72 papers...
how boring!

 

“A” and theater.
A double birthday?

by Cristina Valenti

The tale of a theater that accompanied enzymes, dreams, contradictions of generations.

Forty years of the theater thinking about the forty-year of "A". Can we consider it a double birthday? "A" celebrates forty years of a life that had its incubation in the political movement, militant childhood and ending with the current maturity, which can be read the banner of the openings.
The theater which I think, what he found space on the "A" in 1971 (but actually around those years) collected the contents of a revolt that broke out not only theater in the '60s, and inaugurated a new baby theater, firmly in the "tradition of the renaissance" that run to the bird's history of the theater, can be read between jumps and ruptures as a story of applicants reinvention from new foundations for meaning and necessity. At the dawn of the seventies the death of inauthenticity and the representation of the theater had already been decreed, and the connections between art and life dictated that the existential dimension (and thus political, ethical, relational) interacted significantly with the aesthetic dimension.

Julian Beck and Judith Malina in Antigone (1980). Photo © Marco Caselli Nirmal (by Cristina Valenti's book, History of the Living Theatre. Conversations with Judith Malina, Corazzano, Titivillus, 2008).

The Living Theatre had already shown the way of escape from the theater system and its conventions. By becoming an anarchist community, drew from the political principles which inspire the creative process, working methods and organizational strategies that allowed a nomadic group of about twenty people to live without subsidies. After Paradise Now, a point of no return for a theater that had broken the show form to get the happening on the border between political assembly and ritual of collective liberation, the Living Theatre plays and abandoned theater buildings, since 1970, gave rise to a cycle collective creations for street performances that left from the Brazilian favelas to go on factories in strike, asylums, occupied universities, in urban areas.
Meanwhile, an ever-widening theater movement expressed the need to be elsewhere outside the official channels and by their rules, pushing the boundaries of representation to stir to life, to invade non-theatrical spaces, enhance non-verbal forms of expression. Peter Brook's Royal Shakespeare Company leaves and goes to Africa, where he opened his theater inter-ethnic integration experience and as a mixture of languages and scripts, based in Brazil Augusto Boal founds the Theatre of the Oppressed, which he created with the incursions of the "Theatre Journal "and the" invisible theater "in open spaces in front of the off guard audience, Odin Teatret leaves the size of the closed Danish laboratory to travel in Southern Italy and South America creating" barters", that is meetings with local people through theater. And in Italy the extraordinary experience of the animation play out from schools to expand in the social, with the "theater of fighting in space" by Giuliano Scabia.
For many young people active in the political movement of the theatrical experience in social work, the premise of "grassroots groups" and then the "theater group" of the seventies / eighties, is an important moment of transition from militant liberation of artistic practice and of cultural alternative. Access to theater young people without specific training and yet able to redesign the scene on the basis of an essentially political theater that will yield the conquest of alternative spaces, where do work of a wide-ranging, pointing to a referent and culturally similar registry.
Of those experiences (the teenage of a rebel and creative history) are the ripe fruits of settlements that have broken the monolithic system of play and, after having called themselves "centers" today are called "permanent theaters of innovation"; is the proliferation of languages that are breaking after being today (in an atmosphere of menace, however, return to order) the infinite possibilities of the expressive resources to draw freely, outside of the hierarchical nature of connections, it being his right of access to Theatre for the non-actors, which, having been featured theatrical animation today are the new actors in a drama that combines the appropriateness of inclusion of new languages and the development possibilities of the scene from different abilities.
I browse the articles I wrote for "A" at the beginning of my collaboration. I told of the Living Theatre from the death of Julian Beck on, the American alternative of Bread and Puppet and the musical anti-apartheid in Soweto, South America political theater and Italy's of the younger generation and the occupied spaces, the gay theater and women's theater, group theater, and secluded and in places of discomfort theater...
And while still regret not having told so many important experiences, I pacified a bit with myself because I find that the life of the theater held a dialogue with that of "A", and when, among other forty years, historians will turn over the collection of a magazine that will be considered essential reading for policy and society in the twentieth century and new millennium, they will find the story of a theater that has accompanied enzymes, dreams, and contradictions of generations in which at times has provided a mirror to reveal itself, and sometimes suggested other ways to escape and experience the transformation possible.

 

Libertarian education
on the street

by David Guazzoni

A job training and preparation the implementation of street projects.

Since 2000, the Cooperative Alekoslab has chosen the street as its main place of work, as a dimension of its educational activity, as the main scenario to be with people, to mingle and compete with the 'reality'.
In the work of training and preparation for implementation of street projects we have developed several tools that could help the operators to understand the framework within which we went to work.
Here we offer six items taken from 'Dictionary minimum of education on the street' which was written in 2000 just to start to orient us.

S: surprise / amazing. The ability of. It is a requirement that every social worker should bring in their personal baggage; is that ingredient that makes fascinating their work even after years and allows you to recharge the batteries and to strike sparks, even when we least expect it. When working in the street it is useful to recover this capacity from your luggage.
T: time. It is absolutely necessary not to hurry, to draw comparisons with time-consuming, dilated times, leading to results when you least expect them. This requires, whenever possible, to include street projects courses in several years, because only then you can have a full sense of perspective, an evolution, a change has occurred.
N: network. Work in. The street work and all the social work must always create more generally banks, references, links, trade between the reality that are working in the same territory, thereby expanding the points of view, the comparison food and force isolation.
P: Pending. In the sense of knowing how to wait. Haste is always a bad counselor and street work may not be room for the short-term, for the 'fast 'solutions.
A: availability. It is a skill that every operator must have in any field of action and is a prerequisite in street work. Often workers are asked to have complete mental disposition (in the sense that they are prepared to disrupt and divide the cards and to restart) and practice (very trivially in time, especially in the early stages of work in a new territory).
T: team. Central is the size of the working group intended as a nucleus from which to build on and return to, to reprocess the experience, comparing them and giving them the best possible contextualization.
Alekoslab Cooperativa Sociale ONLUS www.alekoslab.org.

 

Feelings and method: the lesson of Errico Malatesta

by Davide Turcato

Errico Malatesta seen by Fabio Santin (detail).

Malatesta requires continuity between the anarchic action in this society and in the future one.

Errico Malatesta's writings contain perhaps the richest heritage of experience and ideas that the anarchist movement possesses. They fill more than five thousand pages, and such is the size of the complete works of the anarchist, a publishing project currently under way that, it is hoped, will complete the work begun in 1930 by Luigi Fabbri.
But if in these writings I had to choose between a single-symbolic sentence, this would be a definition contained in the booklet The Anarchy of 1891: "Anarchy, like socialism, has the basic point of departure for the necessary environment equality of conditions, is to spotlight the solidarity and for method the freedom." The phrase symbolizes the good blend of simplicity of exposition and depth of thought that characterizes the entire work of Malatesta. It seems a natural definition in its reference to the classic triad of values of the French Revolution, yet synthesizes whole concept of anarchism, thoughtful and original. In this conception of equality of conditions, namely the pooling of means of production, socialism, is not a point of arrival, but the starting point of a process of social evolution animated by a sense of solidarity among men, and explicit through the freedom of initiative of each.
The definition does not propose a static model of a perfect society, but it describes an open society, socialist, experimental and pluralistic. In characterizing the anarchy in terms of sentiment, solidarity, and a method, the freedom that today's anarchists already do, Malatesta postulates continuity between the anarchy action in this society and in the future. And as that sentiment and that method are voluntary choices of each individual, his is a gradualist vision of anarchy, which will be the more realized the more individuals will own that feeling and that method. No concept could be further from the stereotype, hard to die, of anarchism as longing for a perfect arcadia and philosophy of "all or nothing." There is still a lot to understand about what anarchism is, and no one has explained what it is better than Malatesta.
In reconsidering its tradition in view of future struggles, as does this wonderful initiative of "A," the anarchists should draw from this invaluable heritage, largely unexplored or misunderstood, the "pages of the daily struggle" of Malatesta.

 

Soundtracks of “bad music”

by Diego Giachetti

With the clubs changed the places of youth socialization.

