PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:Dmitry Vilenksy (Russia) Contra Filé (Brazil) Etcétera (Argentina) Oliver Ressler (Austria) & Dario Azzellini (Italy) Taring Padi (Indonesia) Richard DeDomenici (UK) Al Fadhil (Iraq)Hito Steyerl (Germany) Arlene TextaQueen (Australia) David Griggs (Australia) pvi collective (Australia) SquatSpace (Australia) Daniel Boyd (Australia) Astra Howard (Australia) Keg de Souza (Australia)Zanny Begg (Australia)

If you see something, say something

“If you see something, say something,” was pasted on bus shelters and train stations around the world in the wake of the 9/11 bombings asking us to view those around us with fear and suspicion. But do we see this government sponsored vision of the world or do these advertisements move us to say something very different? In the state of exception produced by the war on terror we are asked to accept a consensual vision of fear, scapegoating and state sponsored violence. Yet many are moved to dissent from this.

Dissensus can mean widespread disagreement, a failure to reach consensus or a consensus only among those who dissent. Jacques Ranciere uses the term to describe rare moments of genuine democracy whereby new social actors force themselves into the political landscape demanding that their voices, which hitherto have been silent, are finally heard. While what we consider politics is often a ritualised confrontation between opposing parties, armies, or forces, with a known set of protocols on how this resolution will play out, a moment of dissensus allows a reconfiguration of how we understand the notion of politics itself by opening up pre-existing assumptions of social agency.

If you see something, say something is a discussion, exhibition and publishing project in Sydney and Melbourne in January and February 2007. Principally this will revolve around an exhibition that will involve a small number of international and Australian artists whose work has explored aspects of dissensus – by either questioning prevailing notions of consensus or by exploring new possibilities of social agency. Rather than being an exhibition of political art this exhibition will aim to question how we actually understand the connections between politics and aesthetics. The exhibition will be complemented by workshops and this newspaper.

Of particular interest has been the role of the artist as a researcher. In Argentina during the crisis and uprising of 2001 the term “militant researcher” was popularly used to describe an engaged approach to seeking an understanding of reality. As the research group Colectivo Situaciones explains the researcher-militants’ “quest is to carry out theoretical and practical work oriented to co-produce the knowledges and modes of an alternative sociability, beginning with the power (potencia) of those subaltern knowledges.” In engaging with social realities artists have increasingly become archivers, publishers and researchers. This exhibition will bring together some of these research projects which have informed both how these artists have tried to engage with social realities and encourage forms of alternative knowledge and resistance.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the help and generous funding from Mori Gallery, Marrickville Council, The Australia Council for the Arts, The National Association for the Visual Arts, Gallery 4a, Breakdown Press, The Bolivarian Circle and the Australian Venezuela Solidarity Network and various donations by solidarity and activist groups. But it also would not have happened without the community of socially engaged artists and activists who are part of the exhibition or supporters of it and whose generosity and enthusiasm make “another world possible.”

Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg, project initiators

Contents:DMITRY VILENSKY – On the Question of the Political Exhibition ................... page 2

HITO STEYERL – The Articulation of Protest .................................................. page 3

In conversation with ARLENE TEXTAQUEEN .................................................... page 4

PVI COLLECTIVE – The Loyal Citizen’s Underground ..................................... page 5

Secret Pockets: A Conversation between AARON GACH, Founder of the Center for

Tactical Magic and GREGORY SHOLETTE, January, 2006 ................................ page 6

ALISSAR CHIDIAC – Ateeq’oun al afeeya... ........................................................ page 7

CONTRA FILÉ – Program for the Deturnstilisation of Life Itself .................... page 8

AL FADHIL - Home Sweet Home .................................................................... page 8

LUCAS IHLEIN – Art as Situated Experience ................................................... page 9

RICHARD DEDOMENICI - Unattended Baggage ................................................. page 9

TIM WRIGHT – Our Eyes Are Constantly Adjusting ..................................... page 10

EXHIBITION PROGRAM ................................................................................. page 11-12

2016: Archive Project by KEG DE SOUZA & ZANNY BEGG ................................. page 13

DANIEL BOYD – Self Portrait 1788 – 2006 .................................................... page 14

ASTRA HOWARD - CITYtalking - Melbourne City Council Laneway Commissions

2006 ............................................................................................................ page 15

AVA BROMBERG - Along the Path of Revolution: Worker Control in Venezuela,

Agency in Art ............................................................................................... page 16

BRIAN HOLMES - Washed Up on the Beach: The Errorist International in Australia

...................................................................................................................... page 17

SANTIAGO GARCÍA NAVARRO - Bang! The revolution through affect ............... page 18

KATE CARR – Dressed for Success: APEC and Free Trade ........................... page 19

ZANNY BEGG –Alternative Map of Empire (thanks to Hans Holbein) ........ page 20

TARING PADI – drawings by Aris Prabawa .................................................. page 21

MARNI CORDELL – Global Warming turns the heat on Nuclear Energy ...... page 22

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EDITORS: Keg de Souza and Zanny BeggDESIGN: Tom Civil (www.BreakdownPress.org)COPY EDITOR: Jennifer Mills

Printed by: mpd - printing the news everydayUnit E1 46-62 Maddox StreetAlexandria NSW 2015

2007

We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land this publication was produced on, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation.

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On the Question of the Political Exhibition.Who if not we?; Collective Creativity; First What We take is Museum; How do we want to be governed?; There must be an alternative; Space of Conflicts; The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds - 20 proposals for imagining the future; RAF show, Taking the Matter into Common Hands; Disobedience; Ex-Argentina /die Wege von Arbeit zum Tun; An Ideal Society Creates Itself; If I Can’t Dance - I Don’t Want to be Part of your Revolution, Communism etc.

“A specter is haunting Europe”, the specter of the political exhibition. Once in a while, it appears on traditional terrain, in the space of internationally recognised artistic institutions, but more often than not, it arises in a slew of new places unknown to most, existing in a variety of contexts, without any substantial financial support, on the strength of the enthusiasm of its participants.

Some people say that this is yet another trend of artistic fashion, while others speak of the birth of a new avant-garde, but for the vast majority of cultural agents involved in more traditional forms of exhibition-praxis, this tendency provokes aggression and irritation. This is especially the case in Russia, where we have practically never been faced with the phenomenon of the political exhibition in its contemporary Western European sense. In Russia, the political dimension of culture is usually understood as something that either caters to the power of the state or designs some new corporate identity, or engages in yet another “political-technological” game played by spin-doctors and opinion-makers, an “artistic” project to decorate another carded election. True, Russia’s tradition of political struggle reaches back to the 19th century and allocates an extremely important place to cultural production; true, this tradition remained viable throughout the first post-revolutionary decade, but today, this tradition is perceived as something that belongs to ancient history. From the mid-1930s onward, politics and culture in the Soviet Union progressively lost their emancipatory character, becoming completely subordinate to the existing order of things, which continued to legitimate itself through the revolution or the political system of soviets on a purely rhetorical level, having lost any and all potential for self-renewal. In this sense, the hegemony of the single-party-state led to the total annihilation of the political and fostered a cultural industry that propagated the Soviet “way of life”.

At this point, it becomes necessary to note that contemporary culture, in speaking of politics, usually refers to the philosophical dimension of this notion, a meaning that lies far beyond the wide-spread image of politics as the ideological justification of administrative power. For an example, Alain Badiou speaks of the essence of politics as “the question of collective emancipation”.1 In this context, political action begins with the reconstitution of public spaces in which it can undergo further development. Such an understanding of politics is connected to the development of democratic processes, but here, again, the notion of democracy differs quite radically from the parliamentary-political screen of a “democracy” that obscures the power of capital over society. Instead, it entails a re-thinking of democracy as a political system that is not constructed upon the forcible unification of

a minority with the majority, but upon the problematization and exposure of its own antagonisms, which constantly call the entire existing order of things into question and shed doubt upon the nature of power itself.

Ever since the time of the avant-garde, art has positioned itself in society as a political project. Today, even if politics in its ideal sense has almost disappeared completely, its possibility remains alive in the public space of thought, culture, and education. Since they are at the avant-garde of “immaterial labor”, these fields still permit the critical exposure of antagonisms that are usually repressed or neutralized through the normative language of power. As such, they can serve as a platform to assert the interests of all those excluded from the public sphere. In this sense, the goal of progressive thought and culture is to retain a public space for society, open for anyone who is willing to participate in its active (re)construction, a space that could become the basis for other principles of social formation, beyond the total dominance of private property.

SO WHAT DOES THE POLITICAL EXHIBITION MEAN TODAY? The experiences accumulated in many of the political exhibition projects held over the last five years – some of their titles supply the epigraph to this text – already allow us to attempt a generalizing analysis of what the political exhibition actually is and what it could be. In the following, I would like to sketch out these potentials in the form of points to initiate further discussion.

01. The political exhibition produces new models of communication and positions itself as a form of public space.

02. The political exhibition demonstrates an activist approach to art. In this sense, it continues the philosophical tradition expressed in Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In this sense, the political exhibition needs to avoid purely contemplative at all costs; in fact, such passive aesthetisation represents a fundamental danger. Instead, the political exhibition demonstrates the possibility for aesthetic and social change, revealing the difference between what the world is today and what it could become.

03. The political exhibition strives to address an audience that differs from the traditional audience of an art-exhibition in terms of social origin and class composition. It mobilizes the spectator to find himself as a political subject. In actualizing the political potential of the “prospective spectator”, it approaches everyone with the challenge to become a critical co-author by participating in the actions and discussion it will provoke, calling for solidarity through action taken in common.

04. The political exhibition searches for alternate spaces to undertake its representations. Today, it seems as though the tactic with the most potential is not the infiltration of existing structures but the invention of new public spaces, not entrism but exodus. The tactical

effectivity of the political exhibition’s actual strategy is defined by local situations, but the true meaning of both approaches lies in the desire to create/invent/imagine new places for the common.

05. The political exhibition arises in the process of interdisciplinary interaction. This process is not based on pre-determined knowledge, limited by the traditions of pre-existent disciplines (i.e. sociology, economics, philosophy, urbanism etc.). Instead, art becomes the spark and the catalyst for encounters between these fields, presenting them with new challenges and goals. This leads to the erosion of the dogmata of knowledge (savoir) and the narrow approaches of professional guilds, and brings about a process of knowing (connaissance), a creative cognitive process based in the micro-politics of interdisciplinary dialogue. It is in this sense that we can speak of the production of emancipatory counter-knowledge and aesthetic experience, which is the political exhibition’s main result.

06. The political exhibition aims at achieving cultural hegemony. However, this striving toward hegemony has nothing to do with the old models of party dictatorship in cultural policy, or the dominance of one political discourse or one unified aesthetic style. Instead, it entails the strategic construction of the hegemony of subjectivity, critical and irreconcilable to any and all forms of sovereign power.

07. The formal-aesthetic practices of the political exhibition create a new temporal mode of existence through the dialogue with the spectator-participant. As an immediate embodiment of public space, it uses the creation of social architecture to erode the boundary between art and life. In doing so, it employs the aesthetics of cinema and is subject to the logic of participation, becoming an open multi-media archive or a library, existing on foreign territory as a sit-in.

08. The political exhibition erodes the traditional autonomy of individual artworks by placing them into the public space of the exhibition. In this way, it works as a resonator for the differentiated political contexts that singular artworks will entails, bringing about

a form of subjectified polyphony.

09. The political exhibition actualizes the idea of soviets or revolutionary. It is only logical to radicalize the logic of curating that underlies the political exhibition through the creation of “Temporary Artistic Soviets”, which would be involved in the making of the exhibition from its earliest phases onward and which would render repressive notions such as curator or institution null and void. It is the Temporary Artistic Soviet that could serve as a prototypical social model, capable of formulating and realizing its goals independently, taking on the function of an alternative power, an open system for interaction with society at large.

10. The process of creating political exhibition is self-critical with regard to its possibilities and the legitimacy of its power.

It goes without saying that these points for discussion have a certain ideal quality, but their postulates are little more than an extrapolation of the possibilities that existing exhibition practices already provide. It is this new experience that allows us to speak of realism – and not of utopia – when we talk about the repoliticisation of art. To confirm this idea, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to an important observation by Paolo Virno:

“I have the impression that to speak about utopia today in a positive terms is a little like living beneath one’s means. That is, all of the things are today within arm’s reach, beneath our eyes, and within here and now in which we live. Looking more deeply at the things is as if the elements of this utopia were all visible, but hidden under the slab of ice, like something that participates in some way in our present and that is part of the visible order. The difficulty is rather in acting with a kind of fullness of the times where everything is expanded, where, how-ever, some forces rather than some other prevail. Everything is localized even if poorly guaranteed. In the exodus, you go elsewhere, with actions, praxes, and initiatives. No longer an ideal in itself of unobtainable utopia, now we live in a time in which if we ever collide with an absolute reality of the ideal and its tangibility”.2

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DMITRY VILENKSY is part of the art collective Chto Delat? This article is based on a

talk presented at the Sydney Social Forum, September 2005, as part of

the Disobedience exhibition (Ivan Dougherty Gallery).

(Footnotes)1 Cf. Alain Badiou, Tainaya Katastrofa. Konets gosudarstvenoi istinny (The Secret Catastrophe. The End of the State’s Truth), published in Russian on the site http://sociologos.narod.ru2 Quote taken from an conversation between Paolo Virno and Marco Scotini, published in the catalogue to the exhibition “Disobedience”, Kunstraum Bethanien, January 2005.

EVERY ARTICULATION IS A MONTAGE OF VARIOUS ELEMENTS - VOICES, IMAGES, COLORS, PASSIONS OR DOGMAS - WITHIN A CERTAIN PERIOD OF TIME AND WITH A CERTAIN EXPANSE IN SPACE. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ARTICULATED MOMENTS DEPENDS ON THIS. THEY ONLY MAKE SENSE WITHIN THIS ARTICULATION AND DEPENDING ON THEIR POSITION. SO HOW IS PROTEST ARTICULATED? WHAT DOES IT ARTICULATE AND WHAT ARTICULATES IT? The articulation of protest has two levels: on the one hand, it indicates finding a language for protest, the vocalization, the verbalization or the visualization of political protest. On the other, however, this combination of concepts also designates the structure or internal organization of protest movements. In other words, there are two different kinds of concatenations of different elements: one is at the level of symbols, the other at the level of political forces. The dynamic of desiring and refusal, attraction and repulsion, the contradiction and the convergence of different elements unfolds at both levels. In relation to protest, the question of articulation applies to the organization of its expression - but also the expression of its organization. Naturally, protest

movements are articulated at many levels: at the level of their programs, demands, self-obligations, manifestos and actions. This also involves montage - in the form of inclusions and exclusions based on subject matter, priorities and blind spots. In addition, though, protest movements are also articulated as concatenations or conjunctions of different interest groups, NGOs, political parties, associations, individuals or groups. Alliances, coalitions, fractions, feuds or even indifference are articulated in this structure. At the political level as well, there is also a form of montage, combinations of interests, organized in a grammar of the political that reinvents itself again and again. At this level, articulation designates the form of the internal organization of protest movements. According to which rules, though, is this montage organized? Who does it organize with whom, through whom, and in which way? And what does this mean for globalization-critical

articulations - both at the level of the organization of its expression and at the level of the expression of its organization? How are global conjunctions represented? How are different protest movements mediated with one another? Are they placed next to one another, in other words simply added together, or related to one another in some other way? What is the image of a protest movement? Is it the sum of the heads of speakers from the individual groups added together? Is it pictures of confrontations and marches? Is it new forms of depiction? Is it the reflection of forms of a protest movement? Or the invention of new relations between individual elements of political linkages? With these thoughts about articulation, I refer to

a very specific field of theory, namely the theory of montage or film cuts. This is also because the thinking about art and politics together is usually treated in the field of political theory, and art often appears as its ornament. What happens, though, if we conversely relate a reflection about a form of artistic production, namely the theory of montage, to the field of politics? In other words, how is the political field edited, and which political significance could be derived from this form of articulation?

