Category Archives: Egypt

Strike Everywhere

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If you live in these peculiar United States, you might almost believe that the most important thing in the world is how many times Mitt Romney lied in the debates (trick question: he always lies). Unreported and undiscussed, a wave of strikes is spreading across the regions of the world that were most affected by the global social movement. The shift from Occupy to Strike is underway.

Tunisia

This is where it all kicked off. Today, the entire journalistic profession went on general strike to pressure the government to accept laws passed in the first weeks of the Arab Spring guaranteeing freedom of the press, following months of demands. And won. While these laws have perhaps to-be-regretted state of exception clauses, they are detailed and extensive, covering all areas of intellectual, journalistic and artistic expression. Light years ahead of where the American-backed dictatorship of Ben Ali had been, these laws are comparable to any liberal democratic state.

Egypt

Just as with the Arab Spring, the strike wave has extended to Egypt. In the forefront here are doctors and other medical personnel. After a series of assemblies last May, doctors called for one day strikes on May 10 and 17. Their demands are simple: effective pay scales for all medical staff, an increase of the health share of the national budge to 15% from its current 4.5%, pay increases and free public health care. Watch this excellent video from Mosireen that explains the new strike that began on October 1 and is set to continue until demands are met:

It discloses a shocking lack of facilities, armed attacks on hospitals, and that the salary of a 30 year veteran hospital consultant is only $200 a month. Emergency rooms are still open and people needing surgery are being treated: without charge.

Doctors now plan a mass resignation of 15,000 physicians to compel action–like some Occupy actions, they are waiting until that many have committed before launching the resignation tactic. The ethical nature of the strike is noticeable: just as Tunisia called for the right to free expression, Egypt advances the concept of health care as a human right.

Spain

This wave of rights-based activism has spread to Spain. Unremarked in all the discussion about austerity and the euro in the business pages has been a series of drastic education cuts amounting to €6.5 billion. School students are fed up and are planning a general strike this Thursday, like their peers in Chile, who have been striking for the right to an education for the past two years.

European General Strike

Today comes news of a co-ordinated general strike against austerity of all workers that has spread first across the Iberian Peninsula and now around Europe. Spanish unions today joined the Portuguese call for a general strike on November 14. Later,  unions in Greece, Italy, Belgium, Malta and Cyprus have joined them. Let’s hope the connections are made and anti-austerity is presented as a political claim for fundamental democratic and human rights.

United Kingdom

A weekend march planned by the Trades Union Congress against the austerity measures and cuts in the UK has morphed into a call for a general strike. Legal prohibitions on striking put in by Thatcher and Blair have limited options for the unions but The Guardian reports:

A leading industrial relations barrister, John Hendy QC, argues that a general strike against government policies …can take place under the European Convention of Human Rights…. Steve Turner, Unite’s director of executive policy, said: “This will be a political strike. There will not be any ballots and it is our view that political strikes are not unlawful.”

No doubt the Tory government will take a different view…but a major union calling for an explicitly political strike is, well, striking.

Estados Unidos

And will the wave carry here? N14 would be after the elections and if, god forbid, there’s a President-elect Romney, it would be a great time to make a statement. It’s not at all likely. There is some agitation building up in New York about yet another rise in public transport costs that could see some actions. It’s not likely to be the labor movement that answers the European call, not least because there’s really no precedent. There are those that have been more responsive…

 

Que se vayan todos!

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It’s time for them all to go. Who? The global neo-liberal Goldman Sachs-dominated financial elite. Around the world, it’s clear that people are coming to this conclusion and for good reason. In Portugal mass demonstrations forced the government to backtrack on cuts and raise taxes instead. In Egypt, workers are meeting in assemblies. What’s happening is a widespread withdrawal of consent to be governed in the name of austerity, cuts and finance. There are alternative programs emerging. The last year and a half was the warm up. Now it begins.

Egyptian car workers

I spent the morning reading about the civil rights movement as part of Strike Debt’s project to think about how to expand and build its campaign. Then I get online to see what’s going on in Spain, and there it is, happening. Today was a day of action 25S/S25 in which the Congress was encircled.

You wanted demands? They have demands:

– The dismissal of the entire government, as well as the dismissal of the Court and the Leadership of the State, because of betraying the country and the whole community of citizens. This was done in premeditation and is leading us to the disaster.

