DISOBEDIENCE ARCHIVE

An on going video archive
Curator: Marco Scotini
Assistant curators: Matteo Lucchetti, Andris Brinkmanis
Display design: Zbyněk Baladran
Graphic design: Chiara Figone

Disobedience is an archive and a video station about the relationship between artistic practice and civil and social disobedience. Founded in 2005, the project is a guide to geography of recent protest, from the social struggles in Italy in 1977 to anti-globalisation actions before and after Seattle. In particular, Disobedience is an investigation into practices of art activism emerging after the fall of the Soviet bloc that are today developing on a global scale. A new and different kind of political and artistic collaboration characterises the current phase of post-Fordism. With regard to the relationship between art and politics, a radical shift away from modernism is evident; the forms of art activism are determined by a common recognition that traditional democratic politics is largely bankrupt. Contemporary dissent manifests itself less as theoretical criticism or protest than as defection, exodus and exit.

Abandonment rather than confrontation, the search for new participatory spaces, constituent practices, micro-actions on a local scale, forms of self-organization and empowerment are the main strategies of the new movements. Disobedience is an atlas of the plurality of resistance tactics such as direct action, counter information, parallel planning process, self-managed architecture and media activism which have been developed by artists and film-makers like Ashley Hunt, Oliver Ressler, Marcelo Expòsito, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Harun Farocki, Alberto Grifi and radical art collectives such as Park Fiction, Critical Art Ensemble, Black Audio Film Collective, atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa), Street Rec, Etcétera, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Kanal B and others.

The goal of the archive is to create a common space for artistic output and for political action, understanding that society itself is changing and with it the language it produces as a political subject and as a media object. Disobedience is designed as a long-term work-in-progress and is presented as non-comprehensive and provisional, intended to expand over time. The archive contains ten sections of which six are presented here. Along a panoptical scheme one follows collections around contemporary issues – Reclaim the Streets, Protesting Capitalist Globalization, Bioresistance and Society of Control, Disobedience East and Argentina Social Factory. One section is dedicated to the Italian 1977 “workerist” movement (operaismo) as a form of introduction to the configuration of contemporary Multitude.

1) 1977 ITALIAN EXIT
The 1977 movement in its expressive forms and in its political intuitions seems to be current in the behavioural strategies of the movement after Seattle, and more generally, in the behaviours of political and existential independence in the living cultures (I can no longer use the word alternative) of our times. How come? From my perspective, the answer lies in the two-sided, ambivalent nature of the 1977 movement, which is partly influenced – especially in its awareness – by the history of the workers’ and communist revolution of the 20th century. On the other hand (and perhaps in the more vibrant, deeper and less superficially sensitive part), it is an anticipation of the social and anthropological crisis of the forms of modernity and perhaps of the forms of humanity. The 1977 movement is the first view of a painful encounter between the humanist dimension, which has continued throughout the 20th century, and the intervention of an unsettling post-human dimension that technology and the power of the capitalist machine force upon social life. When the movement perceives the advent of a new age, it perceives it as a movement of desperation, as if the instruments that we had previously used (intellectual, political, existential) were wholly inadequate to process a subject matter so complex, mobile and rich in elements of automatism.

(Franco Berardi “Bifo”, excerpt from Disobedience and Cognitariat, a conversation with Marco Scotini)

ALBERTO GRIFI (1938-2007, Roma, Italy)
Festival of the Young Proletariat at Parco Lambro, Milan (B/W and colour, 120’, 1976)
A cult video of the Italian political cinema, Parco Lambro marks Grifi’s transition from experimental cinema to that of counter-information. Parco Lambro is not a Woodstock type of film about militant music, but a record of the revolt that arose at the sixth Festival of the Young Proletariat held in Milan in 1976, in which the function of the camera changes according to the unpredictable nature of events. Filming as direct involvement that catalyses people’s active participation, prompting them to take a stand.

DODO BROTHERS (group formed and split in 1977, Bologna, Italy)

Escape (B/W, 3’, 1977)
The video is a reconstruction of the police raid at Radio Alice. A few days have passed since its closure and everything has been left as it was. In the background the editors’ voices are talking live. In a certain way Escape is like an “opening theme tune”, the spot that best synthesizes those days and the role of the radio station.

Camera-car (B/W, 15’, 1977)
This is a long single shot sequence. In those days no one was authorized to film except Radio Alice. It is a journey all over the city of Bologna viewed from above – from the roof rack of a Renault 4 travelling at minimum speed. The intention was to look at the city in relationship to the thousands of new visitors who had come for the meeting. Had it been filmed at eye level, this relationship would have remained hidden.

