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Interview with Naomi Klein (page 2 of 4)
by: Yogesh Chawla and Sachin Pandya
This interview is available free of charge, however we encourage
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NK: But the Zapatista rebellion weaves poetry so deeply-poetry and art, visual
art, into the fabric-and puts it at center stage. And of course Marcos’
writings-they are the opposite of Leninist dogma. They are these poems
that come down from the mountain and are picked up and put on the
Internet. And I think that had a profound effect on a new generation of
activists. That sort of freed us to think about what political writing could be.
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SP: You seem to get excited in your writing about actions and
protests like Reclaim the Streets, things that can be much more of a
carnival experience. Obviously one of the big goals of these kinds of
protests is more than just about getting streets back for bicycle
traffic, but about reclaiming public space.
And I think one of the things we’ve noticed here, getting involved
locally in trying to create public spaces for the arts, poetry readings,
art shows and things like that-is this idea that public space
has a necessary purpose, a very specific purpose. It’s not just a
place where people can stand publicly and mingle. We need to use
those spaces as forums for a certain kind of discourse and a certain
kind of thought.
Can you talk a little about the role, perhaps throughout Europe,
that arts and artists have played in those kinds of protests? And
what you think the role of art in public space really is?
NK: Well, I think that there has been a community of artists that are
linked, some of them acting on their own, who are trying to free art from-a
friend of mine, John Jordan, is one of the founders of Reclaim the Streets in
England. He recently gave a paper at the Tate Modern in London, which was
about performance art, and the name of his presentation was "Escape the
Art Bunker." It was sort of a challenge to the arts community in Britain, who
do tend to lock themselves up in art bunkers. And the Tate looks like a
bunker, which is why he used that phrase. To bring art to the streets, and to
make that their tool. I guess to come back again to the Zapatistas-there’s
this idea that anything can be a weapon if you use it right. And you know,
that’s their famous phrase: Our word is our weapon.
But a video camera can be a weapon, and poetry can be a weapon. One of
the examples that I am thinking of is a project that happened in Quebec
City during the protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
a couple years ago. A group of artists realized that there was going to be a
huge repression, and they wanted to do something that would be both
beautiful and functional. So they produced about 5,000 bandanas that they
silk-screened with the image of a fence on it. Because that was sort of the
image of Quebec City. They fenced the whole downtown.
It was a way of taking, of playing-being aware of how our movement’s
iconography was being manipulated in the media. Black Bloc sort of all
masked-up and anonymous. It was becoming almost borg-like and threatening.
They were realizing that people do need to wear masks because they are
being tear-gassed, but how can you play with the image of the mask so that
you are more in control of your image?
Right before September 11th, when there were going to be protests in
Washington against the World Bank and IMF, there was a project. Those
protests were cancelled because the meetings were cancelled, but the project
by a group of artists was to put sequins and feathers on gas masks. Once
again it is the same idea. The idea of art that is functional.
I’ll give you another example from Argentina. What I’ve been doing in
Argentina is making a documentary film about an amazing movement that’s
happening there, which is the occupied factory movement. You have all
these factories that during the economic crisis were shut down, went
bankrupt, or the owners decided it was no longer profitable to do business
in Argentina, and they shut down the factories to move them elsewhere.
But in about 150 cases the workers at these factories refused to leave, so they
locked themselves in and did something which was kind of the reverse of a
strike. Instead of withholding their labor in the traditional strike sense, they
refused to stop working. Seamstresses refused to leave their machines and
kept sewing, and tile workers kept making ceramic tiles. The factories in 150
cases have stayed open, are sustainable, and people are getting paid, in many
cases more than they were before.
In one of the most famous cases, there was a factory called Brookman. It
was a clothing factory and it was one of the first factories to be occupied.
While we were there, they were evicted after a year and a half of staying
working, of continuing production. There was a massive police presence
outside the factory, and the workers decided that they wanted to go back in
and retake the factory. So once again there was a group of international
artists who had a meeting to talk about what they could do to help, to be
practically useful.
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