[p2p-research] Fwd: some youtube activism links

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arthit Suriyawongkul <arthit at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:09 AM
Subject: Fwd: some youtube activism links
To: andrew paterson <agryfp at gmail.com>, Michel Bauwens <
michelsub2004 at gmail.com>, Narawan Pathomvat <kyo at readingroombkk.org>
Cc: Andrews Little <andrews.little at gmail.com>


curated by Andrew Little for Clip Kino Thailand
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Andrews Little" <andrews.little at gmail.com>
Date: Dec 10, 2010 12:02 AM
Subject: some youtube activism links
To: "Arthit Suriyawongkul" <arthit at gmail.com>

Regina Jose Galindo (Guatemala City, Guatemala)
"Huellas" (1:02)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D46p71QdCTc

from BOMB Magazine:

"A slight young woman in a black dress walks barefoot through the streets of
Guatemala City, carrying a white basin filled with human blood. She sets the
basin down, steps into it and then out, leaving a trail of bloody footprints
from the Constitutional Court building to the old National Palace. The
corrupt Constitutional Court had recently allowed the former military
dictator, General Ríos Montt, to run for president despite the
Constitution’s barring of past presidents who gained power by military coup.
A Guatemalan who didn’t know that it was a performance titled Who can erase
the traces?—or even who had never heard of performance art—would have had no
trouble understanding the symbolism: the ghostly footprints representing the
hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered, overwhelmingly by the Army,
during the long years of war and after; the persistence of memory in the
face of official policies of enforced forgetting and impunity. I’ve read
(and have contributed) plenty of words, a surfeit of words, about violence
and injustice in Guatemala. That trail of bloody footprints was the most
powerful statement I’d encountered in ages."

Bilin Activists (Bilin Village, Palestine/Occupied Territories)
"Protest Reenacting the Movie Avatar" (3:25)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KStnbXWfnuk

from bilin-village.org:

Bil’in is a Palestinian village that is struggling to exist. It is fighting
to safeguard its land, its olive trees, its resources… its liberty. By
annexing close to 60% of Bil’in land for Israeli settlements and the
construction of Israel’s separation wall, the state of Israel is strangling
the village. Every day it destroys a bit more, creating an open air prison
for Bil’in’s inhabitants. The occupation of Palestine by the Israeli armed
forces was condemned by United Nations’ Resolution 242, and by the
International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The village of Bil’in reenacted James Cameron’s new film Avatar during
today’s weekly demonstration. Five Palestinian, Israeli and international
activists were painted blue, with pointy ears and tales, resembling the
Avatar characters. Like Palestinians, the Avatars fight imperialism,
although the colonizers have different origins. The Avatars’ presence in
Bil’in today symbolizes the united resistance to imperialism of all kinds.

Erroristas (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
"Palestino - Estada de Israel" (4:50)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1nYWjXrGWM

Press Statement from the Erroristas Collective

"This action, carried out by the people and collectives supporting errorism,
will take place in Buenos Aires, errorist city and only urban zone in the
world where Palestine and Israel intersect on a map.

The street signs themselves and the intersection of these two streets, will
be used as geographic reference points so that Argentina and other societies
of the world will pay more attention to the terrible current situation in
Gaza and the urgent necessity for a cease fire and peaceful solution to this
historic conflict."

Zapatistas (Chiapas, Mexico)
"Zapatista Airforce" (0:28)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BliFqcIgdqs&playnext=1&list=PL2711FC916DA54802&index=1

>From Wikipedia: Tactical Media entry

"In 2000, Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation social movement
decided to launch a "tactical air force." The Zapatistas air force consisted
of hundreds of paper airplanes. After throwing the planes over the fence of
a federal barrack, confused troops were quick to point their rifles at the
paper intruders, creating an image that conveyed a very strong message of
peace versus war—the target ultimately being the government."

I would add that the key to this action's success (along with all of those
undertaken by the Zapatistas) is to clearly emphasize the huge imbalance of
power between the Mexican government (backed by the US) and an army of
largely unarmed indigenous peasants. Paper airplanes made by children
succeed in communicating this important point (an earlier strategy was for
Zapatista soldiers to march "armed" with wooden toy guns rather than real
ones, which they didn't have and could never afford).

Fran Ilich (webmaster for Zapatistas)
"Interview with Fran Ilich" (7:31)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhbOSmSI9is

>From a LatinArt.com interview:

"LatinArt:  In your talk in San Cristobal you referred to the internet as a
neo-liberal space and as a reflection of urban gentrification. Could you
elaborate on that?

Fran Ilich:  It’s a superior stage of neo-liberal urban development. By
definition, the public space is eradicated, its non-existent online. Of
course there were investments in fiberoptics and other technologies but
later these were privatized by corporations. The only kind of space where
people meet are servers. But most of these servers are owned by private
companies. All communication comes through satellites or telephone
companies, domain names are controlled by private registries, etc. There
used to be a public space called usenet. It was a series of servers that
mirrored what was on other usenet servers. Unfortunately, it was really
expensive to keep up with this amount of information. If you could compare
it to other forms of public space you could compare it to ham radio. In the
city we go to shopping malls. The internet is kind of the same thing. There
is no actual public sphere...everything is privately owned."

Institute for Applied Autonomy (Los Angeles, United States)
"Bridging the Gap" (7:46)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RiS5OEBsQ

The other very significant project that IAA did (in partnership with
experimental geographer Trevor Paglen) was called Terminal Air, which is an
app that allows you to follow the flight path of any plane from one airport
to another. This project was done as part of an investigation into the
Extraordinary Rendition kidnap program, which utilized unmarked corporate
airplanes rather than showy military crafts in order to kidnap terror
suspects and take them to other countries to be tortured. By using plain,
unmarked aircrafts, one of the US government's most clandestine programs was
effectively "hidden in plain sight," as they say.

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html



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