CHAINS OF PRODUCTION I would like to discuss these issues on the basis of two film segments - and to address their implicit or explicit political thinking based on the form of their articulation. The films will be compared from a very specific perspective: both contain a sequence, in which the conditions of their own articulation are addressed. Both of these sequences present the chains of production and production procedures, through which these films were made. And on the basis of the self-reflexive discussion of their manner of producing political significance, the creation of chains and montages of aesthetic forms and political demands, I would like to explain the political implications of forms of montage. The first segment is from the film Showdown

in Seattle, produced in 1999 by the Independent Media Center Seattle, broadcast by Deep Dish Television. The second segment is from a film by Godard/Mieville from 1975 entitled Ici et Ailleurs. Both deal with transnational and international circumstances of political articulation: Showdown in Seattle documents the protests against the WTO negotiations in Seattle and the internal articulation of these protests as the heterogeneous combination of diverse interests. The theme of Ici et Ailleurs, on the other hand, are the meanderings of French

solidarity with Palestine in the 70s in particular, and a radical critique of the poses, stagings and counterproductive linkages of emancipation in general. The two films are not really comparable as such - the first is a quickly produced utility document that functions in the register of counter-information. Ici et Ailleurs, on the other hand, mirrors a long and even embarrassing process of reflection. Information is not in the foreground there, but rather the analysis of its organization and staging. The comparison of the two films is therefore not to be read as a statement on the films per se, but rather illuminates only one particular aspect, namely their self-reflection on their own specific forms of articulation.

SHOWDOWN IN SEATTLE The film Showdown in Seattle is an impassioned documentation of the protests revolving around the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. The days of protest and their events are edited in chronological form. At the same time, the developments on the street are grounded with background information about

the work of the WTO. Numerous short statements are given by a multitude of speakers from the

most diverse political groups, especially unions, but also indigenous groups and

farmers’ organizations. The film (which consists of five half-hour single parts) is extraordinarily stirring and kept in the style of a conventional reportage. Along with this, there is a notion of filmic space-time, which could be

described in Benjamin’s terms as homogenous and empty, organized by

chronological sequences and uniform spaces.

Toward the end of the two and a half-hour film series, there is a segment, in which the viewer is taken on a tour through the production site of the film, the studio set up in Seattle. What is seen there is impressive. The entire film was shot and edited during the period of the protests. A half-hour program was broadcast every evening. This requires a considerable logistic effort, and the internal organization of the Indymedia office accordingly does not look principally different from a commercial TV broadcaster. We see how pictures from countless video cameras come into the studio, how they are viewed, how useable sections are excerpted, how they are edited into another shot, and so forth. Various media are listed, in which and through which publicizing is carried out, such as fax, telephone, satellite, etc. We see how the work of organizing information, in other words pictures and sound, is conducted: there is a video desk, production plans, etc. What is presented is the portrayal of a chain of production of information, or more precisely in the definition of the producers: counter-information, which is negatively defined by its distance to the information from the corporate media criticized for their one-sidedness. What this involves, then, is a mirror-image replica of the conventional production of information and representation with all its hierarchies, a faithful reproduction of the corporate media’s manner of production - only apparently for a different purpose. This different purpose is described with many

metaphors: get the word across, get the message across, getting the truth out, getting images out. What is to be disseminated is counter-information that is described as truth. The ultimate instance that is invoked here is the voice of the people, and this voice is to be heard. It is conceived as the unity of differences, different political groups, and it sounds within the resonator of a filmic space-time, the homogeneity of which is never called into question. Yet we must not only ask ourselves how this voice

of the people is articulated and organized, but also what this voice of the people is supposed to be at all. In Showdown in Seattle, this expression is used without any problematization: as the addition of voices of individual speakers from protest groups, NGOs, unions, etc. Their demands and positions are articulated across broad segments of the film - in the form of “talking heads”. Because the form of the shots is the same, the positions are standardized and thus made comparable. At the level of the standardized conventional language of form, the different statements are thus transformed into a chain of formal equivalencies, which adds the political demands together in the same way that pictures and sounds are strung together in the conventional chain of montage in the media chain of production. In this way, the form is completely analogous to the language of form used by the criticized corporate media, only the content is different, namely an additive compilation of voices resulting in the voice of the people when taken together. When all of these articulations are added together, what comes out as the sum is the voice of the people - regardless of the fact that the different political demands sometimes radically contradict one another and it is not at all clear how these demands can be mediated. What takes the place of this missing mediation is only a filmic and political addition - of shots, statements and positions - and an aesthetic form of concatenation, which takes

over the organizational principles of its adversary unquestioningly.In the second film, on the other hand, this method of

the mere addition of demands resulting together in the “voice of the people” is severely criticized - along with the concept of the voice of the people itself.

ICI ET AILLEURS The directors, or rather the editors of the film Ici et Ailleurs, Godard and Mieville, take a radically critical position with respect to the terms of the popular. Their film consists of a self-critique of a self-produced film fragment. The collective Dziga Vertov (Godard/Morin) shot a commissioned film on the PLO in 1970. The heroizing propaganda film that blusters about the people’s battle was called “Until Victory” and was never finished. It consisted of several parts with titles such as: the armed battle, political work, the will of the people, the extended war. It showed battle training, scenes of exercise and shooting, and scenes of PLO agitation, formally in an almost senseless chain of equivalencies, in which every image, as it later proved, is forced into the anti-imperialistic fantasy. Four years later, Godard and Mieville inspect the material more closely again. They note that parts of the statements of PLO adherents were never translated or were staged to begin with. They reflect on the stagings and the blatant lies of the material - but most of all on their own participation in this, in the way they organized the pictures and sound. They ask: How did the adjuring formula of the “voice of the people” function here as populist noise to eliminate contradictions? What does it mean to edit the Internationale into any and every picture, rather like the way butter is smeared on bread? Which political and aesthetic notions are added together under the pretext of the “voice of the people”? Why did this equation not work? In general, Godard/Mieville arrive at the conclusion: the additive “and” of the montage, with which they edit one picture onto another, is not an innocent one and certainly not unproblematic. Today the film is shockingly up to date, but not in

the sense of offering a position on the Middle East conflict. On the contrary, it is the problematizing of the concepts and patterns, in which conflicts and solidarity are abridged to binary oppositions of betrayal or loyalty and reduced to unproblematic additions and pseudo-causalities, that makes it so topical. For what if the model of addition is wrong? Or if the additive “and” does not represent an addition, but rather grounds a subtraction, a division or no relation at all? Specifically, what if the “and” in this “here and elsewhere”, in this France and Palestine does not represent an addition, but rather a subtraction? What if two political movements not only do not join, but actually hinder, contradict, ignore or even mutually exclude one another? What if it should be “or” rather than “and”, or “because” or “instead of”? And then what does an empty phrase like “the will of the people” mean? Transposed to a political level, the questions are

thus: On which basis can we even draw a political comparison between different positions or establish equivalencies or even alliances? What is even made comparable at all? What is added together, edited together, and which differences and opposites are leveled for the sake of establishing a chain of equivalencies? What if this “and” of political montage is functionalized, specifically for the sake of a populist mobilization? And what does this question mean for the articulation of protest today, if nationalists, protectionists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists, Nazis, religious groups and reactionaries all line up in the chain of equivalencies with no problem at anti-globalization demos? Is this a simple case of the principle of unproblematic addition, a blind “and”, that presumes that if sufficient numbers of different interests are added up, at some point the sum will be the people? Godard and Mieville do not relate their critique

solely to the level of political articulation, in other words the expression of internal organization, but specifically also to the organization of its expression. Both are very closely connected. An essential component of this problematic issue is found in how pictures and sounds are organized, edited and arranged. A Fordist articulation organized according to the principles of mass culture will blindly reproduce the templates of its masters, according to their thesis, so it has to be cut off and problematized. This is also the reason why Godard/Mieville are concerned with the chain of production of pictures and sound, but in comparison with Indymedia, they choose an entirely different scene - they show a crowd of people holding pictures, wandering past a camera as though on a conveyor belt and pushing each other aside at the same time. A row of people carrying pictures of the “battle” is linked together by machine following the logic of the assembly line and camera mechanics. Here Godard/Mieville translate the temporal arrangement of the film images into a spatial arrangement. What becomes evident here are chains of pictures that do not run one after the other, but rather are shown at the same time. They place the pictures next to one another and shift their framing into the focus of attention. What is revealed

is the principle of their concatenation. What appears in the montage as an often invisible addition is problematized in this way and set in relation to the logic of machine production. This reflection on the chain of production of pictures and sounds in this sequence makes it possible to think about the conditions of representation on film altogether. The montage results within an industrial system of pictures and sounds, whose concatenation is organized from the start - just as the principle of the production sequence from Showdown in Seattle is marked by its assumption of conventional schemata of production. In contrast, Godard/Mieville ask: how do the

pictures hang on the chain, how are they chained together, what organizes their articulation, and which political significances are generated in this way? Here we see an experimental situation of concatenation, in which pictures are relationally organized. Pictures and sounds from Nazi Germany, Palestine, Latin America, Vietnam and other places are mixed wildly together - and added with a number of folk songs or songs that invoke the people from right-wing and left-wing contexts. First of all, this much is evident, this results in the impression that the pictures naturally attain their significance through their concatenation. But secondly, and this is much more important, we see that impossible concatenations occur: pictures from the concentration camp and Venceremos songs, Hitler’s voice and a picture of My Lai, Hitler’s voice and a picture of Golda Meir, My Lai and Lenin. It becomes clear that the basis of this voice of the people, which we hear in its diverse articulations and at the level of which the experiment takes place, is in fact not a basis for creating equivalencies, but instead brings up the radical political contradictions that it is striving to cover up. It generates sharp discrepancies within the silent coercion - as Adorno would say - of the identity relationship. It effects contraries instead of equations, and beyond the contraries even sheer dread - everything except an unproblematic addition of political desire. For what this populist chain of equivalencies mainly displays at this point is the void that it is structured around, the empty inclusivist AND that just keeps blindly adding and adding outside the realm of all political criteria. In summary we can say that the principle of the

voice of the people assumes an entirely different role in the two films. Although it is the organizing principle in Seattle, the principle that constitutes the gaze, it is never problematized itself. The voice of the people functions here like a blind spot, a lacuna, which constitutes the entire field of the visible, but only becomes visible itself as a kind of cover. It organizes the chain of equivalencies without allowing breaks and conceals that its political objective does not go beyond an unquestioned notion of inclusivity. The voice of the people is thus simultaneously the organizing principle of both a concatenation and a suppression. Yet what does it suppress? In an extreme case we can say that the empty topos of the voice of the people only covers up a lacuna, specifically the lacuna of the question of the political measures and goals that are supposed to be legitimized by invoking the people.

ADDITION OR EXPONENTIATION So what turns a movement into an oppositional one? For there are many movements that call themselves protest movements, which should be called reactionary, if not outright fascist, or which at least include such elements easily. The movements this involves are those in which existing conditions are radicalized in breathless transgression, scattering fragmented identities like bone splinters along the way. The energy of the movement glides seamlessly from one element to the next - traversing the homogeneous empty time like a wave moving through the crowd. Images, sounds and positions are linked without reflection in the movement of blind inclusion. A tremendous dynamic unfolds in these figures - only to leave everything as it was. Which movement of political montage then results

in an oppositional articulation - instead of a mere addition of elements for the sake of reproducing the status quo? Or to phrase the question differently: Which montage between two images/elements could be imagined, that would result in something different between and outside these two, which would not represent a compromise, but would instead belong to a different order - roughly the way someone might tenaciously pound two dull stones together to create a spark in the darkness? Whether this spark, which one could also call the spark of the political, can be created at all is a question of this articulation.

✘

Hito Steyerl. Thanks to Peter Grabher / kinoki for calling attention to the films. Translated by Aileen Derieg. Reprinted with permission by the author from Transform http://transform.eipcp.net/.

Articulation of protest.

because the

thinking about art

and politics together is

usually treated in the field

of political theory, and art

often appears as its

ornament

In conversation with Arlene TextaQueen.TEXTAQUEEN:… I like the camera more than the documentarian and it takes me stepping way back or maybe right in to see what I’m doing as more than (objectively) documenting what I see which is the people I ask and choose to draw… But of course the pictures turn out the way they do because its me as the person I am situated as, who I am, meeting who I meet, identifying with who I identify with, and asking them to be the vehicle to illustrate our ideas in naked texta form…VANESSA:I know that our particular portraits had the theme of the show in mind, but I can’t help but feel that had you asked me to come up with something without there having been any pre-established political undertones, that mine would not have turned out much different… it was representative of so much of what I have been feeling like for the past five to 10 years. It felt natural that it looked just as it did as BOTH a portrait of the person I understand myself to be, in so many ways, and as representative of my concerns for “anyone” living in a similar world as the one I find myself in. And I have been thinking of this show as relating to a “fear culture” of sorts, mine of course being a fear of weakness and dysfunction . . . which is as personal as it is a political analysis, for me.FRANCESCA:It makes our case for us; what we create when told to create an image of ourselves and our politic/aesthetic, is what we would create if told to create an image of ourselves, at all… If you live your politics, if your politics is your life, it’s what your life looks like, its your relationship to self, to others, it’s the way you move, the way you act, the way you eat, the way you touch, the way you work. The same for aesthetics…we exist and act within similiar communities, and when we talk about the structures in the world that oppress and repress, we talk about the same structures. So even though our particulars are different, and in some ways they conflict, we can accept this “dissensus” as a basis from which we may enrich our analysis and our methods of action.VANESSA:Especially when so many fundamental similarities were actually exposed throughout our discussions of these things… “dissensus”, within our analyses, may only be superficial. You have talked about de-emphasising yourself as an individual because of the ways that any focus on your agency causes you to become self-conscious about making too much of a distinction between yourself and what may be regarded as the “external”. And I have talked about the feelings of alienation from ideas of functionality and productivity and health, because of the ways that I have felt my own individual needs and abilities have been trampled by what I have perceived to be a standard of sorts; because of never feeling “good”. Where you see individuals as all part of something larger than ourselves, I mourn the ways that our individual selves are being over-ridden for the purposes of creating standards that no one seems to fit into. Yet we both agree that our experiences have translated themselves into patterns of self-destruction, wherein the instinct has often been to “fix” oneself instead of something structural or “outside” because, in your case, your individual needs were not as important as being a part of something larger than yourself, and because in my case, the “outside” has always felt so oppressive and alienating that I have only known how to try to beat it by being stronger, rather than trying to work with it.FRANSCESCA:We will never be able to expunge our individual selves of all “external” negative influence, because there is no self outside of our context, but if we realise the inherent lack-of-distinction between ourselves, others, and the society at large, we might be able to approach those parts we find destructive and alienating in a more productive way. What I mean is, if we realize how situated we are in the world, how connected we all are, we may form different and more effective approaches to the things that we don’t like about the world and our lives. People around me die in their I-ness. People “I” love feel terrible, and they, because they see themselves as an “I”, try to fix their “I” so they don’t feel terrible anymore, but so often, that doesn’t work.TEXTAQUEEN:… I’ve regarded, for a few years, the actual portraits that come into existence as just one little symptom or side effect – and the only public manifestation – of a whole special lucky experience of knowing the people I draw and I share. I don’t feel like we are finally shouting our voices to the world, I mean haven’t we been shouting to each other? and we are the world…

✘

Articulation of protest.

WE SEPERATE OURSELVES (FRANCESCA). IT COULD BE ANYONE (VANESSA). 6

65

Somewhere along the border areas where familiar cultural references and recognisable social interactions brush up against tacit systems of power and control, the Center for Tactical Magic (CTM) has been staging public interventions since 2000. CTM founder, Aaron Gach, describes projects such as the Tactical Ice Cream Unit, the Cricket-Activated Defense System, and the Ultimate Jacket as “opportunities for heightened clarity in communication…even when the audience doesn’t explicitly regard our work as ‘art.’” For Gach, political agency is like shape shifting. It involves inhabiting a series of identities that all employ tactical forms of creativity. Having learned from experience that “private investigators, magicians, and ninjas all use secret pockets in their day-to-day activities” Gach maintains that the “secret pocket” not only holds the keys to Power but is, in its own right, a key to understanding power.

