openbracket

We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us

What do you think about this then?

I’ve been thinking a lot about:

Border crossings, (as ever, it seems to be the only thing I do think about, there are so manyborders to be crossed and each one is a challenge to the sense of integrity and ethical action i hold so dear as i try to love ethically, work ethically (ie in ways that don’t subsume me to the demeaning trap of wage labour that has killed me off so many times before but the cat is spritely) consume ethically (an impossible task i know & the ethics of a self-organised production seem a more irresistible hanger to drape my second hand clothes over) and resist in a way that pleases my ethical bones.

Cross the borders of silence

The possibility of no borders

always excites me.

Cos you & I have seen some unbelievable things.

a tussle with immigration forms

a Hassle – my touseled head, a computer, a pen, lots of paper, trips to the lawyers

doing the opposite of what they say

playing it safe is no way to bring a loved one into the country.

Not to romanticise the taking of risks.

this is no time to lose one’s tousled head

which are for caressing.

but i digress, my tigress (with black nails)

for we are one in precarity

you, and I and my young Spanish friend who works in menswear departments and my angolan friend whose husband refused to fight a war, not a nation, but found himself without one, with not even the right to human rights, for these, if you follow Slavoj Zizek’s logic (which I don’t always, i resist the way he repeatedly posits the inversion of a situation as its truth, as if he is seeing what no-one else is seeing. the limits to this lacanian model of communication are stark. Truth, power, hierarchy, analyst, parent, boss, politicians, philosopher, man, car, petrol. can we resist the temptation of truth and just analyse how the utterances operate?). but if we follow zizek’s argument – and he is working out of Etienne Balibar who is in turn working from Hannah Arendt’s work on the condition of refugees … Man (and i don’t know where this leaves woman) is made by citizenship and not citizenship by man (Balibar).

The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human begin as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. (arendt)

So that when I have been stripped of my socio-political identity through war, displacement, economic neo-liberalism, terror and borders, all i am is human and then I am denied human rights and am taken to a detention centre outside London or Paris.

Andwhat is the link between this and the brutal transformations that have transformed labour relations as a result of a succesful capitalist response to the struggles of the 60s and 70s. I am a white, educated, european woman and I have no choice but to live as a marginal in this city of mine. Therein lies my freedom but it’s a rocky road and i don’t count my battery chickens too triumphantly because this blip of arts money won’t last. In fact, I’m neatly caught in a horrible paradox, this world is rich because the other world is poor and the fat trickles down.

The history of Capitalism has been a series of attempts to solve the problem of worker mobility .. indenture, slavery, coolie systems, contract workers, guest workers, innumerable forms of border control. Recent movements of throught and protest, despite being labelled as mobilising around themes of anti-globalisation, are precisely the opposite when elaborated into the area of border control. Free market ideology is a myth. If we are truly to globalise, then let’s do it properly and open up borders for EVERYONE, not draining anyone’s brain and not indulguing the rich in this selective protectionism which is killing half the planet.

etienne Balibar has also drawn attention to the new apartheid in Europe. He says that you can see it in every European city – you can see it in the conditions of territorial, social and economic segregation that most migrants live in.

Migrants’ everyday practices are attempts to open up the borders of citizenship, to win new spaces of freedom. It’s a constant struggle with daily rewards and hourly frustrations.

To claim and affirm the right to mobility against the reality of labour and existential precarity seems radical and life-affirming. As I was reading this, i looked up from the page and saw this,

“Now, when, where and how you work is entirely up to you” – an advert for a Microsoft windows mobile.

but the point is that the european migration regime is aimed not just at keeping refugees and migrants out of europe but in promoting a process of selective inclusion.

there’s always someone being relegated to a 2nd class citizen

and there’s always someone for whom the borders are shifted according to a hierarchy of preference based on sameness.

Basic demands of groups working in this area are:

Freedom of movement

The right to stay

a Europe-wide legalisation for all undocumented people living in Europe

The CLOSURE of all detention centres in Europe

the uncoupling of the residence permit from the labour contract.

www.noborder.org (against the global border)

www.nolager.org (against camps and detentions outside and inside EU)

www.frassainfo@kein.org

http://www.labournet.net/antiracism/0509/brides1.html (Brides without borders)

15 acts that attact individual rights and freedom
in favour of vastly extending powers of ministers
making them
less answerable to Parliament. a minister
can declare a state of emergency to
seize assets without
compensation
(ie stealing)
set up courts
ban assemblies
hold people in particular areas on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur.

The government is actively
promoting the fear of terrorism and crime
to persuade people they must exchange their freedom
for security.

Boring as fuck but violently powerful
Protection from harassment Act 1997
Civil Contingencies Act 2004
Inquiries Act 2005
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (trying to be smuggled in, 2006)

This first was designed
to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation
but is being used
to control protest.

This last in its original draft
would have allowed ministers to make
laws without reference to
elected representatives.

Did you hear about the woman who sent 2 emails to a pharmaceutical company?
She was prosecuted for repeated conduct.
Who is she? I want to hear her story.

ASBO legislation makes hearsay admissible as evidence

standards of evidence
are
lower
than in a normal
court – a pre-emptive strike
a fast track to prison

small measures of control and censorship
add up over time
to a society of a completely different
flavour

the threat of terrorism is being used to justify measures
which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively

FROG BOILING

We live not in a police state but a controlled state.
Who are you controlling?
How happy / stressed does that make you?

Blair now wants legislation to limit thepowers of British courts
to interpret the human
rights act

even Churchill said that the point
of human rights is that they treat
the innocent, the suspect, the convict
e q u a l l y

Helena Kennedy accuses ministers
of seeing themselves as the
embodiment of the state

Simon Davies
LSE pioneering work on ID card scheme
then the government did not agree with
his findings

www.no2id.net/index.php

www.renewforfreedom.org

Every now and again, a protest happens that functions on many levels, turns the city into a party and has a potent, temporary effect on the city. This happened on Saturday when between 600-700 people took off their clothes to ride naked through central London to say no to oil dependency, to encourage people to get on their bikes, providing their own means of transport in a car-clogged culture.

It just so happened that it was the day of England’s first game in the world cup.But why decide to do this bike ride naked? Why expose one’s own body to laughter, ridicule, and unwanted attention. Surely these people don’t think that the freedom to be without clothes is as important as the freedom to earn a decent living without exploitation, to live free of violence, trauma and environmental disaster. Before today I had thought the link between pollution, the world’s petroleum power struggles and the naked human body tangential, even haphazardly conceived, but after the flesh feast of today I doubt if there is a more potent symbol of human fragility than the naked body.

It is the site of the differences of gender, race, sexuality and physical ability.

The forced removal of clothes involves violence and torture.

The voluntary removal of clothes is an empowered act and makes us smile.

The covering and ‘discovering’ of the body is such a fundamental part of our daily working, leisure and sex lives. Yet the naked body is considered so inalienably other to ‘modern’ life; which let’s say for argument’s sake began with the expeditions of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. What if, as anarchist anthropologist David Graeber argues, that the people who these travellers ‘discovered’ on their expeditions were just us? Or certainly, just as much ‘us’ as Columbus and da Gama ever were? What illusions has the West been constructing – scrupled on the conception of some random sense of superiority over other people and other lands – ever since?

But why protest naked? Cycling through central London naked is obviously exciting and liberating for the protestor through that beautiful mixture of weirdness and normality which makes one suspect that the act isn’t actually so difficult after all. But this protest works on another level. It was immensely popular amongst the shoppers, tourists and football watchers. We were irresistibly cheered, applauded, and endlessly photographed. A woman in a wheelchair on waterloo bridge clapped us by, enraptured, repeating ‘This is so good. This is so good. On the other end of the bridge, three football-kit clad men raised their arms into the air and dropped their shorts and pants to the ground in a riotous salute; an old lady shielded her eyes as the ride halted to let her cross a pedestrian crossing on Westminster Bridge, and everywhere mouths dropped open or sprung into beaming smiles.

There was embarrassment, ridicule and alienated attempts to humiliate of course, the coincidence of England’s first game in the world cup finishing as we were starting meant the regimented, leering, drunken masculine found it difficult to cope with the penises and testicles that were on the street. One guy who was holding a large golf-sale style advertisement for a South American restaurant didn’t think twice. He abandoned his advert and tried to grab the breast of a rider in front of me, a rider whose beautiful bum I happily cycled behind for most of the ride. But these people were in the minority. The majority sang and cheered. One football fan hollered ‘Good on ya’ with such an aggressive intensity that it seemed beyond doubt that the bikers were articulating something that the shopping, working, football-worshipping, oil-dependent, profit-subservient Londoners were loving and needing. Most fans couldn’t believe their luck that such a parade was cycling past them to extend their victory celebrations. In fact, this seemed to be something real to celebrate, something physical, palpable, unmediated, something that struck at the heart of the illusions which sustain the lifestyle of the majority, and this something was joyous; much more joyous than a dreary one nil victory over Paraguay, from an own goal to boot.

