Category: Ramparts

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Only here for so long: understanding what antifascist architecture could mean

By Alhelí Harvey

It’s a rainy morning in Austin, Texas. The kind of morning where the mugginess outside seems to creep in under the door, around the window frame, smothering the walls; it feels like a climatological manifestation of this state’s malice towards people. Anyone with a womb and without a wallet is a target, and anyone can be their bounty hunter. 1 Haitian migrants are literally stranded under a bridge, only to be brutalized by the Customs and Border Patrol; 2 this assemblage of goons on horses is the direct descendants of the Texas Rangers, one of the most openly racist police forces this “Empire of Maladies” has ever devised. 3  I tap a video on Instagram: “There was a fire last night…” and see that a stage in the center of a community that looks like a cross between a set from The Smurfs and a 1970s summer camp is a pile of ash. As the video presents the facts of the fire, we see that the community is a series of cabins (referred to as “cobbins”) under an overpass (US Interstate 880). This place is Cob on Wood– referring both to the earthen community space’s literal material and its location on Wood Street. It is as much makeshift as it is tactical: in the face of multiple failures by Oakland, California, and the country, unhoused residents and their collaborators created what has been described as an “eco-oasis” in under a year. 4

Cob on Wood has a health clinic, a hot shower, and a community kitchen. Residents make shelters on their own from a material that is both cheap and effective: cob, a weather-resistant mixture of soil, clay, sand, and straw. Similar to adobe, cob has been used all over the world and is highly durable. In many ways, the community is an example of architecture without architects. In one sense, Cob on Wood is a manifestation of a collective response to an urgent need for both housing and resources. The methods for its building came about through a collaborative process rarely seen in capital A- architecture. These details, while laudable and certainly inspiring models for different building approaches, just as easily point toward the inadequacy of architectural practices, understandings, and relationships as they are widely practiced by the trade and discipline itself.  Continue reading “Only here for so long: understanding what antifascist architecture could mean”

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Notes on the Upcoming “Unite the Right” Civil Trial: A Guide to Who’s Involved and Why It Still Matters

It’s been over four years since the Unite the Right (UTR) rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017. Since January 6 of this year, those events astonishingly seem destined to be remembered as only the second-most infamous outbreak of mass violence during the Trump era. But if the storming of the US Capitol building is primarily remembered as an attack on institutions, norms, and ideas, UTR stands as a symbol of the visceral and often very personal fear and animosity that drives a great deal of far right activism.

Starting on October 25, the Western District of Virginia will commence the Sines v. Kessler civil trial against a number of the groups and individuals who, the plaintiffs contend, “conspired to plan, promote, and carry out the violent events in Charlottesville.” I plan to attend all or most of the trial and will be posting regular updates here. I was also on-site when UTR happened, so some commentary may be from personal recollection and not exclusively quoted from other sources.

UTR participants near the southwest corner of Emancipation Park on Aug. 12, 2017. James Fields is visible third from left holding a Vanguard America shield. (Photo by the author)

The four years of pretrial motions, arguments, briefs, and hearings leading up to this point have been extraordinarily chaotic and I plan to address some of those details at a later date. In the meantime, as a way of bringing readers up to speed, I’m going to use this introductory post to describe who the players are and just what the purpose of the trial is.

Continue reading “Notes on the Upcoming “Unite the Right” Civil Trial: A Guide to Who’s Involved and Why It Still Matters”
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The Snail of the End and the Beginning

(Neoliberalism and Architecture or The Ethics of Searching vs. the Ethics of Destruction)

translated by Madeleine Collier

This essay, originally written by Subcomandante Marcos (Delegado Cero) in 1996, can be accessed in the original Spanish at the EZLN archives.

In the Lacandona jungle, in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, there is a deserted settlement surrounded by heavily armed military posts. The name of this abandoned town was Guadalupe Tepeyac. Its inhabitants, the indigenous Tojolabals, were forcefully expelled by the Mexican government in February 1995, when federal troops sought to assassinate the leadership of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation [EZLN]. 

