We are writing with the smell of tear gas rising from our fingers. The springtime symphony of birdsong is punctuated by the explosive echo of concussion grenades. Our eyes are watering, less from the gas than the sadness; because our friends’ homes, barns and organic farms are being destroyed. Bulldozers, supported by 2500 riot police, armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, are rampaging through these forests, pastures and wetlands to crush the future we are building here on the to the zad (The zone à defendre).

The interview departs from SHARE Lab’s “investigations on Facebook and the various algorithms that shape our reality through the moderation of information feeds, on the processes of how we are transformed from users to products, and how they basically transform our online behavior into power and profit.” It discusses various aspects of the resulting reports and their meaning during a time when the critique of major Internet platforms has hit the mainstream.

It has been a long and intense morning with hundreds of demonstrating on the streets of Kreuzberg to protest against the eviction of the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Schule, against German racist and neocolonial asylum and migration policies, Fortress Europe, and deportations.

Stellungnahme zur Ablehnung der Förderansuchen für die Frauen*beratungsstellen maiz, FIFTITU% und Arge SIE durch das Frauenreferat des Landes Oberösterreich mit der Begründung, die Tätigkeit der Frauen*beratungsstellen gehöre nach den „neuen Förderkriterien“ nicht mehr zum Kerngeschäft des Frauenreferats.

The GHS is supposed to be evicted on the 11th of january, 8 o’clock in the morning. The only offer made to the inhabitants was somewhat questionable and stands in the tradition of the so-called‚'Oplatz agreement'. This is another attempt by the Berlin senate and the district government to divide and conquer the refugee movement.
7:45 rally: Ohlauer Straße /Gerhart-Hauptmann-Schule
8:30 demo

This is the third and last part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia. The first and the second parts were published over the last weeks on transversal.at.

Anlässlich des Erscheinens des Bandes 'Ökoligen der Sorge' veröffentlicht transversal texts hier das Vorwort.
Das Buch wird am 19. Januar 2018 in der Raum Station in Zürich präsentiert.

This is the second part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia. The first part was published two weeks ago and the third of three parts was published - as well on transversal.at - on December 29th, 2017.

An improper name is first an inappropriate name, a name that is not qualified, that is in certain ways not fitting. Secondly it subverts the logic of authenticity and identity that is seemingly attached to any name. As Marco Deseriis writes: “An improper name is improper not only because it lacks manners or propriety of behavior […] but because it fails to label and circumscribe a clearly defined domain”.

Immediately following the killing of Colby Friday last August (2016) in Stockton, California by Stockton Police officer David Wells, Dion Smith went to the spot where Colby had been slain, and with several others refused to leave —watching over the spot and protecting the makeshift community memorial for two weeks until Colby’s body was laid to rest. Of her own action, Dion says: “We wanted to show the community that we care. They can’t just kill us.” Dion’s own son, James Rivera Jr. had been killed by two Stockton Police officers and a San Joaquin Sheriff Deputy six years earlier. Colby’s mother, Denise Friday, who lives two hours away in Hayward, returns to the spot regularly, to sit and engage neighbors, refusing erasure and the fear that comes when police attempt to impose narratives and silence. These acts of vigil occurred alongside other community gatherings and speak-outs, spaces where mothers come together to seek and define justice. These are the quiet moments of care beneath the defiant clamor of protests and the arrests. They are visible reminders of a community of struggle that refuses the criminalization imposed on it.

This is the first part of a longer conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche. By discussing Black Studies in Germany and the US, the consumption of Blackness and the reproduction of exclusionary settings, they aim at opening up a critical transnational debate on forging strategies to create im-pertinent epistemologies and inter/personal politics of doing, both inside and beyond academia. The second of three parts was published on transversal.at on December 15th, 2017.

Anlässlich des Erscheinens von 'Die neuen Munizipalismen' veröffentlicht transversal texts hier das Vorwort.

The Polish government plans to erase Cultural Studies from the list of registered disciplines of science in the country. We publish here a petition by the Polish Association of Cultural Studies (Polskie Towarzystwo Kulturoznawcze, PTK).

