© Sofia Silva, Stop messing with my life (detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
To all authoritarian regimes insisting on a capitalist structure and austerity measures: vaffanculo!
Live updates about the European strike journey via The Guardian and Libcom.org
some of my photographs from monday’s concentration in front of the parliament to fight Portugal’s austerity plans. as can be seen, this film has been to hell and back, which actually seems to suit the scene. what follows is an excerpt of a text distributed amongst protesters on 15O.
“If you’re photographing a demonstration, make sure not to take any images that might incriminate others. A photograph can fall into the hands of the police and help them chase someone. The police can easily have access to these photos by capturing people’s cameras.
(…)
In case you’re arrested, do not say anything other than your name and address. Do not talk about yourself or others. A good cop might come to tell a joke or a bad cop to make a threat; both want to get information. Ask for a lawyer, be quiet and still and stay away from their game. You are not alone: your fellow protesters and friends will be thinking about you or waiting outside the police station.”
still from Dogtooth
In Greece, Police decided to ban all forms of gatherings and demonstrations happening tomorrow, October 9th, between 9am and 10pm in downtown Athens for the fat queen’s coming to town. It’s just as saying: I’m sorry, democracy is down for the moment, we’ll be back in a few hours… This is not going to go well with the Greeks. Beware, they bite!
Yesterday, September 26th, in the Streets of Greece during general strike day
© Susana Vera (Reuters)
After midningh, the Basques and the Greeks go on general strike!
© Sérgio Pérez (Reuters)
live streaming of the protests of the 25S movement in Spain, surrounding the Congress
update, live also here, via El Pais
© Graham Smith, (Boy) George O’Dowd at Great Titchfield Street squat. 1980
© Graham Smith, Kim Bowen at Warren Street squat 1980
© Graham Smith, Tony Hadley (Spandau Ballet) at a Warren Street squat, 1981
This weekend a new law came into force that makes squatting – the occupation of empty buildings by otherwise homeless people – a criminal offence. Previously a lesser civil offence, the new law confronts squatters with the possibility of a £5,000 fine or six months in prison, with ministers declaring that this will shut the door once and for all on squatters while helping protect “hard-working home-owners”.
from The Guardian. continue reading here
photo taken from Le Chat Noir Emeutier
“Violent clashes between youths and riot police in the northern French city of Amiens have left 16 officers injured and several public buildings torched in some of the worst rioting in the area for years – reopening the fraught political debate about France’s troubled housing estates.
Rioting broke out on deprived estates in the north of the city at 9pm on Monday and raged until 4am. Around 100 youths set fire to cars, a nursery school and a youth centre as well as firing buckshot and projectiles at police officers, who saturated the streets with teargas as reinforcements arrived from neighbouring areas.
“The confrontations were very, very violent,” the mayor of Amiens, Gilles Dumailly, told French television network BFM, describing “a scene of devastation”.
There had been unrest among youths on housing estates in Amiens-Nord earlier this month and again on Sunday night, apparently sparked by tensions over spot checks by police on residents.
French media reported that violence broke out between local residents and the police following a check on a driver said to be driving dangerously, near to the spot where the family and friends of a 20-year-old who died in a motorbike crash on Thursday had gathered for a memorial ceremony.”
© Javier Barbancho
© Theodore Wan, Bridine Scrub (For General Surgery), 1977
(…)
Therefore, when contemporary art or contemporary art theory uses terms of contemporary liberal democracy, a meaningless democracy given that the only right surviving today in fact is the right to dominance (I have the right to assert dominance, power), then, in reality, (art) does nothing but preserving the same system that creates it, doubting only on-demand. Such a characteristic example is the recent exhibition organized by the Ministry of the Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works, “Art and Nature” by which it actually legalizes – through a much-promoted event with the participation of many artists – the adoption of the General Framework for Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development, a text that flagrantly sacrifices natural environment on the altar of capitalist profiteering.(5)
We are not therefore interested in contesting the conditions under which contemporary art approaches the social field. And this is for we believe that art is clearly a part of society (the artist is primarily a social subject); art is based within the body of society, regardless how deeply rooted it is in social reality in any respective historical circumstance, or how much autonomous it becomes as an ideological construct of the bourgeois society. Art echoes society.
We believe that it is perhaps more important to re-state the initial question by keeping similar terms: How can a society in crisis – economic, social, political, value crisis – and turmoil hear the voice of an art, which is usually whispering behind the thick and high walls of the mainly institutionalized spaces (museums, institutes, galleries), inside hallways of television studios or newspapers, or in exhibition spaces where art events are organized with excessive government or private sector sponsorships?
The question is rather rhetorical since its phrasing embraces the answer identifying contemporary art practice (namely, the way art functions within the contemporary society, the institutions surrounding it, the system it is feeding on) with the conservatisation entailed by the practice of the dominant economic and political system (capitalism, neoliberalism) and definitely not with radical social and political demands. Contemporary art practice, many times even from the artist’s workshop to the large domestic and international art events, meets market mentality, and likewise the artistic work meets the value mentality (or surplus value / symbolic value) of the merchandise. Therefore, it meets the same mentality that imposes raw violence (upon the worker, the citizen, the citizen of an opponent state), the same mentality that imposes the relations of subordination, the exploitation and the individualization of our needs to such an extent that they are turned into infinite indifference towards the consciousness of our sociability and the collective demands and common claims.
(…)
excerpt from Let’s do politics, (1), by Reconstruction Community. continue reading here
things will start growing in the right direction, even if for now it all needs to be destroyed. All eyes on Greece!
© Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Grow Homes, 2010
Installation View: 64 Houses on Stilts with local wild plants inside
Wood, Inkjet Prints, Soil, Plants, rotating Grow-Lamp System
@ Juan Manuel Serrano/Associated Press, more images here and here
miners struggle for working conditions in Asturias, Spain. It’s been going on for weeks… You can read a personal account of what’s happening here
“The total absence of limitation to the thirst for power which wants to hold everything under its thumb, even beyond all necessity, is only the expression of the absolute disappointment that the I feels when it realises that once in existence it is confined to share it with other beings and that the totality of existence is not its alone. A word from Nietzsche, ‘If there was a God, how could I endure not to be God’ [sic], constitutes the definitive formulation of this painful state. In the desire for power, man seeks to make up for the advance that the world has on him; since already he is not all, he must have all. He gets his revenge on the world by spreading his contingent self over the world, by incorporating it within himself and by representing it. For the one who is powerful is no longer only himself, such as he was in his miserable condition, but this one and that one, himself and the other, an ensemble. He is simultaneously here and there and there again. For he is, in domination, in representation, and in glory, to employ an expression from theology, omnipresent.
So he wants to be now and always. That is, he attempts to be immortalised in time, just as he worked to be glorified in space; he attempts to subsequently refute the contingency of the now to which he is abandoned. And he endeavours to set up his authentic being in the form of a permanent monument, in relation to the Memory and in the Renown of which his actual and incomplete form stands merely as the phenomenon to the Idea. His being is still only the unfaithful and temporal copy of this glorious monument. Here is the paradox: the more its glory increases, the less he ‘himself’ seems to have to do with his own monument. It has usurped his name and will reap the glory in his place even long after his death. Crushed and devastated, he is now envious of his own great name.”
excerpt from The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification, by Günther (Stern) Anders, translated by Katharine Wolfe
