Suicide or Solidarity: Red Channels in Berlin
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Red Channels
Jul 2, 2011, 7:42:00 AM7/2/11
to Red Channels
In this visit to Berlin we follow recent trips to San Francisco
(“Gentle People in Motion”, February 2011) and Chicago (“As a Crowd
Gathers”, March 2011), where we connected with old friends and new
comrades. The goal is not to franchise, or to charter new branches,
but to engage with our collective struggles in different contexts.
To Have Done with Passive Interpretation: Reading Capital Politically
Saturday 2 July 2011 - 4PM
Okk/room 29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
"As social movements waned in the late 70s, the study of Marx seemed
to take on a life of its own. Structuralist, post-structuralist,
deconstructed Marxes bloomed in journals and seminar rooms across the
US and Europe. These Marxes and their interpreters struggled to
interpret the world, and sometimes to interpret Marx himself, losing
sight at times of his dictum that the challenge is not to interpret
the world but to change it. In 1979, Harry Cleaver tossed an
incendiary device called Reading Capital Politically into those
seminar rooms. Through a close reading of the first chapter, he shows
that Das Kapital was written for the workers, not for academics, and
that we need to expand our idea of workers to include housewives,
students, the unemployed, and other non-waged workers. Reading Capital
Politically provides a theoretical and historical bridge between
struggles in Europe in the 60s and 70s and, particularly, the
Autonomia of Italy to the Zapatistas of the 90s."
We will discuss:
--Reading Capital Politically - Harry Cleaver, 1979, 138 pages:
http://redchannelsinberlin.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cleaver-reading_capital_politically3.pdf
---
Our Friendships are Constructed on the Basis of Conflict: Collectively
Produced Film and Video
Sunday 3 July 2011 – 5PM
West Germany
Skalitzer Straße 133
10999 Berlin
Entrance: 3-5EUR donation
Who made these movies? We did it together! This series features films
and videos by media makers around the globe who operate as
collectives, using group identities rather than assuming individual
authorship. Whether a political statement or an artistic choice,
working collectively means combining many individual visions into a
cohesive whole – egos will be crushed.
An earlier version of this series was presented over 5-days at the
Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY.
5PM
--Everything Has Been Done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes (Polish with
English subtitles)
--Builders – Chto Delat, 2005, 8 minutes (Russian with English
subtitles)
--Oury Jalloh – Ak Kraak, 2008, 5 minutes (English, German with
English subtitles)
--Ethnoprop – Ak Kraak, 2008, 2 minutes (German with English
subtitles)
--Kraak-Reisen – Ak Kraak, 2008, 2 minutes (German with English
subtitles)
--Nagai Park Elegy – Leo Sato [Nakazaki-cho Documentary Space), 2009,
63 minutes (Japanese with English subtitles)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes | Digital Projection
Member of Ak Kraak will be present.
7PM
--Hope and Failure: Investigations in the American Dream 1 – Global
Alien, 3 minutes (English)
--Hope and Failure: Investigations in the American Dream 2 – Global
Alien, 18 minutes (English)
--The Terror and the Time – The Victor Jara Collective, 1978, 75
minutes (English)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes | Digital Projection
Members of Global Alien will be present.
9PM
--Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes (English)
--Cop Humiliation in Their Own Domain – Voina, 2008, 12 minutes
(Russian with English subtitles)
--Dick Captured by KGB! – Voina, 2010, 3 minutes (Russian)
--As a Crowd Gathers, Red Channels 2011, 40 minutes (English)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 65 minutes | Digital Projection
---
Red Channels Meets Red Megaphone: Kuhle Wampe Revisited
Part I: Screening and Discussion
Monday July 4th – 9PM
b_books
Lübbener Straße 14
10997 Berlin
--Ø - Red Channels, 2011, 4 minutes
--From Wall Street to Wall Street to Wall Street - Red Channels, 2011,
4 minutes (English)
--Kuhle Wampe – Slatan Dudow, 1932, 68 minutes (German with English
subtitles)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 76 minutes | Digital Projection
Part II: Work-in-progress meetings, discussions, editing sessions
okk/room29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
Sign up to participate: mar...@redchannels.org
How is it possible to invent new forms of solidarity in times of
imposed capitalist absurdity? How can we define new spaces of struggle
against the suffering of budget cuts, mass unemployment and
nationalist threat? And not what is to be done, but how is it to be
done?
“Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns The World” was a communist avant-garde
cinema project conceived in the Berlin summer of 1932, under an
atmosphere of no money, no time, and extreme political oppression.
Immediately censored after its release by both the German state and
the Soviet Union, Kuhle Wampe explores the tension between the petite
bourgeoisie family and the principle of collective solidarity.
For the week following our screening of Kuhle Wampe, we will be based
out of okk/room29 in Berlin-Wedding. We hope to facilitate a
collective response to the film, open to all. Using video as our
primary means of documentation, we invite everybody to collaborate
with us on this research project, which is open to any media or
practice.
*We want to reimagine, retrace, remix, reenact, and reload Kuhle
Wampe.
*We want to film, perform, intervene, interrogate, walk, bike and sing
Kuhle Wampe.
*We want to create a cinematic compilation of our collective responses
to Kuhle Wampe.
Free. Bring equipment if you have it. Languages: German, English,
Denglish. More information: martyna[at]redchannels.org
---
The Human Strike: A Few Clarifications
Thursday July 7th 2011 - 7PM
Okk/room 29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
"One of the aspects of human strike is the rejection of activity, but
this is somehow the aspect that the idea of human strike has in common
with the one of general strike. Human strike is above all the
interruption and the change of a behaviour that feeds oppression in an
unapparent way. The movement of women is the best example: it fought
amongst other things domestic exploitation, the implicit injunction to
take responsibility for the care, the love, the infrastructure, the
projections of male desires and so on. So human strike is the de-
identification with one’s professional identity, which is a process
that is always part of strikes, but that only becomes essential when
the movement generalizes and when it reaches other categories of
workers or people. This de-identification, de-subjectivation if you
wish, is supposed to occur at the very first stage of the human strike
in order to make it potentially general since the beginning and also
immediately effective. The change is decreed and then other people
join the struggle. It is maybe the only possible way to fight today
for many." (Claire Fontaine)
We will discuss the following works:
--Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications - Claire
Fontaine, 2005, 13 pages:
http://redchannelsinberlin.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/claire-fontaine_ready-made-artist-and-human-strike.pdf
--Historical Fiction as Realism: Interview with Claire Fontaine -
Realism Working Group, 2008: http://realismworkinggroup.wordpress.com/interview-with-claire-fontaine/
--The Human Strike Within the Field of Libidinal Economy - Claire
Fontaine, 2009, 9 pages:
http://redchannelsinberlin.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/claire-fontaine-human-strike-within-the-field-of-the-libidinal-economy.pdf
---
Armed Love: A Walking Tour of Red and Black Sites of Attack
Saturday July 9th 2011 - 8PM
Starting at Berlin’s magic hour, the last hour of sunlight, we will
convene a walking tour of sites attacked by leftist groups including
“Bewegung 2. Juni”, “Rote Zora”, and others.
This tour follows a “Days of Rage” tour we organized in Chicago last
March, retracing the first action organized by the Weatherman in
October 1968; as well as a tour in Manhattan this May following
bombings from 1920-2008 by the anarchist Galleanists, the FALN (Armed
Forces of National Liberation), MIRA (Armed Revolutionary Independence
Movement), WUO (Weather Underground Organization), and Sam Melville
and Jane Alpert.
For more information: armedlove[at]redchannels.org
---
Less Fetish, More Action: All Power to Collectivity!
