A NEW BABYLON
Gothenburg New Babylon deals with the political situation in the gothenburg area one year after the protests against the swedish EU-summit and the first shots on protestors in a EUropean context for decades.
Paris New Babylon. Constant, 1963
through audio-visual mapping of the "normal" cityscape and extensive interviews with the multitude of the new social movements we learned about the transformations of the city, represented for instance in the threads of innumerable personal stories about the main icons of the powerstructure, the images of the cargo-container module and the sounds of helicopters. surprised by the accounts of the violent impact on a very bodily level the days ofprotesting and the repression after that had on the people involved, we try to continue to explore questions of identity, the body under repression, the transformation of (urban) space. that is, the fields between global imperatives and local narratives, the media image and personal experience, the spectacle and the situation, micropolitics and political movements, spaces of uprising and repression, ...
red and yellow zones at the G8-summit in Genua. Empire, 2001
a large portion of the theoretical background comes from the "new babylon" project of dutch artist constant. starting in the end of the 1950's out of situationist ideas he worked over 15 years on the utopian model of a modular urban megastructure, spread out over existing cities and meant as the matrix for a sociopolitical revolution.
nowadays, we face the dystopian reality of a modular megastructure of control and repression, spreading out in invisible layers and lines of flight over the territory (materializing once in a while in red zones and open state violence), breeding paranoia, running through our very bodies by immense force: in a EUropean context this phantom is known under the chiffre of "schengen".
gbg_nb is planned to be mediated through an experimental documentary film, installation environments, and other channels of theoretical, artistic and activist political spheres.
-> german version with more images