A former industrial warehouse in Barcelona’s Poblenou provides a place to live and work to a group of people, most of them originally from black Africa. In this video, they denounce their living and working conditions, and the segregation and attacks that they suffer. And they give us a lucid vision of the society that discriminates against them: “They ask us be to be civilized, to become civilized… I ask myself, what does it mean to be civilized? To spend money, to buy things… to consume.

2 Mostra de Vídeo Independent de Barcelona 1994.

At the height of French colonial expansion in West Africa, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (re)created a theoretical and practical model of submission to the Real that provided an effective alternative to the power structure, which limited and was limited by the colonial invader. The model or path founded by the Sheikh (the Muridiyya) is based on an Islamic premise according to which knowing is an act of love for each and every thing in creation and for the relationships between them: this is why not the heart, not the brain, is the organ of knowledge. Now, the echoes of Bamba’s loving experience migrate through his followers, the Mourides, who came from African lands and now live among us, perfuming the space, opening us up, and activating memory within us, inviting us to travel along the path of presences towards the One and Only. To migrate is thus to return to oneself. Dhikr ceremony [Remembrance] To conclude, the Baye Fall community invites us to attend and participate in a Dhikr ceremony. The remembrance of Allah (Dhikr or Zikr) is the main task of Sufi schools. “Recordar”, the Spanish word for remembering, comes from the Latin recordari and in some places it means to awaken, to stop sleeping and journey back through the heart (cor), to summon something to mind and invoke somebody's presence.

Today we experience a deepening crisis in every sphere, which urges us to rethink our acceptance of the most basic social institutions. The division of labor and domestication, the cornerstones of civilization itself, need to be problematized. The absence of fundamental critique would mean that we accept an unfolding, multifaceted disaster as merely inevitable. Might we find a new paradigm/ framework/vision that breaks out of the confines of failed earlier approaches to health and liberation? Keeping in mind that there should never be a single “correct” path, there is much promise in what is called anti-civilization theory, primitivism, and green anarchy in various parts of the world. Mass society and its technological imperative are now increasingly seen as the problem, not the solution. John Zerzan is an anarchist author and activist, and an editor of Green Anarchy magazine. His writings include Elements of Refusal (1988, 1999), Future Primitive (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), and Twilight of the Machines (2008). He has also edited Against Civilization (1995, 2002) and (with Alice Carnes) Questioning Technology (1991).