Amidst Humanitarian Crisis: From Protest to Citizen Participation. What about Guerrilla reactivation?

"Ricardo Raphael declares: 'Indignation is the choleric feeling provoked buy scandalous injustice. It must not be confused with frustration or exasperation: the first is sterile while the second is uncontrollable. Frustration paralizes and exasperation may easily lead towards violence. The anger that comes from indignation provokes powerful change in the state of things". [source: From Protest to Citizen Participation by Ulrich Richter Morales]

City in a deep sleep has woken up. It seems urgent, like we're already running late for democracy. The putrid smell of the corpses has made us realize we were not living in a city but a cemetery. Our indignation has finally made us conscious of the fact this violence is not a way of living but a way of feeling grateful for surviving unscathed through these impune events.

How can you organize society as means to change? How do you engage an artistic community for participation? How do you prevent forces from clashing into each other or avoid events that could become an initiation towards something else?

"A month after the disappearance of the 43 students in the Rural Normal School Raúl Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, the federal government observes with certain nervousness the position of the guerrillas that express their support towards the families of the disappeared, as they announce the "justice brigades" and are calling their bases to a "state of alert". [source]

In terms of art projects where bad has been transformed into good I can think of great examples from NOLA like Before I Die. The GGAD or Guerrilla Art Action Group from 1969 was a determinant example for actions, prints, leaflets and publications from artists like Vito Acconci, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Naumann, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dennis Oppenheim. There's also the Guerrilla Girls and of course, Banksy.

Today I spoke with my students about the way Twitter/YouTube/Facebook can inform/confuse and the duty to engage some kind of social conscience where there could be a creative output. Some of them looked at me in the same way I looked at my teachers when the EZLN appeared in 1994.

Truth is, back in 1994 there wasn't that much information at the tips of your fingers. A simple Google search can lead anyone to Toolboxes for Revolution, Creative Activism or Artivism, Art Affecting Political Change and Brave New Art.

I'll keep working tonight with an excerpt of John Gibler's poetry running through my mind:

"Maybe if we were organized / like the compas (buddies) in the south,

but not here, and that's what we're missing

getting organized, but how? with so much/ lead in the air,

with so much polarized rage, with so many/ centuries [inscribed] in the now?

Where to start? Where to take from

when the silence is charged in blood,

when the t.v. refills it's cartridge at you, / [when] the boy around the corner

denounces you, and the president [only manages to]

/ give(s) you a bouquet of horns
[20 Poems to be read at a Gunshooting]