[-empyre-] Frente 3 de Fevereiro forward

[Irina Contreras]

Im curious as to what your response was locally with sis?


--- On Sun, 6/1/08, lotu5 <lotu5 at resist.ca> wrote:

> From: lotu5 <lotu5 at resist.ca>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Frente 3 de Fevereiro forward
> To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Sunday, June 1, 2008, 7:46 PM
> 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
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> gpg:  0x5B77079C // encrypted email preferred
> gaim/skype: djlotu5 // off the record messaging preferred
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre