What ever happened to Luther Blissett?:How Italian activists took the name of an unsuspecting English footballer,and still use it today

Luther Blissett playing for Watford FC against Tottenham Hotspur in 1987

Credit: David Edsam / Alamy Stock Photo

Vicky Baker looks at the enduring legacy of a 1990s collective of Italian writers and activists, who carried out a series of media hoaxes in the name of a Watford FC footballer

LUTHER BLISSETT IS nobody… and everybody!” said Constantinos Tachtsidis, a journalist and musician from Greece who runs the Luther Blissett Music Project. Since 2009, he has been collaborating with musicians across the country, producing and sharing songs under the same name: Luther Blissett. His project was inspired by a 1990s Italian activist group, which was, in turn, oddly inspired by an English footballer whose name was appropriated as the collective’s pseudonym. “It is something like a guerilla war on the cultural industry,” Tachtsidis told Index.

“Long live the Luther Blissett dissidents, fuck the Luther Blissett Project!” shouted a protester when a brawl broke out in an Italian bookshop at the tail end of last year. The conflict had started with some eye rolling, mumbled swearing and ssshhing during a reading. Then tempers rose. Before long, the speaker had risen to his feet, moved towards a particularly disruptive audience member in a black hoodie, and launched some punches. The reason? The speaker had declared that “artivist” Luther Blissett was back, and some people clearly didn’t agree.

The original Luther Blissett collective committed ritual suicide almost 17 years ago. The group of Italian cultural activists decided enough was enough. Together they had written books, including best-selling historical thriller Q, and conducted a stream of media pranks, such as convincing an Italian TV programme to cover the disappearance of British conceptual artist, Harry Kipper, who had gone missing while biking along the Italian-Yugoslav border. (Harry Kipper didn’t exist. And neither did Loota, the female chimpanzee they said would exhibiting at the 1995 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Arts.)

The fight in the Rome bookshop happened last November during the launch of a new title, The Luther Blissett Project in Rome: 1995 to 1999. The book uncovers lesser-known stories of offshoot activities in the capital, away from the founders’ base in Bologna. On YouTube, footage of the bookshop fight includes a footnote mentioning Rome theatre group, Dynamis Teatro, implying that this too might have been a stunt.

“You guessed right,” Dynamis Teatro’s Valentina Vaccarini told Index. “The audience didn’t know it was staged. In fact, most of them were embarrassed and some were nervous about what was going on.”

“I am Luther Blissett. I have organised and performed the event at the bookshop,” wrote an Italian activist, who wished to remain anonymous, in an email to Index. They insisted a clear distinction should now been drawn between the obsolete Luther Blissett Project and the collective pseudonym Luther Blissett, which is still in use today. “In Italy you can find an indefinite number of individuals making use of this name for political, cultural and artistic activities.”

Roberto Bui, one of the founders of the original project, told Index they are fed up with being asked about Luther Blissett. “For us, it’s archaeology,” he said. They ensured the project only lasted five years, as a nod to Stalin’s first five-year plan to collectivise the Soviet economy, but their curious slogan, “Be Luther Blissett”, soon ran out of their hands and others, including Tachtsidis in Greece, have been picking up on it ever since. This was always the intention. Bui and his colleagues produced all their works under a “copyleft” policy – ie the antithesis of copyright and a precursor to Creative Commons licensing.

Marco Deseriis, author of the book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous, believes the motivations behind using a collective pseudonym go beyond simply wanting to mask an identity. “Only a handful of shared pseudonyms have gained international notoriety,” he told Index. “This is due to the fact that these pseudonyms emerge in times of crisis, when other forms of representation are precluded. Yet we can say that pseudonyms such as Luther Blissett and Anonymous have influenced, perhaps indirectly, a variety of actors.” He cites movements and grassroots organisations including the Tea Party, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter, which may experience disagreements over use of their name, “a practice that is accelerated and made highly visible by the hashtag politics of social media”.

As for the original founders of the Luther Blissett Project, they went on to found the Wu Ming Foundation in 2000 and have continued to write collectively, albeit now with only three of the original five members. Their identities are not a guarded secret, although Wu Ming – which means anonymous in Mandarin – is a common byline for dissidents in China. It was a pseudonym for director Wang Xiaoshuai for his 1997 film Frozen, which was banned in China after he screened his previous film internationally without government approval.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the real Luther Blissett is very much alive and well. The former Watford Football Club and AC Milan striker had his name appropriated for reasons he’s never quite understood, but he has come to accept it. As he said to Italian journalist Malcom Pagani: “The first time I heard about this thing, I didn’t want to believe it. To think that someone, a group or a single person, could take on my name seemed ridiculous. I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself in my life. Then I reflected on it and I was happy. It was like leaving a sign of my passage, a fingerprint, a stone left behind on a street.”