– The beginning of a constitutional process in a transparent and democratic way, with the goal of composing a new Constitution

They want the elimination of all remnants of Franco-ism and the beginning of a new democracy and sustainable employment. Central to that process is the citizens’ audit of debt:

– The audit and control of the public debt of Spain, with moratorium (delay) of debt’s payment until there is a clear demarcation of the parts which not have to be paid by the nation, because they have been served private interests using the country for their own goals, instead the well being of the whole Spanish community

This is the outline of a political alternative, one that could operate state power, albeit in a very different way.

It was in order to visualize that claim that the massive encircling of Congress took place today. It began earlier with a rally in the Avenida del Prado at the center of Madrid. Here’s a video (HT Marina Sitrin):

They’re chanting: “They don’t represent us.” Indeed they don’t with official unemployment at 24% and poverty at 22%.

They moved off to Congress:

To Congress

There were, shall we say, quite a few people there by the time they arrived and established the circle.

The police behaved with typical restraint.

But as often as the police waded into the crowd, they reformed, sat down and held the ground. Their chants reflected the manifesto: “It isn’t a crisis, it’s a fraud!” and “This is not a democracy, it is a Mafia.”

Ugly Naked Man with a sign: “Life Without Hope in Madrid”

The tunes were often ones used at soccer matches, together with classic left slogans like “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido.” These are forms of social connection that Occupy in the US can’t really draw on. Attending professional sport is a luxury event here, as is class activism. The Indignados are activists because they activate such patterns of social life. NFL referees can go on strike–NY state workers cannot.

If Occupy is to follow, it will have to learn how to cross the color lines that still prevent social activism from cohering here. It’s not that social conditions are different. Poverty in New York City, center of global capitalism, stands at 21% and the top 20% make an incredible 38 times the income of the bottom 20%. Madrid’s unemployment rate is 18.6%, while it reaches 13% in parts of New York like the Bronx, with much more stringent conditions and shorter eligibility. Of course, that difference is both  marked by and defines racialized hierarchy in the US. That’s the task ahead on this side of the Atlantic.

For the Indignados, today was simply a step on the road to the Global Day of Action on October 13, preceded by  O12’s celebration of America Latina Indignada or Occupy Latin America! Which makes sense because this refusal to be governed by neo-liberalism follows in the wake of similar Latin American refusals from Argentina to Bolivia and Chile. As so often, resistance moves from the decolonial regions to the former colonial metropole.

Last March, Madrid led and New York followed in September. Can we close the gap this time?

A Tale of Two Cities: NYC and Cairo

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As Occupy activists shake the May Day dust off their feet, the real discussion and decisions over “what next?” are beginning. The calls for global actions are becoming less rhetorical, more substantive. There’s a new form of Occupy emerging, as long assemblies and meetings gather to discuss strategy, tactics and goals in the context of the ongoing global social movements. While the Occupy strategy is of necessity intensely local, its reactivation of the popular claim to public space in conjunction with the European crisis and the continuing Arab revolutions has set in motion the possibility of a globalized countervisuality.

Here’s two report backs from discussions about the movement in New York and in Cairo and how they might relate or interact.

Yesterday, Occupy Theory called an assembly in Washington Square Park on the first hot day of summer. About twenty-five people came and others were drawn into the circle of the discussion as it carried on: unlike the heavily-policed Zuccotti, you can sit down in WSP and no-one seems to mind. It’s the hippy park, after all.

Facilitated by Marina Sitrin, the discussion at first reviewed how people were feeling in general about the movement. There was some expression of unhappiness with May Day’s direct actions, and there were some feelings that without Liberty Plaza, the movement is without direction. Against that, there was a sense that this is a different moment to last September and that horizontalism needs to be reconfigured, that we need to learn from Greece, Spain and Egypt.

A particular turning point was David Graeber’s observation that the real question going forward might be preparing for another, perhaps still more serious collapse of global capitalism. Sure enough, today we’ve seen a wave of nervousness concerning the Grexit–the Greek exit from the euro. That is to say, it’s not so much a question of formulating “demands” in this time of rapidly accelerating change as deciding what principles might guide our choices. There was a stress on developing mutual aid as a form of direct action, in addition to the idea of horizontal learning as direct action.

It was decided to hold a set of thematic assemblies on the Spanish model on successive Sundays. The first one next week will be on climate change and the commons, I’m pleased to say–more on this soon.

