through europe

On 24th December 2010, in the Romanian parliament, a bleeding man was shouting “Freedom!” while being carried outside by the paramedics. He had just tried to kill himself, jumped from the journalists’ balcony, little before the prime minister began his speech.
This surreal image is the pitiless representation of  Romanian society: an autistic political class and an aphasic public opinion.

The language of representation and change is always fraught with difficulties. Change is invariably a process which can accelerate or slow down based on a number of factors. The rapidity with which change takes place affects our ability to perceive precisely what those factors are and our relationship to them. But change, the movement from one point to another in a political process, is always represented in one form or another and how it appears and is communicated is inseparable from the manner in which we perceive change taking place. This is why In a very significant way the two are inter-connected.

L’Inghilterra è sempre stato un paese particolarmente abile nel reinventarsi. Era la terra che aveva schiavizzato mezzo mondo col suo colonialismo, poi è diventata quella che lo ha salvato dal Nazismo. Era il paese in cui alla fine del 1945 gli sfollati avevano dato vita alle occupazioni di case più massicce nella storia europea, poi è diventato l’incubo yuppy degli anni della Thatcher. Era la Cool Britannia del New Labour, poi è diventata ‘la cosa’ scontenta e sanguinante dell’attuale governo conservatore. Ma a ben guardare, sotto tutti questi capovolgimenti e cambi di maschera, qual’è la verità sull’Inghilterra?

On the 2nd December 2010 FIFA announced the country that will host the FIFA World Cup in 2018. This may seem an unusual place to start to unravel the trends of power - but the reaction to this announcement and to the beginning of the release of 251,287 US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks, gives a hint of a shift in attitudes towards democracy and corruption.

I've seen him before. An older man, from another space-time when work and the rest of life remained distinctly separate, even for those for whom poverty forced to labour long and broken hours.

I come from these lines, the labouring masses. My people, on the whole, were working people. Cooks, waiters, clerks, typists, and a dancing girl, my English great-grandmother. Was this code for a prostitute I wondered, but my Pommie brother who's delved deep into working class culture tells me it could simply mean that she was a dancing girl.