Author: Editors

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Athens, July 2011

State repression in Greece becomes more desperate in the face of widespread public demands for radical democracy:

From the Greek Streets:
Riot police throw stones at protesters in what appears to be officially-sanctioned brutality:

and

from OpenDemocracy

The uprising in Greece is “alternative and new in a more settled sense, as the recovery or reactivation of something latent. That is, a citizenry which prioritizes its identity as citizenry of a given state – rather than as a global activist, a human being, or a local protester. Entrapped in old vocabularies, we have been too one-dimensional to notice that the citizenry rebounds to make claims on their state, at precisely the moment that the state abdicates all responsibility to its citizens. What we are witnessing is a reactivation, rather than an institution, of a responsible state.”

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Tunisian migrants and activists occupy Paris

With a series of important events over the last 5 days, the city of Paris has been witness to the material transnationalisation of the radical democratic movements that began this spring in Maghreb and the Middle East.

Thursday, May 28th between 300-400 Tunisian exiles arrived in Paris, France. After having travelled for over 45 days – from Tunisia to the small Italian island of Lampadusa where they had been initially held by Italian authorities and overcoming the French government’s attempt to block trains entering France from Italy – this community of migrants made a makeshift camp at a small park on the exterior of the French Capital.

Almost immediately, the police welcomed these young migrants – predominantly young males no older than 25 – with mass arrests, militarily invading the Villette Park where they were staying and launching a citywide manhunt. Between Friday the 29th and Saturday the 30th over 100 arrests were made, including at least 4 minors.

Following the arrival and persecution of the Tunisian migrants, Parisian activists – notably the Front de libération populaire tunisien (FLPT) Coordination des Intermittents et Precairs (CIP) and Knowledge Liberation Front (KLF) – began organizing in order to find safe havens and supply basic needs (food, shelter and medicines) for the new arrivals. Representatives from leftwing parties and unions also began concerning themselves with the urgent situation.
However, after several grassroots meetings, the Tunisian community made clear that they did not want any (colonialist) charity from French organizations but rather a stable and safe place where they could exercise their right to self-organize. They vehemently insisted against any political manipulation of their situation by the institutional left.

A last minute decision to participate in the traditional demonstration for the 1st of May was made in order to bring attention to their situation and to gather the Parisian community of Tunisian together.
The demonstration was a huge success. Hundreds of Tunisian migrants created the most lively and politically decisive blocks of the otherwise traditional march. The block was lead by a huge white banner that read “No Police Nor Charity: A place to organize” signed by “The Tunisians from Lampedusa to Paris”. Carrying ad hoc placards and signs that read “Ben Alì, Murabak, Sarkozy…” and “We’ve come to help you do the same” the message was clear: the Maghreb wind of radical democratic change has arrived in Europe.

Despite continuing police repression and the attempts of the institutional left to coopt the burgeoning movement, on the night of May 1st well over 200 migrants and activists (now officially organized as the Collective of Tunisians from Lampedusa) occupied a building in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Although the police arrived almost immediately at the scene and attempted to enter the building and arrest the occupants, an overnight sit-in outside and physical resistance inside has so far managed to prevail over any eviction.

Currently, the City of Paris is now trying to conduct negotiations between the occupants and the national government and police. Tonight an activist meeting has been called to continue this new mobilization. But one thing in sure: this autonomous, transnational and grassroots movement has no intention of giving up their right to self-organize nor will they fall into the trap of political manipulation by the institutional left.
 
 
Jason Francis Mc Gimsey
 
 
 

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Communiqués

Brian Holmes: Art and the Paradoxical Citizen

To the Arts, Citizens: it’s a fantastic title. Hearing it, anyone who’s been involved in political activism will probably think: “At last we’re getting somewhere.” The idea that art is part of citizenship, that there is a democratic exercise of the arts within the framework of public life, and that this appeal to the citizen-artist can be supported by a major cultural institution, is about as progressive as you could get today. Especially since this is a direct echo of the French republican tradition, where the phrase, Aux armes citoyens, is nothing less than a call to rise up and institute democracy against tyranny – in other words, a call to revolution. The Portuguese know the meaning of this revolutionary call to arms from decisive historical events that are still in living memory. So one can imagine that the organizers of this exhibition did not take their title lightly.

The call to arts is a recognition that citizenship does not stop at the ballot box, that an expressive politics is essential to a democracy, and that in an era saturated with media and advertising, the aesthetic dimension has become a crucial field of social interaction. What’s more, this call to arts is an acknowledgement that censorship continues to exist in all societies and is often intensifying; that archaic values and beliefs raise a barrier to free expression even more powerful than the force of the law; and finally, that citizens’ day-to-day participation in the shaping of their own societies is as urgent an occupation today as at any time in the past, precisely because of the professionalization of politics and the tendency to treat any disruption of the norm as a security issue. All this assigns challenging roles to institutions that attempt to take up the call to arts. Among them is not only that of exhibiting politically engaged art to the public, but also of mediating the ensuing debates, sustaining the inevitable critiques and scandals, archiving the results and thereby helping to build a culture of democratic exchange, which is never easy to maintain and never flourishes without the people involved taking an individual stand, beyond all bureaucratic limits and guarantees. Quite a tall order – as though we were going to wake up and start living again.

Could anything like this dream be achieved in reality? Based on work carried out with a wide range of collaborators over the last decade, what I would like to outline in this short essay is a critical and constructive program that necessarily goes beyond any single exhibition. At a minimum, such a program would have to address the relations of art to financial capital, the issues of national identity and race in artistic representation, and finally, the question of citizenship itself as a frame for the individual’s involvement in society. The call to arts requires us to face certain paradoxes. But it is a chance to examine how democratic and egalitarian ideals can be expressed right now, in the world where we are actually living.

Forces of desire
In the developed and rapidly developing countries, the most impressive urban project of the last thirty years has been the redefinition of cities as competitive nodes in a global financial network. The aesthetic-economic phenomenon of iconic “starchitecture” – including a large number of luxurious new museums – has been the most obvious sign of this competition for visibility within the world hierarchy of cities. At the level of lived experience, the process translates into the gradual reclassification of decaying residential areas as consumption zones for the new professional and managerial classes, i.e. gentrification. Here, the role of artists as “urban pioneers” who brave the difficulties of life among minority and immigrant populations has been well documented since the 1980s – often via highly critical shows in the new museums of the financialized city centers. Yet despite some radical attempts to work with social movements, the failure of critical artists to achieve anything concrete on the level of urban planning demonstrates the trap of career paths dependent on the same flows of investment capital that have reshaped the cities, driving poorer inhabitants far away from the urban centers. In this story, the “call to arts” has mainly involved, not citizenship or democracy, but the valorization of urban real estate as a speculative commodity, leading directly to the current economic crisis.

The place of the arts within the gentrification process derives from their capacity to foster specific kinds of desire. Over the thirty-year period of financialized globalization, it has become obvious that certain forms of vanguard art – for example, the dadaist practice of visual montage, the  situationist theory of the construction of ambiances, and the pop-art embrace of exuberant exoticism – have been functionalized to fit the perceptual and expressive repertoire of a networked corporate culture. Just as  pictorial abstraction offered a visual vocabulary for the dominant forms of industrial capitalism in the Cold War period, so the recombinant signifiers and improvised performance practices of relational art have shown their adaptation to today’s computerized economy of images and signs. The homogenization of the urban landscape under the cover of glittering lights and exotic attractions poses a serious challenge to cultural and educational institutions, whose long-term capacities for the generation of alternative values are increasingly reduced by demands for budget-cutting and box-office type profitability – demands which can only be satisfied by the transformation of those institutions into leisure facilities and corporate innovation centers. However, it is now possible that the economic crisis and the diminishing appeal of kaleidoscopic urban experiences will offer new missions to public culture, if anyone is willing and able to invent them.

Fenced-in nations
Perhaps the greatest challenge to an egalitarian and radically democratic stance in art today comes from the resurgence of conservative electoral rhetorics based on national identity. This resurgent conservatism and outright racism grows in direct proportion to the destabilization of traditional customs and labor relations by the individual mobility and ethnic mixing that accompanies financially driven globalization. Threatened with joblessness, established citizens attack the migrants whose cheap manpower used to make their lives so easy. In the United States, major progress in the cultural integration of ethnic minorities was countered, from the late 1980s onward, by the outbreak of the neocon “culture wars.” Since then, the US has witnessed the construction of physical barriers as well as a network of electronic security systems along its 3000-kilometer border with Mexico. The situation is even worse in the European Union, whose member states have not had such long experience with  inbound immigration and have not been able to generate the political and cultural representation that can bolster the claims of recent arrivals to full citizenship. At this point, the political systems of all these democracies are prey to racist sloganeering, resulting in the intensification of repressive policing, the arbitrary denial or suspension of visas, outbreaks of violence at street level and increased legitimacy for the seemingly endless wars in the Middle East.

