War declaration

The Trojan horse is being used here in its original ancient context as a symbol to denote the gift-wrapped disaster BP is presenting to humanity. the Trojan horse with its original ancient context, gains a new emancipatory context. But although the circumstances might differ substantially from the original ones, the horse used by the protestors remains a Trojan horse. This predicate will never detach from the wooden animal, and therefore the origins of the Trojan horse will always leave their mark on future replica’s and contexts. What effect does it have on the new emancipatory context, that the ancient Trojan context plays its role as well?

The original Trojan horse was used at the end of a horrendous war that lasted ten long years and caused great bloodshed. Heroes went to battle ill-fated, husbands and wives were violently separated and many children went missing. Clytaemnestra had to manage the palace while Agamemnon was off to Troy, having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia in order for the Greeks to travel to Troy' . Hector's only offspring Astyanax was cast off the city walls by Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. King of Troy and Hector's father Priam had to fall to his regal knees in the Greek camp to beg for the last remnants of his slaughtered son. Above all, the Trojan horse brings to mind the immense horrors and brutality of war, the universal feeling of dread when conflict takes its toll.

All of this was not lost in translation in the context of the protest in the British Museum. The replica of the Trojan horse says that the environmental crisis is a war as true as the Trojan War. BP or not BP wants us to realise that the political and economic consequences of multimillion-dollar companies establishing themselves in foreign countries to extract fossil fuels are tremendous. Where a number of jobs are generated, the distribution of the acquired wealth is uneven and unjust, leading poverty rates to skyrocket in countries that often already have to deal with large-scale poverty. Numerous armed conflicts have arisen over territories that are rich in fossil fuels, causing immense harm to people who have no opportunity whatsoever to recover. Consequently, people see no other solution but to abandon their homes and seek refuge in a foreign land, often to no avail. War damages people in vastly different ways, but the outcome is often all too familiar. It is this image BP or not BP summons by putting BP’s logo on the side of a Trojan horse. It is above all else a declaration of war: the struggle against climate change is not a peaceful fight for earth’s wellbeing, it is a war against the heavy-handed institutions that continue to ransack foreign lands, choose to ignore problems and thereby destroy many lives.