[-empyre-] Frente 3 de Fevereiro forward

[lotu5]

Hi,

I just wanted to chime in response to this other late response. ;-)

brian whitener wrote:
> 1)
> Our group was formed with a very clear and specific objective: to
> reflect and act upon the racism issue in Brazilian society. Of course,
> from that we could connect this issue with other issues that are more
> ample, and more global (like immigration problems, or mass
> incarceration processes, etc.). Since the

Similarly, both of the collectives I mentioned (sharing is sexy and the 
boredom patrol) came out of very specific local concerns. Both groups 
are composed of people who think of themsleves as artists and are 
trained as such and people who do not think of themselves this way, but 
may think of themselves as activists. So, in order to build a collective 
and gather energy together, we worked on local issues that were very 
important to us.

With the Boredom Patrol, there was a very strong concern about the 
Minutemen, who have a history of violence against migrant people in San 
Digo county since they began organizing here a few years ago. They have 
shot migrant people, pepper sprayed them, picked fights with them and 
even gone to migrant camps and destroyed them. So, there was a real 
sense of urgency among the clowns to intervene in a direct way. The 
primary site was outside of stores like Home Depot, where Day Laborers 
go to find construction jobs for the day. the minutemen knew that some 
of these people are migrant people, so it made a good target them to 
find and harass migrants. Numerous times, we went to these sites, early 
in the morning when the Minutemen went there, and we put ourselves 
inbetween them and the migrant people. You can see this in the videos.

With Sharing is Sexy (SiS), some of the people starting it felt a lack 
of queer community in San Diego. Here I have to speak for myself and not 
represent the collective. There is a gay community and a lesbian 
communtiy and both are strong, but there was very little specifically 
queer, genderqueer, transgender space and activity. In addition, I felt 
that there was very little discussion of sex positivity, especially in 
our activist circles, I felt like there was this kind of martyr 
mentality around activism, which led to a lack of pleasure and a 
constant focus on outrage, sadness and guilt. So, I wanted to work on 
something different, something which would promote pleasure in a radical 
way, something which would be enjoyable but which would challenge 
heteronormativity in san diego, but also in tech culture. So much of the 
open souce community is male dominated and averse to discussing 
race/class/gender inequalities within tech culture.

> 2) To elaborate the intervention, we try to find a symbolic and artistic
> way to expose the urgency. We also try to find cracks in the systems
> that controls the public spaces, so that we can use these cracks that
...> system, the possible viewers of the media system. For example, we
> opened huge flags with messages questioning the racism in football
> games, so we got to the public watching the game at the stadium, but we
> also got the TV to show it live, so we reached everybody who was
> watching the game. After that we also try to organize an artistic

This also makes me think of our interventions in these two collectives.

As I said, with the Boredom Patrol, we propagated our videos through 
YouTube. This worked well with us getting tens of thousand of views to 
our videos for a number of reasons, one being, of course, that people go 
to youtube to find funny videos, and our videos (i think), are funny. 
another being that youtube is very actively used by both the 
anti-immigration movement and the pro-immigration or no borders 
movements. for example, you can see this collection of videos with very 
different views on immigration, which creates its own strange at times 
macabre environment:

http://youtube.com/inbetweenborders

or if you look on youtube for videos of the marches against hr4437, the 
sensenbrenner bill, or of the student walkouts against the same bill, 
there are tons of videos that people have uploaded there. so, our 
intervention into this online public space worked in a way by going to 
where people are already looking and intervening.

Also, with SiS, I'll just quote myself, ;-) , from a previous interview:

"One of the most interesting and exciting things about porn is that it
can function like a short circuit for the attention economy. Porn gets a
lot of attention, and if our current information economy is so
intimately related to attention, then it seems like a line that cuts
through the system. If you take your clothes off, someone will be
looking. The question for me is, what to say once people are looking?
And what we are saying is that we want a million genders for a million
people, that we want an infinite multiplicty of sexual practices to
propagate, that we want to empower people in learning about their own
desire and following it, that we will be empowered by the system we find
ourselves in by finding its weaknesses and we will use them to get what
we want."

from
Power to the Pornographers: Audacia Ray interviews Sharing is Sexy
http://www.sharingissexy.org/node/419


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