The important question is, to what extent can contemporary art institutions become effective sites of social integration, beyond the mere display of exotic signifiers? At least three pathways offer real possibilities. The first and still most common is the high-culture elaboration of motifs and cultural practices borrowed from the heritage and everyday experience of minority groups, which is exactly what modernist art did with European folk motifs in the early twentieth century. The second involves the collaboration of artists with neighborhood groups on activist campaigns for equal rights and protection from violence and discrimination – a kind of work which gives minority publics a direct stake in the institution. Unfortunately this remains rare in contemporary art because of a class bias that uses the criterion of aesthetic purity as a way to screen out most local participation. The third possibility is to support and display vanguard practices from non-Western countries as a way to explore world society and to encourage the complex process of cross-cultural interpretation. All these possibilities challenge the former concept of artistic institutions as the guardians of a national identity. And the most interesting thing about them is that they all point directly to the limits of current conceptions of citizenship.

Human ecology and progress
The fundamental political problem now facing the developed nations is that the values of citizenship are conceived exclusively in terms of economic growth. The only imaginable progress lies in rising profit margins and increasing levels of consumption. But the endless search for competitive advantage requires at least four things: an aggressive expansion of markets at the expense of other countries; a cheapening of labor either through automatization or recourse to a work force not subject to national standards; a predatory use of credit to extract savings from individuals and governments; and finally, a negligence of the human and ecological costs, which are treated as “externalities” and left off the account books of a social order that is regulated only by monetary accounts. Under these conditions, the “citizen” is redefined as an increasingly cheap worker (whose economic rights should continually be diminished) and as a voracious consumer (whose pockets must be filled with borrowed money). At the same time, the “non-citizen” is invited to work for even less than the most ill-paid sectors of the national population while simultaneously being reviled and declared illegal, so as to stave off demands for expensive social programs. Clearly these are the ingredients of not one but several disasters, all of which are at least partially underway: economic penury even within the developed nations; climate change for the entire world; generalized alienation manifesting itself as terrorism; and finally, outright war. The twenty-first century is likely to see a major crisis, different from those that marred the twentieth, but perhaps equally violent.

In this threatening configuration, the artistic sphere remains a place where philosophical inquiry, sociological analysis and radically egalitarian political concepts can be articulated with common forms of perception and intimate experiences of daily life. Yet such uses of art are rare, by comparison to the major role that aesthetic production has taken in the financialized economies. And they are paradoxical, compared to the reigning doxa or dogma of financial capitalism and consumer citizenship. To sustain the democratic potential of artistic invention will ultimately require a reworking of the very notion of progress, whether through the kind of fiery debate that attends upon scandalous transgression, or through the pleasure that comes with a generous exploration of diverging values. Art institutions, if they want to survive as something other than corporate design labs and pay-per-view leisure centers, will have to show larger numbers of people that they can serve as social sites for participation in the development of alternatives. Really, it’s no joke to associate the historical call to arms with a contemporary call to the arts. At stake is a new practice of what it means to be a citizen.

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Bifo: ‘Lesson of Insurrection’ by Franco Berardi Bifo. A call to revolt on a European scale.

I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.

Arise. In the dictionary, the word ‘Insurrection’ is described in different ways. But I stick to the etymology. To me, the word insurrection means to rise up, it means to take on ourselves our dignity as human beings, as workers, as citizens in an uncompromising way. But it also means something else. It means to fully unfold the potency of the body and of collective knowledge, of society, of the net, of intelligence. To entirely unfold what we are, in a collective way. This is the point. Those who say that insurrection is a utopia are sometimes cynics, sometimes just idiots. Those who say that it is not possible to revolt, don’t take into account the fact that, to us, almost everything is possible. Only, this ‘almost everything’ is subjugated by the miserable obsession for profit and accumulation. The obsession for profit and accumulation led our country and all European countries to the verge of a terrifying catastrophe, into which we are now sinking, and we should realize we are already quite far into it. It is the catastrophe of barbarism and ignorance.