Gregory Sholette emailed Aaron Gach his thoughts about the concept of “data aesthetic,” and asked him to respond. An edited version of the exchange follows:

GREGORY SHOLETTE: As far as I know, the notion of information or “data” understood as an artistic medium simply does not arise in classical aesthetics. Perhaps, Kant would have relegated it to the merely pragmatic realm of technical knowledge. In terms of a data aesthetic therefore, one might initially argue that the sheer onslaught of information today –primarily in the form of content-packets we receive from an increasing multitude of sources from email, to internet, to cellular phones, to mp3 players, to public advertising– approaches the Kantian notion of the sublime: a perceptual experience too vast to be fully graspable and therefore experienced as both thrilling, and simultaneously startling, or even frightening. The philosopher Lyotard has gone so far as to describe post-modernism and post-modern art itself as a type of aesthetic sublime in so far as it manifests the very impossibility of achieving adequate representation of contemporary life. Returning to this notion of data aesthetic then, it seems a truism that the flow of information today is impossible to fully process. Its volume and its velocity are literally super-human. Nevertheless, there is nothing about data that is inherently beyond the grasp of human beings, especially when supplemented by the prosthetic of computer processors. Or is there? In dealing with the subject of “magic”, how do your ideas of illusion, secrecy, and the occult (literally “hidden”) tie in with concepts of data transmission?

AARON GACH: Like “art” the word “magic” can be very confusing for people. It simultaneously conjures notions of trickery, witchcraft, illusion, mysticism, fantasy, and a vast array of products, services, and popular culture references. Many of these notions evoke a dismissive response from people when they encounter the term, partly because they tend to immediately latch onto a single notion of magic – cheesy Las Vegas sideshow; dreadlocked Wiccan hippy; Dungeons & Dragons wannabe; Satanic drug fiend; pet psychic; reality escapists; and so forth. Of course, by conjuring such characters as Gandalf, Harry Potter, Sabrina, and John Edwards, popular media also adds to the mix. The Center for Tactical Magic does not exclusively align itself with any one interpretation of “magic”, in part, because the vastness of the interpretations of “magic” is what gives magic its power in the world of meaning.

In nearly all of the permutations of magic(k), the conventions of presenting information are completely fucked with. A stage magic trick is a good example of data mystification on many levels. For starters, a magician often uses “patter” or a story to provide a context for the audience’s experience of the illusion. S/he might say something like, “Ladies and Gents, as a special treat for you tonight, I’m going to make the president disappear. Now before anyone gets too excited, it’s an already dead president – Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill – our racist, Indian-killer president.” In the patter, the magician may or may not lie, but the intention is always to manipulate the audience’s perceptions. This is done easily enough because the information presented in the form of patter appears to coincide with the visual information presented through the magician’s movements and use of props. (The $20 in the magician’s hands will disappear… from view, but not likely from material existence. And Andrew Jackson does appear on the twenty dollar bill; however, historians debate whether

he killed more Native Americans then some of our other racist presidents.) And of course, the magician’s movements are deceptively “natural” in appearance: a well-placed cough or a hand on the hip doesn’t generally attract attention. Similarly, the props are shown to be beyond suspicion: an audience member inspects the bill; the magician’s clothing looks normal enough; the hands are shown to be empty; etc. If performed successfully, a good magic trick will have a convincing effect largely because the magician has presented several forms of discordant information in a harmonious manner. The verbal info, the body language, the sequence of events, and the overall physical appearance conform to the audience’s expectations of normalcy (i.e. the magician faked a cough and used a hidden gimmick to ditch the bill half way through the performance yet kept a closed hand in plain view while continuing to discuss the merits of vanishing racist presidents). When the magician finally opens the fist to reveal not a twenty but a handful of pretzels the audience will attempt to bridge the gap between what they believe they have witnessed and what they formerly believed was possible.

SHOLETTE: When art does concern itself with the aesthetics of information, it tends to concern itself with data display rather than interpretation. Most artists approach the data-sphere by drawing attention to the limits of comprehension through the use of some type an interface that overwhelms our senses - think of Thomas Hirshhorn or the type of computer art favored by museums in which visualising data takes precedence over its meaning. And on those occasions when content is tackled, it is the paradoxes that plague what Habermas termed “communicative action” that are underscored. This is the sort of aesthetic ambiguity that contemporary art exercises over and against conventional logic with typically disorienting, and apolitical results. By contrast however, the interventionist artist has to deal with the pragmatics of data content and transmission. I suspect this is where the political meets the aesthetic in all tactical media including your work. But how does the CTM do more than simply create a spectacle around data mystification?

GACH: In the Western traditions of ritual magic and various occult practices there is often a “lust for results” that demands linearity in the form of cause-and-effect. Nearly every other expression of ritual magic across the globe regards the magical act as a liminal space that appears during the performance. This is a zone of transformation; a place where the rules of everyday life are suspended and alternative realities can trickle in. It is here that the “real” magic takes place.

The Tactical Ice Cream Unit, for example, certainly incorporates some spectacular elements: a cross between an ice cream truck, SWAT vehicle, hot rod, and an activist command center, it combines familiar elements in a strikingly unfamiliar way. But beyond the shear aesthetics of the TICU, it is designed for use in public contexts. Concealed within its uncanny cloak resides a wifi internet transmitter, public address sound system, and a vast array of surveillance devices that can be used for activities ranging from monitoring police activity to assisting independent journalists at public events. Additionally, the unit has proven useful as tactical support for demonstrators at political rallies in Chicago and Kansas City. Like other CTM projects, the TICU is regarded as a sort of “secret pocket” that harbors useful items for interdiction, but also creates a space where meaningful shifts in consciousness and action can occur.

SHOLETTE: But if the mission of the Center for Tactical Magic is one of focusing the viewer/participant’s attention on encountering life or perception in an unexpected way, I am still not sure how you move beyond merely defamiliarizing reified social forms, just as so much contemporary art does. In other words, how does one go further and intervene to challenge ideological assumptions or to produce an alternative experience? Here I am thinking of the notion of free movement that the Ultimate Jacket purports to offer its wearer. Your Ninja vest holds out the promise of a modern cloak of invisibility. And in reality it calls attention to the run-down status of public space that, as we all know, is today riddled with networks of optical surveillance and fortified with elaborate systems of spatial management. So are CTM’s projects therefore doing two

things at once? Is the aesthetic play of data also a practical act of communication? Is it both art, and magic? Or is it all more than meets the eye?

GACH: While the Center for Tactical Magic confesses a fondness for misdirection, we also thrive on using magic to expose some illusions. The Ultimate Jacket is a good example. The officially-stated origin of the Ultimate Jacket – that it was inspired by the fact that ninjas, magicians, and private investigators all use secret pockets in their day-to-day activities – is absurd but entirely true. This is important to acknowledge because the CTM triad was initially selected in an investigation of Power –

how individuals with unique skill-sets navigate diverse power relationships, and how these skill-sets

could empower others with an enhanced sense of autonomy and agency. The fact

that all three were using secret pockets lends credence to the metaphor of

power as represented by secret pockets. The value of a pocket is measured by its absence; a pocket is only useful in that its emptiness can be used to contain something of import. Thus, one has to create a space before one can fill it.

The CTM seeks out potent spaces and also creates spaces of potential.

In many instances, these spaces are, both public and private, physical

and psychological. But in all cases our approach is tactical rather than strategic in

nature. Our projects are often temporary and repeatable in multiple contexts, either by ourselves or by others. The latter consideration is still widely unfamiliar territory to contemporary artists who still cling to the modernist exaltation of the unique author. Yet, among activists and many professional communities it’s largely acknowledged that the sharing of information is crucial for the successful advancement of their collective desires.

As you allude to, “public” space has largely become an illusion, especially in urban areas. It is increasingly privatized, even by “public” institutions. All one has to do to discover this for him/herself is to perform an unproductive, non-consumptive, and preferably interesting act in a presumed public space and see how long it takes before an authority figure threatens to press charges for trespassing. Despite the fact that the First Amendment guarantees our rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, cities across the country require local citizens to purchase permits for rallies, marches, and protests, or suffer police repression. We learned this lesson first hand when we helped organise a police accountability rally in Kansas City. Ironically, the park where the rally was held featured a stone monument with the first amendment engraved in it.

SHOLETTE: This is quite a different approach to the type of activist intervention of my generation in the ‘70s/’80s, or even that of the previous one in the 60s, in so far as we sought to demystify the mechanisms of the stage itself, or in Brechtian terms to reveal the technology that produced an illusion of reality to be at the service of powerful, anti-humanist interests.

GACH: If you demystify, do you then assume that the “reality” you expose is starker or more somber than the reality being performed daily? Hopefully not. Houdini emphasised self-liberation from the constraints of everyday life, such as prisons, handcuffs, safes, ropes, and packing crates. Therefore, ideally you demonstrate that it is desirable to embrace a fantastic, self-determined lifestyle; and you simultaneously demonstrate how the machine works so that one is not duped by its workings, but revels in the innovation of their own fantastic complex. Of course, shifting consciousness alone, without corresponding action merely amounts to wishful thinking. To that that end, most of the CTM’s initial projects serve as experiments and training exercises that are easily repeatable by anyone anywhere. We recognize our place in a continuity of resistance and flow, with the gleeful conviction that the audience will “rise up and usurp the principal roles and radically re-arrange the drama to suite themselves”.

✘

Gregory Sholette is a New York based writer and artist, for more information www.gregorysholette.com.

Secret Pockets.A conversation between AARON GACH, founder of the Center for Tactical Magic and GREGORY SHOLETTE. January, 2006

Houdini

emphasized self-

liberation from the

constraints of everyday life,

such as prisons, handcuffs,

safes, ropes, and

packing crates

6

On the first weekend at the beginning of the 34 days of Israeli bombing of Lebanon in July 2006 I’d woken early to a dark, cold and rainy Saturday. Instead of logically hiding inside all day, I felt manic and the need to get up and out, not knowing why and where... and somehow I remembered that I had yet to see the work of Arab artists at the MCA’s Biennale show (a rare and precious opportunity, to have multiple choices of contemporary Arab cultural production accessible in town). I found the Akram Zaatari work in a dim border-like corridor, between two brightly lit galleries. ... this is what I was meant to do, in the largest city of the country that was obliterating the humanity of our existence, through its support of the catastrophe unfolding in Lebanon... in keeping with its ongoing support of the catastrophes in Palestine and Iraq.

On this day, Zaatari’s video work took on renewed meanings. But, it was not Saida (in the South of Lebanon, during the Israeli invasion of) 1982; It was not (the first Gulf War / American invasion of Iraq in) 1991; It was 2006. Within his video work, they were literally digging deep into the earth, to patiently locate and gently cradle evidence of our humanity. The work nurtured my love of detail - the split-screen multi-narratives, the visual use of personal documentation, the wrapping of bigger pictures around a smaller grounded narrative - drawing me in, desiring closure, through the buried handwritten letter, encapsulated in time. And within the experience of unconsciously ending up there alone on a miserable day, on the first weekend of incessant bombing, was the possibility of breathing through the paralysis… the evidence of everyday human details of survival and resistance, love and respect, that I needed to believe were hidden within the earth of Lebanon on that very weekend...

If You See Something Say Something, as a title, plays on government media campaigns that encourage a nasty kind of “neighbourhood watch” during this era of “the war on terror”. In reflecting on Zaatari’s work, not only are there references to recent state terrorisms, there are also excavations of what you cannot see and what you often cannot understand or say. For many artists in our communities, the past is very much part of our present, where we feel that we always have to start the story each time from the very beginning. Just ask any Palestinian. As a non-Indigenous person born on this land, how could I begin to understand the stories buried within the earth here? Maybe if I acknowledge this, then I can also work to understand some of our stories …

There is a dominating convenience in the language of this era, of placing everything under the umbrella of ‘the war on terror’. As critical artists and cultural workers we can also work outside of this framework and reflect on many cultural / political wars that have operated before, during and after 2001. Some recent cultural production work that I have been involved with does not need to be related to this era of repression and militarisation, since the 2001 attacks on America, in order to be subject to monitoring or censorship. However, this specific context does exacerbate everything.

On a more abstract level, I could reflect on ‘absences’ and ‘invisibilities’ in our historical, cultural and political landscapes that are insidious ‘non-evidence’ of wars on culture and freedom of expression and representation. So if you cannot see something, how can you still say something?

In August / September 2006, one way of breathing through initial paralysis about escalations of war on the Arab World, was an intensive quick response exhibition of 45 Arab artists at Mori Gallery in Sydney, co-curated by Mouna Zaylah and myself. It became T’fouh… raw responses from Arab artists. ‘T’fouh…’ to spit with absolute disgust - and it could have been

“t’fouh alaykoum!” or “t’fouh alayhoum!” (“spit on you” or “spit on them”).Sure, there are fears and concerns amongst some artists in this era of repression - especially if they are non-white refugees or recent migrants – and their experiences often pre-date 2001. The State of NSW in particular has been obsessed with racial profiling (those “Of Middle Eastern Appearance”) since the mid-1990s, and Islamaphobia certainly needed no introduction in 2001. White Australia has historically seen Arabs and Muslims as “aliens”, as they were officially defined through Federation legislation in 1901 - unable to own land or businesses, let alone be “naturalized” as citizens. If you came here at age six months, or were even were married to an “alien”, you could not get citizenship. Over 100 years ago it was more likely that the Muslims in Australia were Afghan or Indian, and Turks were yet to be defined as Syrians or Lebanese on their ID papers.

What did I say earlier about the perceived need to start the story each time from the very beginning? I think I first heard Edward Said say this in an interview too many years ago, and it resonated and remained with me. I will always remember the day that he died. I was working on Arab community cultural projects at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, being suffocated by a disgusting process of manipulation and censorship (t’fouh…!) around a state-sponsored exhibition of cultural material from and about Palestine. On Friday 26 September 2003, I heard the news of the death of Edward Said, just moments before witnessing the next internal round of cutting of design plans and gallery space, the slashing of documentary photos and international art posters… I remember my grief, anger and disbelief at the sickening irony of this specific moment…

Palestine, and the creation of art or writing about the “historical truth” of Palestine, is monitored, vilified, pressured by institutional authorities and often censored – like no other. There are many examples locally and internationally, whether virtual interactives in digital art, or narratives represented in public spaces. I will never understand why the parallels with Apartheid South Africa are not blatantly obvious. It would seem a reasonable political strategy to engage in international cultural, academic and economic boycotts. If it is often said that ‘truth’ is the first casualty of war, then these truths have been sacrificed for a very long time, from even before 1948 – and more so by their absence, than by their vilified presence.

At the Performance Space earlier in 2003, an independent collective of artists and activists developed I Remember 1948, a multimedia exhibition and an accompanying cultural programme of events. The vision organically grew from a creative process of oral history documentation, bringing together Palestinian elders and younger Palestinians. The initial dialogues were documented and witnessed by community members and local Arab artists, who subsequently created works inspired by fragments of these stories.

As with T’fouh… three years later, the I Remember 1948 project had international contributions. And within weeks of opening in Sydney, T’fouh… simultaneously had works in a Beirut show (Nafas Beirut, October 2006). Both brought together a diversity of Arab women and men – Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, Sudanese… multi-generational in terms of eras of migration, age, culture and experience. There is nothing homogenous even about our relatively small Arab arts networks in Australia.

Challenging perceptions of homogeneity – as well as opening up internal differences and dialogues between artists themselves

– becomes an inherent outcome of drawing people and work together through interactive processes. In 2005-2006 I worked with Muslim women and girls in a major cultural project based in Auburn, developing a hub of arts workshops and subsequently a multimedia exhibition. Participants were diverse in culture, language, age, politics and personal beliefs. Though government funded – Western Sydney Areas Assistance Scheme funded a project initiated by local Muslim women, developed and managed by Auburn Community Development Network - this was not just a quick-fix project designed to tick policy boxes and to parade outcomes as window dressing with politicians or bureaucrats. This longer-term development work does not need to be part of the linguistic circus – juggling “harmony”, ”‘integration”, “contribution”, “belonging”, “enrichment” and “Australian values”… blah, blah, blah. T’fouh… on that old bag of assimilationist tricks.

Inside Out: Muslim Women Exploring Identities and Creative Expressions evolved from a grounded process, just as significant for its intense and open models of cultural work, as for its critical engagement with complex identities and contemporary

representations of Muslim women of themselves. This is really the guts of it – active listening and

collaboration, working with vision and critical analysis, within the specificities of

context and place - always reinventing the models of work. Though on some

levels we are still ‘reacting’, we are simultaneously speaking in our own terms. Open and critical processes can inspire a particular alchemy, to facilitate the creation of high quality and strong work that can be experienced on many levels.

