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ОглавлениеCultural activism against inequalities: the experience of Quaderni Urbani in Bologna
Alessio La Terra
Project history
How can an individual play a part in changing the existing order of things? This was the very simple question that, as a young Italian university student, I asked myself, in the years when an unprecedented economic crisis affected the most vulnerable strata of the economy of my country, showing its effects in terms of poverty, social marginality and socio-cultural disorientation. My generation has been named the ‘generation of the crisis’: a cohort psychologically scarred by precariousness experienced as an existential condition and yet aware of having been deviously deprived of the right to freely imagine its own future. The frustration with the institutions that enacted the austerity measures of ‘tears and blood’ that exasperated misery and inequality led many of us to experience feelings of surrender and passivity. However, among others it also stimulated new desires for direct intervention in the emerging social problems and the development of a political conscience no longer supported by ideologies and party structures. Starting from this critical awareness about the present in which I lived, I began to feel a burning need for commitment and the need to practically enact my convictions by going beyond the purely theoretical terrain of my studies. At first, I started to volunteer in some reception centres for migrants, homeless people, drug users and other marginalised groups run by the municipality of Bologna. However, it was only when I met the political collective of Làbas that I found a space of engagement that was compatible with my idea of participation. In Làbas, it was for me finally possible to reconcile my ideas about what political engagement should be with practical actions.
Làbas was born in 2012 from the occupation of a former military barracks that the activists tried to save from degradation and turn into an ‘urban commons’. Within the barracks the political collective had set up a self-managed social shelter for migrants. In an environment ‘immunised’ from any form of racial, religious or cultural discrimination, migrants and asylum seekers were directly involved in the management of the shelter and supported in their strenuous process of social integration. These goals were pursued while trying not to replicate the logics of benevolence and welfarism of institutional services. On the contrary, the organisation of an Italian language school, of occupational workshops, and of events where migration policies and laws were explained were intended as measures to stimulate the direct activation of the hosted migrants on the social problems they were experiencing. These activities were inspired by the mutualistic logic of action adopted by the political collective of Làbas and aimed at promoting a real transformation of society. Alongside these projects aimed at ensuring a dignified reception to migrants, several other projects were developed to raise awareness of the issues of housing and migrant reception and to create a network between the local population of Bologna and the political activities of Làbas.
It took me some time to fully understand the complexity of the political community in which I had landed, but I could immediately recognise and appreciate the real freedom of engagement that was guaranteed to anyone approaching Làbas. Members were, of course, expected to share the basic values of anti-fascism, anti-racism and anti-sexism, but everyone was asked for an effort going beyond their own skills, attitudes and inclinations. This allowed me to put my skills at the service of a cause with which I fully identified. Among the many possibilities of activation existing within Làbas, I chose to channel my efforts into the cultural offer of the space and, together with other activists, I worked for the foundation of the self-managed social library of Làbas, which was created thanks to the donation of thousands of books by private citizens.
Within the library we started to experiment with a form of social activism centred on cultural issues. Indeed, the purpose of the project was not only to open an easily accessible reading room in the city centre nor to just make the procedures for lending books more flexible and less bureaucratic than in other libraries. The deepest intention was to use ‘culture’ as a channel to convey our ethical and political messages: the presentation of a book, the setting up of a photographic exhibition or the screening of a documentary became a means to denounce social injustices or to incite people actively to participate through self-representation and self-organisation.
The library was daily ‘lived’ by the activists and by a diverse population of users (for example, local inhabitants, migrants and students). This fostered the necessity to go beyond the often static and rigid organisational logics of traditional libraries: Làbas’ self-managed library was intended as a meeting spot where occasions of dialogue and exchange of ideas were promoted and where alternative forms to voice our dissent towards institutional approaches to migration and other social issues were explored. Our methods, practices and topics were, hence, already ‘political’ and the political nature of our cultural project emerged even more clearly when it became necessary to abandon the places where that experience had sprung up, following the eviction of Làbas from the occupied barracks in August 2017.