And this mixture of football and protest made me think of how when Argentina won the World Cup in 1978, the people took to the streets, celebrating their win and reclaiming the national sport for the people’s enjoyment from the sinister and bloody machinations of the military dictatorship. When football manages to free itself from the clutches of power … government, media, idolatry, gender division, propaganda for a reductionist masculinity, it can become part of the party towards a more equal world.

To create the world we want to live in, there needs to be a massive shift in the daily priorities of a huge number of people. For this, we need actions that gobsmack and delight people, seducing them into pleasure of a living that strives to refuse the enslavement of themselves and others.

And did I go naked or not? Well, if you weren’t there, you’ll never know.

http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/uk/london/index.html

http://www.stopurban4×4s.org.uk/

Next SOMA workshop in London – Tuesday 20th JuneSOMA is a series of physical workshops, which are based on principles of self-organisation. It seeks to recover communication skills and encourage solidarity, which are being lost in today’s highly competitive, branded world. Social and psychological well-being are so interlinked that it is possible to both change the way we organize our lives/ activities and maintain our mental and physical health in the process. SOMA is always conducted in groups with an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual within the support of the group.

SOMA is concerned with the politics, not of institutions but of everyday life. Capitalist values of competition, profit, aggression and sacrifice of pleasure contaminate our belief in the possibilities for freedom, equality and peace. With so many blatant and latent repressive forces in society, the search for your own health, pleasure and happiness can be a highly political act.

At the beginning of the 1970s, SOMA was created in Brazil by Roberto Freire as a means of resistance to help people fighting against the military dictatorship. SOMA uses drama games, sound and movement exercises and Capoeira Angola to help salvage spontaneity, playfulness, communication, creativity and awareness of anarchist organization where no one is boss.

Capoeira, like SOMA, was created under a repressive regime. As the African slaves were developing Capoeira to withstand the inhuman conditions they were subject to under the system of slavery in Brazil, they were also freeing their bodies and minds so that demands for freedom could no longer be ignored.

The body is the material to resist and create with in the world. The pleasure of being yourself challenges the body forgotten, develops new skills and turns the capitalist reality upside down.

Introductory Workshop

Tuesday 20th June 2006 (and further dates)

7 pm

Venue: The Square – 21 Russell Sq

Info: 020 7733 6220 or 07722003465 or jorge.goia@bol.com.br

(I started off at Whitechapel at 6pm … then legged it across town … in the rain … to arrive at the Square at 8.45pm … all snippets have been rendered autonomous from a person’s name … I suppose the main difference between the two discussions is that in the first people were speaking from a variety of ideological perspectives whereas in the second … which I missed most of … the vast majority of participants would have had some kind of interest in or commitment to creating the freedom necessary to organise horizontally … obviously all words selected are shot through with my particular political and artistic preferences …. but i can assure you that every note i took on the night has been reproduced here)

Choose some words for us to talk about!

It’s difficult to speak on behalf of a group of people who are always arguing ( Dismantling the oil industry ( How can the Iraqi oil industry be kept in Iraqi hands ( Supporting community in the Caspian ( Black atlantic ( Does it matter if I call myself an artist or an activist, a teacher or a campaigner? ( The tools may change but the intention is the same ( “I do, I undo, I redo” ( longevity is one of our strategies ( 5 – 15 year time span ( Timing is key ( Longevity affects the integrity of a project ( We don’t subscribe to the service model of activism ( We like to work in solidarity ( We are not happy to work with the people Shell or BP would send to us ( Networks of groupings ( Our manifesto, except we don’t have one, would emphasise process ( How do we work in solidarity over distance? ( Communities of place ( Communities of interest ( Communities of the dead ( Communities of the unborn ( These last two have assisted us over the years in thinking generationally ( How will I act differently if I’m working with 7-generational thinking from my great-grandparents to my great-grandchildren and if I don’t have children, then someone else’s children ( It was done in such a way as to interrogate what it’s doing as it is doing it ( Community grows outwards then comes back in again ( Huge failures of humanity ( slavery ( the holocaust ( We’re not very good in the cultural sector in remembering what’s gone before ( Theatre in Education doesn’t have the potency it used

