(...) Without scruples, on 28 February, in the midst of the Coronavirus emergency – in five days 110 cases had been officially confirmed in the area, which was out of control – the Italian employer’s federation, Confindustria, launched a social media campaign with the hashtag #YesWeWork. “We need to tone it down, make public opinion understand that things are returning to normal, that people can go back to living the way they used to,”  the president of Confindustria Lombardy, Marco Bonometti, told the media. The message of the promotional video for international partners was absurd: “Coronavirus cases have been diagnosed in Italy, but it is no different to many other countries,” they downplayed the situation. And they lied: “The risk of infection is low”. They blamed the media for unwarranted scaremongering, and they showed workers in their factories while boasting that all their factories would remain “open and at full capacity, as always.” Just five days later, the huge outbreak of infections and deaths arrived. It would end up being the largest in Italy and Europe. Even then, Confindustria did not withdraw the campaign, much less consider closing the factories (...) Article excerpt: Bergamo, the massacre that the employers chose not to prevent The part of Italy that was hardest hit by Covid-19 is a major industrial hub. It was never declared a danger zone due to lobbying by employers. The human cost was catastrophic. Alba Sidera Roma , 10/04/2020  

In front of a vision of the multiculturalism as a space, predefined and consensual by power, institutions and violence, the "other" is enclosed in allotments.

Une Jeunesse Allemande

Une Jeunesse Allemande by Jean-Gabriel Périot, tells the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion - RAF (or Red Army Faction, a German revolutionary terrorist group from the 1970s founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society.

In the 1960s, the young democracy of West Germany was embarrassed by its Nazi past, and ingrown in its role as imperialist and capitalist outpost faced by its communist double. The postwar generation, in direct conflict with their fathers, was trying to find its place. The student movement exploded in 1966. The pas de deux between students and the government deteriorated, and radicalized those involved in a gradual escalation of violence and reprisals. From this seething youth emerged the journalist Ulrike Meinhof , filmmaker Holger Meins, students Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as the lawyer Horst Mahler. When the student movement collapsed at the end of ’68, they remained isolated in their radicalism, and desperately sought ways to continue the revolutionary struggle.

The RAF (Red Army Faction) was founded in 1970, its militants disappearing into hiding. Both the government and sympathizers appeared cautious. Initial RAF acts, along with police responses, involved a certain amount of improvisation. Then came 1972, and the irreparable break: in less than a week, the RAF committed five major attacks, resulting in many victims. The government reacted by taking a hardline stance in its conflict with the terrorist movement. Casualties grew on all sides, including the RAF (both outside and in prison), government (police officers but also politicians and officials), and especially anonymous civilians. Voices questioning both the political and moral implications of the RAF’s combat, as well as the federal government’s choice for total repression, were progressively drowned out.

The autumn of ’77 marked the bloody finale to this story, which was also a war of images. The government refused to capitulate to the demands of both the RAF— which sought the release of its imprisoned members in exchange for Schleyer, the kidnapped president of the Employer Union—as well as the Palestinian commandos who, won over to the RAF cause, had hijacked a plane of German tourists. That same night, the plane was taken by storm at the Mogadishu airport, and the hostages were freed, while in Germany the final founding members of the RAF who were still alive “committed suicide” in prison, and Schleyer was killed by his abductors.

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The days of the Gulf War seen from the window of a television in Brooklyn.

[ migra and coloniality ] / OVNI 2016

The Center as the Border. Zones of Being and not Being

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

[ migra and coloniality ] / OVNI 2016

PROGRAMA CASTELLANO PDF

Videos Talks Debates.

The border has a tendency to spread: it explodes into outsourcing to third countries, and implodes as domestic borders, control devices, detentions and disappearances...; in other words, it tends to occupy the entire system, becoming centre. In the shadows of the border-as-system, where control is out of control, the prototype of a totalitarian society is assembled.

Around the subject of migration there are a series of crucial lapses or ‘forgettings’, which not only hinder in-depth reflection but also fuel exclusionary visions There first of these is the colonial lapse – we have forgotten the close ties between migration and coloniality, and its global mutation. The second lapse springs from limiting our reflections on migration to the spheres of politics, policing, economics, demographics and humanitarian action... but rarely considering it in terms of knowledge and wisdom, of which we are truly in need. A third lapse consists of labelling people “immigrants”, creating the corresponding imaginary and confining them within it... failing to remember that all of us in fact migrate between different territories, spaces, times, and forms of knowledge.

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

Montalegre 5. 08001 Barcelona

After the Sept.11 terrorist attacks, more than 5,000 people, mainly non-U.S. nationals of South Asian or Middle Eastern origin, were taken into custody by the U.S. Justice Department and held indefinitely on grounds of national security. Muslim immigrants were subject to arbitrary arrest, secret detention, solitary confinement, and deportation. Many were denied access to legal representation and communication with their families.