----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Dear Renate and Tim —
Thank you for your post. How strange the mixing of the writing address in my
response. Apologies. But I feel, to my only excuse, we are all in this
together, you, Tim and Johannes and all of us regardless of our geographic
locations.
Nevertheless please forgive the mix -up of names in my note.
To all of you, the empyre list members who are protesting now in New York City
and elsewhere - please stay safe and thank you,
Monika
On Dec 5, 2014, at 7:27 PM, Monika Weiss <gnie...@monika-weiss.com> wrote:
> Dear Johannes,
>
> It feels like it’s raining around the world recently, not only in New York
> City. The holiday music so disturbing anyway becomes almost apocalyptic when
> faced with beautiful austerity of hand written protest signs. ’I can’t
> breathe’ said the man who was choked and sat on, by a police officer, as he
> was being filmed… Seeing my city lie down like this, at Grand Central
> Station, I have a strange feeling as if my own work — the once relatively
> poetic and only gently-political projects, involving prostrate body, body
> lying down in public space, as a way to oppose the heroic verticality, works
> involving large groups of people lying down in historical sites—is now
> becoming more and more intertwined with real protests, assuming there is any
> difference left between ‘real’ and performed protest. Our collective
> postmemory is so fast now that it becomes concurrent with history. Postmemory
> unfolds as history happens. It is taking place now/towards and no longer
> ‘after’. If postmemory is a form of trauma that we inhabit even though we did
> not lived through it, current protests are a form of postmemory that leaks
> through time and space, through race especially, responding to ‘not being
> able to breathe' which we did not experience directly yet we are all part of.
> His death lives through us, inhabits our bodies and inhabits the architecture
> of the Grand Central Station. Protests in cities are symbolic, perhaps even
> poetic — and it is their symbolic/poetic and not military power that Saskia
> Sassen calls the “weak regime” — the kind that nevertheless causes dark, loud
> clouds of helicopters to appear over our city’s skies, with their surveying
> eye, the helicopters’ collective eye informed by the fear of the
> symbolic/poetic power of lying down.
>
> Monika
>
> On Dec 5, 2014, at 6:59 PM, Renate Ferro <renatefe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> It is raining here in New York City. Tim Murray and I just joined
>> hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most
>> tourist, commodified streets in the world. Past the Rockefeller
>> Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists
>> stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a
>> light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. Loud speakers
>> filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music. Disrupting
>> that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched
>> directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting "Hands Up,
>> Don't Shoot," "I can't breathe," and other chants to stop shoppers in
>> their tracks. Shoppers had two choices: to clear out of the way for
>> protestors or to join.
>>
>> Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping
>> season, lay down and conduct a "die in."
>>
>> I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the
>> confusion of the junta-postion between a commodity driven season and
>> a politically driven movement that collides head to head. How crazy
>> is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart
>> phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this
>> message:
>>
>> "We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today
>> there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this:
>> Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the
>> longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added
>> over the last 57 straight months.
>> Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the
>> first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014
>> than in any entire year since the late 1990s.
>> It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while
>> there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in
>> putting people back to work.
>> Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took
>> office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know:"
>>
>> HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for
>> the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be
>> heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the
>> past several weeks.
>>
>> World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are
>> shouting out as well about other injustices. Can we take a moment to
>> reflect on how these movements may be organically generating? How
>> does social media, list serves, networked media enable movements such
>> as these? What else may be inspiring these gestures of resistance. I
>> am looking forward to speaking to all of you now but for now I have to
>> run.
>>
>> Renate Ferro (and Tim Murray from NYC)
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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