The exhibition Trademark Guerrilla (May – June 2002) was part of the program on board the boat AMJ, the canton of Jura's representative on the Swiss national exhibition.

The project provided a focus for activities on board the ship during the first three weeks of its life. The chosen theme of this first chapter of the boat's program was La Suisse Politique, a topic not explicitly addressed elsewhere on the Swiss National Exhibition and one approached in a critical way by the participants in the project Trademark Guerrilla.

The exhibition was made up of images, texts and actions that can all be seen as political art. However, only half of the material was made by artists, the rest coming from organisations and individuals involved in political activism and protest. The exhibition acted as a guide to just some of the visual strategies used to voice dissatisfaction with the way the world is being governed. The targets of much of the content were the monopolising tendencies of western governments and multi-national corporations. But allied to direct attacks on such powerful institutions the exhibition focused also on more circuitous and complex forms of critique. These included those individuals and groups who are reclaiming their rights to have a voice in the future of public space, those who fight the challenge to diversity and freedom suggested by unlimited branding, and those who are concerned about the aggressive copyrighting and patenting of cultural material.

Unlike a traditional exhibition Trademark Guerrilla contained few objects and was not contained within a single space. The boat served as a launch-pad for the project but the material took forms that spread themselves out over whichever site the boat was visiting. In this way the form of the exhibition mirrored its content by literally infiltrating, informing and hacking the broader fabric of the Expo 02.

title image: courtesy Minerva Cuevas / Mejor Vida