Swap Meet

A swap meet is a gathering for the sale or barter of usually secondhand objects. (the English use the word 'car boot sale' for such an event) However, our swap meet will be about showing and exchanging ideas about analogue tactical media, meaning stickers, flyers, labels, guides to guerrilla actions, t-shirts, pie throwing, street actions...you name it.... Your blanket can be used as a place to show documentation, circulate flyers, distribute stickers etc.

Here is an image of a typical swap meet.

Imagine the above filled with tactical media of the traditional kind.

Coming to the Next 5 Minutes and want to show some of your analog tactical wares and know-how?

THEN CLAIM YOUR BLANKET FOR THE SWAP MEET WHILE SUPPLIES STILL LAST
register now at: info@geuzen.org

For the Next 5 Minutes 4, De Geuzen (www.geuzen.org) is organizing a swap meet where tactical traditions and the politics they represent will be featured, exchanged and generally talked about. By tactical traditions we mean buttons, flyers, T-shirts, pie throwing, stencils, stickers and various other analog media .

For the event we are designing around 25 blankets that will operate as a tactical interface. Made to be viewed vertically as a banner, or horizontally as a surface, or from above as a shelter, our blankets are a kind of nomadic, carry-all, platform for attending participants. For the first days of the conference the blankets will circulate both inside and outside various venues of the Next 5 Minutes. Owners will quite literally unfold them and squat or occupy any space they see fit to air their wares and promote their cause. On Saturday evening from 9:00 until 12:30, the blankets and their owners will converge in a single place for a turbo exchange of tactical traditions. Audiences/participants will be able to peruse a variety of goods on view or participate in a series of "show and tell"/how-to lessons held at the same location. The space will be a cross between a junk sale and a DIY center where computers converge with ironing boards and the dilettante is valued as the expert. 

In preparation for the Swap Meet we have set-up this weblog 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.

The Next 5 Minutes runs from Sept. 11 till Sept. 14. The blankets will be handed out on the first day and will be in circulation during the whole conference and the turbo moment of convergence will take place on Sept 13, from 21.00 till 00:30.

Above is the pattern we are working on. (at the moment it is a prototype) Each blanket is equipped with buttons and button holes are strategically placed for optimum adjustability. Your blanket will include a set of red bands also with button holes for better flexibility.

They can be adapted in the following ways:

*as carry-all: red straps convert into handles when blanket is rolled or folded tightly.

*as banner: we are currently making a pattern with letters so you can tailor your own messages and use your blanket as a billboard. The banner can then be placed on the ground for an aerial view or it can hung vertically by corner button holes

*as a surface: a soft place to sit yourself and/or your items on

*a display case: button holes can be used to hang your blanket vertically and red straps can be place in various configurations to hold, posters, postcards, flyers etc. The bottom half of the blanket can be folded up and buttoned to hold A4 size papers.

*a soft, flexible, and mobile piece of architecture: straps can be positioned to support the blanket in such a way as to form a tent (warning, blanket is not waterproof so only use for shelter from the cold or sun.)

“Could you do for me with your hands…?”

The drawings on the stickers are the visual result of a research on female representation through a survey made on the streets of Rotterdam, where several people were asked to do, using their hands, a symbol of the vagina.

These stickers are only to be pasted and experienced on public toilets. By doing so they become public but at the same time refer to the privacy with which we deal with our own genitalia, the individual vision of the collection, and also to be experienced on a single basis.

Carla,

Great to see the stickers on the site. Post more! One of the interesting things about that sticker project was that there was no singular image representing the vagina. In the end you made a kind of portrait of gestures circumscribing the form.

We are also considering bringing our Geuzennaam* T-shirts to the Swap Meet so your stickers will have some company in relation to the topic of female representation.

*Geuzennaam: a Dutch term for a negative or derogatory name appropriated and reclaimed as a positive label of empowerment.

1/250 negative names to call a woman (and the inventory is still growing)

*one more time in Dutch... Geuzennaam: zelfgekozen erenaam die oorspronkelijk als scheld- of spotnaam werd gebruikt.

for more info see Easy Iron on Geuzennaam on our DIY Page

My work ACT2

Lately I have been concern with our role as citizens within the collective construction of society, our society – Europe ore more broadly if you will an occidental globalised society. Imbedded and connected by mass media and economic monopolies.

Using art as an interrogative tool to analyse the world we live in collaboration with the audience my work balances between the art world and activism.

Act 2 can be visited on the website
http://www.anti-anti.net/act2/
or the blog:
http://www.takeaction.blogspot.com

Act 2 is a look-a-like political street hand puppet theatre .It is to be placed on public squares and it is meant for participation of the passers-by. Act2 is composed by a wooden box that: when open can be used as frame for the puppet show and holder of the puppets, when closed can be easily rolled through the streets.

«Act 2- do you want to manipulate for a change? » was enacted between October 2002 and July 2003 in Rotterdam and token to Geneva in the occasion of the G8 summit. It was active during the whole war against Iraq issue. Act 2 invites the passer-by to manipulate public and influential political figures, such as Tony Blair or George Bush, whoever is starring on the world political theatre at the moment.

Act 2 invites the participant to control the masters of the world, to play their own narratives or mimic the current ones and by doing so reflecting on their role in society.

Being the first question posed by Act 2 whether they want to be mere spectators or producers of culture, with the decision of stepping into the play or not. Ultimately the provocation is to take action.

I have to say that I am quite smitten with the slogan:

It won't change the world but it's something to do while you figure out how to!

Seems to encapsulate the kind of inadequacy I often feel when responding certain political situations.

And yes, I can imagine how crazy things have become in Australia because this kind of xenophobic knee-jerk reaction is happening across the board. I absolutely think your 'gizmos' would find resonance outside of Australia.

Searching for two images to post in the Body-as-billboard-section, one recent (very pregnant Femke Halsema* in white T-shirt reading: Baas in Eigen Buik) and one from the 60's (very pregnant Dolle Mina lifting up her shirt to reveal the same text written on her belly) I found none of the above, but did come across this recent work by Willem Velthoven:

"I had an Abortion is an installation consisting of vests on wire coat-hangers which bear the text I had an abortion in all European languages. They symbolise the abundance of abortions and the shame connected with abortion, legal or illegal. In addition to these undergarments, in the autumn a line of cheerful T-shirts will be brought out, which openly present the same text. The wire coat-hanger (not the knitting needle), is the most frequently used - and very dangerous - instrument for the inducement of an improvised abortion."

I wondered how this kind of work functions in relation to "empowering women to make conscious, well informed decisions about family planning", which is the mission of Women on Waves, initiators of the show. Or is all fair in love and war?

*leader of the Dutch Green Party, using the pro-abortion classic "Baas in Eigen Buik" (master of our own belly) protesting the fact that the Dutch government is planning to cut birthcontrol pills from general health insurance.

After seeing the Women on the Waves T-shirts, I was reminded of Barbara Kruger's classic image: Your body is a battleground. Circulated on the surface of postcards, T-shirts and flyers, this one below was modified for a pro-choice rally in 1989.

(my apologies for the large scale of the image...if it goes smaller you can't read the text)

Femke, I agree with your unease with the slogan "I had an abortion". While I support Women on the Waves and understand the slogan as a way of dealing with shame or as a means of bringing abortion "out of the closet" so to speak, what I miss is the idea of choice... and this is THE point of women's reproductive rights. I even wonder if it would have been a good idea to place the words "and the choice was mine...." somewhere on the shirt.

If you think a category is missing on this blog or you think one has been named incorrectly then post an entry saying .... add (fill in the blank here) or change (fill in the blank here....) and we will try and put it in asap.

FYI: these are some newly added categories:

add / alter current categories (this lets us know we need to take care of it)
anti-discrimination

I was thinking about the Aids Memorial Quilt and the kind of time and effort that has been put into it. In an age of digital speed where time is the equivalent of capital, its interesting to think about the power of such a slow activity as quilting.

It may be an 'old' tactical tradition but quilting is certainly an effective means of preserving marginal histories, and in this case, visualising loss.

here's more about the Aids Memorial Quilt

comment posted by yomango:

great use of tape (like stickers but on a larger scale) by DINERO GRATIS (=Free Money): a campaign developed in barcelona, spain in occasion of the world economic forum meeting in june 2001 (then canceled because of the wide platform of grassroots movements and collectives opposed to the summit and its politics)

the DINERO GRATIS tape has been later "appropriated" by many other groups in very different kinds of direct action. the tape (still circulating in barcelona) became a shared and really useful tool for all the social movemnts in barcelona. and a great way to make a whole discourse (non work, labor and social precarity, basic income) visible.

images and texts at:
http://www.eldinerogratis.com/

I will also take the t-shirts I have made together with my feminist group of artistic intervention: ZOiNA. These t-shirts present different ways of depicting women and the female body by reworking, altering and questioning images from fashion magazines, the result is then printed on the t-shirts by using the technique of stencil graffiti.

Thinking about loss or abscence and how that can be visualized, I remembered this image which I'd once seen in a magazine:

An action for the desaparecidos or those that disappeared in Argentina from 1976 to 1978 under General Jorge Rafael Videla. Each silhoette has a name written on it, their age and the time they disappeared.

It's a poster bearing the words "WE BELONG TO YOU" and the GPL (GNU Public License) and is designed as a simple way to link Open Source to wider issues of the public commons. We have been distributing them in the form of a bundle of posters sent to people in an envelope with a "read me" file which explains how they can be distributed further (ie, displaying in windows, inserting into magazines, etc.).

The posters can also be added to with new content, messages, etc.