In Italy, the reform of the Berlusconi government and of his crawlers has already taken 8 billion euros away from the school, university and the education system, and soon it will take away even more. Everyone knows what the consequences will be, and not only in Brera, which is still a privileged place within the Italian education system. I have also taught in 3 or 4 other schools in this country, and I know what are, for example, the consequences of the reform of the crawler-minister Gelmini for an evening school for adults in Bologna. The Gelmini reform meant that the available budget for that school has shrunk to one third of that of three years ago. In the face of this process of devastation and barbarization produced by this reform, we can’t continue complaining. We must say: first of all, you all have to go, then we will take care of it. They have to go, just like the citizens of Tunis and Cairo said. I don’t know how the revolutions and insurrections in the Arab countries will end. A lot is up to us, I believe: whether or not Europe will be able to open a secular and innovative perspective. I don’t know how it will end up, but I know that they revolted and they won. What did they do? They said: we won’t leave this place. We won’t leave this square, we won’t leave this station, we won’t leave this parliament. We won’t leave until the tyrant and his crawlers go. This is what we have to say, what we have to do. By the end of spring 2011, this is what has to happen in Italy. We will occupy the central train stations in Milan, in Bologna and we will hold them until the tyrant and his crawlers will go.

But the tyrant and his crawlers are not the real problem. The real problem is an obsession, embodied in financial power, in the power of banks and in the idea that the life of society, the pleasure, well-being and culture of society is worthless. The only worthy things are accounting books, the profits of a minuscule class of exploiters and murderers. From our point of view, at the moment, these two problems, that of the tyrant and of his crawlers and that of the European financial dictatorship are one single problem. But we must understand that it would be useless to get rid of the tyrant and of his crawlers, if their places were taken by the murderers, by people like D’Alema or Fini, who are just as responsible. The destruction of the Italian school did not start with the tyrant and his crawlers. From what I know, it started with the Rivola Law, of which few have memory. It was a law issued in 1995 by the Emilia Romagna region, and it was the first law to give private schools the right to receive public funding. That is, it opened the door to the destruction of the public school and the sanctification of private universities such as Cepu.

So, there is one immediate problem: to hold the country, the squares and stations until the tyrant and his crawlers will go. But at the same time we have to be aware that power, true power, is no longer held in Rome. The Minister of Economy, Tremonti, said this. In an interview that appeared in La Repubblica on 30 September 2011, Tremonti replied to a silly journalist, who was trying to criticize him and instead fell in his trap, saying: ‘Why are you so angry at the Berlusconi government? Listen, we don’t decide anything. Decisions are taken in Brussels.’ Well, we don’t know it very well – who should tell us? La Repubblica, maybe? – but since 1st January 2011 the economic, social and financial decisions over individual countries such as Italy, France, Portugal or Greece are no longer taken by national parliaments. They are taken by a financial committee, formally constituted at European level. This is the rule and the ferocious application of the neoliberal, monetarist principle, according to which the only worthy things are bank profits and nothing else. It is in the name of growth, of accumulation and profit at the European level, that you are forced to live a shit life. And your life will be more and more of a shit life, if you do not rebel today, tomorrow, immediately! Because with every passing day your life increasingly, inevitably becomes a shit life.

They say: insurrection is a dangerous word. I repeat: arms are not implicit in the word insurrection, because arms are not our thing, for a number of reasons. First of all, because we don’t know where they are kept, secondly because we know that somebody has them, thirdly because we know that there are professional armies ready to kill, like they killed in Genova in 2001 and many other times. So, this is not the kind of confrontation we are looking for. We know that our weapons are those of intelligence and critique, but also the weapon of technology. For example, we learnt Wikileaks’ lesson, and we know that it is not only a lesson on sabotage and information; it is also a lesson about the infinite power of networked intelligence. This is where we will re-start. We know how to do it, how to enter your circuits, how to sabotage them, but we also know how those circuits – which are not yours, are ours – can be useful for our wealth, our pleasure, our well-being, our culture. This could be the use of those circuits that the collective intelligence produced and that capitalism stole, privatized, impoverished, that capitalism uses against us. This is the meaning of insurrection: to take possession of what is ours, to perform a necessary action of recognition of the collective body, which for too long has been paralyzed in front of a screen and needs to find itself again in a Tahrir Square.

