Artists are disappearing from our stages, our galleries, and our rehearsal rooms. Not because we have nothing to say —

but because we are not being given the chance to say it.

Today, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creative gurus, and TED Talkers. As Professor Justin O’Connor reminds us:

“Art is not an industry — it’s an essential part of a functioning society.”

Yet artists are routinely squeezed into the metrics of the “creative industries,” their labour reduced to entertainment for the night-time economy, too often unpaid, unseen, or undervalued.

On Friday 12 December, we gather.

• Seventy green chairs.
• A mic on a stand.
• A mic hanging from the ceiling like a question no one wants to answer.
• An unhinged door that refuses to stay closed.
• Artists seated on rows of chairs .

And Visual artists attempting to capture what keeps slipping from view.

The Artists’ Sit-In gathers performing artists for a collective action: to sit, to witness, to take up space, and to quietly declare the urgency of creative labour at a time when opportunities to work are diminishing.

This is not a performance in the traditional sense. No.No.No.

It is an act of presence, solidarity with independents, and refusal of current arts policy. What arts policy?

We sit because our work matters. We sit because our future and the future of our art depends on it. The sit-in speaks directly to industry-wide failures:

• The slow removal of funding that would keep open spaces that hold artistic process.
• The rise of surface-level programming that rewards polish over depth, immediacy over transformation.
• The shrinking capacity for art to build social change, to cultivate witnesses, to seed courage.

These forces are part of a wider mechanism of erasure.

THE CELEBRATION

8.PM Post protest we celebrate 25 years of The Living Room Theatre. Thank you for being part of our past, present and future.