through europe

We are the last ones. We’ve always been, even if we didn’t realize. We were the last ones in 1968, when, as youth, we threw ourselves against everything, whether that was just in our little town, just in our thoughts. We were the last ones in 1977, when the future collapsed over us. The last ones in the 1980s, stuck within, in the 1990s, in the 2000s... After us, work will be something completely different. After us, retirement will be no more. After us, nothing. Of all things that we have been, punk is the only one that really stuck with us, whether we wanted it to or not. We are the pensioners, and we aren’t finished yet.

Disclaimer: God

There are several ways of understanding an object or a phenomenon. We can talk about its essence, its form, its origin... We can also understand it according to its way of being productive. I would like to use this latter point of view. The question, then, is no longer ‘what is it?’, ‘what does it look like?’, ‘where does it come from?’, but rather ‘what does it produce?’, ‘how is it definable according to its production?’.

- More than battles, sometimes the challenge is to pick battle-fields -

All across Europe, youth, workers, the unemployed, retirees, migrants and families are today facing the same bleak army of austerity measures, capitalist backlash and police brutality. Like the British Prime Minister loves to say, in this historical moment the European lower and middle classes truly are ‘all in this together’.

Sono quasi quattrocento anni che una rivolta di queste dimensioni non si verifica a Londra. Quest’inverno, durante le manifestazioni degli studenti inglesi, la stampa internazionale aveva parlato di ‘riots’, di subbugli, di insurrezione. Un tipico caso di esagerazione giornalistica. Stavolta no. Ma stavolta è diverso.

Le riots di questi giorni, iniziate sabato 7 agosto durante una manifestazione di protesta per l’uccisione di un giovane da parte della polizia, hanno un tono che ricorda più le banlieues parigine che la guerriglia urbana dei black bloc. Da tre giorni la capitale Britannica è attraversata da un’ondata di jacquerie semi-fantascientifiche, in cui i moti di folla da ancien regime si incontrano con i messaggi istantanei lanciati dai BlackBerries.

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.