Sunday July 10th 2011 - 8PM
Newyorck im Bethanien
Haus Bethanien Südflügel
Mariannenplatz 2
10997 Berlin
Creative forces often group temporarily together and experiment with
identities and methods in plural. Thereby they activate “collective
intelligences” (Pierre Lévy), and often recreate the rules of the game
and liberate as a form of a “generalized aesthetics for once less
fetishes than rather forces for action” (Michel Onfray).
--Dr. Birte Kleine-Benne, Working Together in the Art of the Next
Society, 2010
How do we gather around affinities and desires? How do we make
decisions together? How do we invent new politics when working through
our inter-collective conflicts? How do our collective identities defy
the categories of art and politics, activism and the media?
Discussion with Ak Kraak, Global Alien, Metanationale, and others TBA.
---
Red Channels is a radical collective based in New York City. The
collective is open for those interested in collaboration and new
proposals.
In New York we do not operate a physical space. We gather when we can,
and when we wish, to organize events and and produce things. Just as
there is no space, there is no fixed mission statement, membership,
hierarchy, financial or legal status. We informally institutionalize
around affinities and desires.
Red Channels has revolved around cinema and discussion. Now we also
curate, perform, publish, read, write, and take direct action. We look
at previous attempts of dissent and opposition to stimulate our
imaginations for collective transformation. We work to defy the
categories of art and politics, activism and media, in search of a new
communist culture.
We have organized screenings and discussions at spaces like Anthology
Film Archives, BAMcinematek, Bluestockings, The Brecht Forum, e-flux,
Flux Factory, Maysles Cinema, 92Y-Tribeca, 16Beaver, Spectacle
Theater, and UnionDocs.
Our collective has produced 10 short videos, as well as 5
publications, both in print and online, of collected and original
writings. Our work has been screened at The Brecht Forum, Brooklyn
Community Access Television, Flux Factory, International House
Philadelphia, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, MassArt, MoMA PS1, New
Nothing Cinema, 92Y-Tribeca, Philadelphia Community Access Media, La
Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, and Spectacle Theater.
www.redchannels.org/berlin
(“Gentle People in Motion”, February 2011) and Chicago (“As a Crowd
Gathers”, March 2011), where we connected with old friends and new
comrades. The goal is not to franchise, or to charter new branches,
but to engage with our collective struggles in different contexts.
To Have Done with Passive Interpretation: Reading Capital Politically
Saturday 2 July 2011 - 4PM
Okk/room 29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
"As social movements waned in the late 70s, the study of Marx seemed
to take on a life of its own. Structuralist, post-structuralist,
deconstructed Marxes bloomed in journals and seminar rooms across the
US and Europe. These Marxes and their interpreters struggled to
interpret the world, and sometimes to interpret Marx himself, losing
sight at times of his dictum that the challenge is not to interpret
the world but to change it. In 1979, Harry Cleaver tossed an
incendiary device called Reading Capital Politically into those
seminar rooms. Through a close reading of the first chapter, he shows
that Das Kapital was written for the workers, not for academics, and
that we need to expand our idea of workers to include housewives,
students, the unemployed, and other non-waged workers. Reading Capital
Politically provides a theoretical and historical bridge between
struggles in Europe in the 60s and 70s and, particularly, the
Autonomia of Italy to the Zapatistas of the 90s."
We will discuss:
--Reading Capital Politically - Harry Cleaver, 1979, 138 pages:
http://redchannelsinberlin.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cleaver-reading_capital_politically3.pdf
---
Our Friendships are Constructed on the Basis of Conflict: Collectively
Produced Film and Video
Sunday 3 July 2011 – 5PM
West Germany
Skalitzer Straße 133
10999 Berlin
Entrance: 3-5EUR donation
Who made these movies? We did it together! This series features films
and videos by media makers around the globe who operate as
collectives, using group identities rather than assuming individual
authorship. Whether a political statement or an artistic choice,
working collectively means combining many individual visions into a
cohesive whole – egos will be crushed.
