note

Today economic crisis is a capitalist crisis of social stability, not a simple recession, that is, a crisis that requires a realignment of class/power relations and new systems of governance in order to re-establish growth and accumulation^[1].

In Precarious rhapsody (2009) Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi argues that autonomous political movements in Italy in 1977 marked an important turning point in moving beyond modernity with its concomitant trends of progressive modernisation and class conflict as the driving motor of social transformation. Putting aside the epochal claims contained in this claim it is interesting to reflect on the role played by the notion of precarity in this description^[1].

A massive protest took to the streets and squares of the world in 2011. In a sense, we can almost speak of a global protest movement, emerging simultaneously in different cities and spreading across the globe, demanding a just society, real democracy, and condemning capitalism. A renewed feeling of urgency brought people en masse together in a struggle for liberation from the yoke of the dictatorship of both repressive political regimes, and capitalist financial markets.

The story is well known. Alberto Korda Díaz’s second snapshot of Ernesto Che Guevara, taken on March the 5^th, 1960, at a mass funeral service that Fidel Castro called for the Cubans who were killed during an explosion in Havana, was destined to become probably one of the most reproduced and appropriated pictures of the late twentieth century. The photograph remained in Korda’s studio until Che’s death in 1967, when an Italian publisher, Gian-Giacomo Feltrinelli, produced posters using two prints of the image given as a gift to him by Korda.

Image from Perlman (1969).

The light is from the East… not only the liberation of the working class. The light is from the East – in a new relation to man, to woman, and to objects. Objects in our hands should also be equal, also be comrades, and not black, gloomy slaves like they have here.

The art of the East should be nationalized and rationed out. Objects will be understood, will become people’s friends and comrades, and people will begin to know how to laugh and enjoy and converse with things…

Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one... (Debord, 1967: 66)

I

In April 2011, Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney met at the Spring Seminars of the Performance Art Forum (PAF) in St Erme, France. Desideri, a dancer and performance artist, and Harney a university professor in strategy, shared an interest in the work of Suely Rolnick and Lygia Clark.

Introduction