Today at the CUNY Graduate Center, an activist from Cairo named only as Mohammed shared his experience of the revolution. As always, you’re struck by the difference in scale at first. Going to a march with hundreds of thousands, seeing people carrying materials to build barricades, or using motorbikes to deliver Molotov cocktails are obviously not daily events in New York. As the discussion continued, I began to see how such distinctions could obscure some important interactions and interfaces of the global movement.

Mohammed mentioned that Tahrir had been designed to be accessible to colonial troops by the British, which also enabled the popular takeover in January 2011. He also suggested that even under the dictatorship there was a certain subcultural street life that was independent, such as the football Ultras whose experience in fighting the police was so crucial in the revolution.

I wonder if there’s a certain fluidity built into the colonial city that paradoxically allows for at least the possibility of the “classic” revolution? Whereas the dispersed, neoliberal, hyperpoliced urban environment requires that (re)claiming public space be the first step towards establishing the possibility of social change? So what is unique about the post-2011 movements is that these challenges to the established sense of authority have coincided, interacted and produced a new sense of the counter-global.

Indeed, as different as Cairo’s revolution was, Mohammed expressed a familiar frustration about the difficulty in sustaining their struggle against a very unified enemy prepared to use whatever violence is (from their point of view) necessary and the move into a “war of positions.” Periods of intense activity are followed by quieter times. Guerrilla art actions have emerged, like women artists holding discussions about sexual harassment in subway cars when denied official space. I don’t think that Occupy and the Egyptian revolution are the “same,” of course, but that, despite the differences in intensity, the different struggles against neoliberalism are paradoxically becoming similar.

In the discussion, these possibilities were drawn out. If there was a focus on the place of neighborhood and local actions from the Occupy side, that is because the more public space is reclaimed as popular space, the greater the sense of disruption to neoliberal business as usual. Then the idea emerged to link Cairo and Tokyo activists over the moving of the IMF meeting in October from the former to the latter–or as it was wittily put, “from revolution to radiation.” It seems that neoliberalist functionaries are running out of places to congregate, that the reclamation of public space has rendered all global cities with Occupies (that is, most of them) so politically toxic that the bankers prefer real toxins.

 

Research Practice: New Delhi

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In trying to reimagine research practice, I’ve been inspired by Mosireen in Egypt and Observatorio Metropolitano in Madrid. The foremother of them all is perhaps Sarai, the remarkable New Delhi collective. Formed as an off-shoot of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sarai has created a coalition of researchers and practitioners for the past decade.

Raqs Media Collective "Strike" (2011)

As befits, their legendary status in “new media” circles, Sarai maintain a comprehensive website that is at the center of their practice. Here they define their mission as:

a commitment towards developing a model of research-practice that is public and creative, in which multiple voices express and render themselves in a variety of forms. Through these practices that range from art practice to publication, academic research to the organization of discursive events, setting up of media labs and creative practices in locality labs in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the city, reflecting upon the culture of freedom, in speech and in software, we have sought to participate in and cultivate a public domain that seeks to find a new language of engagement with the inequities, as also the possibilities, of the contemporary world.

So some distinctive notes created by Sarai are their involvement with visual arts practice as a form of research, “new media” work and software development and a commitment to openness.

Let’s quickly note a couple of these projects before thinking about the challenge they pose to activist research in the overdeveloped world. I am particularly struck by Cybermohalla–a word formed by adding the Hindi and Urdu word mohalla, meaning neighborhood, implying alleys, street corners, and a sense of place both in the city and online. Since 2001, this project has collaborated with young people in some of the newer “colonies” or districts of New Delhi. The hope was that:

if the space can draw a relation between writing, researching, experimenting, and tap into different forms of knowledge, modes of cultural expression and infrastructures of circulation of these within the neighbourhood, then it will be able to build new grounds of knowledge.

The knowledge generated in such projects is shared through print, visual and online sources. One example is the range of Sarai Readers on a range of topical subjects, available copyleft and free of charge on the website. The Readers differ from the Anglo-American model in that they give space to shorter writings than are typical in the academic context, often more experimentally written and less burdened with academic apparatus. There are substantive interviews with key figures, visual interventions and so on.