However, it is not the painful exile of these indigenous peoples, who pay for their rebellion by living in the mountains, of which I will tell you. I want to tell you about an architectural work that was born at the edge of the then-vibrant Guadalupe Tepeyac, in July and August of 1994. Largely illiterate–the most educated among them have a third grade education–, the Tojolabal architects undertook, in 28 days, to build a structure capable of housing 10,000 seats for the event the Zapatistas called the National Democratic Convention. In honor of Mexican history, the Zapatistas named the meeting place Aguascalientes. 1 The gigantic gathering space had an auditorium for 10,000 seated attendees and an 100-member presidium, a library, a computer room, kitchens, sleeping quarters, and parking. It even, it is said, included an “area for staging attacks.”

Continue reading “The Snail of the End and the Beginning”

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Antifascist Architectures Call for Submissions

Ramparts: A Barricade Forum is currently seeking contributions for our next themed series, “Architectures of Antifascism.” From the physical structures of antifascist struggle (the barricade, the autonomous zone, the agricultural collective), to digital configurations (the VPN, the net commons, CV dazzle) and spatial language which describes organizational relationships (distribution, horizontality, the cell, the web) how do antifascist entities use and maneuver within space? We welcome text and media submissions which engage the spatial aspect of resistance from the micro-level of design to large-scale configurations of transnational solidarity. 

Send your submissions and pitches to submissions@barricadejournal.org.

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Four Exercises in Experimental Translation

by Ami Xherro

While language is instrumentalized in all facets of life, the hegemonic knots formed by a major language like English offer rich possibilities in deforming and deconstructing it. One way of doing so is through translation. When I begin to think of translation as a refractive prism of language, it becomes a listening form. Translational praxis becomes a practice of listening where no conversation is privileged to a subject. Louis Wolfson, the French schizo-linguist introduced to greater audiences by Gilles Deleuze, had such a revulsion to his mother tongue (and mother) that upon hearing or reading any word in English, he instantly and homophonically translated the words that crossed him into French, German, Hebrew and Russian. For Wolfson, listening carried with it a danger so grave that he had to divest himself from his inheritance altogether.

The act of listening hems the outer limit of the body with that which is beyond it, but which can still be indistinctly heard, and which still affects the body, unconsciously.

The following are four exercises in experimental translation grounded in listening. They are attempts at withdrawing from the imperative of meaning in communication and insisting rather that meaning is always swimming somewhere across the legible surface of words. More importantly, they are practices of delaying the sensible territories of the body to explore the insensibilities that surround it.

Continue reading “Four Exercises in Experimental Translation”

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Solidarity with Palestine

Pro-Palestinian demonstration in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Saturday May 15, 2021. Photo by Elizabeth Benninger.

May 15, Nakba Day, marked the anniversary of the dispossession and forced displacement of the Palestinian people. Dhikra al-nakba, literally “memory of the catastrophe,” commemorates not only the destruction of a society and loss of home, but also the continuous struggle that Palestinians have since waged for the recognition of their rights.

The current bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli military, which has targeted residential buildings and left scores of Palestinians dead and many more without homes, and the thinly veiled project of ethnic cleansing and land grabbing in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, are not exceptional but rather exemplary of the Israeli settler colonialist state and its apartheid policies. This intensification of the ongoing violence in occupied Palestine underscores the need for vocal and visible international solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many protests and other acts of solidarity are being planned worldwide in the coming days; you can find partial lists here and here; checking social media of local Palestinian advocacy organizations should provide the most up-to-date information. Tuesday, May 18 has been named a day of action in solidarity with the Palestinian uprising and general strike.

Continue reading “Solidarity with Palestine”

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Solidarity with GSOC Strike

Barricade stands in solidarity with GSOC members and their families who are currently on strike to fight for equitability and standards of care in their working conditions.

