RECLAIM THE STREETS: “The street is an extremely important symbol because your whole enculturation experience is geared around keeping you out of the street… The idea is to keep everyone indoors”

Ricardo Dominguez: Electronic Disturbance:

We uploaded the Disturbance Developers Kit at one minute after midnight… And twenty minutes after we uploaded it… Queer Nation did an action… A week later, the International Animal Liberation network did two actions against pharmaceuticals in Switzerland…

CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE:

“as far as power is concerned, the streets are dead capital. Nothing of value to the power elite can be found on the streets, nor does this class need control of the streets to efficiently run and maintain state institutions. For CD to have any meaningful effect, the resistors must appropriate something of value to the state.”

RECLAIM THE STREETS:
The street party can be read as a situ-esque reversal of this assertion; as an attempt to make Carnival the revolutionary moment. Placing ‘what could be’ in the path of ‘what is’ and celebrating the ‘here and now’ in the road of the rush for ‘there and later’, it hopes to re-energize the possibility of radical change. The continuing emergence of street parties in Britain and increasingly in other countries shows that the desire for this change is not limited to economic equality, to ending injustice or ensuring survival. It is an expansive desire; for freedom, for creativity; to truly live. This desire, for the present social order, is revolutionary.

Imagine: it’s a hot summer’s day, four lanes of traffic move sluggishly through the grey stinking city haze, and an airhorn pierces the drone of cars. Suddenly several groups of people appear, running out from side streets carrying 20-foot-long scaffolding poles. In a perfectly choreographed acrobatic drill, the scaffolding poles are erected bang in the middle of the road in the form of tripods and people climb to the top, balancing gracefully 20 feet above the tarmac. The road is now blocked to traffic but open to pedestrians. Then that spine-tingling peak experience occurs. Drifting across this extraordinary scene is Louis Armstrongâ’s voice singing “What a Wonderful World“ this wondrous sound is coming from an armoured personnel carrier which is now standing in the car-free street. Within minutes thousands of people have filled the road.
-John Jordan, Reclaim The Streets