An American journalist, Roger Cohen, wrote in a clever article: ‘Thank you Mubarak, because with your resistance you allowed the Egyptian people, who hadn’t talked to each others for years, to stay in that square for weeks and weeks.’ Like in wars, also during revolutions there are moments of boredom, and during those moments what is there to do? Talk to each other, touch each other, make love. Discovering the collective body, which has been paralyzed for too long. We will say ‘Tank you Berlusconi’, after weeks spent fighting on the streets of Italy. Afterwards, from the moment when the collective body will have awakened, the process of self-organization of the collective mind will begin. This is the insurrection I am calling you to. This is the insurrection that could even start from the Brera Academy, on a day in March 2011. Because the problem is that everyone knows what I just said. Maybe they don’t say it in such detail, but they know it. All that is necessary is to say: it is possible. There are millions of us, thinking this way. So, the next time 300,000 of us will take on the streets, let’s no go back home at the end of the day. Let’s go on the streets with our sleeping bags, knowing that on that night we won’t sleep in our beds. This is the first step, this is the step we need to take. It’s easy! Then, the rest is complicated…

I have almost finished my lecture. I just want to come back to this place. This initiative of mine was born within the situation you all know. Students, lecturers, technicians, precarious workers at the Brera Academy, like those in any other school or university in Italy or abroad, they all know well what is happening. They know that, beyond a complex dance made of ‘I’ll give it you / no I won’t give it to you / maybe I will / but not tomorrow’, beyond the smoke screen of incomprehensible baroquisms, the problem is that there is no more money. How is this possible? What happened? How come all that money disappeared? Brera used to be loaded. It’s all gone. One could say: but Europe is rich, how come all of a sudden there’s no money? Europe is rich, with millions of technicians, poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory workers, nuclear engineers… How come we became so poor? What happened? Something very simple happened. The entire wealth that we produced was poured into the strongboxes of a minuscule minority of exploiters. This is what happened! The whole mechanism of the European financial crisis was finalized towards the most extraordinary movement of wealth that history has seen, from society towards the financial class, towards financial capitalism. This is what happened! So, what is now happening in Brera is just a small piece, one aspect of the immense movement of wealth, our wealth, the wealth of collective intelligence, which is now being counted inside the strongboxes of the banks.

Well, we decide to pay some attention to the banks. And I communicate to you that from this moment, I, as a professor at Brera, will hold my classes inside a bank. My next lecture will be held on 25th March just there, inside the building of the Credit Agricole. It will be held there. Behind this statue, of which we can now see the ass, on the other side of the square there is a bank where I ask to hold my next lecture, on 25th March, at 11.30am. I’m not doing this because I am a deranged individualist. Well, I might also be a deranged individualist… But the reason why I took this decision and I communicated it to you is that in Europe, it has now been constituted the Knowledge Liberation Front. Maybe these kids could have been a little less rhetorical… The Knowledge Liberation Front called a teach-in in 40 European cities, on March 25th. First of all in London, because, as you know, after many years, on March 26 there will be a general strike in the U.K. This is because the U.K. is now under an exceptionally strong storm of financial violence, and thus on March 26th they will strike and will take on the streets. The day before, the Knowledge Liberation Front will perform 40 teach-ins in 40 European cities. In London, but also in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Milan and many other cities. We will do something very simple: we will dress smart, will go to the offices of a bank, will sit on the ground, will take out a banana, a cappuccino and a panini, just like civilized people do, and we will talk about molecular biology, about Goethe, we will read Faust, we will read poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, someone will talk about the poetics of Kandinsky and someone else about nuclear physics. This is what we will do on 25th March, in 40 European cities. Because the time has come for the society of Europe to become, once again, what it could have been in several moments of its history: purely and simply a civil society. Thank you.

Translation and subtitles: Federico Campagna, Anna Galkina, Manlio Poltronieri

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Communiqués

UK Arts Against Cuts: draft of a letter for cultural institutions

Fellow Cultural Workers,

As you may be aware, on the 26 of March there will be a very large scale March for the Alternative, and against the cuts that are profoundly impacting our institutions and constituencies.

The Trade Unions Congress has called for all workers, of all backgrounds to take to the streets in opposition of the dramatic erosion of the welfare state and forms of public provision on this day. (see http://marchforthealternative.org.uk/get-involved/posters/). A march and many direct actions will take place around the city on this day. As many cultural workers are not unionized we understand that this is something that you may not be aware of and wanted to ensure that all of the workers of your organisation are coming out on that day.

If you are not doing this already, we strongly encourage you to suspend ALL cultural programming on the 26th, and bring your creative ideas to the streets. If you insist on remaining open, we would encourage that you create free convergence zones for demonstrators to congregate, rest, and prepare for action. It is important that we in the Arts do not disregard this important event and align ourselves with other workers.

If you, your staff or your friends are interested in getting involved in the making of the arts block for the demonstration or in thinking about what your organisation can provide on the 26th we invite you to the MARCH WEEKEND, THIS weekend:

12/13 March at ULU where a range of workshops will be presented.

Yours truly,

Arts Against Cuts
http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/draft-of-a-letter-for-cultural-institutions/