MON 13 NOV
Slogans, signs and spin. ‘Take back our streets’ is a pillar of the new Labour party plan adopting the far right ‘take back control’ language of Farage and Co. Take back from where and from whom? And for who? This promise of some nebulous safety and security is a world away from the rallying cry ‘Reclaim the Streets.’ Set up in the early 1990s ‘‘FOR walking, cycling and cheap, or free, public transport, and AGAINST cars, roads and the system that pushes them’ RTS organised carnivalesque, surreal action in the streets – painting cycle lanes on and organising parties in the roads of the city.
As they put into practice Brecht’s idea of theatre training people in the pleasure of transforming reality, new laws were being passed to kerb the power of protest (1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act) severely reducing civil liberties and counter cultural practices and criminalising tactics of political dissidence. RECLAIM THE STREETS. FREE THE CITY. KILL THE CAR were the signs and techno and acid house was the beat. Informed by rave culture, Reclaim the Streets became a chaotic subversion of street party and theatre – staging car crashes, bringing pedal powered sound systems – making the street an anarchic space of freedom and possibility. Co-founder of the group Jay Jordon (now of the ZAD – Zone a Defendre Notre Dames des Landes) speaks of the ‘vision in which the streets of the city could be a system that prioritised people above profit and ecology above the economy’ and that Reclaim the Streets sought to ‘prefigure an imagined world.’
This has a lineage and legacy that, from Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’, through Dada, Surrealism and the Situationists, to the rallying cry of 1968 ‘BENEATH THE PAVING STONES THE BEACH!’ informs our work – a way of reclaiming the imagination and creating space for possibility. Of the challenges of doing this not within a counter cultural enclave but on a ‘typical’ residential street. Of the limitations of this in a community of diverse political/apolitical persuasion. Googling the link for the ZAD above I come across an article ‘Revolution is rising up and merging into the Everyday’ - an interview with Jay Jordon about ‘prefigurative politics’ and the power of people. About putting your body in front of the machine. About the streets as our urban commons.
Jay speaks of a holy trinity of art, activism and everyday life and of how they (he and Isabelle Fremeaux) on seeking this final part, found it in the entangled life of and fight for the ZAD. Our specific everyday is here. On this street in North East London where we believe in and attempt to undertake this form of prefigurative politics. The trials and tribulations we face getting the most simple things done are mind numbing and at times crushing - navigating systems that need urgent transformation. Attempting some form of reclamation of the commons in a landscape of privatised property and minds. Living, being and doing, as Jay says ‘despite’ capitalism. We playfully declare ourselves a government, we imagine this as our temporary autonomous zone, we live our version of ‘Passport to Pimlico.’ And we fall short.
We transform the street into a field of sunflowers. But they are in pots - when we should dig up the road. We install solar panels with permission – when we want a microgrid across the whole street, communal batteries, a POWER STATION across the borough. We will get there or perhaps it is always a question. Will we get there? Before flood and civil unrest cancel this all out. By dreaming and making happen, reminding ourselves constantly of why we do this – to bring the joyful anarchy - the insurrectionary imagination to an everyday that seems to exclude and shut this down.
As Jay Jordon says “if you analyse the realities of the world right now, it’s not very joyful. But you can also have a paradox in that. You can be able to see the disaster and the apocalypse, the absolute lack of liberation and the domination, and then at the same time be able to say that we can find joy even in fighting that. ‘ And in doing this we also need to constantly remember the YES and the NO – the duel urgency of both the imagining and building of new worlds and the dismantling of the systems of oppression that perpetuate the impossibility of change.
We occupy our street with an invitation to step out of the front door to see and understand what the street can be - a site of community, agency and reclamation, questioning and reinvigorating what our civic rights and responsibilities are or should be. Prompted by founding father of British documentary John Grierson’s words – ‘the drama is on the doorstep’ we look for and make this drama happen – taking to the rooftops, proliferating sunflowers, singing and making music – editing together a story of possibility – a magic realist, kitchen sink, artistic, political polemic. Grierson was arguing for the ‘doorstep’ in opposition to seeking out stories at ‘the ends of the earth’ in an argument with rival documentary pioneer Flaherty (of ‘Nanook of the North’) but the local and global are always deeply intertwined. The street we call home is never separate from the ‘ends of the earth.’ It is co-dependent with and complicit in global sites of violence and extraction. The textural footprint of our street, within a global city, is immense. As microcosm it takes in continents.
Our neighbour and friend Sam is in prison right now for recognising this. For taking to the streets to change this. Slow walking with Just Stop Oil in a road. His specific crime and the reason for his sentence - for not promising he wouldn’t do it again. As people rally around there is an address to write to him. Thank you. For stepping into the road. Crossing that threshold and knowing that everything we take for granted came from disobedience.
The streets are full again now. All across the world people exercise the right to protest ‘despite’ increasing attempts to legislate against this. Suella Braverman may have gone today but the corrosion of democracy continues apace. Threats to democracy, to humanity, to life on earth.
And again words are not solid. ‘Taking back our streets’ is a world away from ‘reclaim the streets’. The current occupations of public space from train stations to plazas in direct opposition to the occupation enforced by oppressive regimes.
The difficulties of applying ‘reclaim the streets’ philosophy and practice to our home street is that ‘home’ is contested and protected space - a site of sanctuary where public becomes private. But we should know that these streets - home to multiple people with manifold understandings of this age - are equally precipitous and precarious. We are all connected in our vulnerability. The gaps in the streets architecture from WW2 bombing attest to this.
Homes can be occupied. Homes can be violently destroyed. Makeshift homes are lifted from the streets of London and binned. The abomination of a human being, Tzipi Hotovely interviewed on Sky News justifies the wholesale destruction of Gaza with ‘every second house has an entrance to this underground terror city’ …Think about it as a ghost city that is turning into a terror city” - terror perpetrated by her state army with the aim of creating a city of ghosts. The UN argue the case for ‘Domicide’ to be recognised as an internatoinal crime– the purposeful mass destruction of civilian domestic architecture - homes. UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing Balakkrishnan Rajagopal states “I have witnessed how in just a few seconds a home – the culmination of a life-long effort and the pride of entire families – can be wiped out and turned to rubble.Destroyed is not only a home. Destroyed are the savings of entire families. Destroyed are memories and the comfort of belonging,” the Special Rapporteur said. “Along with this comes a social and psychological trauma that is difficult to describe or imagine.”
This house is our home. This street where we live is home. This city is our home. This planet is our only home. We are intricately connected and our safety and survival depends on our understanding this.