The absence of a physical space in which to follow up on the work already done with the library represented, even more than an obstacle, an opportunity to rethink and further reflect on the role of culture in our political activism. We started thus a reflection on the forms that our project could adopt in order to promote a cultural transformation of society while facing the lack of a fixed venue for hosting our events. The imaginative effort that the resolution of these difficulties required led a small group of eight people previously involved in the library to gathered around a table and found a new artistic-literary and editorial project. While maintaining our connection with Làbas, we wanted this new project to engage more with the city and to become a recognised actor in the local environment. In these circumstances the project of Quaderni Urbani (Urban Notebooks) took flight.
Theoretical assumptions, purposes and methodologies of the project
To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947, p 104)
From the start, Quaderni Urbani had the ambition to combine cultural commitment with social conflict. This seemingly belligerent goal, however, was not conditioned by ideological prejudices, but simply emerged from the experience of the obvious distortions of our surrounding social environment. The theoretical assumptions guiding our project were never explicitly discussed in the group, probably because they are considered a common and taken-for-granted cultural heritage for anyone who practises political activism. However, if asked to identify the most direct influences on our project, I would certainly find them in the Frankfurt School’s critique of the ‘cultural industry’ and in the theories on socio-cultural reproduction of inequalities elaborated – within the Marxist tradition – by the French sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron.
In the first half of the 20th century, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School understood that the reproduction of artworks made possible by new technologies (film and photography) (see also Benjamin, 1935) would place culture in a relationship of dependence on the newly emerging ‘cultural industry’ and the economic interests that drove it. The reifying logic of the factory, now applied to cultural products, would transform these latter into proper ‘goods’. The concept of cultural industry was coined to describe a process of mass production of cultural products, which after being ‘banalised’ by advertising communication, would be ‘administered’ to an audience no longer composed of passionate lovers of the arts, but of consumers. The dependence of the cultural work on the mass production system would have as a logical consequence, the emptying of that cultural work from any content that might be hostile to the interests of that system. Mass-produced cultural products would tend to be basic uniformity; they are ‘invariable entities’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947, p 131) that have no creative subjectivity and that encourage the acritical adoption of the consumeristic lifestyle. The power of control over consumers is exercised through entertainment, the quintessence of industrially reproduced culture: the fun and frivolity of the content sold by the cultural industry aim to dull the critical conscience of users in order to socially disengage them and to imprison them in indifference. The alienation from one’s own critical consciousness and the cultural homogenisation imposed by the cultural industry foster in individuals the conviction that the existing social order is ‘natural’ and ‘unmodifiable’. The removal of any resistance against a cultural system that reduces the work of art to a good of consumption and the removal of any claim against a social system based on class privilege that idolises profit are the ultimate goals of the cultural industry (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947, p 164).
The reflections of the Frankfurt School dialogue harmoniously with the study of the mechanisms of social and cultural reproduction conducted by Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1970s. Although the authors focused their analysis on the reproduction of inequalities within the context of formal education, their study (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) shed light on broader social processes. Bourdieu and Passeron stressed how the logic of action of both the educational institutions and the cultural industry entails a tendency towards acculturation that reproduces and crystallises the existing social order, while maintaining the inequalities that are structural to it. This reproduction of inequalities is achieved also with the help of devices of selection and censorships (advertisements, funding agencies, large editorial cartels) that are able to decide what is ‘culture’ and what is not. The culture that emerges from this process of selection has thus an arbitrary and partial character and mirrors the ideas of the ruling classes. It is a culture that legitimates only certain meanings, conceals the relationships of strength imposed by the system, acts as a symbolic and violent reinforcement of those relationships (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) and crystallises their alleged inevitability.