An earlier version of this series was presented over 5-days at the
Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY.
5PM
--Everything Has Been Done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes (Polish with
English subtitles)
--Builders – Chto Delat, 2005, 8 minutes (Russian with English
subtitles)
--Oury Jalloh – Ak Kraak, 2008, 5 minutes (English, German with
English subtitles)
--Ethnoprop – Ak Kraak, 2008, 2 minutes (German with English
subtitles)
--Kraak-Reisen – Ak Kraak, 2008, 2 minutes (German with English
subtitles)
--Nagai Park Elegy – Leo Sato [Nakazaki-cho Documentary Space), 2009,
63 minutes (Japanese with English subtitles)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes | Digital Projection
Member of Ak Kraak will be present.
7PM
--Hope and Failure: Investigations in the American Dream 1 – Global
Alien, 3 minutes (English)
--Hope and Failure: Investigations in the American Dream 2 – Global
Alien, 18 minutes (English)
--The Terror and the Time – The Victor Jara Collective, 1978, 75
minutes (English)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes | Digital Projection
Members of Global Alien will be present.
9PM
--Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes (English)
--Cop Humiliation in Their Own Domain – Voina, 2008, 12 minutes
(Russian with English subtitles)
--Dick Captured by KGB! – Voina, 2010, 3 minutes (Russian)
--As a Crowd Gathers, Red Channels 2011, 40 minutes (English)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 65 minutes | Digital Projection
---
Red Channels Meets Red Megaphone: Kuhle Wampe Revisited
Part I: Screening and Discussion
Monday July 4th – 9PM
b_books
Lübbener Straße 14
10997 Berlin
--Ø - Red Channels, 2011, 4 minutes
--From Wall Street to Wall Street to Wall Street - Red Channels, 2011,
4 minutes (English)
--Kuhle Wampe – Slatan Dudow, 1932, 68 minutes (German with English
subtitles)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 76 minutes | Digital Projection
Part II: Work-in-progress meetings, discussions, editing sessions
okk/room29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
Sign up to participate: mar...@redchannels.org
How is it possible to invent new forms of solidarity in times of
imposed capitalist absurdity? How can we define new spaces of struggle
against the suffering of budget cuts, mass unemployment and
nationalist threat? And not what is to be done, but how is it to be
done?
“Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns The World” was a communist avant-garde
cinema project conceived in the Berlin summer of 1932, under an
atmosphere of no money, no time, and extreme political oppression.
Immediately censored after its release by both the German state and
the Soviet Union, Kuhle Wampe explores the tension between the petite
bourgeoisie family and the principle of collective solidarity.
For the week following our screening of Kuhle Wampe, we will be based
out of okk/room29 in Berlin-Wedding. We hope to facilitate a
collective response to the film, open to all. Using video as our
primary means of documentation, we invite everybody to collaborate
with us on this research project, which is open to any media or
practice.
*We want to reimagine, retrace, remix, reenact, and reload Kuhle
Wampe.
*We want to film, perform, intervene, interrogate, walk, bike and sing
Kuhle Wampe.
*We want to create a cinematic compilation of our collective responses
to Kuhle Wampe.
