Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler, 54 min.

The video “Disobbedienti” thematizes the Disobbedienti’s origins, political bases, and forms of direct action on the basis of conversations with seven members of the movement.

The Disobbedienti emerged from the Tute Bianche during the demonstrations against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001. The “Tute Bianche” were the white-clad Italian activists who used their bodies – protected by foam rubber, tires, helmets, gas masks, and homemade shields – in direct acts and demonstrations as weapons of civil disobedience. The Tute Bianche first appeared in Italy in 1994 in the midst of a social setting in which the “mass laborer,” who had played a central role in the 1970s in production and in labor struggles, was gradually replaced in the transition to precarious post-Fordist means of production. By forcing the closing of detention camps through specially developed acts of dismantling the Tute Bianche became involved in protests against precarious working conditions and the immigrants’ struggle for freedom of movement. The Tute Bianche were part of the demonstration against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and the IMF in Prague in 2000. They sent delegates to the Lakandon rainforest in Chiapas and accompanied the Zapatist Comandantes 3,000 kilometers to Mexico City.

At the G8 summit in Genoa the Tute Bianche decided to take off their trademark white overalls that had given them their name and instead blend in the multitude of 300,000 demonstration participants. The transition from the Tute Bianche to the Disobbedienti, the disobedients, also marked a development from “civil disobedience” to “social disobedience.” The repressive actions and massacre by the police force in Genoa brought the practice of social disobedience in from the streets to the most diverse social realms. In the video, the Disobbedienti spokesperson Luca Casarini describes the Tute Bianche as a subjective experience and a small army, whereas Disobbedienti is a multitude and a movement.

Disobbedienti maintains the political form of the Tute Bianche and attempts to create a better legal justice for and from the people. Spectacular actions are still being carried out against detention centers, such as the dismantling of the detention camp in the Via Mattei in Bologna on 25 January 2002, as shown in the video. Additionally, attempts are being made to further develop “social disobedience” as a collective practice of various groups, to block the flows of goods and communication, to make general the strikes of individual groups, and to plan and carry out general strikes.

The conversations with the Disobbedienti were carried out in Italian in Bologna and Genoa in July 2002.

There are two versions of the video “Disobbedienti,” one with German and one with English subtitles.

Concept, interview preparation, editing, realization: Oliver Ressler
Interviews, conceptual work, translation: Dario Azzellini
Camera: Claudio Ruggieri
Sound: Rainer Antesberger
Interview partners: Luca Casarini, Ulia Conti, Gianmarco de Pieri, Enrico Ludovici, Federico Martelloni, Francesco Raparelli, Francesca Ruocco

For more infos about this project by Oliver Ressler visit the project website http://www.ressler.at/democracy/

A City-Light series by Oliver Ressler in the urban space of Munich, within the framework of the Kunstverein München’s exhibition “Exchange & Transform”

At busy sites in Munich’s inner city, 175 x 119 cm posters will be presented as City Lights from 14 May to 10 June 2002. The repressive actions of both politics and police against the demonstration on the occasion of the 38th NATO security conference which took place from 1 – 3 February 2002 in Munich provides a starting point for the poster series. Munich’s chief mayor, Christian Ude (SPD), took an unverified claim from the German constitutional protection agency, that 3,000 “violence-prone demonstrators” were planning excessive acts of violence and a “de-glassing” of Munich’s inner city as cause to impose a three-day demonstration ban. The lifting of the Schengen agreement and the prohibition for demonstration participants to cross the border from neighboring countries accompanied this measure in order to avoid, according to Bavaria’s Minister of the Interior Günther Beckstein (CSU), “leftist, cross-border violence tourism.”

More than 3,500 police officers, special vehicles, and barricades were called in to execute the officially prescribed infringement of the constitutional right to free demonstration during the NATO security conference.

7,000 anti-war activists and opponents of economic globalization attempted – despite prohibitions, barriers, and police encirclements – to practice their right to demonstrate in Munich’s inner city. Of these, 792 were arrested although participation in a prohibited demonstration is actually tantamount to a disruption of public order (comparable to a traffic violation).

Through the construction of fictive threatening scenarios, people were hindered from practicing their democratic rights and the proudly claimed “Liberalitas Bavariae” (the Bavarian liberalness) of politics, police, secret service and media were trampled on.