We are stunned that the Senator of Culture and the Theatre Director actually called for eviction of the Volksbühne, it shows the deeply authoritarian character of both and of their concept of culture.

On the occasion of the new edition of Gerald Raunig's Kunst und Revolution transversal texts publishes the new preface.

It has been two years that Germany's and Austria's governments opened their borders following the pressure of migration movements. Since then, a lot has changed, and not much for the better. Did the demarcations and enclosures of the nation state win once and for all? How does the present situation differ from the one of 2015? And what has migration got to do with social networks, affect and forms of commons?

One aim of our transnational project Midstream is to do research and attempt to conceptually develop alternative social networks. The generation of activist platforms like n-1 and Facebook-alternatives like diaspora* has been stagnating for several years now, with some projects operating without a chance of reaching a critical mass along with others that have ceased to operate altogether. A new generation of social networking sites has become visible recently. Most of these networks are based on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. But what kind of alternative are they developing?

On May 6, 2017, neighbors filled the building at Calle Gobernador 39 in Madrid in an act of disobedience, following a multitudinous demonstration composed of a great variety of collectives that denounced the process of gentrification endured by the city of Madrid in recent years with the slogan “Madrid is not for sale.” This was the birth of the social center La Ingobernable, The Ungovernable, a territory conquered in the “gold district” of (the) capital in order to reverse the process of expropriation.

Statement of #CityPlaza squat against the threat of eviction.

An interview departing from Stevphen Shukaitis' latest book The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labour After the Avant-Garde.

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and Valiz, Amsterdam are proud to announce the release of Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice). To mark the launch of the publication, the symposium "Once We Were Artists" takes place on Saturday 24 June 2017 from 10.30 till 18.00 hrs at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1).

Ein Gespräch, ausgehend von „Foucaults Kyniker_innen. Auf dem Weg zu einer kreativen und affirmativen Kritik“, Ruth Sondereggers Beitrag im Band „Foucaults Gegenwart" (http://transversal.at/books/foucaultsgegenwart).

Therefore, we wrote. ’Dear Municipality of Milan, dear Mr Mayor, dear urban planning officer, and dear Sogemi spa, represented by its illustrious President.’ We have used an explicit, bureaucratic, and non construable language to say: ’You do have to sell Macao? Let’s find a way to let the city buy it.’ It would be essential to develope a dialogue with You, illustrious institutions, in order to develope this pathway. A pathway that could become a model, to opening new doors, to transforming Milan into a bold city and a hub for innovation - a key word.

On March 10, 2007, citizens, social and cultural collectives and invisible creatives occupied the building Nosquera 9 and 11 in Málaga to begin an adventure that is celebrating its tenth birthday this month. In a context of touristification and rampant speculation in the city center of Málaga, during the early years of an urban planning model that claimed (and claims) to be cultural, which grants spaces and resources solely to large-scale museum and red-carpet festival operations, La Casa Invisible was born.

Something new is taking shape in the world: in more than 30 countries, people are calling for an international women*s strike on the 8th of March.

Ohne uns! Aufruf zum Publikumsstreik und zum strategischen Desinteresse an der Doppel-Veranstaltung «Die neue Avantgarde» am 10.03. und 17.03.17 in der Zürcher Gessnerallee

Der Krieg ist schon längst eine Frage der Städte geworden, und in diesem Sinne verlagert dieser sich auf neue Territorien. Dabei ist zu berücksichtigen, dass die Räume, in die militärische Apparate intervenieren, immer vorgestellte Räume sind, die in sozialen Prozessen fernab der betreffenden Regionen hervorgebracht werden. Ein wesentliches Element dieser Raumproduktionen ist gegenwärtig die artifizielle Stadt. In nie dagewesenem Maße vermittelt sie sozialräumliche und kulturelle Aspekte desjenigen Territoriums, auf dem der Gegner zu Hause ist. Es zeigt sich jedoch, dass diese Aspekte nicht authentisch oder neutral sind sondern immer schon mit kultureller Bedeutung über die gegnerischen Räume versehen.

