forefront since 2019 through several of its demonstrations – from delaying public transport and closing Waterloo Bridge to setting up a stage on a pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus. They also sprayed the British Treasury and the Wall Street Bull with fake blood.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg also emerged as one of the faces leading the climate protests in 2019, rallying thousands of schoolchildren from across Europe in rallies protesting defaulting climate policies. This year she is also among those protesting the curbs on protest space at the summit, and has refused to participate in COP27.

Closer home, anti-Coca-Cola protestors staged a protest in front of the company’s defunct plant at Plachimada in Kerala’s Palakkad district on Sunday, condemning Coca-Cola’s sponsorship for COP27.