The culminating exhibition in May–June 2006, with installation

design by Soraya Asmar and lighting by Sarah Davies, transformed an

industrial urban space in Auburn into an intimate environment, creating spaces

within spaces. Transformation became a key obsession for me, especially during the

production phase. My close working relationships with so many of the artists and participants saw a blurring of assumed perceptions of what is “political” and what is “spiritual”. Material and aesthetic transformations of public space, combined with a strong sense of ownership of so many women involved – and the life-changing experiences that some artists spoke about – ultimately reflected a sense of active citizenship.

These days I reflect on the politics of love… raw love that is contextualised politically and creatively. In November 2006, while speaking at the 25th anniversary of Urban Theatre Projects, I reflected that we were all living and working in an era of silencing and surveillance. This era is politically and culturally more complex than 15 years earlier, when the company (previously known as Death Defying Theatre) worked with Arab communities in 1991, creating the landmark Café Hakawati, at the time of the first Gulf War / American invasion of Iraq. That old company name resonates with renewed meanings for us now –– may we continue to create work that defies the absences and the silences – work that defies the death of our citizenship.

ateeq’oun al afeeya… all strength to you…

✘

ALISSAR CHIDIAC has been involved in community and cultural development work for 25 years. She is currently mapping contemporary Arab Australian cultural production, 1991-2006.

Ateeq’oun al afeeya…

DA

VID

GR

IGG

S

This longer-

term development

work does not need to be

part of the linguistic circus

– juggling “harmony”, “integration”,

“contribution”, “belonging”,

“enrichment” and “Australian

values”… blah, blah, blah.

T’fouh… on that old bag of

assimilationist tricks

7

During the summer of 2005, Al Fadhil, who is based in Europe, asked his brother Ahmed to take pictures of their parents’ place in Iraq to document the condition of the people through the habitat of their house.

With this project, the artist continues an engagement with Iraq begun in 2003 with the performance I am the Iraq Pavilion at the 50thVenice Biennale.

The idea of Talking with Ahmed developed from an intensive, internet-based correspondence between the artist and his brother. Ahmed was to be present at the opening to Talking with Ahmed at Cantonale Lugano Museum in Switzerland in May but fate was hiding a tragic surprise: on March 27th, 2006, he was killed in an attack in Baghdad.

The idea of speaking of the existence of people through the medium of their habitat is coherent when speaking of the situation of a family like ours; all the humours of life are fused and reflected in the lives of its members. It takes some time to understand the sense of our way of life: why we have accepted an abode like this, why we have accepted such degradation. Look at the colour of the earth, the bricks, the stones. They seem imbued with suffering, united in a form without identity, but which is at least protective. Let us not

cower inside this stronghold of illusion. Let us continue to hope.

In this cruel time, there is not a family in the country that has not lost a son, as has ours, in one of these never-ending wars. In recompense, the dictator gave us some land on which the family built a big house to honour the son’s sacrifice. But conditions worsened and in order to combat the problem of growing poverty, the family had to sell the house and buy another one: the one you see, empty and inhospitable.

With our bundles of belongings, fragments shored against our ruin, we have arrived at the epilogue of our existence. The house is a mirror image of our state: afflicted, disoriented, but alive. Is it still possible to dream knowing that everything has finished in a thousand pieces? Look at our possessions, useful only as witness to the ferocious passage of people and events: they have rendered the earth arid, and to remind ourselves that we once had a garden, we decorate our daily lives with flowers - plastic flowers. Our electrical appliances bear witness too, mute spectators in this sorry place, waiting for a spark, a glimmer of light.

We bear the scars carved into our memory, alongside the inanimate objects, without relief. And when a man comes to resemble the objects he possesses, he ceases to exist.

Look well, dear brother, at these spectral beds in a room separated from us by a distance overflowing with solitude; here our parents lay themselves down to rest.

Our mother, resigned, clutches a portrait of her favourite son, now a long way from home. She hopes for his return, perhaps so she may die in peace.

Our father, who has survived everything, believes in nothing any more, only in his Imam, the redeemer who will come one day to bring some justice and, who knows, maybe some order to this mayhem.

I have always asked myself what the point of having a home is, if this is the result. Believe me, looking in depth into this existence breaks my heart!

Ours is a waiting, a waiting without end.

✘

AL FADHIL is an Iraqi artist who lives and works between Milan, Berlin and Paris

Home Sweet Home.A video project by Al Fadhil

8

SquatSpace’s Tour of Beauty takes place in the contested, congested inner-Sydney suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo. These areas, which have for many years housed a large proportion of Indigenous residents and low income public housing tenants, are now seen as potentially valuable land for real estate speculation. In late 2004, the New South Wales state government created the Redfern Waterloo Authority (RWA), effectively excising a slice of land south of Sydney’s central business district from the jurisdiction of the local council by declaring it of significance to the entire state. With this legal sleight of hand, the government can now push through commercial redevelopment plans, sell off local assets, and override existing heritage regulations under the pretext that the land is too important to be subject to normal planning laws.

Not surprisingly, this heavy-handed approach to urban planning has generated great anxiety amongst the numerous local stakeholders. Many of the artists in the SquatSpace collective live in the Redfern area. We wanted to “do something” about this alarming situation, but we were confounded; How could we intervene in a supposedly democratic process when the proper channels of consultation had been swept away, and where traditional dissent seemed fruitless?

The group embarked on a process of conversational research: we began meeting with local community representatives in an attempt to understand, from their perspectives, what the RWA’s actions might mean for life in the area. It became clear that the “locals” felt strongly about their own predicament - we could not do justice to their wealth of knowledge and depth of emotion by utilising second-hand information in the production of an artwork about them. In fact, we discovered that the more people we spoke to, the more we were referred to others who would report different experiences of their particular situations.

SquatSpace organised its first Redfern-Waterloo Tour of Beauty in September 2005 to investigate the disjuncture between the Redfern-Waterloo Authority’s plans and the current lives of local people. “Tourists” are transported by mini-bus, or travel en masse by bicycle, to each stop. Here they are greeted by a “local”, who speaks briefly about the place and his/her connection to it, answering questions and facilitating discussion before we move on to the next site. The tour visits several endangered sites in the area:

Aboriginal housing at The Block, community centres, government assets to be sold off, and public housing towers. We also visit locations which indicate a possible future: a growing commercial art gallery precinct, and new private apartment developments at the eastern end of the suburb. With the Tour of Beauty, the members of SquatSpace draw on their extensive toolkit of aesthetic strategies. We act something like site-specific DJs, mixing the conversation “live” to create an affecting (and sometimes overwhelming) experience for our “tourists.”

‘It is a commonplace that we cannot direct, save accidentally, the growth and flowering of plants, however lovely and enjoyed, without understanding their causal conditions. It should be just as commonplace that esthetic understanding – as distinct from sheer personal enjoyment – must start with the soil, air, and light out of which things esthetically admirable rise.’1

With this statement, John Dewey deploys a botanical metaphor to connect art with life. Rather than cutting a flower at its stem and placing it in a vase in my kitchen, I am urged to admire it in the garden, grounded in the earth where it grows. Similarly, aesthetics, for Dewey, is a situated practice in which our senses are stimulated and challenged continuously in the places and spaces we inhabit every day. In his 1934 book Art as Experience, Dewey sought to restore continuity between aesthetic experiences usually thought to reside only in “special” places like museums and galleries, and those that happen in our daily lives. As a result, both spheres might be enriched. Art within museums would be viewed as intertwined with a wider ecology of cultural practices, and everyday life could be equipped with a set of aesthetic tools to make sense of, and enhance, its rhythms, forms and intensities.

SquatSpace’s Redfern-Waterloo Tour of Beauty belongs to a long tradition of art which attempts to connect aesthetic participation with a rhetoric of participatory democracy. In contemporary art, “participation” has often been used by artists and critics to connote a kind of liberating function. The involvement of the audience can be framed as a salutory move towards a model of idealised social democracy. In allowing the audience to share responsibility for the act of creation (rather than merely its reception), interactive artworks break down the authoritarian, privileged speaking voice

of the artist. By extension, an individual’s participation in the creative act might lead to a stronger sense of his/her ability to participate in society. Audiences are thus released from their passivity and empowered to take more responsibility for governing their own lives.

This relationship between aesthetic interactivity and participatory democracy is

by no means uncontested. However, in the case of the Tour of Beauty

the model of participation employed – verbal dialogue

which takes place within specific sites and

neighbourhoods – brings the question of democracy itself sharply into focus. By considering and discussing r e d e v e l o p m e n t plans set in place

by the NSW state government in the

very places those plans are set to affect, the Tour

of Beauty allows aesthetic considerations to come into play

in a directly experienced manner. The texture of the streets and buildings, the tone and passion of spoken voices, and the presence of my own body in these sites makes me conscious of the complexity of lived space. By taking on board many different voices, the Tour of Beauty embodies the difficulty we have as grounded citizens in coming to grips with the disjunction between lived space and something as abstract as a “plan.”

The dialogical nature of the Tour of Beauty acts as an implicit critique of the systems and methods of the tourism industry, where conflict and contestation is swept under the mat and not regarded as appropriate for public display. In standard city bus tours, a prosperous atmosphere of harmony and progress is presented as an outcome of the well-functioning democratic process – a process in which we participate via the proper channels of voting and buying. By contrast, SquatSpace’s tour offers a more direct experience of democracy – one more closely aligned with Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau’s vision in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics:

a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate—in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased.2

In this, the Tour of Beauty resembles the Western Cape Action Tours (WECAT) in Cape Town, South Africa. These tours are run by former members of the Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress who fought against the old apartheid regime of South Africa. They visit the Cape Flats, a place “most white South Africans, aware of rising crime rates and a history of unrest, would never dream of visiting”.3 Heidi Gruenebaum-Ralph describes the passionate and conflict-laden stories told on the Western Cape Action Tours as a process of “claiming one’s own memories”.4 This is impossible in national memorials of apartheid atrocities because of the necessity for the official voice to speak with a certain “propriety” and thus efface individual, messy and contradicting accounts. Similarly, on the Tour of Beauty speakers represent themselves, and not an official, editorially sanctioned position.

After each tour, SquatSpace uploads reports, information, links, and photographs onto its website. On the site, “tourists” are able to write about their own experiences, a dialogical process which directly feeds back into the way we carry out subsequent tours. Importantly, rather than exploiting a local political situation for the production of a gallery-based artwork, the group has, in fact, begun to produce a series of relationships. We choose not to instrumentalise these relationships in the production of a commodified art object. Rather, the work-that-art-does5 is to allow “knowledge” to emerge through social interaction in contested places. In the process, SquatSpace’s developing network of local knowledge becomes a resource in its own right, feeding back into the very earth from which it springs.

✘

LUCAS IHLEIN is a member of the SquatSpace Collective.

(Footnotes)1 Dewey, J., 1958, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, New York, p.122 The political theory of Laclau and Mouffe is discussed in relation to participatory art practice in Bishop, C., 2004, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, OCTOBER, no.110, p. 66.3 Tarica, A., 2004, ‘Choosing the Rebel Tour: A visitor to Cape Town takes an alternative look at South Africa’s recent past’, Budget Travel Online, August 5, 2004, <http://budgettravelonline.com/bt-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400728.html>. 4 Grunebaum-Ralph, H., 2001, ‘Re-Placing Pasts, Forgetting Presents: Narrative, Place and Memory in the Time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Research in African Literatures, Vol.32, No. 3, Fall 2001, p. 205.5 Dewey, 1958, p. 3.

Unattended BaggageWhat happens when you see what you think is a piece of unattended baggage, but, in actuality, the baggage is attended - only the person who’s attending it is doing so from inside? There’s a potential conflict of interest here. It’s a grey area. Artist Richard DeDomenici likes to work in grey areas; that’s why he lives in Watford.

Dedomenici decided to find out in a daring street performance outside Helsinki Railway Station in 2005. He managed to remain in his suitcase for several minutes before beginning to asphyxiate. At no point was he exploded by the authorities.

After a successful debut in Finland, the plan was to take the performance to London, but then the London Bombings occurred, and DeDomenici changed his mind.

His work is about risk, but managed risk.

To view footage of the performance, simply cut the accompanying image into 4 equally sized pieces, put them in the correct order, and staple along the left side. Alternatively, visit: www.dedomenici.co.uk

Richard DeDomenici

Art within

museums would be

viewed as intertwined with

a wider ecology of cultural

practices, and everyday life could

be equipped with a set of aesthetic

tools to make sense of, and

enhance, its rhythms, forms

and intensities

Art as Situated Experience.

9

Our Eyes Are Constantly Adjusting.

A week ago I went on the Tour of Beauty, a tour of the Redfern Waterloo area organised by Squatspace. It was a brutally cold day and for ages I couldn’t decide whether to go or not. When I came home that night that indecision seemed faraway and quaint because so much had happened.

The first place we visited was a few minutes walk from my house. The tour bus pulled up near a house that looked about the same as any large terrace in the area. I’d noticed this place walking home before because there are often kids hanging around out the front. One of the workers there, Lyn Turnbull, gave us a short introduction to the centre and then invited us in. The facade gave no indication of what was inside: a short corridor covered in paint and posters led into a spacious hall big enough for a basketball court and a small audience, with a raised stage at the end. Paintings were hung up everywhere, and there were coloured handprints and paintings all over the walls. It was like a shearing shed that had been taken over by exuberant inner-city kids. Outside in the yard was an old upright piano and bits and pieces of furniture.

This set the rhythm for the rest of the tour. We would drive for a while, arrive somewhere and, miraculously, our next speaker would be there waiting for us. I felt like we were part of something clandestine.

By this stage the windows of the bus were fogged up and water was sloshing against them from outside. We drove to Alexandria to pick up one of the speakers from her house, Jenny Munro, from where we would drive back to The Block so she could to talk to us about some of the issues going on there. The rain didn’t look good; she invited us inside. Suddenly I was hunched in a kitchen listening to the founders of the 1972 Canberra Tent Embassy talk about Black politics. This was the highlight of the tour. It wasn’t just what they said and the careful, intense way they went about saying it, but the fact they’d let fifteen or so strangers bundle into their house for tea and biscuits without a second thought. It was humbling and said so much about them.

We visited the Waterloo housing towers where resident Ross Smith was waiting for us. One of the stories he told was about the group of old people dubbed “the jury” who sat each day in the lobby of one of the buildings and passed comment on whoever walked by. In this way, he explained, they checked up on each other: they knew which person left at 10:15am every morning to go to the club, and if they weren’t there then someone would have to go and see why.

From here we walked across the housing estate to where Ray Jackson was waiting for us against an old fence around an oval. After drily congratulating us for turning up in the bad weather, he started telling a story. Though it took him a long time to say the name, it was soon clear he was talking about TJ Hickey. Ray walked us through a detailed story of his death and what had happened. The story was complex and detailed and left us aghast, desolate. The couples in the group found each other and started holding. I’d been standing alone but I moved over to Vanessa and put my arm around her. I looked away to two kids playing basketball on the court with the net ripped off. Ray said goodbye and walked across the park home.

We got back in the bus and drove to a new development made of plastic and glass, in the area renamed “East Redfern” - an example of how language can have real effects by segregating communities - or alternatively, “Legoland”. Here Michael King was waiting for us beside a decorative water feature. Because the weather was still bad he climbed in the bus to speak to us about developments of this kind and the impact they have on communities like Redfern and Waterloo. I was glad to hear him criticise the way Redfern-Waterloo is always framed as ‘a problem’. This is true of the public housing towers in Waterloo, which are geographically hidden away as if they’re something shameful. Really these communities are ones to be proud of and to learn from, as Ross Smith had made so clear earlier on. If East Redfern was the future of Redfern the outlook was grim. Michael King refused a lift and walked home. The Tour of Beauty bus – in a pleasing irony, the same bus that shuttles Sydney Uni students between Fisher Library and Redfern Station precisely so they don’t have to experience Redfern - dropped me off near my house. When I got home I felt overwhelmed by everything I’d seen and heard. On the phone later, Vanessa and I were both lost for words.

A week later I wonder what it is I took away from the tour. I left feeling so surprised at the quiet, intelligent voices of this suburb. They weren’t the shrill voices of politics, and everywhere else; they were voices that moved back and forth, that knew what it felt like to be spoken over. The tour as a whole took about four hours. It’s rare that I spend four hours on any task these days. I feel I understand a little more of what’s going on in Redfern now, but I definitely don’t know the answers.

