(...) 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  

Theory and practice of care

"Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.”

Carolina del Olmo, where is my tribe?

In Sweden – an extreme case of Western trends within the Protestant tradition –, over 50% of the population live alone. People also die alone, forgotten by everyone, after a lifetime of pursuing the desire for personal independence, adapting to social norms, comforts, and socialisation without physical contact. The dream of an independent life, free from community bonds and patriarchal family ties, has turned out to be a nightmare of loneliness, sadness, and existential emptiness.

We need to overcome the binary oppositions that lead us to choose between two almost equally bad options. We don’t have to go back to the old, strictly patriarchal family, but we shouldn’t have to settle for metropolitan solitude either. The idea is to create and experiment with other ways of living and loving.

"According to anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, female lab rats locked in cages with only their young for company started to behave in a manner very similar to 1950s American housewives, with their obsessions and their neuroses. But when observed in the wild, mothers and their offspring showed a wide range of different behaviours in all kinds of social contexts."

                                                                                                                                                             Carolina del Olmo, Where is My Tribe ?

In the documentary The Swedish Theory of Love , a Swedish social worker investigating the growing number of people who die abandoned, completely isolated, asks: “What does it matter if I have a million in the bank if I am not happy?” But it’s not just about achieving happiness, it’s about the immense somnambulant sadness washing over a decaying civilization, where life unfolds in the midst of the epiphany of a mountain of waste. “ Did you hear that? It is the sound of your world collapsing ,” say the Zapatistas. Individual independence is the catastrophic ideal of a world that is perfectly organised and efficient but cold as ice.

“ At the end of independence there is no happiness. At the end of independence there is the emptiness of life, the insignificance of life, and utter, unimaginable boredom.”

                                                                                                                       Zygmunt Bauman, interviewed in The Swedish Theory of Love

Project in Residency Falconetti Peña

/ Exhibition War, insubmission, art /

/ FILMOTECA DE CATALUNYA /

/ CRIPPLES OF WAR AND NORMALITY /

/ PATRIOTISM AND COLONIZATION /

/ YOU WILL DIE AS HEROES /

/ PAMPHLET AND REVOLUTION /

WAR, INSUBMISSION, ART

Project in Residency Falconetti Peña

In 1924, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the end of World War I, Otto Dix published his work The War, composed of fifty engravings in which he denounced warmongering with a harshness that had not been seen until then. A century earlier, Goya, a painter who inspired Otto Dix, produced The Disasters of War. And now, one hundred years later, a cruel and senseless war is once again being fought in Europe.

Otto Dix is located between two times, Goya's and ours. The project for this exhibition/intervention is to take his engravings as a starting point for a journey through the art that has rebelled against war slogans.

Goya, Dix, Grosz, Arntz, Watkins and many other artists defied the prevailing aesthetic order by creating works of enormous relevance. To do so, they used modest formats, the engraving, the poster, the mimeographed magazine, the pamphlet, the false documentary, the only ones they could access in times of censorship and blockade. These are works that managed to last against all odds, as there were many who were interested in making them disappear.

Thanks to them, today we can follow the trail of those who in their day disobeyed the patriotic slogans, maintaining the flame of resistance to the war madness.

The project will cover various spaces and historical periods, combining different formats, pictorial, graphic and audiovisual.

The idea is to contrast them, face to face, with the messages of those who at the time bet on galvanizing the warrior ardor of the masses.

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.

http://www.local-films.com/

http://www.local-films.com/

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

“By late 1964 Harold Wilson’s newly elected Labour Government had already broken its election manifesto to unilaterally disarm Britain, and was in fact developing a full-scale nuclear weapons programme, in spite of wide-spread public protest. There was a marked reluctance by British TV at the time to discuss the arms race, and there was especially silence on the effects of nuclear weapons - about which the large majority of the public had absolutely no information. I therefore proposed to the BBC that - using one small corner of Kent in southeastern England to represent a microcosm - I make a film showing the possible effects, during an outbreak of war between NATO and the USSR, of a nuclear strike on Britain.” The BBC panicked when they first saw the film, and sought government consultation re showing it. They subsequently denied this, but the sad fact remains that the BBC violated their own Charter of Independence, and on September 24, 1965, secretly showed The War Game to senior members of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Post Office (in charge of telecommunications), a representative of the Military Chiefs of Staff, and Sir Burke Trend, Secretary to Harold Wilson’s Cabinet. Approximately six weeks later, the BBC announced that they were not going to broadcast the film on TV - and denied that their decision had anything to do with the secret screening to the government". Peter Watkins

Having been tricked by Power and humiliated by the arrogance of those who now wield it, the Pandavas are forced into exile even though they still harbor a desire for justice. They face twelve years of banishment in the wilderness, and a further year during which they must live in disguise and avoid being discovered. The Mahabharata, portrays this exile as a period of extreme hardship in which death is always present – but so is the growing awareness of its opposite. To abandon the palace and swap the city for nature also leads them to renew direct contact with life, embark on a search for knowledge, start a process of cleansing and strengthen the bond of brotherhood. Nevertheless, this strengthening seems to lead back towards war. Part two ends with the famous reflections of the Baghavad Gita in which Krishna responds to the doubts of Arjuna.