Although aware of the schematic synthesis of these reconstructions, I believe that for the activists of Quaderni Urbani, these theoretical assumptions maintain an indisputable validity in relation to cultural activism. From them we draw an historical and sociological lesson: that a considerable part of the cultural production of a society has always pursued the aim of reflecting the established order, then of reproducing and perpetuating in the arts, literature and in movies, a given model of society along with all its injustice and lack of equality. This awareness implies the recognition of culture as a label behind which there is often an ideological opportunism that is concerned with the preservation of the existing social order. The intention to enhance the ability of art and culture to be means through which to foster social change and question hegemonic thinking became the main purpose of Quaderni Urbani. In an historical period in which populist forces started to openly call for inhumanity, and closure of ports and borders, we worked towards a politicisation of culture. In so doing, we aimed to dismantle the alleged neutrality of dominant discourses, and to reveal their emptiness and their complicity with a system of structural inequalities. In this scenario, it became clear that the key element of our commitment should be the promotion of a counterculture and the support to those engagé cultural actors who intended to question and change the existing social order through their art. We turned our attention to independent publishers and artists, collectives of writers, and autonomous theatre companies, with whom we engaged in cooperation and mutual training, so as to create networks and extend in breadth and scope our cultural activism.
Decisions concerning the practices were crucial too. We wanted our political principles to show in the contents of our activities, but also in the practices and forms adopted by our project. We sought to avoid those organisational models in which cultural contents are merely unilaterally ‘transmitted’ from the artist to a passively receiving audience, as is mostly the case in school or academic contexts. Instead, we opted for activities where culture is collectively constructed, debated and resignified. This decision brought us to the organisation of open workshops ending in moments of final restitution in the form of collective exhibitions, readings or performances.
Our cultural activities were usually focused on a given topic (for example, the right to the city, migration policy) chosen from among those of greatest impact on the city and its residents or suggested by specific collaborations with artists or other cultural groups. Every decision on the work to be carried out is collectively taken, through weekly assemblies. The assemblies of Quaderni Urbani are self-managed and horizontal: this approach seeks to facilitate interaction and allows activists of heterogeneous cultural formation to ‘contaminate’ and enrich each other. Finally, we strive to avoid the elitist ultra-specialism that often distinguishes academic cultural events and we seek to maintain our activities free of charge so to ensure an immediate and extensive access to the cultural contents we create and share. In order to meet the necessary costs, we self-finance our activities by selling self-produced goods (such as hand-made notebooks) and by organising dinners based on a ‘pay-as-you-wish/can’ principle.
Since 2017, Quaderni Urbani has organised dozens of cultural events. Often, they have taken place in our spaces, but sometimes they have been organised elsewhere, even outside of Bologna. The horizontal structure of these events has encouraged the development of a critical and political knowledge among the participants and the creation of an authentically independent and free cultural offer. More specifically, we were able to group the organised events into three main types of activities:
•Open workshops: series of meetings through which the participants engage in a collective research/reflection aimed at critically assessing the complexity of a given social issue (for example, housing problems). This phase of collective reflection informs a subsequent practical phase of cultural and artistic self-production culminating in a final moment of open restitution of the results.
•Thematic readings: performative readings of classic and self-produced texts and poems on a given topic of political relevance.
•External collaborations: co-organisation of theatrical performances, presentation of books in the presence of authors, staging of artistic exhibitions in shared curatorship.
In the following section, a description of some of the events organised by Quaderni Urbani is used to exemplify these different practices.
Project work and its social impact
Metropolitan Snapshots (open workshop, May 2018)
In the past five years the city of Bologna has undergone a process of massive touristification. Investing in the food economy and in the transport sectors (and particularly in the expansion of the airport), the local government is trying to make Bologna an increasingly attractive destination for tourists. In so doing, the municipality has given ample room for manoeuvre to businesses ready to profit from the city’s transformation. However, no attention has been paid to the fact that an unmanaged tourist flow causes a radical alteration of the physical and social morphology of the city. In Bologna, in particular, this uncontrolled tourism has produced, in addition to the proliferation of countless boutiques and megastores where local food products are sold at embarrassingly high prices, a housing crisis of devastating impact. It is the city centre that has been mainly affected and particularly the student population, which is now struggling to find affordable housing due to the conversion into Airbnb lets of about 1,700 apartments (Gentile et al, 2018).