That night after the tour, as it was getting dark, my housemate Joel and I took the soccer ball and hopped the fence to the old, abandoned Sydney Korean Ethnic School behind our house. We’d been doing some work in the garden which had broken off into kicking the soccer ball back and forth. It was one of those just-moved-out-of home capers I hadn’t done for ages, and it felt so good. I’ve never seen anyone in this school. From what we can tell it closed down years ago and is being let fall apart. From this aspect our own house looked strange and new. It seemed like it was staying light longer, and I said I could feel the long nights coming on. Then I realised if I’d been inside it would be dark now; it was only because we’d stayed out that we could see each other and the white ball flashing across the concrete. Joel said, ‘Our eyes are constantly adjusting’, and this struck me as very true.

www.squatspace.comwww.kiss-chasey.blogspot.com

SquatSpace Redfern WaterlooTour of Beauty.

11

A blog entry by TIM WRIGHT

Art as Situated Experience.

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MELBOURNE:THURSDAY JAN 25 • FILM SCREENING Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini’s 5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela: 6pm, Trades Hall, followed by question and answer session with Oliver Ressler. Sponsored by the Bolivarian Circle, LASNET and the AVSN. Phone: 0431 720 787.

www.ifyouseesomethingsaysomething.net

SYDNEY:FRIDAY JAN 26 • OPENING

Gallery 4a: 6-8pm, Artists: Daniel Boyd, Hito Steyerl, Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini, Dmitry Vilensky, David Griggs, Taring Padi and Zanny Begg. Gallery hours 11-6pm Tuesday to Saturday, exhibition runs until February 11. Phone 9212 0380.MONDAY JAN 29 •FILM SCREENING Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini’s 5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela. Mori Gallery, fi lm 6pm, followed by question and answer session with Oliver Ressler 7.30pm. Sponsored by the Bolivarian Circle, LASNET and the Australian Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN).MONDAY FEB 5 • OPENING

Chrissie Cotter Gallery: 6-8pm. Artists: Contra Filé. Gallery hours 12-6pm Wednesday to Saturday, exhibition runs until February 17. Phone 9335 2222.WEDNESDAY FEB 7 • OPENING Mori Gallery: 6-8 pm. Artists: Arlene TextaQueen, Al Fadhil, Etcétera, Contra Filé, SquatSpace, pvi collective, Astra Howard and Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg. Performance by Justice Yeldham. Gallery hours 11-6pm Wednesday to Saturday, exhibition runs until March 3. Phone 9283 2904.

SATURDAY FEB 3 • WORKSHOP Taring Padi: 3pm, Gallery 4a.SATURDAY FEB 10 • WORKSHOP Contra Filé (Portuguese with English translation): Chrissie Cotter Gallery, 2-4pm. SUNDAY FEB 11 • WORKSHOP Etcétera: Mori Gallery 2-4pm.SATURDAY FEB 10 • CLOSING PARTY The Chocolate Factory Basement 8pm. SUNDAY FEB 18 • SQUATFEST: THE ANTI TROPFEST FILM FEST (text “squat” to 0428 477 128 for venue details) www.squatfest.com.SATURDAY 24 FEB • REDFERN-WATERLOO TOUR OF BEAUTY Presented by SquatSpace; meet at the top of Little Eveleigh St, next to Redfern Train Station 2pm.WEDNESDAY FEB 28 • FEEDBACK Is it possible to bring political art into the gallery? a wrap up and debrief of If You See Something Say Something, at Loose Projects 6pm, level 2, 168 Day St Darling Harbour.

SPONSORS:

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its art funding and advisory body.

VENUES:MORI GALLERY: 168 Day St Darling HarbourGALLERY 4A, THE ASIA-AUSTRALIA ARTS CENTRE: 181-187 Hay Street SydneyCHRISSIE COTTER GALLERY: Pidcock St Camperdown

121212

Exhibition, workshops and newspaper project. Sydney and Melbourne January/February 2007

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:Dmitry Vilenksy (Russia) Contra Filé (Brazil) Etcétera (Argentina) Oliver Ressler (Austria) & Dario Azzellini (Germany)Taring Padi (Indonesia) Richard DeDomenici (UK) Al Fadhil (Iraq)Hito Steyerl (Germany) Arlene TextaQueen (Australia) David Griggs (Australia) pvi collective (Australia) SquatSpace (Australia) Daniel Boyd (Australia) Astra Howard (Australia) Keg de Souza (Australia)Zanny Begg (Australia)

MAIN IMAGE: THE G20 MEMBERS, MADE UP OF THE WORLDS ECONOMIC LEADERS, GET DOWN TO BUSINESS AT THE GRAND HYATT HOTEL IN MELBOURNE NOV 18-19 2006.

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Ray, interviewed Redfern Department of Housing, November 25th, 2006:

“I have lived in Redfern for 15 years when I was first moved into this Department of Housing apartment in James Cook Building. When I first saw the name I thought, well I am going to change that, but I found out that all these building here are heritage and because they originally started out with the navy they all have naval names of some sort.

… I don’t mix much, I just tend to be here working or I am out of the place, but its reasonably quiet, the sirens go every now and then and we call that the Redfern lullaby… but it doesn’t bother me, it’s a neighbourhood that’s vibrant, we have our crime but then so do other places, we have an over zealous police force but then so do other places, I love living here, thirteen flights up, I only wish I was higher…

The changes will destroy us, they are not only out to remove the Black face out of Redfern/Waterloo they want to move the department of housing out too, they want to move the poor out, for such an area as this to be on such valuable land and its been subsidized so the poor can live here goes against any patterns of what the government understand’s as the bottom-line. This place is valuable, very, very, valuable and they want to make money out of it. Their first push, of course, is to get The Block, but that is going to be a fight and a half, and I don’t they are going to win on that, I think it will be a compromise, but it will be loss for us nonetheless. The Block remaining in Aboriginal hands is the only way we is the only way we will see it. What Mickie Mundine wants to do there with the housing company, personally I don’t fully agree with, but its much preferable to what the government wants to do with it.

Now when it comes to removing the Department of Housing, which covers a huge area, again they are going to have a very large scale fight on their hands. One of the humorous stories, if there is humour in these situations, is that we have a large contingent of Russians here – what is termed the white Russians – and they have been here since the Department of Housing took the units over in the late 70s and they have told Frank Sartor and the respective ministers ‘you leave us alone, we must die here and then you can do what you want with the buildings’. Now that is solidarity for you! They are all ancient mate, they are bloody ancient, and they are not going to last long. So we are here by the grace of their ghosts! But there is a grit and a determination – bugger it we will not be moved. We will stay here, they can blow the place up around us.

…I would like to put more resources into the neighborhood. They start good they put in a tennis court but when the nets start to rot that’s it, they never maintain it. They say that the community should maintain it – but this is Department of Housing, its poor, the community can’t maintain it. Welfare these days is really a welfare, welfare, its people with mental health issues, addictions, all that sort of stuff. There needs to be a lot more done. I would also like to change how cliquey this

place can be – these days there is more emphasis on privacy than community. We had one person in the unit opposite there who was dead for five weeks and nobody found him! Later when people were talking about they said they hadn’t seen him for a while…

I like to think we will still be here in ten years, better managed and better self managed. I certainly hope that we have a better class of copper, ‘cause the police are brutal here”.

With the rapid rate of real estate development throughout Sydney and the high costs of property, the inner-city suburb of Redfern has become a prime target for “gentrification”. The suburb is situated between Sydney central and the airport, and is part of the land known as the city-airport corridor. It is not only its proximity to the city that has drawn attention to the area but also the fact that the surrounding suburbs have already been hit by previous waves of gentrification.

In response to the rapidly changing urban and social fabric of the Redfern area we have set out to build a small archive. 2016 is the postcode for Redfern but also indicates the time period we aim to continue this archive project. When viewing the outcomes of the documentation over the duration of the project we will be able to see the changes that have occurred over the last 10 years. Overall, the project will be an archive of the sites studied in the area, the archiving process will not only include photographic documentation of the area, but also a series of interviews with local residents.

The sites we have chosen for this project are the nine key sites, as set by the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (RWA). The RWA, formed in late 2004 is a unique authority, unlike any other in Australia. They have been granted sweeping powers, one major one being to override heritage legislation if they deem it to be of state significance. The head of the RWA, Frank Sartor is also the Minister for Planning, this enables him to essentially request permission from himself to allow new developments to take place.

The complexity of the area means that there are no ideal solutions. Gentrification is a natural part of society, though its effect on residents is part of what we would like to document. The interviews we conduct with the residents will shed some light on the general feeling of the local community as the changes take place.

Redfern is a diverse area with a unique, strong Indigenous community around The Block And it also has a large number of elderly residents living in public housing. Generally it is a low socio-economic area. Overall it can be said that Redfern has a strong community which the process of entrification threatens to fragment and displace.

Lily, interviewed The Block, November 25th 2006:

“I lived in Redfern from 1981 to 1984, and I now work here at the Performance Space. I like that I know lots of people here, that you can walk through The Block and talk to people and there are Black fellas from all over Australia - its like an extended family. I have my great niece here with me today and she is playing in the park and now she has wandered across the road and I don’t have to worry because she is talking to an uncle and aunty. I couldn’t do that is I was in the city, it would be too dangerous.

After the disbandment of the missions and reserves a lot of people were coming to Sydney for work, it was after the depression too, and everyone seemed to congregate here in The Block. They were squatting in the old houses, it’s a meeting place, a gathering ground.

The changes that they want to bring in… they may as well round us back up and put us on the missions, if its going to go ahead like that. They may as well relocate people again, ‘cause that is what is happening, people are being relocated to other areas, like when they relocated people to Mount Druitt where I have been working for the last 15 years, they relocated everyone here straight to Bidwell in Mount Druitt. There are 11 suburbs that constitute Mount Druitt and Bidwell has to be the worst and lots of Aboriginal and Islander peoples end up there. It fragments the community, you break down family relationships, some have been on a hard journey to find their families and then they break apart again. And that’s grief, and we are already born with 218 years of inherited grief, and they are just adding to it. This will affect not just Aboriginal people on The Block, but Aboriginal Australia. This place is the Black heart of Australia.”

The nine key sites identified for change by the RWA:

Australian Technology Park Gibbons Street South Eveleigh Precinct Eveleigh Street Precinct Redfern Railway Station Former Rachel Forster Hospital Formaer Local Court House and Police Station Redfern Public School MacDonaldtown Stabling Yards

We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation.

✘

Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg are both Redfern residents. Keg also works with the SquatSpace collective.

2016: An archive project.

14

CITYtalking - Melbourne City Council Laneway Commissions 20064 October – 5 November 2006, Wednesday to Sunday 10am to 4pm.

PHOTOS: GREG SIMS

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CITYtalking is an interactive public art project by the Action Researcher/Performer, Astra Howard. A conversation booth was designed, constructed and then wheeled around Melbourne’s CBD for five weeks. Each day the booth would stop in six different laneways across the city and members of the public were encouraged to enter inside in order to engage in a conversation with Astra. Neither person could see one another throughout the dialogue instead speaking anonymously via an intercom.

CITYtalking was an interactive public art project by the Action Researcher/Performer, Astra Howard that created a new public forum for otherwise unheard voices within the city. A conversation booth was designed, constructed and then wheeled around Melbourne’s CBD for five weeks encouraging members of the public to enter and engage in a discussion with an anonymous ‘voice’ via an intercom.

By creating non-conventional catalysts and situations for strangers to interact Astra found that members of the public express quite profound personal, social and political feelings. The aesthetic experience of the situation appears to disable the reservations associated with more normal means and contexts of communication. These works of communication are carried out in public spaces in response to the increasing privatisation of public space in cities due to the commercial development pressures including large enclosed shopping malls which allow very limited types of behaviour by certain classes of individuals only. As well, an increase in transit route functions throughout the city diminishes the number of ‘forum spaces’ that would otherwise facilitate interaction. Locals and visitors are rendered voiceless and any dissensus narratives that might potentially exist go unexpressed, unpublished and unheard

The conversation booth facilitated more stories, new stories, and across days, weeks, and months, an alternate consensus formed by people on the street. For example Leonie, a local homeless women approached the conversation booth in a frustrated, hostile manner, assuming the booth was yet another consumer gadget designing her out of the city. When she realised its sole purpose was an intimate story-telling space for people like herself to ‘feel at home’ she became quite emotional, expressing deep feelings about her life. The conversation with the intercom voice continued for more than an hour. Rarely, Leonie was getting priority treatment, and best of all, she knew that for some minutes at least her story would be broadcast like all the rest of the accumulated narratives of the city onto the two LED screens that were positioned on the outside of the booth for all to read and possibly experience. That someone was willing to listen to what she had to say and acknowledge that what she was feeling was not only true but also part of a new dissensus was a revelation.

Many passing pedestrians expressed their genuine enthusiasm for the projects ability to provide a safe space for dialogue between strangers. They also highlighted the lack of such opportunity for individuals to speak about their concerns for the world around them. This being the case, locals began to eagerly await the daily return of the CITYtalking booth to their nearest laneway. Some people it appeared were keen to read the updated stories from the day gone past, where as others enjoyed the conversation booths’ ability to legitimate dialogue between themselves and the passing pedestrians.

Centre Place. Friday 6 October 2006. Leonie - My experience is that nobody wants to know none of the ruling class wants to know. People are dying in the gutter and it is hidden. I am lucky to be here, to have survived and now be able to speak about it. No one wants to listen to what the government did. You are just supposed to get it all together. I do not know anyone else who is in the gutter and is able to speak. They are either dead, in prostitution, in gaol or in a psychiatric ward. I have not had a secure place to this day. I have been homeless over 100 times in 56 years. My poor sister was a ward of the state her whole childhood. She was abused at home and then released on the street like a dog. Nothing is acknowledged. She was picked up by the police in St Kilda and then ended up suspiciously dying. It was all covered up like she had never lived. Fifty years later I have not stopped crying. Why does this have to be hidden? How do I get on my feet again? I need a voice. I am so distressed, I do not know how I have the strength to walk half the time. I cannot believe that at fifty-four years of age you are still told that you are a piece of shit. My poor mother after all the children were taken she took an overdose, my father had a nervous break down. He got locked up in Pent ridge gaol for years.I was demonised in my twenties, I ended up being trafficked in prostitution. I was lucky to have got out of it. I was helped by my late brother. It is not something that you wake up thinking that is what I want to do.

People have to stop being hyper crits and judgemental and asking why is someone in the gutter, that hurts me shocking. I am powerless and voiceless and intimidated to say anything. They take your personality. I have got to go on, and at the moment, what is keeping me is my singing, it gives me a release. I pick songs that accentuate what I am feeling. I have come down here with my amplifier lately to start busking.

Howley Place. Sunday 8 Oct 2006. Joseph - I am originally from London. I moved to Glasgow to study and then moved to Berlin. I have been in Melbourne for the past two years. A woman drew me here.Some of the cultural stuff in this city gets me down. Unless you have a dodgy 80s haircut and drive a ute you are not really considered to be Australian. I gave up being a professional musician and worked selling pharmaceuticals. I sold my house in England, it was all very chicky-mickey, suave and sophisticated. I have started working for a chemical company here in Melbourne. I have found that Australians are not very open in terms of expressing their feelings. It takes a long while in any conversation before you can get someone to actually admit to how they are.

Centre Place. Saturday 14 October 2006. Renato - I was just busking down here at Centre Place. The members of our band met at Tafe. We were about 19 years old then, all misfits.Six years later we are still here, playing a mix of traditional folk music from Europe and the Middle East. We all learnt our instruments for the band, the accordion player for example was a guitarist, we have just got less and less crap as time goes on. It is about anarchy for us, not really about virtuosity.That is why we all like playing on the street, because people are ready to respond and it is also quite fleeting. The public can stay for as long as they like and so can we. In this way it feels a lot freer.

Bourke Street Mall. Sunday 8 October 2006. Jean - I am from the Western suburbs of Melbourne. I have been selling the Big Issue in Melbourne for the past two months. I love seeing the time moving by watching the shadows change on the pavement. I also love seeing the different way people dress and how the city moves.There are some incredibly generous people out there with an extra buck to hand over. Some days it is rainy and often very cold, but I can change my pitch and buy lots of hot chocolates. I might start bringing a thermos. At the moment I love living in Melbourne. The only thing I do not like is the horse poo.