In recent years, institutions of education have been transformed through an upsurge of policies and reforms. While such reforms have historically developed along various trajectories, more recent reforms have chiefly been advanced by two major aims. On the one hand, these reforms support the transformation of economies that have suffered from crisis. For instance, the OECD has declared that: “Knowledge is now recognised as the driver of productivity and economic growth” (1996, p. 3). On the other hand, the production of knowledge and research should tackle the “grand challenges” of our time posed by globalization – e.g. the energy crisis, limited resources, or climate change – essentially linking it to sustainability policy.

Les violences policières émergent d’une expérience collective qui ne peut d’abord s’éclairer que par une intelligence collective. C’est pourquoi nous avons voulu écouter débattre avec nous et entre eux des acteurs très différents : des militants et des réfugiés, des racisés et des blancs, des hommes et des femmes, dont le point commun est d’abord d’avoir expérimenté dans leurs corps ces formes de violence. ---- Die Polizeigewalt entspringt einer kollektiven Erfahrung, die nur durch kollektive Intelligenz erhellt werden kann. Darum wollten wir mit sehr unterschiedlichen Akteur_innen sprechen und ihnen zuhören, wenn sie miteinander sprechen: Aktivist_innen und Refugees, Rassisierte und Weiße, Männer und Frauen, die alle Formen der Gewalt an ihren eigenen Körpern zu spüren bekommen haben. ----

Neuf ans sur le territoire français. Neuf ans pour rien. C’est ce qu’il répète souvent. Neuf ans dans l’air, comme les avions. ---- Neun Jahre auf französischem Territorium. Neun Jahre für nichts. Das wiederholt er oft. Neun Jahre verpuffen in der Luft, wie die Flugzeuge. ----

Sind Dreadlocks bei Weißen kulturimperialistisch? Offenbart der Protest gegen die Prekarisierung in Europa bloß die Heuchelei der Protestierenden, die ihre Privilegien nicht reflektieren? In den letzten Jahren sind verschiedentlich Stimmen laut geworden, die aus der Perspektive der postcolonial studies und des Critical Whiteness-Aktivismus Behauptungen dieser Art aufgestellt haben.

Commemorating the first anniversary of the day on which north east Japan was struck by a threefold disaster, “The Wall Street Journal” released an online article on the 10 March 2012 entitled “March 11, One Year On: Occupy METI”. At the beginning, the journalist Obe Mitsuru describes a scene, in which a “shaky tent”, decorated with colorful placards and banners demanding Japan’s withdrawal from the nuclear energy program, stands on the corner in front of the comparatively mighty Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in Kasumigaseki, the administrative district in Tôkyô.

Introducing the Conference on Self-Government and Municipalism in Aragón: following what started at the #MacUno1 meeting, this conference is being planned as a space of movements, of people who, bearing in mind the institutional while not reducing all of politics to it, wish to continue developing and strengthening the #municipalist challenge.

At the end of the year 2008 the global economy collapsed. It’s hard to say what will happen next, but it’s easy to guess that the recession is not going to go away anytime soon. The collapse of the global economy can be read as the comeback of the soul. The perfect machine of neoliberal ideology is falling to bits because it was based on the flawed assumption that soul can be reduced to mere rationality. The dark side of the soul, fear, anxiety, panic and depression has finally surfaced after looming for a decade in the shadow of the much-touted victory and promised eternity of capitalism. In this essay I want to consider two different meanings of the word depression. By this word we mean a special kind of mental suffering, but also the general shape of the global crisis that is darkening the historical horizon of our times. We are not dealing here with a linguistic trick; we are not dealing only with a metaphor, but with the interweaving and interacting of psychic flows and economic processes.

On the early morning of July 21, police evicted “Point Break” in the neighborhood of Pigneto: a student house occupied and self-managed by members of the Roman student movement “l’Onda” that took to the streets of Italy in 2008 against the neoliberal reform and privatization of education.

Dear friends, dreamers, rebels, composers of worlds, cosmopolitan diplomats from below, poets of life, autonomous astronauts, shamans of all sorts, breachers of stupid laws and animators of consensus, dear comrades from antiracist, antifascist, migrant, refugee, feminist groups, collectives, networks … all those that swarm and drill so that freedom of movement for everyone will prevail …

Der Philosoph Jacques Rancière, Denker der Gleichheit, erwägt, was die Bewegung der „Nuit Debout“ und die Mobilisierung gegen das Arbeitsgesetz auszeichnet, was sie trägt, aber auch wo ihre Grenzen sind.