PAOLA SALERNO (born 1960, lives and works in Paris, France)
Lettera di Oreste Scalzone a… (Color, 25’, 2004)
The video was filmed in an abandoned factory squatted by artists in the St. Denis neighbourhood, an industrial zone in the outskirts of Paris that has recently been rebuilt and converted into a service sector. The artist filmed a monologue by the fugitive Scalzone, one of the leaders of the Autonomy groups - to show his situation as an exile and at the same time the theatrical nature of the scene in an intimate setting. (Irina Zucca Alessandrelli)

2) BIORESISTANCE AND SOCIETY OF CONTROL

What Contestational Biologists Want: A halt to corporate initiatives to consolidate and control the world’s food supply… All biotech initiatives and policies that are going to have a profound effect on the environment and/or humans should be in the democratic control of the public… Biotechnologies that could have profound effects on the environment over time must be the subject of long-term study, before they can be commercially licensed… In the end, however, resistant culture always needs to find means to fight fire with fire. In other words, how do we develop tactics using biological materials and processes? In response to this question, CAE and some rogue scientists set about trying to form a model of direct biological action.

CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE, (born 1987, the group lives and works in the USA)
Germs of Deception (Colour, 6’24’’, 2005)
Critical Art Ensemble has recently payed attention also to the devastating effects of bacteriological experiments carried out in war programmes by Great Britain and the USA. In Germs of Deception CAE reproduces (in ways which are not harmful both for the environment and the audience) the conditions of a bacteriological experiment carried out by the USA in 1949 when a group of trained soldiers let the Serratia marcescens bacteria in the air to contaminate the surrounding environment.

ASHLEY HUNT (born 1970, lives and works in Los Angeles, USA)
The Corrections documentary project (Colour, 58’, 2001)
Corrections is a documentary, looking at the phenomenal growth of the U.S. prison system over the past 30 years, through the lens of ‘prison privatization’. The film sets these stories into the context of the ‘Tough on Crime’ political movement as it has emerged out of the Civil Rights movement, the devastation that continues to be visited on communities of colour, and the profits reaped from the rapid growth of the prison system.

PAULA ROUSH (born 1971, lives and works in London)
MSDM (mobile strategies of display & mediation)
The Art Strike 1990-1993 (Colour, 35’, 2004)
In this video Stewart Home assesses the contribution of the art strike to his artistic career and the inflation of his value as a commodity in the art market and the simultaneous impact of the strike in the art market crash of the 1990s. Home reviews the reasons that led him to call for an art strike in 1985 to run from 1990 to 1993 in the context of historical materialism, plagiarism and experiments in collective pseudonyms such as the SMILE magazine.

BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE (1982-1998, the group lived and worked in London, UK)
Handsworth Songs (Colour, 58’, 1986)
In October 1985 Britain witnessed a spate of race related riots in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in urban centres of London. The film’s sense of multiplicity extends to a rethinking of black British presence, and a refuting of the idea of a homogenous black community with a single sense of presence characterised by uniformity of ambition and expression. Instead the film evokes a broad range of voices, tones and registers. It is through this panoply of positions and presences that Handsworth Songs approaches the riots and expresses its central idea.

3) ARGENTINA FABRICA SOCIAL

Between the revolt of December 2001 and President Néstor Kirchner’s inauguration in mid-2003 the country experienced an atmosphere of unprecedented institutional instability and ceaseless agitation. Art groups were addressed by the rising of new collective subjects demanding a radical change within the political system [“out with them all”] and were involved in the emergence of renewed activism. “I had never been a victim of repression”, says Javier del Olmo as he remembers the bullets shot past him when the police rushed forth against the generalised pot-banging in the summer of 2002. “It was a completely new sensation: we felt we were protagonising reality”.
In those days they went through an unceasing, intense time of activism, and were showered with requests from assemblies and pickets, urged by the concrete needs posed by the continual calls to demonstrations. They went as far as to produce and collaborate in one single call. Artists who belonged to more than one group moved from one action to another in a matter of seconds.

(Ana Longoni - excerpt from Is Tucumán still burning?)

GRUPO DE ARTE CALLEJERO (born 1997, the group lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Aqui Viven Genocidas (Color, 10’26’’, 2002)
Plan Nacional de desalojo (Color, 2’25’’)
Desalojoarte (Color, 1’32”)
Invasion (Color 3’25”, 2001)
Lanús (Color, 3’24”)

Since 1997, Grupo de Arte Callejero has been demonstrating in the public spaces in Buenos Aires. The group designs, among other tools, traffic signs, posters and alters logos that mark specific instances of repression. The tools are not their final work, but part of a collective action, whose dynamics change according to the subject and context of the intervention. They used to work with other Argentine political and social organizations in an autonomous and horizontal way.

