In response to Centre Pompidou's recent partnership with Nike during the Olympics, Clean Clothes Campaign and the Pay Your Workers coalition initiated the following open letter in solidarity with workers in Nike's garment supply chain:
----
Open artists' letter to the Centre Pompidou on its Olympic partnership with Nike
We, the undersigned artists and museum professionals, want to express our dismay over how the Centre Pompidou was used during the Paris 2024 Olympics. For 17 days the museum was shamelessly used as a massive led-lit ad for sportswear giant Nike, while inside museum rooms looked like fancy Nike stores. Museums like Centre Pompidou are public, partly government-funded, spaces that serve an important cultural purpose and should be a place that cherishes, promotes and supports art and artists. The International Council of Museums, of which the Centre Pompidou is a member, defines a museum as “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society” which will “operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities”. Instead, the museum chose to fall for the partner with a billion dollar company that is widely known for labour rights violations in its supply chain, and let it use the museum spaces and exterior to promote its products and wokewash and artwash its image.
Garment workers in Cambodia and Thailand who used to make clothes for Nike have been fighting for their respectively $1.4 million of denied severance and $800,000 of denied wages since 2020. This struggle has collected growing international support of activists, human rights organisations and even Nike investors who publicly criticise Nike’s refusal to provide justice to these workers. As one Cambodian former Nike worker formulated: "Nike, we are not begging for charity, we just want what we were owed."
While we understand public funding for cultural activities is often insufficient, the unashamed brand promotion that Nike was allowed to broadcast from the museum’s facade and inside its walls goes well beyond corporate sponsorships for the sake of a museum’s accessibility and ability to show art. Without any self-reflection on the role of museums in promoting art, this partnership has allowed marketing to be conflated with art. Above all, the museum could have easily researched Nike’s records on labour rights violations and in particular the payment of its workers. While we do not know how much money Centre Pompidou has accepted to sell out its spaces for Nike’s brand promotion, we know that this money did not go to the garment workers who have been urging Nike to pay them for four years now. The $2.2 million that they are owed pales in comparison to the over $1 billion that Nike spent on marketing in the first quarter of 2024 alone. Activists during the Olympics rightfully brought this message to the museum, and we urge you in this letter to take steps in response to their call.
We are calling on the Centre Pompidou:
- to contact and urge its partner Nike to pay the workers of the Violet Apparel factory in Cambodia and the Hong Seng Knitting factory in Thailand the $2.2 million that they are owed in wages and severance;
- to pledge to properly investigate public claims against a company’s supply chain before starting a new sponsorship with a for profit-company, use its leverage to remediate human rights or environmental violations before entering into a partnership and to not allow any further brand advertising being marketed as art in its spaces.
----
By adding my name, I am signing this letter as an artists in solidarity with the workers in Nike's supply chain and agreeing for my name to be shared publicly.
For questions please contact christie@cleanclothes.org
Find out more about the action that happened during the Olympics here: https://www.instagram.com/cleanclothescampaign/reel/C-KyColoc53/ & https://cleanclothes.org/news/2024/activists-disrupt-nike-olympic-adver…
Read more about the partnership between Centre Pompidou and Nike here: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/nike-centre-pompidou-paris-2024/
Some of the artists who already signed this letter (this list is updated manually periodically only):
Han Bakker, Consultant, Netherlands
Corinne Boureau, artist, writer, France
Kathleen Brants, Belgium
Matthijs de Bruijne, Artist, Professor Kunsthochschule Kassel, Netherlands/Germany
Cathy van Eck, Sound artist & composer, Netherlands
Paula Keilholz, Fashion researcher, Germany
Vannsopharith Leng, Cambodia
Wilfred Löwensteyn, Artist, interior designer, Netherlands
Zofia Mezeyova, Belgium
Nicole Roegiers, Belgium
Hilde Saenen, Belgium
Isabell Schnalle, Threads & Tits, Germany
M Slewe, Slewe Galerie, Netherlands
Titus Slewe, Painter, Netherlands
Rob van Tour, Plastic Artist, Netherlands
Guido Verheyden, Belgium
Jeff Wallburn, The Yes Men, USA