The three poster subjects of the City-Light series bring together the available knowledge on location at the events around the NATO security conference with the fact that a month after the total demonstration ban by the SPD head mayor, his politics – and thereby also the restriction of democratic rights – was confirmed by a brilliant election victory. Therefore, in the work “This is what democracy looks like (Liberalitas Bavariae)” in the City-Light posters, the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD’s) election slogans, “Munich needs more red!” and “It is about Munich” are combined with events surrounding the demonstration ban. The poster subjects, presented at various sites throughout the inner city, create an open structure and do not allow for a clear designation of who is behind the posters. With two of the posters it is even possible that passers-by could believe Munich’s SPD to be the initiator, proud of suspending democratic rights. In this case this intervention into the “order of discourse,” as Foucault described that essential element of the exercise of power, would amount to a weakening of the position of the supposed authors, the SPD, at the level of symbol-politics. The third poster makes a clear statement: “The restriction of democratic rights has many abbreviations” is written next to the abbreviations: CSU, SPD, KVR, VGH and UDE.

This intervention to the urban space is connected in terms of content with the video “This is what democracy looks like!” (38 min, 2002) about a police encirclement on the occasion of the first anti-globalization demonstration in Austria. The video could likewise be seen in the framework of the exhibition project “Exchange & Transform” in the Kunstverein München from 26 April to 1 September 2002.

Poster texts:

• “It is about Munich”The constitutional right to free demonstration successfully suspended!
• Once again next year
• Bans on demonstrations – Bans on events – Police encirclements – Mass arrests – Restriction of democratic rights“Munich has more red!”
• Cordial thanks for your vote
• The restriction of democratic rights has many abbreviationsCSU, SPD, KVR, VGH, UDE

After an invited competition, Oliver Ressler and Martin Schmidl were selected by the city of Kapfenberg (A) to carry out two installations dedicated to the author Erich Fried (1921 – 1988). Fried’s political poems and love poems make him one of the most significant and active German speaking authors of his times.

Oliver Ressler’s installation consists of two 1.5 x 1.5 m light boxes and a 46 m long floor text in the center of Kapfenberg. The text/image montages in the two light boxes combine thematic and associative text excerpts from Erich Fried’s literary work with photographs and a drawing from his estate. The selected texts are concerned with the capitalist system, possible alternatives, and with socialism and issues of democracy. This thematic concentration forms the connecting link between the political position and literature of Fried and the history and present life in the Upper Styrian industrial town of Kapfenberg. The light box, installed in the old town passageway directly adjacent to the main square that was named for the resistance fighter Koloman Wallisch focusses on Fried’s views of socialism and the worker’s struggle based on excerpts from the text “Die Arbeiterbewegung als kulturelle Kraft” (The labor movement as cultural power) from 1987. The text states:

“In an era of steadily growing multinational capitalist weavings, we can, for example, think of new concepts of socialism that don’t eliminate capitalism, that replace class struggle with social partnership. What we can’t do is believe in such a maneuver deep inside.”

The light box as an advertising medium is a reference to the continued relevance of Fried’s judgement. Proceeding from this light box, in the passageway where the entrances to the offices of Kapfenberg’s municipal authorities can be found, are the following texts from Erich Fried displayed in a 46 m long and 17 cm wide white and black floor graphic:

A land in which / official spokespersons declare: / “our judges / say unjust things at times / and our police are often brutal / and equal rights for all are seldom / and besides that there are / political trials / and also a few other things / that are not so easy to justify / And some prisons / and mental hospitals and nursing homes / and hospitals and orphanages / and youth and old age homes / are not as good as they should be / and workers are / still being exploited / And it is doubtful that we always / judge according to the will of the people / and the people / are informed well enough / and it is really possible / to say ‘freedom reigns here’ // A land / in which official spokespersons / say things like that / and cast doubts / would undoubtedly / be the land of my dreams / that I love / and in which I want to live

By following and reading the floor text on the ground, the second light box becomes visible in the new part of the passageway. Set above a photo that shows several police officers in helmets, who have obviously pushed a demonstrator to the ground, is an excerpt from Fried’s poem “Zur Kenntlichkeit” (On recognisability) from 1975-1977:

Is a democracy / where it is not permitted to say / that it is not / really a democracy / really a / real democracy?

The Erich Fried Passage at Koloman-Wallisch-Platz in Kapfenberg is permanently open to the public.