ETCETERA GROUP (born 1997, the group lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Etcetera TV (Color, 24’, 1998-2005)
Etcetera was formed in 1997 by a group of visual artists, poets, puppeteers, and actors, most of whom were under 20 at the time. They all shared the intention of bringing art to the site of immediate social conflict – the streets – while also bringing this conflict into arenas of cultural production, including the communications media and art institutions. In their current formation as the International Errorista, the group embodies the media stereotypes of “terrorists” to examine the repercussions of the War on Terror in visual culture and mounting censorship in the media and the arts.

WAYRURO (born in 1994, the group lives and works in Argentina)
Desocupados y cortes de Ruta en el noroeste argentino (Color, 30’, 2002, director Ariel Ogando)
The film focuses on unemployed workers’ demonstrations in the Jujuy province between 1997 and the famous December 2001, through the organization Corriente Clasista Combativa and its leaders such as Carlos “Perro” Santillan. Unemployment and under-employment in Argentina affect more than 40% of the workforce. The piqueteros’ struggle is shown here with previously unpublished images of its leading figures.

KANAL B (born in 2000 as an internet based political video activist project)
Argentina (Color, 60’, 2004)
This 60 minutes documentary shows how Argentina was systematically ruined by US imperialism, the international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, under the label of neoliberalism, along with some help by the corrupt political class. The compact and unanimous resistance of the public since 19th/20th December 2001 has begun to stir things up: the unpunished military officers (there were 30,000 missing people during the military dictatorship) and politicians have been attacked on the street and openly condemned.

4) PROTESTING CAPITALIST GLOBALIZATION

The videos are thus fundamentally contrary to the investigative journalism of bourgeois media, which insists on its alleged neutrality. The “democratically balanced” television news feature, for instance, which contributes to the exclusion of left-wing perspectives and perpetuates this exclusion despite its asserted objectivity, is only a direct point of reference to the extent that it is exactly reversed in this video practice. The motif of the political activist, so popular in television news reports, as a “violence-prone demonstrator” (the attribution invariably occurs only in the masculine form) is the starting point in both videos for debating the discourse on violence, through which attempts are made to divide the anti-capitalist movement into “violence-prone” and “peaceful” demonstrators, pitting them against one another and thus weakening the movement.

(Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler, excerpt from Die Macht des Gewaltdiskurses, Kulturisse 04/02 (translated by Aileen Derieg)

OLIVER RESSLER (born 1970, lives and works in Vienna, Austria)
and
ZANNY BEGG (born 1972, lives and works in Sidney, Australia)

What Would It Mean To Win? (Colour, 40’, 2008)
Almost ten years after “Seattle” this film explores the impact this movement has had on contemporary politics. During the Seattle demonstrations “We are winning” was a popular graffiti slogan that captured the sense of euphoria that came with the birth of a new movement. This film aims to move beyond the question of whether we are “winning” or not by addressing what it would actually mean to win.

MARCELO EXPÓSITO (born 1966, lives and works in Barcelona, Spain)
Mayday - The city-factory (Color, 61’, 2004)
In the video, the Spanish artist speaks with the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno about the metaphor of “virtuosity” as a precondition of current forms of labour and new political movements. The film traces the development from Fordism to post-Fordism as exemplified in the restructuring of the Lingotto/Fiat plant in Turin and then focuses closely on the work of the Italian Chainworkers group and its activities during the Mayday festivities in Milan.

BETH BIRD (lives and works in Los Angeles, USA)
Everyone Their Grain of Sand (Color, 87’, 2004)
Everyone Their Grain of Sand examines the impact of global industrialisation on land ownership in Tijuana. The film follows the struggle of the community of Maclovio Rojas, a highly organised, low-income community on the outskirts of Tijuana which has been in a land struggle for over 15 years. The film locates this struggle within the context of globalization, NAFTA, the maquiladora industry and socio-political landscape of the U.S./Mexican border.

STREETREC (with THE INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED AUTONOMY, LAS AGENCIAS AND AFFECTTECH/BIKEWRITERS), worked for nine months in 2002 in Chicago, USA
Retooling Dissent (Color, 20’ 12’’, 2004)
This video marks a period of dissent and experimentation around the February 2, 2002 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Manhattan (NYC) at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. The global executives and corporate elite attending the annual conference, usually held in Davos Switzerland, carved the streets of New York City into a police state. Meanwhile artists and activist – tactical media practitioners, from around the world created new tools and held workshops intending to send them a clear message: September 11 will NOT gag the critiques of globalization. This video explores the collaborations and ideas of four collectives working on projects at the WEF protests.

