December 2011
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Decontextualisation is violence
Visiting the panda sanctuary in Macau yesterday was just beyond words… But I was so shocked to learn that there are only 1500 pandas left on Planet Earth. And yet their images are ubiquitous in Hong Kong and Macau - in credit card advertisements, junk food packaging, touristy keychains and fridge magnets; the list goes on. It struck me as incredibly indicative of our predicament right now as...
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“Perhaps a new kind of ’68, of a completely different style, is developing behind...”
– Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions, p. 139 (almost as if Guattari was predicting 2011, way back in the 1980s!)
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"Occupying" or "Liberating"?
Just read an interesting article in the Huffington Post: Occupy Our Homes: ‘Take Back the Land’ Has Lessons For Home ‘Liberators’. There’s lessons also from the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Movement) in Brazil who have been liberating land from the big landlords and turning it into cooperative farms. The idea of “liberating” the commons from the...
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The Bank of Ideas
The banks have repossessed people’s homes; the people, meanwhile, have repossessed a bank! A former bank building in London has just been occupied and turned into the Bank of Ideas - a community space for the sharing of ideas, knowledge, skills, resources, and capacities. This is the next step in the #Occupy movement - the creation of vibrant counter-institutions. I hear abandoned buildings...
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Good news, everyone!
My latest publication has just been released online - a little piece in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest entitled “Towards a Futurology of the Present” . Print version to be available in January. It was submitted just prior to the advent of the #Occupy movement, but I really feel that my argument holds up even better because of it. It’s a love letter to artists, writers,...