Some common threads link the different projects from India, Egypt, and Spain despite the very different contexts in which they take place. Each seems to serve as a key source of information regarding what’s happening in the giant cities created by financial globalization. While Madrid’s three million people would disappear into New Delhi, which has a population density of 37,000 per square kilometer, each city has been transformed over the past twenty-five years of neo-liberalism.

Perhaps it is the very belatedness of the impoverishing, distancing, hierarchizing effects of this moment of global capital’s transformation in its former capitals like New York that has been so traumatizing and galvanizing for us. We should start to look with humility at those who preceded us in this struggle.

Next, each group privileges making its work available free, producing it rapidly and in as many formats as possible. These tactics strike at the heart of the walled, gated communities that call themselves universities in the Anglophone world, always happy to think of themselves as elitists in the intellectual sense. Can we continue to assume that we can still be egalitarian in other ways while maintaining such hierarchies?

Consider these scenarios: a person wants to join your department/program/seminar having attended free, open classes previously. If it’s a class at the Public School with top academics like my colleague Alex Galloway, you’re going to be impressed. What if it’s a person you’ve never heard about before?

Will you consider publishing your own work free and open source? People worry about the imprimatur of double-blind peer review. If you want it, you can get it at Open Humanities Press. But this is not so simple. I’ve benefited from such reviews, especially for my recent book. I’ve also run foul of the system, where a person fundamentally unsympathetic to the project has been allocated to read it. It even happens to Gayatri Spivak, according to her talk at Left Forum:)

Set aside the bias question, and assume it always works for the best. Do we want this kind of closed door process? Would it not be preferable to have discussion in open ways? If material is published digitally, it can be corrected and changed easily as long as people are making comments or suggestions. If we find ourselves reluctant to participate in such interaction, perhaps we are less invested in change than we think? Or is the overload already demanded by the neoliberal university such that we simply can’t?

I’m for quick, direct, open publication but I don’t want to pretend it’s a panacea. It may be best suited to moments of rapid change and not so central when things are more locked down. I think nonetheless that we have to assume that the crisis in research, whether activist, militant, corporate or academic, is not limited to debt and funding but goes to the core of the project.

Occupy Passover

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Why is tonight different from all other nights?–and all other Passover nights? Because tonight we don’t say “next year in Jerusalem.” We say “next year in Cairo.” Tonight we do not think about Occupy but about the ongoing colonial occupations around the world that continue to oppress. And tonight we hope for another future.

In the traditional Passover service, the gathering say “Next year in Jerusalem,” the utopian wish of the diaspora. The “Jerusalem” of the Haggadah (the text used during the service) was interpreted by many modern progressives in the manner of Blake as a place without slavery, the place of emancipation.

The Liberation Haggadah

Often, such affinities are felt to have been expressed by the work done by Jews during the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, noted for its beautiful illustrations was the exemplar of how the book could also mobilize cross-cultural alliances. It was hidden and protected from the Nazis during World War II by local people, including a Muslim cleric. Later it was again saved from damage during the devastating “ethnic” civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

These affirmative histories feel remote from modern Jerusalem as it is ruled under what is, to use Jimmy Carter’s telling phrase, a “new apartheid.” In Jerusalem, Orthodox Jewish men actually send Jewish women to the back of the bus, as if to say that they want to erase the Civil Rights history.

So today the anti-slavery “Jerusalem” is somewhere much more like Cairo after the Tahrir revolution than it is the city of that name.

Perhaps no visual example is more telling than this picture:

The "separation wall" in Bethlehem.

It shows the city of Bethlehem, named as the birthplace of Jesus, a city of importance for Jews as the seat of King David and long part of the Arab Caliphate. Now it is divided by the separation wall that epitomizes the key tactic of global counterinsurgency: once you have identified your insurgent, separate them from the “good” population.

There’s so much writing about the disastrous consequences of Israeli policies, above all from progressive Israelis like Ariella Azoulay, Eyal Weizman and Adi Ophir, that there’s perhaps no need to dwell on them. Except that it has now become clear that Israel has embarked on a “necropolitics,” a sovereign determining of who it is that must die, which now extends to other nations. The entirely unsurprising “October surprise” of the 2012 election will be the Israeli attack on Iran, telegraphed and planned by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Obama might be enough to get him on the Supreme Court. Just because we can see this coming does not mean it will not have most serious consequences.