Etwa hundert Intellektuelle prangern die Strategie der französischen Regierung an, „organisierte Gruppen“ zu isolieren und ihre Gewalttaten aufzubauschen, um so den Demonstrationen gegen das Arbeitsgesetz in Rennes und Paris ihre Glaubwürdigkeit zu nehmen.

Sollten die Kouachi-Brüder und Amedy Coulibaly posthum doch noch die Schlacht der Ideen gewonnen haben? Die öffentliche Debatte richtet sich seit dem 7. Jänner 2015 an falschen Alternativen aus.

The autonomous factory Rog is under threat of being evicted and destroyed by the municipal authorities which are pursuing their project of renovating the area into a centre for creative industries.

Networks of protest and dissent, actual and virtual, were understood to have become increasingly centreless and leaderless across the 1990s, and beyond. Even the nature of protest and dissent fell away from previous models, as aligned to pragmatic demands and manifestos, single issues and norms of controlled civil disobedience. Now the masses were understood not to assemble behind any one position, or rally to one slogan, but more to stand in a kind of collective negative correlation to the faltering status quo: a crowd of singularities. This crowd or mass has been identified and explored in various ways as “the multitude” by theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, The Invisible Committee, Mauricio Lazzarato, and Franco Berardi among others.

The first edition of the Performance Biennial will take place on 23 June to 4 July in Greece. Emerging from DIY self-organised cultural practices appearing during these past years in Athens, in a present without a future, this event seeks to critically interrogate the role of performance, historically and in the present, in relation to political and social materialities and imaginaries. Playfully subverting the term ‘biennial’ into a self-organised practice, the event will test self-instituted forms of culture and politics. Under the title “No Future” this guerrilla biennial will bring together forms of artistic, political and theoretical practice and discourse questioning the potential of a collective refusal to a referred futurity.

On the occasion of the new edition of Instituierende Praxen transversal texts publishes the new introduction to the book.

In the morning of April 22nd, activists and refugees joined action to squat an abandoned hotel in the northern center of Athens. The “Hotel Plaza” is supposed to host up to 400 refugees, and hopefully in the upcoming week, they will be able to receive further room requests. Since the occupants have entered the building, the weekend has been a busy one: The rooms have been aired and cleaned, the kitchen cleaned and prepared for cooking, weeds and trash removed from the front entrance, the first meals cooked, assemblies held and plans made.

We, the undersigned, support the struggle to defend the integrity of the art project Park Fiction and to keep the Golden Pudel Club as a part of the park and Gesamtkunstwerk Park Fiction.

On the occasion of publishing the German edition of The Undercommons, transversal texts spoke with the authors about the book’s central concepts.

Semiotext(e) / MIT Press has announced the publication of Gerald Raunig’s new book DIVIDUUM. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, Part 1: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dividuum.

The Institute for Democracy and Municipalism (Institute DM) introduced itself this morning in Madrid. The initiative’s objective is "to stimulate the cycle that was started by 15M beyond its current limits, or to work so that the democratic revolution continues its course,” as its promoters point out. The think tank, as one of its founders, the sociologist and historian Emmanuel Rodríguez, describes it, “aims to become a space of reference at the levels of debate, education, research and political discussion.” Ultimately: “to animate and promote the emergence of ideas that stimulate a change in the political cycle.”

Statement des Demobündnisses zum offenen Brief über die Zustände bezüglich der Frauen in der Unterkunft Westerwaldstraße

Late Saturday night, the Golden Pudel Club stood in flames. The roof structure is destroyed. The improvisational shelter of a homeless refugee burned as well, including his papers. The Park Fiction Archive housed on the building’s top floor is drenched in extinguishing water.
Demonstration: Friday, February 19, 8:30 pm, from: FC St. Pauli, South side areaway, to: Golden Pudel Club / Gezi Park Fiction