Cohen Place. Thursday 5 October 2006. Jackie - I work at Vincents Dom, a barber shop. I have been working there for 11 years. We were merged from the Southern Cross Hotel, that is where I used to work, starting back in 1977. People often ask me whether I get bored, but I have never thought of that, you have to be a character who likes talking and listening. I was born in Melbourne. I have two children and the same husband. My son, Peter is twenty, my daughter is sixteen. My daughter is in year ten. Liverpool Street. Sunday 15 October 2006. Orriel - I have just been to the theatre, to the philosophical society, a typical type-cast bunch of senile people, philosophising about the meaning of life.I have been going to there for the past eight years. It is full of bored middle-aged people, wearing purple sashes and looking scary as sin. I have tried to take my girlfriend there, but she gets eclectically bored.

16

It is all too rare that a visit to a museum or gallery leaves me satisfied or stimulated, no less thinking about revolution. I am, to be sure, selective about what kinds of work I seek out. That I am more likely to have a satisfying experience walking to the corner grocer than walking the halls of a well-funded art institution says as much about my own desires and where I see creativity operating in the world, as it does about the concerns that occupy most of the art world. But every once and a while a museum visit actually enriches my life. Every now and then, someone uses media in a way that slices through our heavily mediated existence to take me closer to an experience or a body of knowledge otherwise hidden or not easily accessible.

When I traveled to Berkeley, California for the March 26, 2006 opening of Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler’s third collaboration 5 Factories – Worker Control in Venezuela at the Berkeley Art Museum, I was hopeful that I might learn something, but skeptical that it might be yet another unsatisfying art project about a pressing social and political situation. I was pleasantly surprised. The exhibition, accompanying essays, and panel discussion left me thinking not only about the social and political changes underway in Venezuela, but more broadly about the role of creativity in social revolutions and the implications of celebrating this creativity within the museum.

The 5 Factories installation marks the beginning of a yearlong exhibition cycle “Now-time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process.” As the series title indicates, and as organizer Chris Gilbert’s introductory text makes explicit, the works in the series are “not only or even primarily representations of or reflections on this process but…along the path itself.”

This distinction explains one way in which Azzellini and Ressler’s project—and the exhibition cycle as a whole—is important. Unlike other exhibitions about revolutionary processes or projects this one does not, to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre, turn the effects

of a strategy into an aesthetic object. It is a documentary piece, but one that leaves the agency of its subject(s) intact. The fact that the videos take the viewer inside a process and let the workers speak for themselves—that they are not actually subjects, but agents—shifts the dynamic in a way that quelled my usual concerns about agency and representation. Like others who work with the Venezuelan people, Azzellini and Ressler have certainly been selective in their choice to interview workers from five worker-controlled factories. Yet their project succeeds in giving the viewer direct access to the voices, experiences, and insights of workers engaged in struggling for and reclaiming the means of production. It reminds the viewer that what is going on right now in Venezuela is not only—or even primarily—about Chavez.

The six ten-minute video installations feature interviews with workers from five different factories—a textile company, an aluminum plant, a tomato factory, a cocoa factory, and a paper factory. Each of these factories has been reconfigured under a system of co-management sanctioned by the 1999 Bolivarian constitution. The constitution provides legal basis for returning inactive factories to productivity as cooperatives governed and owned by the workers. In some cases, the state provides start-up loans; in others it helps purchase the factory in partnership with the cooperative.

Through the videos the workers explain decision-making in the cooperative and the role of the factory in supporting the surrounding community. They provide thoughtful reflections on intellectual traditions with which they are engaged and the significance of their efforts. Although the situation in each factory is different, the workers share a commitment to a more equitable production process and a better way of life. The interviews, interspersed with sequences of the production process at each plant, give visitors to the museum direct entry into the process of factory reconfiguration. It is to Azzellini and Ressler’s credit that the film is a clear vehicle for accessing this information. It provides a level of detail and a clear voice—from the people—that is not readily available.

But what, you may ask, is particularly liberating about industrial factory production? Perhaps nothing is inherently liberating about it, or about any form of labor per se. But, in a world where labor is a fact of life for

most people, the potential for an otherwise oppressive relationship to be transformed into a liberatory one remains latent until it is brought to the fore. Such a transformation is a decisive step in a larger process to transform social relations. For, as Elio Sayago, an environmental technician and member of the aluminum factory Alcasa’s Board of Directors states, “if we concentrate our workers, our people, on the construction of new human relations, which is for us what is at stake, we are guaranteeing the destruction of the… blocking, up until now, of the potential for human growth.” The electricity behind this vision comes through the videos loud and clear.

Carlos Lanz, president of the aluminum factory Alcasa sums it up well when he asks “How does a company push toward socialism within a capitalist framework?” It is clear they are trying by beginning to establish coherent values outside of capital in practice, and making them law in their constitution. Article 113, for example, ensures “the existence of adequate consideration or compensation to serve the public interest,” in the case of the exploitation of natural resources which are “the property of the Nation.” Article 114 makes “economic crime, speculation, hoarding, usury, the formation of cartels and other related offenses” illegal. For the worker-controlled factories, a commitment to social interest is clear. As social production companies (ESP) they give 10 percent of their profit back to the community in which they are based through a local development fund. In two of the factories, everyone gets the same pay regardless of their position in the company. The five factories featured in this film are among 155 that, according to labor minister Maria Cristina Iglesias, are already being managed by workers cooperatives. They are a start along the path of an important shift in our thinking about industrial production and other forms of labor. For, as Azzellini stated during the opening panel, the point is to “put an economy to work for the benefit of society, not put society to work for the benefit of an economy.” 5 Factories provides a detailed look at factory reconfiguration, but it is only one component of the recent changes. The film builds upon one of Azzellini and Ressler’s previous collaborations, Venezuela from Below (2004), which also uses interviews to illustrate a variety of programs and changes, from the oil sabotage to farmer’sstruggles,

land reforms, grassroots media projcts, and a women’s bank. Here again the strengh of the project lies in the approach, as viewers hear the thoughts and stories of the people engaged in each action, in their own voice.

That Gilbert is using museum resources to create propaganda “to support, defend, and promote the Venezuelan revolution and the Bolivarian government of Hugo Chavez” is worth some attention. “Works or exhibitions that advance revolutionary aims,” he writes, “are, by virtue of what they connect with and contribute to, quite creative.” This exhibition cycle is evidence of Gilbert’s commitment to, as he says, “put the superstructure back on the table,” to acknowledge that the political, economic, and social conditions in which we live are the context in which creativity operates, and the sphere in which art gains its relevance and its urgency.

Gilbert’s curatorial agenda distinguishes his work as a kind of organising in a field where most curators are selecting. This exhibition cycle is in service of agency for the poor, challenging the notion that art and exhibitions are only ever in service of the upper classes. By using museum resources to make visible the inherent creativity of a social revolution, Gilbert subverts the internal micropolitics of art discourse by ignoring them. He puts the macropolitics of the struggle against capitalism back on the table. That he does this from within the institution—the art museum—that perhaps best epitomizes the architecture of bourgeois legitimacy, shows that it is possible to treat the museum as a vehicle in service of something larger than itself. This exhibition cycle is, thus, more than an important gesture within the world of art. A powerful piece of media has been produced—a piece of revolutionary propaganda—that will travel beyond the institutions walls and back out in the world where new creativities take form. And for a brief moment, the institution is transformed into a safe space in which a visitor can gain direct access to information on a very sensitive topic and come to her own conclusions.

✘

Ava Bromberg is a writer, thinker, and student of cities currently based in Los Angeles.

Endnote: Chris Gilbert resigned from Berkeley Museum after this exhibition. To read why go to www.metamute.org/?=en/node/7834.

Along the Path of Revolution: Worker Control in Venezuela, Agency in Art.

17

It was December 20, 2003 in Buenos Aires, the “heroic phase” of the Glorious Argentine Revolution was already over, and the politicians who were all supposed to go without even one remaining had all come back home to roost – including the neoliberal thief, former president Carlos Menem. A movement of young artists had begun making life-sized black-and-white photocopies of the colorful revolutionaries whose effigies, captured on film by innumerable photographers, now formed the folklore of an inexorable return to normal. Mounted on hinged wooden backings with snap-out sticks to prop them up in public, these were the Gente Armada, or “Army People.” But the Spanish title doubles the sense of “armed and dangerous” with the idea of a mechanical trick, so it could just as well be “Phony People.” Set up on the Plaza de Mayo like a fairground attraction, a group of them featured cut-out or missing heads, so that the passing admirer could pose behind them and become “part of the movement.” The artists, who had participated for years in the illegal, carnivalesque demonstrations against accomplices of the former dictatorship, had a slogan to accompany their satirical creation. In English it goes something like this: “We put our bodies on the line, you put your face in the picture.”

The bodies on the line were Etcétera, who think of themselves less as a group of artists and more as a movement of the surrealistic imagination. During the heyday of the anti-militarist escraches, from 1998 to 2001, they would stage delirious theatrical events in front of the houses of former murderers and torturers, as part of a larger project of denunciation carried out by the sons and daughters of those who disappeared in Argentina’s “dirty war” (H.I.J.O.S: Children for Identity and Justice, against Oblivion and Silence). Politics has always been at the heart of their concerns, but protest tactics of the usual sort would never be enough for Etcétera, whose story is filled with unlikely inventions

and improbable encounters. While seeking to squat an empty building for their activities, the collective happened upon the abandoned premises of the former Argonauta publishing house founded by the surrealist Juan Andralis, filled with dusty books, photographs, images, paintings, sculptures, costumes and old mannequins from the 1930s-40s. It was a turning point, a moment of “objective chance,” just as Marcel Duchamp had described it. They built up a library, a darkroom, a studio and a small theater with seats recovered from an old cinema, and they used the materials around them as the accessories of a unique aesthetic, somewhere between the guerrillas of the 1970s and the “gay science” of a Nietzschean future. Their relation to the public became clear when they created the Niño Globalizado (Globalized Boy), with a hand-pump that the art audience could use to bloat the child’s belly into a distended globe of hunger. But that was only one station on a longer journey. The point was to develop an art as poetically unpredictable as a dream, and then hurl it like a football into an unbelievable reality.

One of their early protest pieces was the satirical soccer match, “Argentina vs. Argentina,” held before the home of the former dictator, General Galtieri, in June of 1998 during the World Cup pitting Argentina against England. It recalled the waste of life in the Malvinas war under the direct command of Galtieri, but also the shame of the 1978 World Cup, held in Argentina beneath the spotlights of the media even while torture and assassination continued off camera. The mock soccer match reached its conclusion when a member of H.I.J.O.S. kicked a penalty ball full of red paint into the former dictator’s house, triggering the climax of the public denunciation. Video recordings show the paint spattering onto the hats of police lined up in rows around the building. At other escraches, like the one against Dr. Raúl Sánchez Ruiz, the Etcétera performance served as a lure, a decoy, distracting the attention of the police at a critical moment. It’s impressive to realize that interventions like this unfolded in Argentina at the exact time when groups such as Reclaim the Streets were inventing the carnivalesque demonstrations of the antiglobalization movement. In this case, the political carnival would culminate in a national insurrection.

After the revolt of December 20 and 21, 2001, the streets of Buenos Aires and all of Argentina became an open theater of action, even as the escrache generalized into the major form of political demonstration. Etcétera fulfilled

some of their wildest dreams at this time, including Otra realidad es posible (Another Reality Is Possible), in which they dressed up as a kind of medieval troupe of knives and forks with tin-pot helmets and silvery shields, comically attacking transnational corporations like McDonalds, YPF and Shell with the oversized tableware they had made in an occupied aluminum factory. The riot-performance recalled the hunger stalking the provinces; but it also represented a fusion between the pot-banging middle-classes and the militant piqueteros armed with wooden sticks and shields. Their most outlandish event was the Mierdazo, in February 2002, when they invited people to hurl bags of shit and rotting vegetables at the Congress building and to “crap on the system” during the vote of the 2002 national budget. The action had been approved by due process in the inter-barrio assembly and was destined to a huge popular success, leading to a similar assault on transnational banks like HSBC. Television news clips – often the only trace of Etcétera performances, since the group was more concerned with acting than recording – portray the protest scenario on the congressional steps beneath the caption, “Algo Huele Mal” (something really stinks). “Is this your form of protest?” asked the man with the TV camera. “Yes, because they treat us like shit,” replied an anonymous woman who spoke the blatant truth for everyone.

Those days of the truth are gone, however, “cleaned up” by the return of the politicians and the police; and now we have all become “phony people,” wandering around the world circus, connected by wires and whispers, watching, wondering, waiting for the next lucky chance. Maybe Etcétera realised this around the time when they photocopied me into the Gente Armada, shrunken down to the size of a dwarf, with a copy of the journal Multitudes in my hands and an even more diminutive Karl Marx as a sidekick. But the return of the police and the politicians has not stopped people from protesting, nor Etcétera from stumbling into more improbable encounters. Such was the case on another day of celebration, November 5, 2005, when the President of the World Mr. G.W. Bush came flying to the city of Mar del Plata in Argentina for the failed Fourth Summit of the Free Trade Area of the Americas – one of the biggest mistakes of an administration that has made them its specialty. U.S. Marines were directing traffic and people in a supposedly sovereign country, while on the other side of the fence, Chavez and Maradona worked up

their worshipers to an anti-imperial frenzy, tossing around the name of G.W. Bush like a political football. Out under the sun on a peaceful beach, far from the madding crowds of demonstrators, a strange commando appeared as if by magic from the sea, waving photocopied bazookas and machine guns with bright red pennants that said BANG! at the end of the barrel. Just as they reached they beach, took up their combat positions, and unfurled the banner that revealed their name and their creed – ERRORISTAS – who else but G.W. came flying through the skies, on his way to the refusal of his policies by Latin America? And what greater mistake could the Errorists make, if not to raise the photocopied guns in a pointed salute?

Sure enough, in a matter of minutes a whole platoon of policemen were there, dogmatic and unblinking, to find the Errorists laughing and lounging on the beach. “What’s the matter, can’t you see our weapons are made of cardboard?” they asked the officers. And so they were, manifestly. “It doesn’t matter, we have orders, this is serious,” the head cop replied, trying to hang on to some authority. “We were filming a scene in a movie, a parody of the media’s exaggerations of terrorism,” the Errorists explained in return. “But then you need a permit,” the policeman countered, sweating in the sun, with the locals incredulous all around, and the Errorists filming everything. Out came the permit, specially forged for the occasion. G.W. hadn’t even yet faced off against Chavez and Maradona, but the tide was already turning. And the best, amidst the banter and the jokes and the liberation of the locals “by mistake,” was when one of the Errorists asked the chief cop, “Is this what you always wanted when you were young, what you always dreamed of, to be a policeman?” He looked back at them, at the costumes and the props and the beach and the cameras, and he said, “Are you kidding? Me, I always wanted to be an actor!”

Play your parts, backwards or forwards, right-side up or up-side down, or leave them behind if you choose. And just imagine what might happen, if the Errorist International washed up by mistake on a beach in Australia.

✘

Brian Holmes is an activist writer, for more information go to: www.u-tangente.org.

Washed Up on the Beach:

The Errorist International

Imagination…, that mistress of error and falsehood, all the more deceitful because sometimes it isn’t.” PASCAL, Pensées

“It is not the world as a thing in itself, but the world as imagination (as error) that is so rich in meaning, deep, wonderful, pregnant with happiness and unhappiness.” NIETZSCHE, Human, All Too Human

In November 2005, security at the fourth Summit of the Americas transformed a 250-block section of the central coast of Mar del Plata into a hermetic enclave. In this resort town, a place where the vacation fantasies of a majority of Argentines are exercised, local residents could only enter their homes after showing police-issued ID cards. The morning before the close of the Summit, a peaceful mass demonstration, led in spirit by Hugo Chavez, crossed dozens of blocks of one of the unrestricted sectors of the city. That same afternoon, a more radical march was planning to break through one of the few access routes to the military and police cordon that guarded the closed neighborhood where the heads of state were holding their discussions. The conclusion was swift: police deployed a mysteriously moderate repression, some of the demonstrators destroyed stores, there was an arbitrary round-up, dozens of individuals ended up in police stations, and everything was edited and reproduced by the communications media in living colour on the news. Mar del Plata, cordoned off under the pretext

of a global terrorist threat while being shaken by these street mobilisations, gave birth to a new political movement, adept to these anachronisms and promoting a revolution through affect: The International Errorist (IE). Arising from the Etcetera… Errorism was formed by extension and, in a certain sense, by overcoming the ideas and practices of the original group, and by organising itself in reticular cooperation with groups acting beyond the almost transparent Argentine border. The following are some fragments of a conversation in Buenos Aires between Santiago Garcia Navarro and members of Etcetera…

FEDERICO ZUKERFELD: Errorism arose, in a way, as a continuation of the Armed People project. In 2004, we noted that the enemy in Argentina was being constituted in the shape of the picketer. The media created an imaginary concept where the picketers were dangerous, delinquents, different from us, and comprised a new social sphere which nobody really understands because they have their own music, their own way of dressing, their own way of talking, their own codes. That “enemy” had to be separated from society, because it could potentially some day form part of a guerrilla force. The main accusation is that they went to the demonstrations armed and with their faces covered. If one takes an image of the pickets and compares it with the Palestinian Intifada, there wouldn’t be much difference: the same neckerchief, the same stick, the same gunman, but in different latitudes. Out of that, we made Armed People: photocopies enlarged to natural size of different figures that reflect identifiable characters from fiction or reality.