Not least will be a renewed clampdown on all anti-militaristic, anti-hierarchical politics. It should be remembered that the tent city in Tel Aviv was evicted long before Liberty Plaza. Only you can’t call it the Israeli Occupy because that already exists.

Looking back, as one does on ceremonial days, I reflect on the opportunity that the Oslo Accords appeared to present in 1993. Among them was the possibility for a secular Jewish identity that was not linked to Israel and also not shamed by it. At the time, the late lamented Edward Said indicated that Oslo was going to be a disaster. Along with many others, I could see that but hoped that it would lead to something better. It did not and the possibility to play with being “Jewish” disappeared as well. Israeli officials do so much in the name of “Jewish” and not just Judaism that it would be sophistry to do otherwise.

Nonetheless, there is of course a new Haggadah this year, translated and commented upon by earnest, bearded young men from Brooklyn of the Jonathan Safran Foer kind. Actually, it is edited by Foer.

The Haggadah says that

in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt

I don’t want to do that now. I want to stay in the “Egypt” that we’ve seen since 2011, the Egypt of Tahrir. I want to decolonize Palestine and finally bring an end to slavery. L’chaim.

The Anarchic Archive of Refusal

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As people worldwide develop new tactics to refuse the subjugations and humiliations imposed on them in the name of austerity, an archive of resistance is re-emerging into view. It details the present, as evanescent as it is, and generates connections to past struggles. It is what we might call the an-archive, an archive of the desire for a fairer life, which we might call a world without hierarchy. Or anarchy.

Has any nation in the developed world been more damaged by neoliberalism than Ireland? When I visited after the 2008 crash the sense of despair was palpable. It’s all the more remarkable, then, to see the success of the campaign to resist the so-called “household levy,” a quaint-sounding term that attempts to disguise the fact that it is in fact what one might call an “austerity charge.” Each household is supposed to pay 100 euro (about $130) in advance of a more onerous property tax to come next year. As of this writing, only about half of Ireland’s households have complied. No doubt the authorities will try and claim that getting just over 50% is somehow a victory.

5000 demonstrate against the tax--note the Occupy banner top right

It’s clear, though, that no-one anticipated this refusal because the tax process is voluntary. As there is no existing register of households, each is supposed to register themselves and then pay. It says much about the hierarchical culture of Ireland that it was just assumed that this would happen.

The refusal brought a  predictable response from former Celtic Tiger booster economist Jim Power:

If we go down the road of breaking the law because we believe it to be unfair, we will create a total disrespect for the law and the logical conclusion is that we will gradually descend into a state of anarchy.

For the aptly-named Power and his ilk, this anarchy is the worst imaginable state, the war of all against all. The actions taken by the majority of the Irish people suggests that an anarchy in which laws are consensed, and the quality of life of the multitude is the determining factor, might indeed be just what they want. And they are not alone.

It’s very interesting to see how widespread the global contempt for the solutions proposed by austerity has become and how the desire for an alternative is reviving long-forgotten precedents. Over the last couple of days, activists in Tahrir Square, Cairo, have set about demolishing the walls built by the Egyptian military to contain and separate the square from the rest of the city.

The wall comes down

In these photographs by Mosha’ab El Shamy, the familiar Tahrir coalition can be seen, toppling a wall that had been brightly graffiti-ed by star artists of the new street art movement.

Celebrating the collapse

No nostalgia here, no call to preserve the art, as there would inevitably be in the overdeveloped world. Luckily Suzee in the City had documented it already:

Graffiti by Kaiser on the separation wall, Cairo

Such photographs now become part of the resistance archive that is being rediscovered and recirculated at the moment. I have already posted some examples of the photographs of past May Day actions in Union Square. Gavin Brown today posted a photograph of a rent strike in London from 1959:

3500 refuse higher rents in London, 1959

Such organized rent strikes were a common tactic of radical city life from the 19th century on. Here’s a painting by the Parisian genre artist Louis Léopold Boilly known as The Movings from 1822, showing a typical scene on the day that rent for the next quarter fell due and many of the city’s working classes were forced to move.

Boilly, "The Movings" (1822)

I like these kinds of genealogies that lead us from present-day actions to the now canonical archives of a certain modernism. This moment of quiet dignity, a refusal to pay a rent that could not be afforded, is the backdrop to the more celebrated Paris of the dandies, the courtesans and indeed the revolutionaries.

