On the eve of the Met Gala in New York City, a series of messages condemning Jeff Bezos and Amazon lit up the billionaire’s Madison Square Park luxury residence on Sunday, May 3.
The guerrilla projection is the latest in the group Everyone Hates Elon’s protest campaign against Bezos’s involvement in Monday’s event. After the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art named Bezos and his wife Lauren Sachez honorary co-chairs of the gala in February, the group has denounced Amazon’s alleged dangerous workplace conditions and the company’s lucrative contracts with federal immigration agencies through a series of visual actions.
Last week, the group littered the Met with bottles of fake urine in a reference to claims from Amazon delivery workers that they were forced to pee in plastic bottles under severe time constraints. The group also wheatpasted posters across the city that called for a boycott of the event.
A video cast onto Bezos’s penthouse on Sunday evening featured the testimony of Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker who says she struggles to live paycheck to paycheck while battling cancer. Hill has been at the forefront of a campaign to secure better conditions for elder Amazon employees. In the video projection, she called for the Met Gala to honor the company’s workers instead of the billionaire.
“These are the people who should be honored at big events, not people who avoid their taxes and help Donald Trump,” an organizer for Everyone Hates Elon told Hyperallergic.
Everyone Hates Elon also projected slogans, including “Boycott The Bezos Met Gala,” onto the residence and, later, onto the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.
“ The stories [the Amazon workers] have are incredibly powerful, and these are the people we should be celebrating, billionaires,” an organizer for Everyone Hates Elon told Hyperallergic. “These are the people who should be honored at big events, not people who avoid their taxes and help Donald Trump.”
Passersby sit near Bezos’s apartment building.
Nearby, a small group of union workers, including Lamont Hopewell, who formerly worked in an Amazon warehouse in Queens, gathered to commemorate the projection.
“All working-class people deserve better than what we’re getting, especially workers at Amazon; that’s the main reason we’re here,” Hopewell told Hyperallergic.
Hopewell learned of the projection through his union, Teamsters Local 804.
”It makes me feel inspired. It makes me feel like what we’re doing is the right thing,” Hopewell said, reacting to the display. “People are actually on board with us, even if they’re not part of the organization; they still feel the same sentiment that we have.”