When we discovered that George Bush was going to come to Mar del Plata, we thought of one of the slogans that he always used in his revelations: ‘Wherever they go, we’ll hunt them down.’ That is, that wherever Bush went we would go in order to denounce him. Our main idea was to form a kind of image-mirror of the Middle East. In the same style as other actions of ours, the idea was to appear dressed as terrorists, so that the image would be disseminated by the international mass media, who are the same ones who constructed that figure. We sought to have that figure spread a message: ‘Watch out, they are also waging a war there, watch out, this could be the next point…’ Afterwards, we began to work through theatre and cinema.

“Errorism” was born because we couldn’t speak about terrorism. When we began to research how the terrorists trained and acted, one of our colleagues, Ariel, sent an email entitled ‘How a suicide of (who knows where) prepares’. However, Hotmail blocked it and we became paranoid. We became aware that strong censorship exists on the subject, because either it appears that you are supporting terrorist methods, or you are condemning the entire Muslim society. One day, when a colleague of ours was writing something on the computer, he pressed the spell-check and the first word that appeared was “errorism”. This colleague had wanted to write “terrorism”. The spell-check said: ‘“errorism” doesn’t exist, did you mean “eroticism” or “terrorism”?’ That’s where the name came from. On one hand, it is an opposition to and denunciation of the stereotype. But on the other hand, we had found the right word, one that had its own philosophical discussion on the subject of error.

SANTIAGO GARCÍA NAVARRO: Errorism would be a way of disarming that opposition…

ZUKERFELD: I’m not so sure. Errorism breaks down barriers because it has humour and facilitates debate that would be very difficult to engender otherwise.

GARIN: Errorism emerged, in large part, with this idea of error, which appeared as a totally random objective. This was a time when the English police killed a Brazilian in the subway and said that it was in error, when the CIA had taken a German citizen to a concentration camp and said that it was in error. Then the word “error” began to be used within the discourse on terror. When we began to write the Errorist Manifesto, we saw that, on one hand, it opened up the possibility of discussing something that is very difficult to discuss because it is completely blocked, but on the other hand, it makes it relative to such a level that the debate becomes very complex.

ZUKERFELD:The argument for the discussion is that upon reproducing that image you would be collaborating with the system that oppresses the women, and to include the weapons would be endorsing their use. The symbol for the weapon is so strong that the people see it as a real weapon. That’s why we use the “bang”, which is an essential comical element. We integrate the theatrical action with a comedy aesthetic, by the positions of the actors, by the characters, by the makeup, etc. Onomatopoeia serves that purpose. The first declaration we made was: ‘We are all errorists,’ a play on words with ‘we are all terrorists.’

GARIN:Terrorism has become a form of control of such magnitude that now it isn’t even aimed at those who form part of a given ideology, social class or culture. And the most complex part is that it begins to generate an everyday logic.

NAVARRO:And which type of social configuration believes that it is being defended from a terrorist attack?

GARIN: At the time of the ‘76 coup in Argentina, what they installed was state terrorism, which created a situation of permanent paranoia such that you could denounce your neighbour with the excuse that there were guerrillas who wanted to introduce Communism. Then the concept of “State terrorism” was accepted.

However, when the dictatorship made its defense, it said that it had committed errors and excesses, the same kind of speech given by the United States. Now the next target is Iran, and perhaps the next after that will be Venezuela or wherever. But I believe that this is approaching Latin America.

NAVARRO:In Mar del Plata, I perceived that the people were afraid, above all, of the enormous security apparatus, much more than of the hypothetical threat of a terrorist attack. The fear was that, at any given moment, the security apparatus would become the object of discussion, that it would produce chaos right there, which to a certain extent produced the afternoon demonstrations. The strongest image is that of dozens and dozens of federal police positioned in ranks, in the first of the three cordons that defended the hotel where Bush was staying, and in front of them, the spectacle of a completely deserted avenue, without one person visible, without one parked car. And so you ask yourself: ‘Which one is the enemy?’ It became very clear to me that the enemy was, to a great extent, a fiction created in order to facilitate control and to keep common people away from the “affairs of state”.

ZUKERFELD:We went to the morning march, and in the middle of the show we acted in disguise for the cameras. We are artists, so for us it worked out well… But when we came to the part with Chavez, it all got heavy. We didn’t want to feel like a flock being led. We had our Errorist autonomy and we left. We prepared for the afternoon march, and that led to an internal group discussion with the 25 Errorists that were there. I took the position that we shouldn’t go, as different sources had told us that everything would turn sour that afternoon, and I thought that we could fall at the first turn. We discussed this for three hours and decided that we had a responsibility as an organisation. In the end we went, but without the “weapons”. Only with pamphlets and handkerchiefs. However, our participation only lasted five minutes, because, as soon as we arrived at the march, the tear gas began and everyone ran.

The next day, four hours before the Summit was due to close so we went to the beach and spent the time filming a scene for the film Operation Bang. Two minutes later, from all sides, sirens could be heard. They began to close the beach and a lot of armed police arrived with dogs: ‘Freeze, freeze, freeze, freeze, freeze.’ And we had to say: “It’s an error. The guns are made of cardboard”. And we said: “We’re actors, we’re shooting a movie”, and we showed them a municipal authorisation that we had made ourselves, but which worked. A police officer said: “Who’s in charge?” And one of our colleagues, el Mota, said: “I am”, and the two of them went off to negotiate.

They ended up having this big discussion, and many people showed up with cameras, and then our colleague, like an Evangelist, began to ask the people who were there, one by one: “And you, have you never committed an error?” And a woman said: “I got married in error, honey”, and so on; each of them began to have a cathartic moment. Later, the police arrived with the authorisation letter and said: “It’s okay. You can carry on now”. And that’s how it ended.

The Errorist error consisted, in this case, of aiming our guns at Bush in error; they came to stop us in error, and also in error, they let us go, because the letter was a fake. And there we said: “This is the heart of the piece, this is the key”. And there also our theory of the spect-actor and the actor-cide was born. ✘ 18

Bang! The Revolution Through Affect.

“Strengthening our community, building a sustainable future” is the theme for Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC) fifteenth series of meetings, which will be hosted in Australia throughout 2007.

Commencing with the Senior Officials Meeting in Canberra in January, this year’s events will involve over 100 days of ministerial and official level talks focusing on energy security, transport, mining, governance, climate change and trade liberalisation, culminating in the APEC Economic Leaders Meeting in Sydney in September.

This final event, which brings together the leaders of APEC’s 21 members, including US President George W Bush, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in addition to thousands of delegates, and the international media, was recently declared by Australian PM John Howard to be “the most significant series of international meetings” ever held on local soil.

Initially formed by Australian initiative in 1989, APEC has swollen from a membership of 12 to 21, including Australia; Brunei Darussalam; Canada; Chile; People’s Republic of China; Hong Kong, China; Indonesia; Japan; Republic of Korea; Malaysia; Mexico; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea; Peru; Republic of the Philippines; The Russian Federation; Singapore; Chinese Taipei; Thailand; United States; and Vietnam. India has consistently expressed interest in joining and may be given observer status this year.

Together the APEC nations account for over 40 per cent of the world’s population, 56 per cent of global GDP, and around 48 per cent of world trade.

According to Alan Oxley from Monash University’s APEC Study Group, the fact that both China and the US are members of APEC gives the organisation particular relevance in the current period.

“The APEC region is host to the two most important drivers of the global economy - China’s rise as a global economic power and, less spectacular, but possibly more profound, the demonstration in the US economy of how the world’s economies will function in the information age,” Mr Oxley said in APEC’s 2006 Outlook report, released in December.

Historically APEC has focussed primarily on bolstering global free trade and fostering technical cooperation between its member nations. However, more recently the organisation has widened its scope to focus on the need to liberalise investment and has boosted at least its rhetorical commitment to the idea of sustainable development.

However, trade liberalisation remains central to APEC’s activities, particularly for the USA. Last year’s Hanoi meeting for example reaffirmed the revival of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Doha Development

Agenda as APEC’s’ ‘top priority’.

The faltering Doha round has also revived discussions on the feasibilty of an Asia Pacific Free Trade Agreement (FTA), with the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council and the APEC Business Advisory Council releasing a joint study on the issue in November last year.

Despite concerns about the political viability of such an agreement, the APEC Leaders Meeting in Hanoi launched an official investigation into the long-term possibility of a regional FTA, noting it was time “for APEC to seriously consider more effective avenues toward trade and investment liberalisation in the Asia-Pacific region.”

The investigation is due to report on its findings to the APEC leaders meet in Sydney on September 8-9.

APEC’s current attempt to breathe life into the global free trade agenda is a familiar role for the organisation.

The first Economic Leaders meeting, which is now famous for its convention of cloaking representatives in attire associated with the host nation, was called by Bill Clinton and held on Blake Island, Washington in 1993 in an attempt to help bolster the derailed Uruguay round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks. The leaders donned bombardier jackets for this important task.

“…we pledge our utmost efforts to bring the Uruguay Round to a successful conclusion by December 15. We are determined the Asia Pacific region will lead the way in taking concrete steps to produce the strongest possible outcome in Geneva. Increased participation by APEC economies in a strengthened GATT system also will facilitate greater regional cooperation,” the leaders statement from 1993 declared.

By 1994 the Urugauy round was completed, resulting in an agreement to form the Word Trade Organsiation (WTO).

The same year APEC’s leaders, clothed in Batik shirts from Indonesia adopted the “Bogor Goals”, declaring their aim of reducing tariffs in the region to between zero and five per cent by 2010 for industrialized economies and 2020 for developing nations.

The Bogor meet congratulated itself on APEC’s role in rivatilising the Urugauy round of talks.

“We are pleased to note the significant contribution APEC made in bringing about a successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round. We agree to carry out our Uruguay Round commitments fully and without delay and call on all participants in the Uruguay Round to do the same,“ the multilateral organsiation’s 1994 leaders statement crowed.

“We call for the successful launching of the World Trade Organization. Full and active participation in and support of the WTO by all APEC economies is key to our ability to lead the way in strengthening the multilateral trading system.”

By 1995, when APEC was held in Osaka and the leaders wore business suits, lauding free trade had become a well worn theme and one which was embraced with enthusiasm as the Asian region enjoyed rapid economic growth.

“The Asia-Pacific is experiencing the most striking economic growth in the world,” the Osaka Leader’s Declaration noted.

“We believe our economic reforms based on market-oriented mechanisms have unleashed our peoples’ creativity and energy and enhanced the prosperity and living standards of our citizens in the region and the world as a whole.”

By 1998, following the Asian financial crisis, APEC’s annual declarations had taken a more somber turn, with the organisation again donning batik shirts to profess the “need to deal urgently” with the crisis and its repercussions in the region and beyond.

But by 1999, those worst hit by the Asian crisis were entering safer waters and appropriately APEC members donned sailor jackets in New Zealand to celebrate “ten years of unprecedented cooperation in our region” and the “improved performance and prospects of our economies.”

Through a dizzying array of costume changes, APEC has continued to say much the same thing to the present day. From silk jackets at Shanghai to ao dai at last year’s Hanoi meet, APEC has maintained its annual production of a pro-free trade treatise at each Leaders Meet with admirable enthusiasm.

But aside from midly amusing photos of poker faced leaders in more colourful than usual clothes, what has APEC actually achieved over its 18 years of existence?

It seems, according to many observers, not very much at all.

In his book entitled APEC and the Construction of Pacific Rim Regionalism John Ravenhill, a Professor at the ANU’s International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies argues in fact that in terms of trade liberalisation APEC’s results have been dismal. Little meaningful progress has been made towards the achievement of the Bogor Goals, and despite APEC’s preference for regional trading arrangements, bilateral FTAs have mushroomed.

The organisation’s Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalisation scheme as well as it’s non-binding Investment Principles have both proved unmitigated failures in terms of liberalisation, Ravenhill writes.

Unlike the WTO, all APEC’s liberalising goals are voluntary and, unlike bilateral agreements, come without guarantees of reciprocity. Unsurprisingly then, few nations have opted to unilaterally dismantle trade barriers, which in many cases protect domestically important and politically sensitive industries.

APEC’s value then is not so much in what it does, but in the annual opportunity for lobbying and alliance formation it provides. Most of this occurs with an eye to future

outcomes within the WTO.

For the US APEC offers an opportunity for it to play a leading role in the Pacific region, and an instrument to help assert its liberalising agenda within the WTO. APEC’s existence also discourages the formation of pan-Asian economic forum which could exclude Western nations, thus providing the US with a valuable opportunity to build a free trade consensus within the region.

The Asia Pacific is now a more important trade partner to the US than Western Europe, and is regarded by it as a regional bulwark against EU advances and as a lever to strengthen Washington’s economic agenda within the WTO, according to John Gershman from leftwing US think tank Foreign Policy In Focus.

The way APEC attempts to influence the outcomes of WTO talks can clearly be seen in the 2001 Economic Leaders Statement and the US-sponsored Shanghai Accord which were issued just before an important WTO meeting.

“In November, a major decision will be taken at the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference. Its outcome will have long-term implications for our future,” the Leaders Statement said.

“Our choice is unmistakably for a stronger Multilateral Trading System with greater opportunities for all. We strongly support the launch of the WTO new round at the conference, recognizing that the current slowdown in the world economy has added to its urgency. We agree that, once launched, the new round should be concluded expeditiously.”

Meanwhile, the Shanghai Accord attempted to more explicitly set out how APEC nation’s would achieve the Bogor Goals as well as strengthening the organisation’s Individual Action Plan Peer Review to encourage stricter compliance with APEC’s Bogor roadmap.

At the November WTO Conference the Doha round of talks, which continue to this day were launched.

The revival of this round remains at the centre of APEC’s free trade agenda, with last year’s Hanoi meet warning that “the failure of the Doha Round would be too grave for our economies and for the global multilateral trading system” and adding that APEC nations would “spare no efforts to break the current deadlocks and achieve an ambitious and overall balanced outcome of the round with the development dimension being at its core.”

As the Doha talks continue to languish, expect more the same sort of rhetoric to emerge from Sydney’s Drizabone clad (just a guess) Economic Leaders, as they shape up for the big time of the WTO.

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Kate Carr is a Sydney based writer and artist.

Dressed for success: APEC and free trade.

“I’m gonna get dressed for success

shaping me up for the big time, baby.”

Roxette 1989

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Climate change was the best thing that ever happened to proponents of the nuclear industry. What better way to back environmentalists into a corner than with their own arguments? Over the past two years, the Howard Government’s rapid turn around from climate change skeptic to true believer has been remarkable to say the least.

It all began in August 2005, when Minister for Education, Science and Training Brendan Nelson announced that it was time to talk nukes.

Earlier that year the New Statesman magazine had revealed a well-orchestrated public relations push by the British nuclear power industry in the lead up to the British election. The campaign targeted key journalists and politicians at a series of briefings selling nuclear power as the “clean and green” answer to climate change. The campaign resulted in a flood of positive media coverage.

It wasn’t long before Australian politicians were chanting the “clean and green” mantra too.

Nelson’s call for a “debate” on all things nuclear came as a surprise to many in the environmental and trade union movements, who had been actively participating in that very debate since the 1970s – on the winning side. Most Australians have never supported a domestic nuclear energy industry, and many rightfully asked: what more is there to debate?

But the Australian media dutifully took up the baton, as politicians from both major political parties echoed Nelson’s call.

