through europe

Un decalogo per pensare il presente ed agire collettivamente in esso. Con la “lentezza” necessaria. La lentezza è consapevolezza e attenzione al ‘qui e ora’. A volte, pare indispensabile una ‘snap decision’, cioè decidere rapidamente, esercitare una capacità – la velocità - che va conservata a patto che ci sia una lucidità e una consapevolezza alla base, ma soprattutto una 'libertà di pensiero e d'azione', in verità, negletta socialmente.
Gli antichi greci la chiamavano kairòs, il momento opportuno.

Il Trasloco (Moving out of the future) is a 1991 independent documentary directed by Renato de Maria, was screened for the first time in the UK with English subtitles as part of a project by Auto Italia South East, London. The film is set in Bologna and retrospectively depicts the history of one of the key places where Autonomia took place during the 1970s. It was translated and subtitled through a collaboration between Auto Italia and Through Europe.

In 1972, Franco Berardi, aka ‘Bifo’, moved with couple of friends into a flat at the number 19 of Via Marsili, in Bologna’s medieval city centre. In January 1991, a young man from Iran, one from Zaire and the 41 year-old Bifo were evicted from that same flat by the landlord. In between those two dates, not only 19 years had passed through those walls, but also an incalculable amount of people, stories, political movements, zines, free radios, police raids, and all sorts of poetic and existential experiments.

(music: ‘Stress’ by Justice)

As a matter of fact, economy is the religion of the current era. It is through the economy that the inhabitants of today’s world are given the possibility to achieve a better life (once the afterlife has disappeared), to enter the Olympus of glamour, and to be today’s equivalent of a good believer: that is, a winner. Like every religion, the economy also has its churches, its priests and its wars.

The main religious war ended just twenty years ago, when the crusaders of Western Capitalism defeated the infidels of Soviet Marxism. A few years of jubilee followed, through the 1990s, when the gods of growth, credit and liquidity (the holy trinity of GDP) cast their benevolent gaze all over the chosen people of the West.  But then, inevitably, as soon as the golden age ended, a new wave of war took over.

(Italian version of this article)

Europe will be the product of your mind

Spring 2011 : the European Union is on the brink of the catastrophe, as Neoliberal dogmatism is imposing the diktat of the financial class upon the interests of society.
Let’s look back, before we try to understand what has to be done.

In the year 1933 in his Discours à la nation européenne, Julien Benda wrote the following words :

Vous ferez l’Europe par ce que vous direz, non par ce que vous serez. L’Europe sera un produit de votre esprit, de la volonté de votre esprit, non un produit de votre être. Et si vous me répondez que vous ne croyez pas à l’autonomie de l’esprit, que votre esprit ne peut être autre chose qu’un aspect de votre être, alors je vous déclare que vous ne ferez jamais l’Europe. Car il n’y a pas d’Être européen.