The open workshop Metropolitan Snapshots was Quaderni Urbani’s response to this housing crisis. The workshop aimed at being an opportunity to reflect on the ability of mass tourism to change the face of the city and to make an explicit call to act in the opposite direction. We found social photography to be the most incisive artistic medium for denouncing the transformation of the city, as well as the most effective means to win back the authentic soul of the city. We divided the work into three moments. First, we organised an initial briefing, in which we debated the narrative criteria of street photography, as well as its ability to portray the surrounding environment. Second, we organised a ten-day ‘photographic relay’, which saw the participants share and pass from one to another some analogue cameras. These were used to portray, in their neighbourhoods, places and people with a significant social or historical value. Finally, we created an exhibition of the shots that were also placed on a map of the centre of Bologna with the aim of revealing an alternative cartography of the city where the places of greatest social importance were highlighted.
The external participation in our first workshop and its results went well beyond our expectations. In fact, the workshop not only fostered the rediscovery of Bologna and its social composition, but also stimulated a collective process of awareness of the implications of our living together in a multi-ethnic and plural urban space. The ultimate message that our work aspired to convey? That travelling in already planned and standardised tourist routes means becoming part of a mechanism working for the profit of a few, as well as harming those who inhabit and animate the city every day.
Voices for Mediterranea (thematic reading, April 2019)
Over the past two years, every government that has ruled Italy has pursued migration policies centred on rejection of migrants and closures of borders. The adopted institutional policies have also promoted a criminalisation of humanitarian intervention. The numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have helped to mitigate the already dramatic death toll of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea have been threatened with financial penalties and criminal measures. This has led to the almost total disappearance of NGOs in the central Mediterranean, thereby exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe we have witnessed over the past decade.
In this context, Làbas and Quaderni Urbani have become co-funders of the courageous operation of Mediterranea Saving Humans (Mediterranea). This operation arose from the indignation fostered in us by the repressive and racist measures enacted by political institutions. Mediterranea was born as an enlarged umbrella association of different political groups and civic associations. Through international crowdfunding, the project has brought two boats back into the Mediterranean. Having an Italian flag, the two boats are partially spared from the restrictive measures applied to NGOs’ boats. In the span of eight months, Mediterranea’s boats have been involved in seven patrol missions in the Strait of Sicily. To date, the operation has rescued 237 people. The beginning of this mission led Quaderni Urbani to enlist in what we have called the ‘land crew’. The land crew of Mediterranea has the task of spreading as much as possible the message of the project, of raising funds, and of empowering civil society to recognise the value of humanity. Although simple and basic, this value has assumed traits of heroism in a time marked by an increasing barbarisation of the public debate.
Taking advantage of our previous experience with the social library, we first took care of the management of a private library that was donated to us. The books of this library were sold to finance the mission. We organised a weekly ‘book banquet’ aimed at selling as well as collecting books and magazines. Through the resources obtained by selling the books we have brought a considerable economic contribution to Mediterranea and the banquet has also been an opportunity to talk about the operation and activate new forces around it.
We also sought to amplify the narrative power of the operation, by organising public thematic readings of some texts that our comrades had written. The reading Voices for Mediterranea gathered two types of texts: ‘logbooks’, that is, testimonies of direct experiences of navigation and rescue in the Strait of Sicily, and ‘land journals’, written by comrades who, like ourselves, had participated in the land crew.
The success of the event was huge. During 2019 we were asked to organise this thematic reading more than four times and the logbooks and journals of Mediterranea will soon published by Quaderni Urbani. It is not intended for these texts to be simply a literary exercise. On the contrary, they are born to witness and to communicate the personal efforts and political intentions entailed in a mission aimed at saving human lives from death at sea. In this way a wonderful and powerful interweaving of action and art is realised. This form of art gives recognition to the generous effort of those who jeopardise their physical and legal safety to fight against inhumanity and disengagement. Through these readings we thus ambitiously sought to turn our voices into megaphones.
Examples of external collaborations (2018–19)
Over the years, Quaderni Urbani has managed to create and diffuse an independent and free cultural offering, also thanks to the collaborations developed with other artistic and political groups animated by the same values. We have asked each of our collaborators to take an unequivocal position with respect to the issues we consider decisive, such as the anti-sexist and anti-racist nature of our activities.