About when this magazine was born, the Italian '68 was making terms with the songs of "bad conscience" committed to rediscovering the engaged song, politics and protest old and new. The "rebel music", as Eugenio Finardi summarized effectively in 1976, the one that vibrated in your bones and in your skin and invited you to come to "give up the leading is put to fight." In the second half of the Seventies music, concerts, were the occasion, in the youth party of the proletariat, to meet, get together, flirt, smoke joints, while the sense and meaning of the words "political commitment" suffered a first change . The connotation was still positive, but his reference was extended, dilated. On the threshold of the eighties, the generation that had been the protagonist of the movement of the seventies, was en route to reflux, overwhelmed by the crisis of ideologies abandoned the effort. Painfully discovered to be "a generation of overwhelmed," with no "more saints nor heroes" (Vasco Rossi, Siamo solo noi, 1981), without a "center of permanent gravity," as ruled Franco Battiato, "each one with his journey, each one different, lost behind his affairs "(Vita spericolata, 1983).
With the clubs changed the places of socialization. Thousands of young people met by setting up communities based on the need to escape, to break the monotony of daily life. The juvenile was prolonged, synonymous with precarious social status. The music, of which they were major consumers, combined the playfulness with that participation. The words of the texts did not have an immediate and explicit pedagogical and educational message, they served to aggregate, sync up the bodies of individuals on the same rhythm. When the movement of movements came its soundtrack was a global music that abolished the concept of "foreigner." A new musical Koine, which embraced a new musical traditions of various peoples of the world not as a curiosity to discover, but as part of their cultural heritage. In the expressions of the movement in Genoa, Florence, Rome, there were red flags, the singing tradition of the labor movement. A lot of red, but if the quote from Tiziano Ferro is not blasphemous, it was a "relative red" (2001), which was from the past and in which the proceedings were discontinued, as to be young it meant also to feel naked creatures in front of the windows of ideologies.
So, that's why you have to accept the invitation of Marcel Proust not to despise the bad music, the one that plays and sings with more passion and more of that good one, that which has filled "the dream and the tears of men" because, if its place is none in the history of art, is immense in the sentimental history of society "(The Pleasures and Days).

 

Breaking down the domain.
Building freedom

by Domenico Liguori

This is the challenge that libertarian municipalism launched to us.

In the words of Errico Malatesta, anarchists believe that "the greater part of the ills that afflict poor people dependent on bad social organization, and just because they are convinced of this, they offer as an alternative to the domain society to build a society based on freedom . Two, then, are the driving forces of anarchism, one destroyer and one manufacturer. The first does not recognize itself in the present, even delegitimize it, fights it and seeks to destroy it gradually, and the second one is already all intent on the prospect of the future: a society of freedom and equality.
In other words, anarchists believe that inequities are due to the hierarchical organization of society, they propose that each one resume in their hands the destiny and that together we take in hand the destiny of humanity, to make the architects of a society in horizontally, which starts from the individual to step to free association between individuals, to community, and ultimately to a federation from below, which combines free communities from the territory to the whole world.
Here, that's how I like to think the municipality or the libertarian communalism, as whatever you want: as a radical proposal, revolutionary, but at the same time gradual, a proposal that fits in the conflicts of today to defend the immediate interests the lower classes, but aims at the same time to start building in the "here and now" the alternative bases on which to build the free society of tomorrow.
This kind of argument is certainly not new for A-anarchist magazine, if we only think in terms of contributions that are libertarian municipalism before it, for the thirty past years, in collaboration with the philosopher Murray Bookchin. In short, in front of the loud chatter about institutionalist federalism, A-anarchist magazine must be given credit for having played a major role in proposing the issue of federalism in essence, that essence that is located in the genesis libertarian of the same, a genesis that reminds us that where there is hierarchy, there cannot be true federalism.
I write from Spezzano Albanese, abereshe town of Calabria, known within the anarchist and libertarian movement for its communalist libertarian practical experience of several decades unfolds outside and against the establishment of state municipal organization with self-government initiatives from the low, in the world of work and in the territory, through social campaigns promoted by the FMB - Federazione Municipale di Base (for those who wants to learn more: www.anarchia.info).
Destroying the domain to build freedom: that is, in short, the challenge that we launch today, the municipal or communal libertarian, as if you will. Would we know to pick it up?

 

A beautiful dream to be
delivered to the future

by Dori Ghezzi

It is still difficult for me to be able to consider myself a true anarchist.