I draw energy from these past and present reconfigurations of everyday life, the archive of a set of claims that laws should be fair and that a certain anarchy should indeed prevail.

 

Shots Heard Round the World

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In his classic 1997 novel Underworld, Don Delillo visualized the Cold War by the coincidence of finding on the front cover of one newspaper in 1951 of the first Soviet atomic weapons test and the “shot heard around the world,” the victory by the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers. More recently, W. J. T. Mitchell was struck that the front cover of the New York Times for September 11, 2001 had a lead story about cloning, leading to his book Cloning Terror, a visualization of the Bush era. Ironically, Delillo’s novel had André Kertesz’s somewhat sinister photograph of the World Trade Center on its front cover, seeming to foretell Bush’s post 9-11 “crusade.”

Kertesz, WTC, 1972

Today’s webpages have accounts of the shooting of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx by the NYPD and the continued upheaval in Egypt after the death of 75 football [soccer if you must] fans. The apparently contingent association resonates powerfully in the fashion of Delillo and Mitchell (and all good Surrealists). The connection here is the overreach of autocratic power, a countervisualization to their assertion “move on, nothing to see here.”

Since 9-11 the New York City police department have had a free hand to act as they choose, bolstered by their reputation as heroes on the day of the attacks and the decline in the crime rate. Most notably in the latter category, street crime of the kind for which New York was once notorious has notably declined, albeit not as much as you might think. The murder rate, according to official statistics declined precipitously from 2,016 in 1994 to 924 in 1998. It’s fallen further in the past decade but not that much: 866 murders were reported in 2010.

It looks as if Bloomberg has nonetheless decided to cut his police commissioner loose after this latest scandal. This week alone, three people have been shot and killed by police with Ramarley’s death simply the most egregious of the group. In an article that appeared in today’s New York Times with the evident approval of the mayor–because one detail that he disagreed with was noted–it is noted that

There has been a stunning rise in so-called stop-and-frisks — 601,055 in 2010, compared with 97,296 in 2002

This ethnically-discriminatory practice has been highlighted by activists for years, so it’s curious to see that it happens to make the One Per Cent Times front cover at this moment of scandal. The target is Police Commissioner Kelly, perhaps the one person in New York with whom Bloomberg  feels he has to share power. If Bloomberg succeeds in pushing Kelly into retirement, his regime will be truly autocratic.

In Egypt the scandalous connivance of the police and the military government in fomenting a riot between football Ultras in Port Said, leading to over 70 deaths, has been missed by nobody. Whether it was lighting that  mysteriously failed, or a gate that somehow was opened, it’s clear that Cairo believes its football Ultras, who held the line in Tahrir against Mubarak’s camels a year ago today, were being targeted in revenge.

Rather than launch attacks on the immediate perpetrators, the Cairo street has turned against the military government. The film clip below from Mosireen shows the demolition of the wall built by the military to protect the Interior Ministry, home of the police, from Tahrir.

The Ultras and their allies have done the unexpected and surprised the new autocrat Tantawi and his forces. At the same time, these events show that the casual analysis of the Egyptian elections, which would suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood won because they were better integrated into the Egyptian masses, missed the mark.

Even as we were digesting this interface, Washington DC police moved in on Occupy DC, whose encampment had remained in place under federal park regulations, until House Republican Darrell Issa targeted these protections last week. Ever fearful of Republican attacks–and the Park Service have been a long-term obsession for the right–the law was simply ignored.

This is not what democracy looks like

The fragmentation of the rule of law produced by the global crisis has generated a set of unequal and competing autocracies. This may not end well.

January 25: (Re)Occupy Egypt

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Tahrir Reoccupied 1-25-12

Today we salute the courage of Egypt, one year on from the beginning of the revolution.
If we want to remind ourselves why the legend of Antigone risking her own life to bury her brother seems so relevant today, look at this new video by Mosireen, the inspiring Cairo video collective (I first embedded this last night: this morning, it had been sub-titled–amazing).

The dead body of a protestor, Mohammed Tousi, is hauled to the side of Tahrir and left in the garbage. His niece speaks of her grief, followed by his mother. It becomes clear that he was killed during the eviction of the midan or encampment in Tahrir on November 20, 2011. Tousi was beaten to death and hauled to the garbage: “Is this what they call honoring the dead?,” asks his sister. In a further evocation of the judicial killing of Antigone, she then criticises the walling-in of the square by SCAF, calling it a “separation wall,” like that used by Israel. But the conclusion is firm–this violence will not drive the protestors away but motivate them to renew their struggle. These women, veiled or not, want justice for their murdered son/brother/relative–Antigones all. The final long pan around the room shows the entire group, all radicalized, all looking for ways to claim their rights.