After ten months of bad-faith negotiations and stonewalling by the NYU administration, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC-UAW 2110), NYU’s Graduate Worker Union, has been left no alternative but to strike. NYU has refused to adequately respond to the most pressing matters to rank and file GSOC members, including: a living wage, robust healthcare, childcare subsidies and parental leave, financial and legal support for international students, and stronger workplace health and safety regulations — crucially, protections against power-based harassment and the removal of NYPD from campus. 

For a cogent statement of the stakes and of cross-faculty support from the NYU chapter of American Association of University Professors, see here.
The NYU chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America also stands in solidarity with GSOC members and affiliates. 

For information about the demands of GSOC related to healthcare, living wage, and workplace safety, see here. If you are interested in supporting GSOC, please learn about potential actions here or sign a letter of support here. Click here to read GSOC’s response to President Hamilton and Provost Fleming’s offensively misleading email to the entire NYU community, mischaracterizing GSOC’s position. Join the virtual picket line here.

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“Alle, zusammen, gegen den Faschismus!” — “All of us, together, against Fascism!”

Protests Commemorating Hanau Massacres in Berlin

by Deren Ertas

On February 20, 2021, Berliners came together in one of the busiest streets of Neukölln, which is home to a community of migrants hailing from all over the world, but especially migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Organized by several leftist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist syndicates, people from a range of positionalities came together to publicly remember the nine victims of a far-right extremist attack on two shisha bars in the city of Hanau that took place one year ago on February 19. Long forgotten by mainstream German media, demonstrators marched through the district repeating the names of those killed—Hamza Kurtović, Kaloyan Velkov, Mercedes Kierpacz, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Sedat Gürbüz, Vili Viorel Păun, Ferhat Unvar, Gökhan Gültekin, Said Nesar Hashemi—with righteous anger and intention. In a beautiful speech read in German, English, Arabic, and Turkish, they pronounced the structural nature of the violence against those identified as refugees, migrants, and immigrants in Europe against a dominant narrative that dismisses the Hanau massacre as an Einzelfall, or an isolated incident.

“Widerstand überall! Hanau war kein Einzelfall!”
                  “Resistance everywhere! Hanau was not an isolated incident!”

Continue reading ““Alle, zusammen, gegen den Faschismus!” — “All of us, together, against Fascism!”“

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Mutual Aid: A Feel-Bad Story

by Amy Obermeyer

It is March 12, 2021, and I am riding home to Queens over the pockmarked industrial roads of eastern Mott Haven. I am crestfallen, having just had to tell a regular whom I bring food to that our mutual aid organization is running out of funds to keep up the grocery delivery system we’ve had going now for a year. For a year, we’ve been able to bring groceries and supplies to some of the members of our community most marginalized and most harmed by covid. I’ve been delivering to this individual nearly from the beginning. I always knew the funds would eventually dry up, that the initial outpouring of generosity last April would give way to ennui and normalization. It doesn’t make it any easier. I promise her that I will figure out something, that I will keep visiting and bringing any food I can scrounge up from local food banks and the like, but unfortunately, it won’t be quite as robust. Continue reading “Mutual Aid: A Feel-Bad Story”

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Islamo-leftism: “We cannot fail to underline the resonance with the most somber moments of French history”

translated by Deren Ertas

This article was originally published in French on Le Monde on March 4, 2021.

Translator’s Note: In the past two months, Emmanuel Macron’s Minister of Higher Education and Research, Frédérique Vidal, has commenced a witch-hunt against French universities. Under the unfortunate title of “Islamo-leftism,” she is attacking academics whose research is located in the field of “postcolonial studies.” The charge against them is that they threaten the unity of French society. Macron is following along the dangerous footsteps of Orban, Duda, and Bolsonaro—to name only a few—in curtailing academic freedom. The text translated below is a petition drafted by academics from the United States and elsewhere expressing their concerns with the steps taken by Vidal.

We write to express our profound concern about the recent request of Frédérique Vidal, the Minister of Higher Education and Research, asking the National Center of Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique—CNRS) to launch an investigation on “Islamo-leftist” intrigues in French universities. Continue reading “Islamo-leftism: “We cannot fail to underline the resonance with the most somber moments of French history””