5) RECLAIM THE STREET

Constituent Practices / Practices that constitute social relations without being commissioned by authorities to do so – avoiding to address the state in a participatory or protest sense, as much as avoiding trench battles with power. Constituent practices much rather develop parallel interdisciplinary universes from an everyday life perspective. They study on the street level, organise autonomous planning processes and collective productions of desires for real places, connect arts and social movements, invent new games, engage in alternative forms of science, squat land, build new settlements and whole cities, redefine public space – and thus challenge dominating systems of urban planning, reality description, universities or planning instances. Constituent practices operate in a rhizomatic way. Unlikely Encounters / Groups that develop tools, attitudes, courage, practices, programs, that make unlikely encounters, meetings and connections more likely, search for them, jump over cultural or class barriers, go where no one’s looking. They do not let their activities be reduced to symbolic action, mirroring, critique, negation, or analysis of their powerlessness – nor do they muddle along in their assigned corner like a social worker.

(Christoph Schäfer/Park Fiction, excerpt from Art is a semi-detached house)

PARK FICTION (born 1994, the group lives and works in Hamburg, Germany)
…die Wunsche warden die Wohnung verlassen und auf die Strasse gehen (…the wishes will leave home and take to the streets) (Color, 61’, 16 mm blow up from Super 8, 1999, directed by Margit Czenki )
Margit Czenki shows the clever struggle of a small group, carried out from a seemingly inferior position. In bright colours she shows the glamorous ideas for a park at the banks of Hamburg’s harbour that St. Paulians achieved against a big corporate housing project. A film collage about a park that doesn’t exist yet, about art & politics, about nomadic warfare and about radiant desires. About the city – and what it could be. Park Fiction, a public-art project and a stage for the wishes of a community. (excerpt from a text by Christoph Schäfer)

MARIETTE SCHILTZ (lives and works in Milan and Luxembourg)
and
BERT THEIS (born 1952, lives and works in Milan and Luxembourg)

Picked Out (Color, 14’, 2004)
OUT stands for “Office for Urban Transformation”. The video shows several aspects and activities of the Office’s work since it was founded in 2002 by Bert Theis in Milan. Isola district in Milan, Santa Maria la Ribera district in Mexico City, Tirana in Albania are some of the spots documented by the video. The Office is working to find out what determines the character of urban situations; it is working out projects for these situations, and acting to carry out urban transformations.

ATELIER D’ARCHITECTURE AUTOGÉRÉE (born in 2001, the group lives and works in Paris, France)
Un espace à venir (A space on the way) (Color, 17’, 2005)
Video that was realised for project The Mobile Geographies Of Savoirs-Faire, investigates the creative practices and spatialities of the immigrant populations in La Chapelle area of Paris. The project promotes cultural diversity and intercultural dialogues between majority and minority groups and it was partially connected to EGNATIA, an EC funded network initiated by Stalker.
PPC_T/FARKADONA POST PROGRAMMED CITY_TERRITORY (born in 2004, the group lives and works in Athens, Greece)
Farkadona Case (Color, 16’ 52’, 2005-2007)
Post Programmed City_Territory is a collaborative project that consist of a series of cultural activities, which are devices of interaction with the territory and public events concentrated on Emergency Case Situations as seen at the settlement of the repatriated community in Farkadona, in the district of Trikala, Thessaly-Greece. The settlement was created in the early 1990s for repatriated Greek Pontians from the former Soviet Union as a result of a state policy of peripheral dispersion of refugees to organized camps and units.

6) DISOBEDIENCE EAST

Compared to the Soviet period, nowadays there is more breathing room, but the air conditioners have been turned on, so to speak: the very possibility of thinking about acting collectively in public space is being confiscated. As part of our legacy from the Soviet era we’ve inherited not only the notion that “personal initiative is punishable by law”, but also an aversion to collective forms of action. (…) In our country there are lots of subcultures that are practically invisible in the public and political sphere; the most radical but also the least well represented of these is DIY culture. The very idea of reclaiming space that we’ve been talking about is now simply taboo. In the past, such practices were also few and far between, but each of them either formed or significantly fortified the subcultures. . . We could compile some kind of user’s guide, a manual entitled What to Do in Petersburg. This might be a guidebook to weird places and alternative clubs as well as a catalogue of ideas – what seemingly impossible things you can do in the city, how you can use it in ways it isn’t meant to be used. One could condense virtual-reality practices, turn real life into a quest, a game that changes not only one’s take on the city, but the city itself. It’s quite risky to base a book like this on the practice of “spatial hacking”. It’s precisely in this instance where a direct parallel emerges with the way The Chronicle of Current Events and other samizdat periodicals were put together. . . Collecting material, creating utopias and trying them out will enable us to map the limits of the possible.

