This started off in Italy and was taken up in Britain and America by students who had seen them on social media.

We didn’t go ahead with this idea in the end, and everything in this particular display case would sit on its own bespoke Oriented strand board (OSB), which is a material that appears frequently in the final exhibition. There are accounts of women saying that it was only when they had their eyes down on their sewing that they felt safety in confronting what was going on and were able to document what they were otherwise proscribed against speaking about. But some of the most powerful exhibits are the simplest ones – things that engage with the more theatrical side of a demonstration and show how the balance of power on the street can be swung with just a bit of mischievous wit. In one corner, a cluster of gigantic inflatable cubes hangs above a line of placards, like metallic clouds. These are inflatable cobblestones, made by the Eclectic Electric Collective, and used in worker protests in Berlin and Barcelona in 2012, as a way to outwit the authorities.Disobedient objects were not made with a museum in mind. Nor do they rely on the museum to legitimate them – but this does not mean that they have nothing to gain from appearing here. Before we located them, some of these objects were retired from the street to rest in private lofts or social centre basements. Now they find themselves returned to visible public history. For other objects, their struggles are unfinished, and when this exhibition closes they will return to take their place within them. Whatever our emotional reaction or identification with these unfinished objects, we mostly encounter them for only a brief moment. Perhaps inches from our bodies in a crowd; held by (or holding up) our friends; in news footage of people who could be us; in photographs of days growing distant; or suddenly reappearing in a courtroom. The exhibition of these objects is, in fact, one moment when you might actually spend time with them, right in front of you, able to slowly examine them beside each other. How might this moment of exhibition relate to these other moments, of use by activists, newspaper photographers and so on?

The objects on display are not part of the world of commercial design, but I think there’s a lot here for designers to learn from. That’s also been the case for us as curators. We had to recognise that the people who made these materials were the experts – there weren’t any professors or critics we could consult – so we had to go to them and let them lead on how their stories that were told. In other news, two striking commissions: the designers Barber Osgerby are to design the inside and outside of the new Crossrail trains, which, after decades of British trains having been less beautifully designed than the average vacuum cleaner, is a step forward. And Goldsmiths, University of London, incubator of much of BritArt, has chosen the young architectural collective Assemble to design a public gallery on their New Cross campus to show the work of international artists, students and staff. These textiles often left the country, and were seen as innocent by the authorities because of their resemblance to folk art, but carried letters and communicated with the outside world. This technique spread, and we have examples from Colombia in 2010. It was also used in Ireland by women protesting against the use of Shannon Airport in extraordinary rendition.Disobedient objects are often those which are simply to hand and waiting to be re-purposed. These masks made from water bottles were used during last year’s Gezi Park protests in Istanbul as a response to the unprecedented amounts of teargas used against protestors in Taksim Square, and became symbolic – they were featured in street art and graffiti and there are photographs of whirling dervishes wearing them. We start in the 70s and the rise of neo-liberalism; among the earliest objects in the show are Chilean appliqued textiles produced by women in workshops during the Pinochet regime. These documented the social realities of the disappearances, the tortures, the economic hardships. These worked on a number of levels. Guerilla Girls, the group of women artists who, in 1985, set out to expose racism, sexism and corruption in the art world In the same section of the show we have “bloc books”, painted shields in the form of giant works of literature and philosophy made by students protesting at education cuts. When they demonstrated, the students were effectively being defended by culture, and by striking the shields, the police not only invoked the destruction of books but were also forced into a performance without realising it. Traditionally between these dates the Spirit worlds open up as the veils between worlds become thin and we can communicate with those who have crossed over.