In relation to these external collaborations, a particularly interesting example is that of the meetings with students of the Academy of Fine Arts, which have allowed an exchange of information and mutual training on the difficulties experienced by those who wish to make a living through art. By using our spaces within Làbas as an ‘open atelier’, we have sought to meet the needs of young emerging artists of the city of Bologna by enabling them to use the open atelier as a free exhibition space. Through the open atelier we have sought to spare art from commodification and to open up opportunities for critical discussion on the problems of independent culture.
During the event Avant-Punk, organised in partnership with the group LaZecca (a political and cultural collective working mostly through music), we promoted an unusual meeting between the surrealist movement and underground music. Through this event, we sought to give visibility to female surrealist artists, such as Nancy Cunard and Anaïs Nin, authors of a fervent literary counter-narrative permeated by the recusal of the dominant values and declined in terms of feminist and anti-fascist militancy. In addition to the public reading of their writings, some of which were translated into Italian for the first time by our group, the event included the exhibition of surrealist thematic posters and the screening of some short movies by Luis Buñuel, with simultaneous musical accompaniment. From a rebellious and eccentric subculture was thus born a seductive and dreamlike crossover of genres, in an evening that was a memorable experience of a riot of lights, sounds, colours and poetic verses.
Continuing our reflection on gender issues and in preparation for the global strike of the trans-feminist movement of NonUnaDiMeno, we developed a collaboration with the independent theatre company Ortika. This collaboration has led to the staging of a show on the topic of femicide. Femicide is an abomination that is still very prevalent in Italy and that needs to be addressed also changing narratives and discourses on violence against women. Indeed, our group will soon author a play script written collectively on the issue of gender-based violence. It is superfluous to continue enumerating the many events that have taken place in addition to those already mentioned: the history of Quaderni Urbani, although brief, already includes a rich haul of experience and achievements.
Conclusions: on sustainability and the role of militancy
A hungry belly has no ears.
(Jean de la Fontaine)
It is impossible for a call for justice to sprout in ground suffering from severe material scarcity, and in economically deprived contexts. This is the problem to which cultural activism remains exposed. Those who work through the arts or through knowledge must be aware that those who are receptive to cultural inputs are not the entire population but, on the contrary, represent a small privileged minority. Next to them, there is an endless multitude of people whose life has the appearance of a daily struggle for survival. Anyone who advocates the cause of social transformation only through culture and education is unaware that these same means can be used to achieve the opposite purpose, that is, they can be used as instruments of the reproduction of a system of inequalities. Culture can educate to the indifferent acceptance of injustice and to voluntary servitude too. This ‘culture’ hides from the more deprived groups the material conditions that could allow them to empower and emancipate themselves. This culture, like every attempt to make knowledge the prerogative of the few, entails ill-concealed authoritarian tendencies.
As I have previously argued, this is not the kind of culture that interests the political activist. The principles that inspire cultural activism are exactly opposite. It is truly worthy of us only when it is good for everyone, and knowledge becomes a form of oppression when it is not understood as collective achievement. The experience of Quaderni Urbani can represent a model of activism in which intellectual work is placed at the service of the community and where the horizontal sharing of knowledge gives rise to a commitment to social equality. However, the ultimate goal of liberation from inequality, in order to be achieved, requires that this commitment should not remain only at the intellectual level. This commitment must be translated into practices aimed at the concrete deconstruction of the system of inequality. True cultural activism must entail a two-fold emancipatory aim: cultural activism should work towards the liberation of bodies, no less than of the spirits. Only then, following Mayakovski’s invitation, can we avoid art being simply a mirror that reflects the world, and allow it to become the hammer through which the world can be forged.
References
Benjamin, W. (1935) ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ [The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction] in Walter Benjamin Schriften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron J. (1970) La Reproduction: Éléments pour une Théorie du Système d’Enseignement [Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture], Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Gentile, A., Tassinari, F. and Zoboli, A. (2018) Indagine sul Mercato degli Alloggi in Locazione nel Comune di Bologna [Inquiry on Housing in Bologna’s Municipality], Bologna: Instituto Carlo Cattaneo. Available from: www.cattaneo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Indagine-sul-mercato-degli-alloggi-in-locazione-Bo.pdf
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1947) Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente [Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments], Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag GmBH.
