Swap Meet

No, the blanket is yours to keep forever, so it is far from a 'temporary' autonomous zone. In other words, although you'll pick them up at the Next 5 Minutes, you can take it and squat any place you see fit to show your tactical wares. They are made for re-use. Maybe you can think of it as a sort of Flexible Autonomous Zone, (FAZ) or a Mobile Autonomous Zone (MAZ).

Then you can choose to share one blanket with others or you can join blankets together because we have sewn buttons on the sides allowing for multiple coalitions when necessary.

Sure you can, there is a lot to do at the Next 5 Minutes and we can imagine you want to take time off from squatting your blanket to see other things.

Post your idea on this list or email us in person at:

info@geuzen.org

Although we only have an afternoon for the workshops, we are open and excited about suggestions from others.

No, its for free but you will need to pay to get into the Next 5 Minutes 4 conference. Have a look at their website listed under our links for exact entry prices.

If you want a blanket to air your wares then simply email us at:

info@geuzen.org

We intend on giving them out as long as they last.

In preparing for the Swap Meet we wanted a virtual space for people to get to know each other and exchange ideas, resources and know-how in advance of the event. We will also use the site for documentation and hopefully continue the debate around tactical traditions long after the event is over.

While surveying the net for images we found this. The title reads:

Mr. Robin's Grade 6 French Class Make a Human Peace Sign

okay, a bit cheesey and too hippy but nonetheless a few thoughts came to mind: "design for aerial views" and "the body as typography"

how is this for a banner? Get out your sewing kit cause we're going totally analogue:

(who would have imagined that this silk banner would have recently been up for auction at Christies... That is the ultimate Debordian twist..... yesterday's cause is tomorrow's commodity)

or how about this one:

As a quote across a womans breast, "votes for women" sure beats "Ms. Florida"

These are some of the qualities or functions we are currently attempting to build into the design of the blankets:

*a cover
*a carry-all
*a banner
*a table
*a display case
*a soft, flexible, and mobile piece of architecture

we are modifying cheap European moving blankets that look like this:

and in our minds we are hoping they will have the potential to transform into this:

and hopefully will be able to be carried somewhat like these: (ours won't be as luxe but they will at least be practical)

We would like to use this site to collect sticker actions and create a kind of archive of how they operate within various campaigns or guerrilla actions.

We are interested in this because in 1996 we designed a sticker for the prostitutes rights organisation, The Red Thread.

When we met with them to discuss issues around women's rights, they spoke to us about a very practical need. On the windows where prostitutes stand behind, there is usually a sticker reading “No Pictures” , and The Red Thread is the distributor of these stickers. Unfortunately, they had run out and needed to produce more. So we started to brainstorm together about how the sticker could be produced as a solidarity campaign for women. However, finding a way of doing that was not easy because, as an organisation fighting for the rights of prostitutes, The Red Thread isn't really liked by the proprietors of the brothels. We need something that could slip in without being too upfront. Our solution was to make a "No Pictures" sticker with a peel-away backing reading: OUR IMAGE IS OUR OWN.

The slogan, performed through use, operates as a moment of solidarity. It raises a fundamental issue relevant to all women. Ultimately, its about drawing the line or setting the border of "NO" when it comes to owning not only your own body, but also your own representation.

Button collector and 70's feminist Jo Freeman writes: "[with buttons] you can also say things repeatedly without being repetitive. Flo Kennedy's urgent plea to DEFEAT FETUS FETISHISTS can be stuck into casual conversation once, but you can wear it into almost any gathering where it will at least be read if not agreed with."

Her collection of feminist buttons is excellent by the way.

For the Dutch, you might want to have a look at: Internationaal Informatiecentrum en Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging

We just got news from the Next 5 Minutes production crew that the turbo event will take place on Saturday night from 9:00 until 12:30. Basically, all the spaces are booked up before then.

With this kind of time frame it looks like we are going to have to approach "the moment of convergence" less like a workshop and more like a kind of show and tell. This means everyone with a blanket will gather together and show their things simultaneously.

Although time is short and it is the end of a long day, we are still thinking of setting up a small production house where buttons, T-shirts and stickers can be produced on the fly. Is this idea interesting for you or your organisation? Let us know because we will need to make arrangements for materials in advance. (Basically we'll be bringing our own personal computers and printers, ironing boards, and the kitchen sink...)

Steve Cisler sends us this:

"One of the people who took part in the TML in New York City is Howard Besser who has the largest online collection of t-shirts (he got his grad students to do a lot of the cataloging and photo work). Many of them are political. One of my favorites is this one of General Noriega on a milk carton "Have you seen me?" (alluding to the fact that he was missing for weeks after the U.S. invaded Panama and that missing children were featured on milk cartons here in the US). No such versions so far for ObL or SH, also missing..."

Besser's Archive

Thanks Steve its an excellent site

At the February anti-war demonstrations we realised how the language of protest does not differ much from the 60's or 80's and is of a very different register than the sophisticated commercial images surrounding us. What has changed is the way signs and slogans refer to earlier protests, or are build on/from other slogans worldwide. Plus the concious re-invention of old slogans ["liever een irakees in de keuken dan een bom op irak"].

This classic campaign from the Civil rights Movement we returned to because it is an impressive examples of how banners communicate the many individual voices that make up a mass.

...this one taken in Amsterdam, 2003

The French design group Ne Pas Plier talked at some point about developing tools for keeping the memory of demonstrations. They documented demonstrations against unemployment, and reprinted the photographs on large banners. Protestors than carried these on the demonstrations following, as powerful signs of issues still unsolved, litterally carrying their own accumulating history of struggle.

Its all here:

Cleansurface.org

A rich collection of flyposters, stencils...photographed in context:

RESPECT

Next to pointing, perhaps the simplest form of tactical media. An image of Mordechai Vanunu who, unable to speak to the press, wrote of his ordeal on the palm of his hand. It reads, "Vanunu was hijacked in Rome 30.9.86". He was kidnapped by the Israeli secret police in 1986 after exposing Israel's nuclear weapons program in an article in the Sunday Times. After it was published, he was followed by the secret police to Rome where he was kidnapped and finally extradited to Israel. He spent ten years in solitary confinement and remains imprisoned for simply verifying a "public secret".

information from on Israel's stance on nuclear weapons taken from the bbc website:

"Israel is now the only state with nuclear weapons that does not admit to having such weapons. It has always refused to allow international inspection of the Dimona facility, and is among the few states that have refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Israel maintains what is known as a policy of 'nuclear ambiguity', saying that it will not be the first country to introduce them to the Middle East."

A Power Tool from the Geurrilla Girls

The site of the San Francisco based Billboard Liberation Front includes amongst others, a comprehensive guide to the alteration of outdoor advertising.