Up to a certain point in my life, for me the concept of anarchy was a distorted version than what anarchy is in its true essence, and I believe that this could happen to the majority of people conditioned by information that too often inappropriately used the word anarchy.
The awareness of what it meant was gained by knowing closely who declared himself an anarchist with awareness and honesty.
I understand that you do not become anarchists because someone indoctrinates you and affiliates through the code, but arises from a natural tension knowing how to live with others.
It is the freedom which sets the nth degree the possibility for humans to be completely self-relying and understand and respect, not as a duty but as a choice.
Despite being fully in tune with this thought, it is still difficult for me - I do not know whether out of shame or a (irrational?) question of clarity - to consider myself a true anarchist.
I have not met Stirner, Bakunin or Anna Kuliscioff, but Fabrizio and his circle of friends, and some anarchist in Carrara, and a then very young Paolo Finzi with his partner Aurora.
Paolo and Aurora were the ones just to give me a few volumes of Emma Goldman, and still I thank them for reading through those I knew the right way to redeem the condition of the weak and, even more, the dignity of women.
Some years later I had the good fortune to meet Fernanda Pivano, another convinced anarchist, with whom I shared the same thoughts on the (for us) wrong setting of feminist struggle.
If, unfortunately, there are still inequities not only between ethnic groups and cultures, but also between men and women almost everywhere, unfortunately, at least for now, the anarchy seems to be a beautiful dream to be delivered to the future.

Fabrizio De André and Dori Ghezzi (photo Reinhold Kohl)

 

Not one,
but many revolutions

by Elena Violato

Long been a deep sense of loss in people houses and especially among the younger generationsi.

Let me start this paper with a very obvious statement but I really hope so widely shared: we are in a period of crisis.
Many words have been spent in this regard and it is the common heritage the fact that we are experiencing a period of economic crisis, cause and a consequence of the environmental one that centuries of exploitation by humans have created.
But what about that I would like to focus here is the existential aspect, the cultural thing: we no longer know how to define, how to deal with the existing and with our very existence, the imaginary with which we were born and has grown has vague and nebulous boundaries.
On the one hand the process of secularization has challenged the unquestioned faith in one god, be it that of the church, state, or a great ideal for which to live and fight.
Against what we were offered in exchange for faith is an even more intoxicating opium to abuse: constantly urged to consume to live, to have your life, never satisfied and insatiable, always looking for something else and / or someone else, the "comfort" seems to be at everyone's reach and few realize that the more we fill it with things, the more we empty ourselves being bad.
Having been put into question all the major faiths, this has allowed a partial release from human mental cages, which of course over time have not encouraged the desire to improve their living conditions. But it also happened that put an emphasis only on the objective conditions of the individual and society and we should forget everything, everything that helps the same way the essence of a society or individual.
Only in recent decades it was realized that in the conceptualization of a change a piece was missing and who has begun to deal with all the writings referred to that point of talking about the "imaginary."
For some time now a deep sense of loss harbors in people and especially among the younger generations, who more or less consciously rejecting the codes of the old "culture," reel in failing to create, to give birth to a new system of exchange and shared understanding .
"Liquid life" according to Bauman.
It might sound absurd but it is here that nests the "seed" for change, a hope of change of imagery that could lead to further liberation from the shackles of the Dominion.
Given that giving meaning to his life and another's is a conditio sine qua non in order to live and "be" human, and given that most of the founding myths of the ultimate meaning of life is or is collapsing, it can be absurd for think that we are at the beginning of a radical transformation.
For now we only put emphasis on the progress of nationalism and fundamentalism. This is a frighteningly real and imminent risk.
But the other extreme you can see a light of hope, a profound relativism that is permeating all human and social sciences and even more people (though not always so idyllic and taking into account the difficulty of the case), also due to the ever- more frequently clash with other cultures.
This relativism does not want to find its own way on something transcendent and the absolute tranquility with which to accept that if something is right and good for the individual, not necessarily have to be written at the bottom somewhere create real and mental spaces of freedom, they create a "culture of freedom."
Listening to the opinions of others, listening, the real thing can be done only if one assumes that the other thinks of his way to be right and it is only with this assumption that each of us can compare the views of others with its own, without wasting time and energy in wanting to assert himself at all costs.
Respect for diversity can take its first tentative steps only from here, only when it is the common heritage that nothing is more absurd than anything else, that nothing is more normal and objective of the rest.
And that basically is the one that always tends to anarchy ...
I have emphasized one aspect of killing domain. It is certainly not the only one and it is obvious that all this talk is useless for people who are continuing and will continue to impose their rule by force and violence, deception and repression. But on fascists, state and institutions I think that much has already been said.
To break free and be free should not neglect any aspect: from macro to micro, from thought to action, from the creative destruction to destructive creation.
Not one but many "revolutions", not waiting for the sun of tomorrow, but here, now.

All Translations by Enrico Massetti ("The other Fabrizio" + "Pinelli-Piazza Fontana")