Shia Labeouf, Luke Turner and Nastja Rönkko’s ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ livestream has recently become less anti-Trump protest art and more an international game of capture the flag, waged between artists and the combined efforts of 4chan and 8chan.
Last week, Labeouf and his cohorts got schooled in Liverpool, England; they had to take down their stream after just one day when 4channers scaled the roof an arts center to mess with the stream. And that beatdown was right on the heels of the chans’ crazy three-day operation to find and steal the flag from a secret location in Greenville, Tennessee.
So where will the stream go next? Members of 8chan’s HWNDU board are speculating the new location will be in Helsinki, Finland.
It sounds random, but it’s actually quite logical. The stream started in America, Labeouf’s home country, then moved to England, the home country of Luke Turner. Nastja Rönkko is a native of Helsinki, so it seems only fair the group will give her home country the next shot.
Labeouf, Turner and Rönkko will be participating in the ARS17 exhibition for contemporary art at the Kiasma Modern Arts Museum in Helsinki. The exhibition starts this Friday, but it is unclear when the group will arrive at the museum. Rönkko has done exhibitions previously at the Kiasma in 2012 and 2013. Their names were on the ARS17 website before the “He Will Not Divide Us” project started, but it still would be a convenient new home for the stream.
Helsinki would appear to be a good place that is out of the reach of pro-Trump trolls, but appearances can be deceiving. The HWNDU board is already preparing a heist on the Kiasma Museum if the stream is placed there. Multiple members of the board claim to live in or around Helsinki and are standing by to troll the stream.
The Fins also have a message board called Ylilauta, which functions much like 4chan and 8chan, and many of its users have already volunteered for the trolling operation.
No word yet from the artists where the next location (Season 5) will be, but they can certainly expect a warm welcome for them in Finland. The stream probably would not last more than a day.