The Yes Men used slick branding to spoof ExxonMobil in New Mexico. Inside the cloak and dagger intervention by a wave of “laugh-tivists” with a serious cause.
ALBUQUERQUE—Infamous quasi-art disruptor group The Yes Men were surprise guests at Balloon Fiesta earlier this month, repping their latest parody organization: ExxtremeEnergy. Tying into ExxonMobil’s inaugural title sponsorship of Albuquerque’s most iconic event—now officially called the “ExxonMobil Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta”—uniformed members of ExxtremeEnergy toted translucent backpack reservoirs through Balloon Fiesta Park and encouraged fiesta-goers to sample their delicious “produced water.”
Though the actual substance served was a mix of water and vinegar, the spokespeople gleefully advocated for public consumption of a real industrial byproduct that ExxonMobil has attempted to rebrand: water contaminated by oil and gas extraction. They boasted about its “spine-tingling” bouquet of arsenic, lead, mercury, benzene, and radium.
“It’s totally non-lethal!” one ExxtremeEnergy representative proclaimed, filling a plastic cup with what appeared to be a pesticide sprayer. This blithe pronouncement was closely followed by a caveat from his beaming compatriot: “dosage dependent.” Another team member in a branded ExxtremeEnergy polo handed a cup of supposedly radioactive liquid to an unsuspecting fiesta-goer declaring, “Radioactivity is a rich New Mexico tradition!”
The Yes Men tend to eschew the title of ‘artists’… [but] they nonetheless align with a robust legacy.
These jarring exchanges provoked nervous laughter, polite confusion, and sincere outrage from Balloon Fiesta attendees, setting the stage for local activist “truth-tellers” to swoop in with facts and swag. Though the educational presence of activists alongside the ExxtremeEnergy team rendered their produced water advertisements obviously apocryphal, they also made clear to witnesses that their scripts only slightly exaggerate language in corporate proposals that position produced water as a “drought solution” for New Mexico.
Though these proposals do not recommend human consumption of produced water—it is radioactive, after all—they confidently claim its efficacy for ‘responsible reuse’ in industrial, construction, and agricultural contexts. However, produced water is currently confined to cement-lined pits due to its toxicity. Informed detractors in health and environmental sciences point out that flooding major sectors of our economy with such a hazardous material astronomically increases the risk of spills that endanger our drinking water and ecosystems, introducing new pathways for produced water to enter our bodies. Given ExxonMobil’s own prolific record of spills in New Mexico, these concerns seem more than justified.
“The irony of ExxonMobil, New Mexico’s top polluter, title sponsoring Balloon Fiesta was too big to pass up,” commented Mike Bonanno, also known as Igor Vamos, founding member of The Yes Men. For decades, The Yes Men have engaged in similar acts of “identity correction,” or public interventions that reveal the true nature of oppressive powers.
Utilizing the same mass communications that corporations and government organizations use to sanitize their images, projects by The Yes Men span branded presence at international events like Balloon Fiesta, news appearances, advertising campaigns, press releases, websites, social media accounts, and more. They have impersonated Dow Chemical, the World Trade Organization, the National Petroleum Council, and others so convincingly that they have talked their way into televised interviews and major international conference spots.
Though The Yes Men tend to eschew the title of “artists” to avoid blunting their explicitly political aims, they nonetheless align with a robust legacy of artist-activist collectives like Gran Fury that apply their aesthetic talents in service of social justice.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
“We’re inverting corporate propaganda using an ethos like Bertolt Brecht’s definition of art,” commented Tom Hoy, a career activist who participated in the ExxtremeEnergy action and is an alumnus of The Yes Men’s Trickster Academy. “He says, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’ Like many artists and comedians, I write and do things that make me laugh, and those things end up being disruptive and confusing to authorities. I’m using my art to protest in a way the system doesn’t know how to process.”
Balloon Fiesta, itself a promotional stunt started by the local news channel KOB in the 1970s, formed an ideal backdrop for The Yes Men to perform their signature impersonation of corporate iconography.
Fitting right in with similarly appareled representatives of Wells Fargo and Creamland Dairy attending their special-shapes balloons, this guerrilla performance played an important role in a broader constellation of resistance actions forming the first protest in the history of Balloon Fiesta.
Coordinated locally by WildEarth Guardians’s climate & health director Rebecca Sobel, ExxtremeEnergy’s in-person interactions complemented eye-catching banner installations co-created by Youth United for Climate Crisis Action, Oil and Gas Action Network, and New Mexico Climate Justice. The dovetailing actions infused surprise, laughter, and confusion into an otherwise bleak discussion of environmental degradation.
“Activism is hard. Movements need joy and solidarity,” commented Sobel on her move to invite The Yes Men to join the resistance to ExxonMobil at Balloon Fiesta. “You can’t stay mired in tragedy all the time or you’ll burn out. Humor and levity allow us to sustain our work.”
New Mexicans have a lot of power to resist oil and gas deregulation on a local level.
This needed dose of “laugh-tivism” comes less than a month after the New Mexico board overseeing water regulations bowed to pressure from the Governor and pushed through a proposal expanding the use of produced water for agriculture, despite strong opposition from environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and Western Environmental Law Center.
“Big oil companies wield tremendous power, but still depend on state and local governments to approve their infrastructure plans,” Hoy explained. “That means New Mexicans have a lot of power to resist oil and gas deregulation on a local level.”
Though plans for upcoming ExxtremeEnergy actions remain intentionally mysterious, Sobel hints that representatives may be in attendance at upcoming water quality control meetings. Documentation of their darkly absurd interactions live on the ExxtremeEnergy website and Instagram account, which both maintain the gag that produced water should be consumed by all. You can also find an ExxtremeEnergy billboard at the intersection of Paseo Del Norte and Edith Boulevard in Albuquerque.