Today, and in the run-up to the anniversary, this vow to seek justice has been fulfilled.

Here’s a remarkable account by Ahdaf Souief, the novelist/activist of Mosireen’s recent action:

The campaign against SCAF has gained huge traction over the past three weeks. Inspired by anger at the mid-December killings of protesters in the parliament area, young revolutionaries held a press conference called Kazeboon (“they lie”). It was a packed and emotional meeting. They screened a film by the Mosireen Collective that showed the generals making statements – and the actions that belied them. A young woman gave an impassioned speech holding up a piece of fabric soaked in the blood of a protester: Rami Hamdi. The film ended with the camera slowly tracking the trail of blood that had poured out of the young man as his friends tried to carry him to safety. On each side of the blood the pathway had been marked with small stones. At intervals there were young people sitting by the trail. Kazeboon is now a countrywide campaign where young people screen footage of the military’s deeds in streets and squares and universities – despite intimidation, and often violence.

You can download all of Mosireen’s films here. Do it today, show them widely.

Women wearing V for Vendetta in Tahrir today

As the news today shows, the reoccupation of Tahrir is underway, huge crowds have moved in. “The revolution is on its way to Tahrir”, was the chant. Earlier they were singing “Bread, freedom and human dignity, bread, freedom and social justice.” The continued crisis in basic food provision drives the revolution as it has since 2010.  Above, women using Anonymous masks as veils complicate and repurpose the debates over masking and veiling.

The young man mic checking early on in the video from Ahram Online says:

Yes, we’re chanting against the military./

We’ve come back again and this time we’re not leaving.

The slogan of January 25, 2011 “the people and the military are one hand” has gone. It’s now clear to the revolution that SCAF is the regime. Keep watching, it’s not over: follow events online via Twitter #J25 and please ignore The New York Times.

Jan 24: In the Cairo Streets

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Watching the Egyptian revolution for the past year has been an extraordinary experience. First we watched live online via al-Jazeera, when the feed held. We saw photographs posted to websites, blogs, Flickr and elsewhere. We read all we could of the blogs. And we learned about the dynamic forms of Cairo street art. From this distance I can’t pretend to any expertise but I am moved and inspired by this work.

It’s clear from what we can see online and what information there is in English on blogs like ArabStand that street work by artists like Keizer, Sad Panda and Ganzeer is strongly interfaced with that of well-known Anglo-American artists like Banksy or Shephard Fairey. In the Egyptian street art community these references are clearly appreciated. For all the real difficulties that the Western tagger confronts, the Egyptian context has nonetheless vastly more dangers and hazards. It’s clear too that the end of the dictatorship made it briefly far more feasible to work outdoors. How the recent crackdown by SCAF will impact their projects is less clear.

When we look at the streetscape of Mahmoud Street, Cairo, that leads from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry today, there’s a palpable sense of the change:

Mahmoud St. Credit: Suzeeinthecity

This isn’t graffiti in the derogatory sense: it’s a street gallery and a reclamation of space that says: “Whose streets? Our streets!” In this crucible of countervisualization, a number of artists have become prominent.

"Chess Game" by El Teneen

"Kill TV" by Keiser

Tahrir represented in the street

El Teneen’s visualization of the revolution as a chess game and Keiser’s Situationist reference might be seen in other cities, albeit with different references. Tahrir is a new way for the anonymous to visualize their history, a place that so few outside Cairo had heard about a year ago.

Keiser’s work has a sharp political edge, as in his détournement of Disney’s Snow White:

Keiser "Snow White"

In more allusive fashion, he visualizes the people as ants, not as pests but as determined and energetic collaborators working for the collective good:

Keizer "Ants"

On one wall in the Zamalek district of Cairo, there’s an interesting confrontation between two very distinct styles of work.

Ganzeer (left) and Sad Panda (right)

Left is Ganzeer’s work, clearly learning from Banksy, with a witty sense of how the new city is being carried by the person in the street. At right is Sad Panda, the work of an artist known only as Hatem. Before January 25 2011, Sad Panda worked in secret.

