Continental Drift

Toward the New Urban Struggles

or, Why Smash the State When Your Local Neighborhood Theme-Park is So Much Closer?

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On October 17, 2003, seven groups of some 20 to 30 persons descended into the Paris metro, with paint pots, glue, rollers, brushes, spray cans, sheets of paper and marking pens in their hands. Their aim? To overwrite, cover up, deface, subvert, recompose or simply rip to shreds as many advertisements as possible, without violence to any individual or to any piece of property, other than the images which impinge on our most intimate desires. Arising against a background of aggressive cuts in public programs which had originally been designed to withdraw specific activities and times of life from market pressures – cuts which affect teachers, the unemployed, retirees, researchers and performing artists, among others – the movement declared its intention: “to attack the driving force of this commodification: advertising. It invades our public space, the streets, the subways, the TV. It’s everywhere, on our clothes, our walls, our screens. Let’s resist it, with creative, peaceful and legitimate means.” And resist it they did, organizing three more major actions in the metro before the end of the year, defacing over 9,000 advertisements and causing almost a million euros of “damage” – at least from the viewpoint of the organization charged with selling the display space, or more precisely, the psychic space of millions of people who ride the trains every day.1

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Oyvind Fahlström, "World Map," 1972

This paper was originally presented at the “MoneyNations” exhibition in Vienna in October 2000, and later published in a book under that title. It was updated for presentations in Valencia (Spain), Zagreb (Croatia) and Ljubljana (Slovenia), in 2002. Further variations can be found on the website of the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media Design program: http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl. Basically, these papers are part of a matrix of work which cannot be finished and must continually evolve with changing knowledge and changing realities. The seminars and investigations of the “Continental Drift” project form the most recent phase of these reflections.

Revolutions tear a society apart, they smash it into atoms, with a violence that alone can set the people free. But is the present neoliberal order not precisely that of an atomized society? Do its laws not guarantee our individual rights? Have its markets not liberated our energies and desires? Do its currencies not constitute our universal language? What could be priceless in such a society? How could we imagine another taste of freedom?

A social order that claims to mark the end of history has placed the real questions under a strict taboo. From beneath their veils, those questions are staring us in the face today. No single individual can answer. But perhaps we can look back into the mirrors of history, to speak about the future of a revolutionary solidarity.

To even begin the conversation, one must understand that solidarity means something real: the very cohesion of social relations, which demand a denial or abrogation of individuality, a transfer of property and sovereignty. Solidarity is a gift for the survival and well-being of others – but a gift that’s most often extorted, or imposed. At certain moments in history, people choose their solidarities. One of the ways they do so is by imagining a different map. At the largest scale, this is a map of the world.

Maps are very practical, very real: they show borders which, depending on who you are, may be open or closed. But if maps can be imaginary, it is because they also exist as half-unconscious, historically layered representations and attitudes that shape our capacity to move through the physical world. Every society has mental maps, patterns of movement which also assign people to their proper places. Political dissent implies the imagination of a different map, which gradually takes form by tearing itself away from the dominant ones. A revolutionary map comes into being with the desire to cross the borders, to meet different people in another world, to speak another language and to exchange things that are priceless and free – outside the grasp of the “money nations.”

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