For a few months it was unclear what the debate would consist of – aside from calls for one. There was a lot of posturing about our “responsibility” as one of the most uranium-rich countries to play a lead role in curbing human-induced climate change (from a Government that didn’t believe it existed 12 months before) by supplying the world with yellowcake; there were stacked frameworks and committees set up; and legislation prematurely pushed through parliament. None of which constitute what anyone could consider debate.

The major development in 2005 was the introduction of the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Bill, which strips the powers of the Northern Territory Government, and of Aboriginal Land Councils, to oppose the establishment of a nuclear dump within their jurisdictions. The Bill gives the responsible Federal Minister the power to declare a proposed site suitable and also extinguishes all interests — such as Native Title — that the Commonwealth does not already hold on the site.

Despite all of this, it was still unclear what exactly we were debating: domestic nuclear energy production; increased uranium export; or becoming the world’s dumping ground

for spent fuel. There was very little detail, in media coverage or from the government. It wasn’t until mid last year that Howard finally embraced the pariah, using a press conference in Washington during a visit to the US President to announce to Australians that an Australian nuclear energy industry was on the table. “I want a full-blooded debate in Australia about this issue,” he told journalists.

There it was again: the D word. This time the ‘debate’ involved the establishment of the Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy Review Taskforce, headed by former Telstra boss Ziggy Switskowski.

In all the debate about debates, one thing seems to have been largely overlooked: a domestic nuclear power industry is actually not an immediate priority in Australia. Nuclear reactors are not legal under current Federal law and when the Switkoswki report was delivered in late December last year, even John Howard said that going nuclear now makes no sense when it is still significantly cheaper to use coal.

In fact the debate has been staged in order to bring Australian public opinion onside so that the Federal Government can push ahead with increased uranium exports and a nuclear waste dump in Central Australia – most likely to take waste from other countries.

The Chairman of the Federal Government’s Uranium Industry Framework, Dr John White, has candidly admitted that “If we agree to [take waste] for America, we will never again have to put young Australians in the line of fire. We will never have to prove our loyalty to the US by sending our soldiers to fight in their wars, because a project like this would settle the question of our loyalty once and for all.”

And the Switkowski report estimates that Australia could double its earnings from exporting uranium to more than $1 billion a year by the end of the decade. Production in Australia is set to rise from the record 12,360 tonnes of yellowcake last year to more than 20,000 tonnes by 2014-15. Of course the uranium industry can’t, by any stretch of the PR machine, be painted as environmentally friendly. It uses huge amounts of water and, once used for nuclear power, produces highly toxic waste. So proponents of an expansion of the industry have instead chosen to focus on our “global responsibility” to provide “clean energy” to the rest of the world.

Professor Ian Lowe, an emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University, sees parallels between the tactics being used now and those used by Malcolm Fraser’s Government in the late 1970s: “The Fraser Government was desperate to approve the [Ranger] mine. It used the argument that an ‘energy-starved’ world needed our uranium. This was an attempt to turn selling uranium from a crass commercial operation into a moral imperative. It conjured up the picture of small children freezing in the dark

if we were so irresponsible as to deny them our uranium.”

According to Lowe, the argument that nuclear energy does not produce greenhouse gases is false. He says that while the stage of energy production may not, other stages in the fuel cycle do: “Significant amounts of fossil fuel energy are used to mine and process uranium ores, enrich the fuel and build nuclear power stations.” It also needs to be remembered that uranium is a finite resource, he says. “The known high-grade uranium ores [in the world] could supply the existing nuclear power stations for 40 or 50 years. If everyone went nuclear tomorrow, known stocks would last for approximately five years.”

“People are desperate to believe there’s a technical fix to climate change,” says Lowe, “that there’s some bit of wizardry that will mean life can go on more or less uninterrupted. Unfortunately politicians are very happy to pander to that desire.”

THE FOX FINDINGS: AUSTRALIA’S ROLE IN THE NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE

In July 1975 a commission was established by the Whitlam Labor government to inquire into environmental aspects of a mining proposal by the then Australian Atomic Energy Commission (now the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation) and Ranger Uranium Mines Pty Ltd.

What is now known as the ‘Fox report’, after the commission’s chairman Mr Justice Fox, is widely recognised as one of Australia’s most important environmental impact reports. The Inquiry’s reports were presented in October 1976 and May 1977, to the Fraser Government.

The Fox inquiry was formally an inquiry into the proposal for the Ranger uranium mine, but it effectively became a broader inquiry into Australia’s role in the nuclear fuel cycle. While some of the evidence presented was specifically about the problems of mining uranium in Kakadu National Park, a lot of the submissions, both in favour of and against Ranger, dealt with the broader issue of whether Australia should be involved in the nuclear fuel cycle at all.

The Fox report found that there were two serious problems with exporting uranium. The first was that uranium inevitably produces radioactive waste in nuclear reactors, and there was not — and still isn’t — a solution for storing the waste for the long periods for which it needs to be isolated from the biosphere. The second problem it identified was that if we export uranium we’re inadvertently aiding the development of nuclear weapons by increasing the amount of fissile material available.

It did not rule out uranium mining, but recommended that it be strictly regulated and controlled. Those still opposed to further uranium mining in Australia point out that the problems identified by the Fox report remain unresolved.

The current federal policy with regard to uranium exports, which requires recipient countries to sign bilateral safeguards agreements and be signatories to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, is based on the findings of the Fox inquiry.

KEEPING TABS ON OUR YELLOWCAKE

Federal Resource Minister, Ian McFarlane, argues that the best way to ensure that uranium does not end up in nuclear weapons is for Australia to be a major supplier of it. According to the Minister’s logic, if Australia does not sell uranium to fast developing countries such as China, another country — with less stringent safeguards — will.

“The reality is that if we don’t deal ourselves into this market, we not only miss out on the economic benefit, but we also miss out on the opportunity to set the rules,” Macfarlane told industry heads at the Australian Uranium Conference in 2005. “Australia has some of the most stringent safeguards for the export of uranium of any country in the world.”

But Professor Richard Broinowski, a retired diplomat and author of Fact or Fission? The truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions, says there is no way of controlling what happens to Australian uranium once it leaves our shores. He says the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is “dead in the water”.

“You have an Australian Government that continues to say ‘we have faith that none of our uranium will enter weapons programs’, but frankly, that’s just not credible. There are tens of thousand of tonnes of Australian uranium around the world in different countries in different forms in different reactors.”

“Once you take [uranium] away from Australia and start putting it into a very complex industry, you simply can’t keep tabs on it.”

“The Japanese have quite a considerable amount of plutonium. A lot of that would be Australian originating uranium. That’s weapons grade; it’s there, they have it. If the Japanese decided to go nuclear — and they could do so tomorrow — then they would be using Australian uranium.”

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Marni Cordell is Associate Editor of New Matilda Magazine www.newmatilda.com.

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Global Warming turns the heat on Nuclear Energy.

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SYDNEY EVENTS27 JANUARY Queer Prom: The Cake Lady, Zoo, Celia Curtis, Scary D, Tranny Cops and sets by Bug Girl and Blush Foundation. Fundraiser for a Scabaret/ Craparet tour of US and Vancouver. 7pm at Iceland 2-8 Weston Street Balmain East. $5 / 8.

52 PICK UP. Calling peeps to pose as Truck Stop Pin-ups for our themed deck of playing cards. We’re looking for tranny truckers, roadside slags, muscle mary mechanics, boxtruck bears, diner darlings, trucker moles, highway patrolers, diesel dorks, hitchhiking hotties and other characters. To be shot in Sydney during February. Call Kaka 0405 268 002 The Cake Lady 0424 209 192 Scary D 0416 119 426.

7 -24 FEBRUARY

workshop.nonstop (opening event February 7) CLUBSproject, Bridget Currie, Kate Fulton, Christopher L G Hill, Lucas Ihlein, Lisa Kelly, OSW (Open Spatial Workshop), Spiros Panigirakis, guests and collaborators... plus pitstop Saturday events, hosting, performances & ceremonies. Taking the idea of workshop and continuous self-organisation as broad starting points of reference. workshop.nonstop invites practices that propagate their own working contexts and conditions (via projects, spaces, blogs, networks, publications, critical writing and making…) to a project that will unfold as an open, multidimensional diagram of a workshop. Developing throughout February. 6-8pm at Loose Projects; Level 2, 168 Day St Darling Harbour looseprojects.net

WEDNESDAY 7 FEBRUARY

“Freedom Next Time” a public lecture by radical journalist John Pilger.6.30pm at the Teachers Federation Auditorium 39-41 Reservoir St, Surry Hills. Sponsored by Green Left Weekly & Gleebooks.$20/$15/$8. Ph 9690 1977 or 0413 976 638 to book greenleft.org.au

SATURDAY 10 FEBRUARY

The People’s Occupation of the World’s Biggest Coal Port: peaceful mass action against climate change1pm at Horseshoe Beach (aka Dog Beach, Newcastle)Contact: Steve 0437 275 119 or Emma 0400 906 699 newcastle.flotilla@gmail.com risingtide.org.au

SUNDAY 11 FEBRUARY

Sydney Body Art Ride: a community driven artistic project which raises funds for children’s cancer research while promoting healthy sustainable living. Contact: Jake Lloyd Jones 02 8333 4474 sbarhq@yahoo.com.au sydneybodyartride.org

WEDNESDAY 14 FEBRUARY

Justice for TJ! Stop Black deaths in custody! Rally in Redfern.Meet Cnr George and Phillip St opposite old Redfern School10:30 amContact: Ray 0415 858 264

THURSDAY 15 FEBRUARY

Sydney G20-arrestees fundraiser madame.fong@gmail.com aspaceoutside.org stopg20.org

SATURDAY 24 FEBRUARY

The First International Gala Forest Feast Masquerade Dinner & Video Night, 6pm. ms.phuong.l@gmail.com

FRIDAY 25 FEBRUARY (And Last Friday of every month)Sydney Critical MassMeet 5:30pm Hyde Park Fountain to ride at 6pm. (02) 9990 2911 criticalmass.org.au/sydney

SATURDAY 10 MARCH

South East Forest ForumAn info night and forum on the continuing large-scale destruction of the forests of South East Australia by the woodchip industryNatalie Stevens 0415 221 239 nataliestevens@care2.com

FRIDAY 6 - MONDAY 9 MARCH

Lake Cowal Corroboree ms.phuong.l@gmail.comsavelakecowal.org

JULY- SEPTEMBER Cycle Against Nuclear Cycle III canc.org.aucanc3.burrawangcoop.net.au

SUNDAY 26 AUGUST

Concert for Cape York All proceeds go to the campaign to protect the Cape York Peninsula.Sydney Town Hall 2:30pmThe Wilderness Society (02) 9282 9553

MELBOURNE EVENTSTHURSDAY 8 FEBRUARY

“Freedom Next Time”. A public lecture by John Pilger, on the themes in his new book.6.30pm at the City Conference Centre, 333 Swanston St, city.Sponsored by Green Left Weekly & Readings Bookshop$18/$12. Bookings essential. Contact: 9639 8622 www.greenleft.org.au

FRIDAY 23 (Last Friday of every month)Melbourne Critical MassMeet 5:30pm State Library, Swanston St to ride at 6pm www.criticalmass.org.au/melbourne

SATURDAY 17 MARCH

Troops out of Iraq!Rally for peace on the 4th anniversary of the invasion of IraqMarcus 0406 965 896

OTHER STATES:TASMANIA2-4 FEBRUARY

Weld Valley Pirate FestivalCelebrating community, Honouring Earth, Inspiring awareness & action www.huon.org/festival www.huon.org/weldvalley

QUEENSLANDFRIDAY 23 MARCH Cape York Gala DinnerStamford Heritage Plaza Hotel All proceeds support the Cape York and Wild Rivers Campaigns Janina Jones (07) 3846 1420 wilderness.org.au

CYCLE AGAINST NUCLEAR CYCLE III Cycling through various locations in Australia, July-September. canc.org.aucanc3.burrawangcoop.net.au/

PERTH5-19 JULY

Students of Sustainability 2007 (SOS)Largest annual student-organised environmental conference in Australia radicalhack.com/sos07 asen.org.au

OTHER LINKSActive-sydney events listing for social change.active.org.au/sydney

AID/WATCH is a not for profit activist group campaigning for a positive use of Australian overseas aid funds in development projects. aidwatch.org.au

Alfalfa House is a not-for-profit cooperative that aims to provide, where possible, minimally packaged and minimally processed, affordable, wholesome, organic food to its members. 113 Enmore Road Enmore alfalfahouse.org

Australian Student Environment Network (ASEN) is the national network of students active on environmental justice issues. asen.org.au

Australian Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN) venezuelasolidarity.org

Bolivarian Circle Venezeulan Solidarity Network bolivariancircle.org

dualpLOVER An almost not-for-profit community-minded CD replication business and record label. “we can’t change the world, but we can change some thing” dualplover.com

Eco-shout. The internet portal to Melbourne’s green underbelly. Sustainable development and environmental justice. eco-shout.org

Engage Media An online video activist community for South-East Asia and the Pacific. www.engagemedia.org

Indyblogs is a collection of blogs from indymedia activists around the world. indyblogs.protest.net

Indymedia Sydney - don’t hate the media... be the media Reports on politics and events, created by independent activists.sydney.indymedia.org

LASNET aims to raise awareness of the struggles of Latin American people. latinlasnet.org

Mexico Australia Solidarity Network masn.org.au

Post G-20 debrief arushandapush.blogsome.com

New Matilda is a weekly online current affairs magazine. newmatilda.com

Redfern Outdoor Cinema (ROC) is an outdoor, grassroots accidental theatre screening great films, for free! redfernoutdoorcinema.com

Scoop Leading source of New Zealand political news. scoop.co.nz

Stop APEC Stop Bush 2007! Protest against war, global warming & attacks on workers’ rights when John Howard & George Bush meet in Sydney in September for APEC. Katelyn 0422 722 736 or Anna 0401 900 690. stopwarcoalition.org

The Big FAG Press is a DIY printing collective in Sydney, with a beautiful offset printer perfect for posters and short run artworks. bigfagpress.org

Transmission is a network of citizen journalists, video makers, artists, researchers. transmission.cc

University Tangente - Alternative university u-tangente.org

Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN) Join the invitation to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez to visit Australia in 2007. AVSN: 0432 335 030. venezuelasolidarity.org

We are all Boat People spreading the simple message that most Australians are ‘Boat People’. boat-people.org

Western Cape Action Tour Project (WECAT) South African Guerilla tours. dacpm.org.za/wecat

BIG THANKS:Stephen Mori, Imogen Yang, Gallery 4a, NAVA, Australia Council for the Arts, Marrickville Council, Tom Civil and Breakdown Press, Jennifer Mills, Kate Carr, Lucas Ihlein, Lauren Parker, Marni Cordell, Brian Holmes, Alissar Chidiac, Dmitry Vilensky, Lucas Abela, Bolivarian Circle, Australian Venezuela Network, LASNET, The Big FAG Press, Dodo, Zebbie, Lisa McDonald, Severine Levrel, Phuong Lee, Vanila Netto, Lisa Kelly, Loose Projects, The Chocolate Factory, Kat ‘Spat’ Barron, Andy Nicholson, Brendan Phelan, Marina Carman, Macromantics, Emily York, Francesca, Jorge Joquera, Roberto Joquera, Hector, Natalie Woodlock, Mickie Quick, Sally Jackson, David Harris, Lou Smith, Ned Sevil, Vanessa Berry, Guy Sterling, Alice Williams, Diego Bonetto, Sister Joan, Peter the plate maker at FSL, Kurt Eckardt and all the artists, newspaper contributers and the many people in our extended networks who make projects like this possible.

ARTIST LINKS:ARLENE TEXTAQUEEN

textaqueen.com

CHTO DELAT (WHAT IS TO BE DONE?) chtodelat.org

KEG DE SOUZA allthumbspress.net

OLIVER RESSLER ressler.at

PVI COLLECTIVE pvicollective.com

RICHARD DEDOMENICI dedomenici.com

SQUATSPACE squatspace.com

ZANNY BEGG checkpointblacktown.blogspot.com

TOM CIVIL (BREAKDOWN PRESS) www.breakdownpress.org

If You Say Something, Do Something… DAVID GRIGGS. IMAGE COURTESY OF KALIMAN GALLERY