Sad Panda from the revolutionary period

Today his work is widespread and he shared with the blogger who posts as Suzee in the City how he makes his work by creating stencils:

Stencil in action

 

Stencil under construction

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad Panda is a multiply-repeated icon whose presence calls attention to the places where it appears and that which it looks at. By dint of repetition and familiarity, the Sad Panda reterritorializes the city. The Panda has become known by the metonym of its eyes, as if to say, you may be watching us but we can and do watch you back.

Sad Panda's eyes watch Suzanne Mubarak and warns "danger"

In this complex cityscape, an image of the former dictator’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, is watched by the Panda at bottom right and a text warns of “danger.” It’s up to you to associate the pieces in this visualization in the same way that any city dweller constantly interprets and reinterprets the built and socialized environment. This metonym serves as a means to represent the claim of the right to look, which works precisely because it requires us to notice it, decipher its look and the relation to the other it invents and the one it refuses.

More on Egypt and countervisuality tomorrow, the anniversary.

 

 

 

 

Working Out Autonomy in the Street

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The emergence of Photography 2.0 is itself now in process. Its “darkroom” is not in a studio but on the street. Its transitional form is so-called “street art,” aka graffiti. Like that precursor, street art may be just a transition to a marketable art form. For the time being, it helps think through the paradox that autonomy eludes representation.

In Tunisia, the French “artivist” (artist/activist) who calls himself JR realized a transformation of photography was happening.  He organized an “inside out” visualization of the people as portrait photographs of random individuals, printed in poster size and posted as graffiti.

A JR poster replaces the portrait of Ben Ali

The project was called “artocracy.” This photographic commons turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past. Working in conjunction with Tunisian bloggers and using all local interlocutors and photographers, the goal was to create a series of one hundred portraits of people who had participated in the revolution.

The photographs were the large-scale head-and-shoulder closeups in black-and-white that have become JR’s signature style. Printed as 90x120cm posters, they were flyposted across four cities in Tunisia, including startling examples in the former secret police commissariat (below)

JR in the Police Commissariat

oron the façade of one of Ben Ali’s former houses (below).

Yet as the documentary posted on JR’s own website indicates, even this open access project was subject to intense criticism in Tunisia. “Why only a hundred?” was the common refrain. For the revolution is widely held to have been the work of the people, not a sub-set of heroes. No-one wants to replace autocracy with artocracy, even as a joke.

In Cairo, the contingency artist Ganzeer—his self-definition—who produced a widely-used PDF pamphlet on how to conduct a protest during the revolution, is now attempting the marathon project of street portraits of all 847 people who died in the revolution, the martyrs.

Ganzeer, "Martyr Portrait"

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who are running Egypt, persist in painting over these memorials so Ganzeer, and his fellow street artists like Keizer  and Sad Panda [more on them tomorrow] are using the Internet as an archive of their work. A Google maps mash-up indicates where and when the work was posted. Users are invited to “like” the link on Twitpic and Flickr but not Facebook, which is now too carefully under surveillance. Ganzeer had only accomplished three of these portraits as of last summer, making it unlikely that his martyrology will ever be accomplished.

The street art process centered on the individual, even when decentred and distributed, taken out of the gallery into the street, is not yet equal to the visualization of autonomy. I have argued that one person cannot convey the right to look: the interface between two or more people as they look at each other and allow the other to invent them even as they invent the other. In his essay that coined the phrase droit de regards, which I translate as “the right to look,” Jacques Derrida, the Algerian, insisted on precisely this incapacity of photography to convey the look into another’s eyes, whether literal or metaphorical. For the autocrat the answer is the same as it has ever been: “they cannot represent themselves: they must be represented.” So SCAF is as determined to push through a “representative” parliamentary democracy as it is to retain effective power.

The nub of the issue, then, is how, once autonomy has been claimed by the anonymous, they might visualize that autonomy as something that goes beyond transition. Street art has some components right–the value of the project is judged by the “street,” the anonymous. It perhaps overvalues the secrecy of its means of production as an end in itself–“how did s/he tag there?” is a great question under autocracy, less so as a means to autonomy. Its capacity to spontaneously generate new forms, however, is a striking way to think through how these issues are being worked out and worked over.

Continued tomorrow with the work of Sad Panda, Keizer and Ganzeer,