The poster is part of a series slateford have been doing, we normally work with software and these are an offshoot, extending some our interest in issues such as the "creative commons" into a more social-poetic form.

Like everything we do, the posters are very cheap and lo-tech.

http://www.slateford.org

http://www.creativecommons.org

We are currently producing the Swap Meet blankets at Riek's house

The recent postering of public places in Canberra acted as a statement where the derogatory term UNAUSTRALIAN is reclaimed and turned on its head. This action is an example of how public awareness is being created around issues related to the detention of asylum seekers.

For more information regarding Canberra activism look at :

http://www.refugeeaction.org
www.argusonline.com.au

Hello all - not quite sure how this works - but a link to some of the projects i will be bringing along are cactusnetwork.org.uk and weareeverywhere.org
And some spoof newspapers (print only except for the_spun.org i think)

chees for now - i will see what this does and learn more...

tony (cactus)

Deborah Kelly comments on Baas in Eigen Buik: A Pro-choice classic with:

YOUR BODY IS ALSO A PLAYGROUND is the name of a gorgeous poster/postcard/online graphic that responds to and takes off from the famous Kruger piece.
It was made by the very prolific US-based artists who go by the name of Protest Graphics, and you can see some of their giant body of work at:
www.agitart.org

Expect your blanket to come fully equipped with ribbons, extra buttons and paper alphabet. The alphabet can be simply cut out or used for stenciling.
Here's the pdf version to download and print at home:

Download file / 156KB

I am also bringing stencils related to female representation and will be making them on the spot. My idea is to give kind of "how-to" lessons and exchange stencils with others.

The idea is that I can stencil my city with your stencils and you can stencil your city with mine.

Last year Zoina did a project called Urban Body in Linz in collaboration with Transpublic, an artist run space. We graffittied and stenciled areas around beauty centers, sex shops, and clothing shops with images of or text of women taken from magazines.

action in front of a military shop:

action on the main shopping street of Linz:

Walking in the streets thinking of you and your project, I remember to send this link and pictures to your blog. "A room of one's own" is a project of a young feminist group of artists based mainly in Austria. A part of the project was to make visible feminist statements and questions by printing them on skirts which could become banners, if needed. More thoughts later, still walking....

From Thursday onwards (from 19:30----), you can pick up your blanket opposite the N5M registration desk at the Balie. (we will be stationed by the V2 bookstore folks) We are setting up a kind of depot where people can not only pick up their blanket but they can also drop it off if they are sharing one.

For those travelling from afar, have a safe and enjoyable journey.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Incomplete inventory of blankets circulating:

Hyla Willis / Cyberfeminsm.net
Undercurrents
Tony Credland / Cactus Network
Carla Cruz
Art Against Apathy
FAC_2 [we belong to you] slateford
Anna
Yomango
Laurence Rassel / Constant
Tracey Benson / UNAUSTRALIAN
Diana McCarthy / Faces / Bootlab
Autolab: tactical media from the masses!!
Deborah Kellly
Zeroglab Rotterdam / Origami
Rolf Homan

Claim your blanket fast - only 2 left!

The swap meet will take place at 22:00 tonight upstairs in De Balie [across the N5M4 registration desk].
We have also brought an original buttonmaker / diameter: 57mm

all packed with my Swap Meet and soft Blanket.

This month you'll find the above image in large format on the streets of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam City Council is using the poster in a campaign that is meant to stimulate its inhabitants to discuss 'diversity in the city'.
Surprisingly enough, although many responses are being posted on the accompanying web forum www.amsterdamleeftsamen.nl none addresses the to our minds paternalistic and racist character of this campaign.

In 2001 the City Council of Rotterdam was already starting to be obsessed with the same 1950's conservative 'reveil' that is currently spreading over The Netherlands like an infectuous disease. What to think of the following campaign:

Text: Turk... or your neighbour? / Moslim... or your neighbour?
Pay-off: How are you dealing with your environment?

The fact that the series was meant to better 'stadsetiquette' [so called 'city etiquette'] of Rotterdammers makes it even more insulting.
Public money is spent on these kind of campaigns, but is anyone thinking about what public this is for, what these kinds of representations are supposed to make us think?

see 'More' for the official press release [in Dutch]

The Swap Meet blanket in action at the Melkweg, promoting a screening of the documentary Hippies from hell [directed by Ine Poppe, photography Sam Nemeth]
The film can be viewed on-line

this is my contribution for the swap meet on the balie, how I used my blanket. As a table cloth over which I was cuting some new stencil graffitti, that could be taken away and after sprayed, preferentially on the places requested on the stencil itself, such as Algeciras and tanger, for the series - Clandestino - marroco.

Using the cheerleader formula with visible pleasure, these Californian teenagers decided it was time to chant their own messages and formed Radical Teen Cheer.
[from the N5M4 media library]