to have ( Explicit political content in our schools ( Thatcher ( TIE companies began to die out ( Scare stories ( Baa baa black sheep ( Black bin bags being banned ( Branded ( Loonie left activism ( Self- appointed community reps ( Predominantly male ( Behind closed doors ( Domestic violence ( 18 months ( using photography as a tool for tackling ( sari hanging of asian wife ( went to Delhi and presented aspects of it ( however, the academics from Delhi ( the women returned to Bolton pretty disappointed ( memorial places ( the whole thing folds up and tours very easily ( south asian queer culture ( black british punk aesthetic ( I want to talk about Lenin ( March 1921 to the Transport Workers Congress ( The reign of the workers and peasants will never end ( He pointed out step by step the errors in this phrase ( The supportive statement that was wrong ( I’m not saying I want to identify with Lenin ( I think Lenin took this opportunity to split the room ( Politics is about precise division in any particular community ( Encouraging conflict ( Not smoothing over differences ( Political art means taking sides ( Art contests culture ( Creating tensions and conflicts within the artwork itself ( I want to contest what an artist is ( There is no alternative ( Thatcher ( Dialectic ( Try with all of your might to keep things the same ( Letting things change ( Pledge ( Advert get in touch with gallery favourite political slogan from history to a daily walk convert that walk into a private march turn the slogan into a chant chant it in your head ( A map of pledges rather than a map of actual events ( I don’t work individually any more ( “The function of public art for regeneration is to sex up the control of the underclasses” ( billboard ( Lenin – his part in my downfall ( We’re very fickle that way ( Raising issues of slavery through multi-cultural cookery classes ( never get on ( Feel too compromised by the entering the system ( How paranoid one must be about checking where your funding comes from ( My organisation was radical 20 years ago and now it’s mainstream ( If we get what we want we won’t want it ( Take the money and run ( It’s our money, take it ( Early black film makers funded their work through gambling ( Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future Lenin again ( Early totalitarianism of the future ( My response would come from Kant ( The hungry don’t make aesthetic judgements ( I hate panel discussions ( University of adversity ( Strong roots in the Italian autonomy area ( Tore up our final papers ( Never regretted it ( Went out into the world without degrees ( Everyone is bowed under to the nth degree ( A weight of administration that is crucifying them ( Political conformity ( No-one wants to rock the boat ( Proposed academic boycott of Israel ( Thank you and

good night ( Arabic and Hebrew medieval poetry ( No one can supervise me ( That’s kind of depressing ( Cutting a paper on the music of the middle east ( In times like these ( I decided I was going to set up my own university ( It’s not a real university ( Bring in networks of people ( Immaterial labour ( It exists in the USB key ( Worldwide ( The role of the donkey in the Mediterranean ( It was the best conference ever ( We don’t go asking for funding ( Well we do but they say no ( It’s amazing what you can do without funding ( Establishment of free universities in the UK ( Big on dissent and being alive in the wicked times in which we live ( Hermit crabs climb into other shells and live there for a bit ( Content is entirely up to you ( There will shortly be a free university of Cambridge ( Using the reply to all button one of the most radical technologies we have at our disposal ( Hello we are taking over this space ( I’m a member of the railway workers social club in Venice why because its lecture hall is one of the best in Vienna ( Once you say it it exists ( It doesn’t take a lot to get it moving ( This is family ( A free university structure ( Regardless of whether this building is here ( The pursuit of knowledge as a human activity ( I’m not sure if I’m satisfied with my answer ( You said I have to do that do I really have to what happens if I don’t ( The students took the lead ( Put an a in front of the logo auel ( I hate this word ( I never use this word ( Leadership ( We want to do something for YOUR jobs ( Solidaristic ( Grounded union culture ( The measuring process we’re subject to ( Knowledge takes place despite ( Analyse a movement as part of your struggle ( It tells me something about my life and my struggle ( I’ve given a lot of thought to the vanguardism thing ( Sectarianism in the way that intellectuals think ( I like to think of a gift model ( There are such great people here ( Stay and talk ( Re-examining the very form of their work and how it has been influenced by sectarianism ( Knowledge as output not as outcome ( I mean that’s what value is ( Black black black black sheep

www.openbracket.org.uk