(Dmitry Vorobjev, excerpt from Reclaim Your Space or, the New Dissidence, an interview with Dmitry Vilensky, published in #12: (Im)possible spaces, newspaper of the platform Chto Delat/What is to be done?, March 2006

DMITRY VILENSKY (born 1964, lives and works in San Petersburg, Russia and Berlin, Germany)

Protest Match Kirov Stadium 2006 (Color, 28’, 2006)
The Russian Social Forum run parallel to the G8 Summit in Saint Petersburg at Kirov Stadium, in July 2006. Those who got in convened under close surveillance by the authorities who made an offer that couldn’t be refused: to hold the forum at a defunct football stadium slated for demolition. The film covers the situation that happened at the stadium during Social Forum, discussed with a series of interviews with Russian political activists.

HARUN FAROCKI (born 1944, lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
and
ANDREI UJICA (born 1951, lives and works in Berlin and Karlsruhe, Germany)
Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a revolution) (Color, 107 min, 1992)
Farocki and Ujica’s Videograms shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu’s last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the videocamera, with its heightened possibilities in terms of recording time and mobility, can bring the process of filming history to completion. Provided, of course, that there is history. (Andrei Ujica)

NOMEDA AND GEDIMINAS URBONAS (work together since 1993, live and work in Vilnius, Lithuania)
Pro-test Lab Archive (2005-2007)
Pro-test Lab is the project of artists joining to become catalysts for a movement protesting against the demolition of the Lietuva, the last cinema remaining in Vilnius city centre. By extension, the project also condemned the gradual erosion of public space, the imposition of a neo-liberal system and the destruction of cultural heritage.

Includes:
LIETUVA sold out (Color, 17’ 30’’, 2006)
SOLD OUT (Color, 08’40’’ 2005)
SOLD OUT 3 CROSSES (Color, 05’34’’, 2005)
VIP market (Color, 02’22’’, 2005)
Exploration of public space (Color, 05’02’’, 2007)
Human chain of swimming enthusiasts (Color, 02’20’’, 2005)
America will help us (Color, 02’09’’, 2005)
Dogs barking will not disturb the clouds (Color, 01’27’’, 2005)
TV bridge. Talk show between Oslo and Vilnius (Color, 16’20’’, 2005)
Pro-test lab (Color, 20’52’’, 2005)

RADEK COMMUNITY (1997-2008, the group lived and worked in Moscow, Russia)

By Non Governmental Control Commision

The barricade (Color, 02’03’’, 1998)
On 23 May 1998 the “Non-Governmental Control Commission” (a group of artists including Anatoly Osmolovsky, Audei Ter-Oganyan, Radek Community) organized its first action, called Barricade on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street. The artists published the following press release: “The Barricade is an act of civil disobedience with the aim of testing new practices of political struggle and artistic gestures” (Osmolovsky). (excerpt from a text by Sylvia Sasse)

The mausoleum (Color, 01’50’’, 1999)
An action during the 1999 governmental elections in Russia. Traditionally the Lenin Mausoleum in the Red Square was a stage for politicians’ speeches, from which the Soviet leadership once viewed parades. Now it was occupied by the group of young artists and anarchists, who proclaimed an “Against all” slogan.

By Radek Group

Manifestation (Color, 5’49’’, 2001)
Moscow. The Barricadnaya metro station. The pedestrian crossing on Sadovoye Koltso street. Crossing takes a maximum of thirty seconds. It is necessary to make several slogans on red cloth, and in the moment when green light flares unexpectedly, to unfurl them above the pedestrians’ heads, and reach the other side of the street with everybody. All indications of a demonstration are manifested: masses of people, slogans, a central street, traffic is stopped. Marx’s thesis about the genesis of the self-awareness of the revolutionary class in action.

Hunger strike without demands – we do appeal but we do not demand (Color, 15’, 2003)
This hunger strike is very different from other forms of protest, like the workers’ strikes or the religious’ strikes. This is not a protest in the common sense. This hunger strike is without demands. When people appeal to some authority and agree with something, when they demand a better life they agree to belong to a lower rank, to be subordinates. Here they do not demand, so nobody can answer. Hunger strike aims to draw attention to the issues of how to protest and what protest is in general.