Free. Bring equipment if you have it. Languages: German, English,
Denglish. More information: martyna[at]redchannels.org
---
The Human Strike: A Few Clarifications
Thursday July 7th 2011 - 7PM
Okk/room 29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin
"One of the aspects of human strike is the rejection of activity, but
this is somehow the aspect that the idea of human strike has in common
with the one of general strike. Human strike is above all the
interruption and the change of a behaviour that feeds oppression in an
unapparent way. The movement of women is the best example: it fought
amongst other things domestic exploitation, the implicit injunction to
take responsibility for the care, the love, the infrastructure, the
projections of male desires and so on. So human strike is the de-
identification with one’s professional identity, which is a process
that is always part of strikes, but that only becomes essential when
the movement generalizes and when it reaches other categories of
workers or people. This de-identification, de-subjectivation if you
wish, is supposed to occur at the very first stage of the human strike
in order to make it potentially general since the beginning and also
immediately effective. The change is decreed and then other people
join the struggle. It is maybe the only possible way to fight today
for many." (Claire Fontaine)
We will discuss the following works:
--Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications - Claire
Fontaine, 2005, 13 pages:
http://redchannelsinberlin.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/claire-fontaine_ready-made-artist-and-human-strike.pdf
--Historical Fiction as Realism: Interview with Claire Fontaine -
Realism Working Group, 2008: http://realismworkinggroup.wordpress.com/interview-with-claire-fontaine/
--The Human Strike Within the Field of Libidinal Economy - Claire
Fontaine, 2009, 9 pages:
http://redchannelsinberlin.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/claire-fontaine-human-strike-within-the-field-of-the-libidinal-economy.pdf
---
Armed Love: A Walking Tour of Red and Black Sites of Attack
Saturday July 9th 2011 - 8PM
Starting at Berlin’s magic hour, the last hour of sunlight, we will
convene a walking tour of sites attacked by leftist groups including
“Bewegung 2. Juni”, “Rote Zora”, and others.
This tour follows a “Days of Rage” tour we organized in Chicago last
March, retracing the first action organized by the Weatherman in
October 1968; as well as a tour in Manhattan this May following
bombings from 1920-2008 by the anarchist Galleanists, the FALN (Armed
Forces of National Liberation), MIRA (Armed Revolutionary Independence
Movement), WUO (Weather Underground Organization), and Sam Melville
and Jane Alpert.
For more information: armedlove[at]redchannels.org
---
Less Fetish, More Action: All Power to Collectivity!
Sunday July 10th 2011 - 8PM
Newyorck im Bethanien
Haus Bethanien Südflügel
Mariannenplatz 2
10997 Berlin
Creative forces often group temporarily together and experiment with
identities and methods in plural. Thereby they activate “collective
intelligences” (Pierre Lévy), and often recreate the rules of the game
and liberate as a form of a “generalized aesthetics for once less
fetishes than rather forces for action” (Michel Onfray).
--Dr. Birte Kleine-Benne, Working Together in the Art of the Next
Society, 2010
How do we gather around affinities and desires? How do we make
decisions together? How do we invent new politics when working through
our inter-collective conflicts? How do our collective identities defy
the categories of art and politics, activism and the media?
Discussion with Ak Kraak, Global Alien, Metanationale, and others TBA.
---
Red Channels is a radical collective based in New York City. The
collective is open for those interested in collaboration and new
proposals.
In New York we do not operate a physical space. We gather when we can,
and when we wish, to organize events and and produce things. Just as
there is no space, there is no fixed mission statement, membership,
hierarchy, financial or legal status. We informally institutionalize
around affinities and desires.
Red Channels has revolved around cinema and discussion. Now we also
curate, perform, publish, read, write, and take direct action. We look
at previous attempts of dissent and opposition to stimulate our
imaginations for collective transformation. We work to defy the
categories of art and politics, activism and media, in search of a new
communist culture.
We have organized screenings and discussions at spaces like Anthology
Film Archives, BAMcinematek, Bluestockings, The Brecht Forum, e-flux,
Flux Factory, Maysles Cinema, 92Y-Tribeca, 16Beaver, Spectacle
Theater, and UnionDocs.
Our collective has produced 10 short videos, as well as 5
publications, both in print and online, of collected and original
writings. Our work has been screened at The Brecht Forum, Brooklyn
Community Access Television, Flux Factory, International House
Philadelphia, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, MassArt, MoMA PS1, New
Nothing Cinema, 92Y-Tribeca, Philadelphia Community Access Media, La
Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, and Spectacle Theater.
www.redchannels.org/berlin
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