

⚡️ZAP⚡️ Get ready for Zone Anti Pub, the ZAP Games are back! From 13-25th November, groups around Europe will be taking down, pasting over, painting, covering, defacing, hacking, subvertising and generally ACTING IN RESISTANCE against advertising to mark Black Friday 🖤
Groups have been on the streets offering a public service by subvertising the corporate agenda and their greenwashing that encroaches into our public space with their visual pollution. SubGames is an invitation to celebrate this subversion of advertising. Throughout the year in rounds of the games you can enter all the subvertising pushing the boundaries of creativity you can find. There are 8 categories they can be entered into to be crowned winner and receive awards.
Get a group of people together you can trust
Check out the categories for inspiration
Share images of subvertising actions on social media and tag @XRPaintTheStreets with the hashtag #SubGames2023
Send images to subs@subgames.earth to be entered into the games
Bask in the joy that your public space has been freed from the commands to consume
Photographing and submitting creative subvertising is all good but actively taking part in subvertising can involve some legal risk. Technically, replacing adverts can constitute criminal damage due to the cost of hiring people to remove the posters, despite no lasting damage.
If you’ve ever wondered how subvertising is done there’s loads of information and guides online.
Check out some here
Each month brings a new round of the games. Teams can submit their entries to 8 categories which will be scored on artistic and creative merit. Winners will be announced at the beginning of the next round with awards up for grabs.
Send in your photos of subvertising Choose from 8 categories Winners announced at the beginning of the next round
Email the entries that you have spotted on the streets to
subs@subgames.earth
Have you always dreamed of exhibiting your latest artistic creations on the street? Calling on artists to beautify our pavements! Showcase creative talent throughout your community. Photography, drawings, paintings, poems, collages,… any medium possible and imaginable!
For those who have delusions of grandeur, there is no shortage of large advertisements to satisfy your desire for large-scale actions.
Considering the billboard as a practical and public means of dissemination, make it yours to make visible the struggles. Government distrust has never been higher. The world finds itself in a democratic crisis entangled within a planetary crisis while governments are busy cosying up to billionaires and shareholders ignoring the issues faced by everyday people and the overarching global issues that feed into our struggles.
The digital world is encroaching into our public spaces. What imaginative ways can you find to slow down this demise?
For the serial liberators of advertising, those who love records and the adrenaline of the challenge, join the competition to free as many panels as you can.
Surprise us! Make us laugh! Make us dream! Improve the public landscapes! Waiting for the bus can become an incredible adventure (we really like jokes, crossword clues, shopping lists, challenges, declarations of love, grandmother’s recipes, astrological predictions, flyering, stickers, clowning, imitation press releases, etc.).
Best subvertisement of a commercial campaign. Repurposing capitalist propaganda for the public good. Highlight greenwashing by big polluters, use the weaponised psychology against these goliaths and go after their public image.
The best installations of posters that enhance the streets. Think location, messaging and location.
We must end all new licenses and funding for fossil fuels.
Those who hid the science and projected impacts, worsening the situation for short-term profit, should be made to pay. Rich countries must support those already on the front line of climate impacts. The people will work together to address inequality and restore the living world through tackling the climate crisis.
Mobilise a world-wide effort, more ambitious than anything in all of history, to transform society using a participatory approach to politics at local, national and transnational levels.
Citizens’ assemblies, citizen-led politics, are the transitional tools needed to achieve this.