VOLUME 1

Before Today

*Note: In bold at the beginning of each entry, the number refers to the index of images on the first page.

 1 Sao Paulo
Paraisópolis favela next to its wealthy neighbour, Morumbi

Sources:

Departing Portugal in September 1501, a fleet of Portuguese caravels, under the captaincy of Femao de Loronha, glimpses the coast of Brazil.

From the poem by Elizabeth Bishop, “Brazil, January 1502” [excerpt]:

““big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin underleaf turned over;
monster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like 

giant water lilies…”

____________

“Plant a grain of corn in the asphalt and it grows. It is a rich country for any type of harvest.”

 --Jair Bolsonaro, press conference,  2019

___________

“As local safety nets disappeared, poor farmers became increasingly vulnerable to exogenous shock: drought, inflation, rising interest rates, or falling commodity prices…Rather than the classical stereo type of labor-intensive countryside and the capital intensive industrial metropolis, the Third World now contains many examples of capital intensive country sides and labor-intensive deindustrialized cities. “Overurbanization, in other words, is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs.” Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, pp.15-16. 

Reflection

Paraisopolis

the cliff dwelling 

white high-rises  

balconies 

curved like sea shells

around their sides…

tennis courts

lounges on the grass, pools…

all looming over

just above

Paraisopolis

brick block-like 

tapestry of corrugated shelters, 

leaning shacks 

wedged against the fence

excluded

Paraisopolis

in its trough

no path up and out

Brazil before today 

and after…1502 

2 Marseille
Hostile Architecture - Someone in the city hates you
Bolts installed on the front steps of a building in order to discourage sitting and sleeping.

Sources

“This strategic rearmoring of the city against the poor is especially obvious at street level. In his famous study…William Whyte points out that the quality of any urban environment can be measured, first of all, whether there are convenient, comfortable places for pedestrians to sit.” Mike Davis, Fortress Los Angeles: the Militarization of Urban Space

Reflections

our bodies passing by

the dark fact

private property

a step to somewhere 

owned by someone else

we cannot rest

…

3 North California 
Hyatt Place.

Reflections

 but we make a place

temporary by its nature

a tent, debris of daily life

and we live on below the levee

by the rail road track 

4 Hong Kong

Sources 

“ ‘At the end of the day, the protests change the narration of the city…they are aiming at reconstruction of the story of the place by adding missing components and emphasizing neglected parts. Even after the events the images of the events will remain in the collective memory of the society.’ ”

 “From sidewalks to shopfronts, Hong Kong’s protests have rearranged its urban landscape”

Quartz December 19 2019

Reflections

we do not consent

to the taking of our city

we reclaim story

we reclaim place 

we scatter cement blocks

glue them to the street

and so, stop the traffic of police

and so, reshape city memory

5 Santiago
La linea del Caos/Claudio Quintanilla

Reflections

burn what we do not own

start over

our bodies more like flame

than stone

6 Lebanon

Protests in Beirut

Sources

City: “…where power becomes concrete and can be engaged, and where the oppressed are part of the global infrastructure for power…” Saskia Sasken, Expulsions p. 16

“ A large city is a frontier zone where actors from different worlds can have an encounter with no rules of engagement.” Saskia Sassen 

“All the armed services…launched crash programs to master street fighting under realistic conditions… ‘The future of warfare…lies in the streets, sewers, high rise buildings and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world…but [past encounters] have been but a prologue, with the real drama yet to come.’” Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, p.203.

“But the principal function of the Third World urban edge remains a human dump. In some cases, as in such infamous “garbage slums” as at the aptly named Quarantina outside Beirut…” Davis, p.47

Reflection

what have you done

to our Beirut

these four men now poised

in the moment of their expulsion

pausing 

for strategy in chaos

crossing

into fury, into ruin

7 Portugal
Hundreds of thousands of students join global climate strikes

8 Santiago
Un Violador en tu camino. Performance colectivo Las Tesis.
El Estado opresor es un macho violador / El violador eras tú.
Reflection

each one

different shoes

different shapes

again our bodies

represent/ assert

resist as women 

9 Bolivia
Indigenous flag.
Ethnic Rifts in Bolivia Burst Into View With Fall of Evo Morales.

Sources

“But thanks to Sunday’s stunning rebuke in Bolivia, the standard tactics [of a US coup] failed. Ever since Morales’s election victory almost exactly one year ago today, Bolivians never stopped marching, protesting, risking their liberty and their lives — even in the middle of a pandemic — to demand their rights of democracy and self-governance. Leading up to the election, the coup regime and right-wing factions in the military were menacingly vowing — in response to polls universally showing MAS likely to win — that they would do anything to prevent the return to power of Morales’s party.” The Intercept 10/20/20

Reflections

these crude modern stairs

not built

to hold the country

the crowds of working people

climbing step by step 

fly their indigenous flag

10 Santiago

Sources

“Here, a group of protesters stand underneath graffiti saying ‘inequality’ as they demand greater social reforms. 

Chile is one of Latin America's wealthiest countries but also one of its most unequal - it has the worst levels of income equality among the 36 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” (BBC)

“Protesters were seen throwing rocks at security forces, while riot police used water cannons and tear gas in an effort to disperse them.” (BBC)

Reflections

Security forces –

whose security? whose forces? 

the new class

inherits nothing

but debt

dispossessed bodies 

empowered, furious

out of the ruins 

out of the flames

Saturn’s children ignite

11 Ferguson Black Lives Matter

12 Hong Kong

13 Port Au Prince

Haitian police use tear gas, live ammunition to break protests

Sources:

“…it is New Year’s Day 1804 that marks the beginning of a long, brutally resisted and not yet concluded counter-sequence of direct and effective confrontation, on a world historical scale, with the domination of the planet by Europe and its settler colonies.

“On this day in 1804, the French colony Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola became Haiti, the first independent Black republic in the modern world…Enslaved African people seized their freedom.

“Within a week [of the initial declaration] 10,000 enslaved people, women and men joined the rebellion, 1,800 plantations were destroyed and 1,000 slaveholders killed.

“Saint-Domingue was the wealthiest of the European colonies, a place where incredible riches for some were built on others being worked to death. Each year, around 40,000 new slaves were brought to the island to sustain the plantations that produced fabulous wealth in France. 

“The United States invaded Haiti in 1915, and since then it has denied its citizens their right to political autonomy, whether through military occupation, backing massively corrupt and authoritarian dictators, or organising coups such as the one that removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a hugely popular president, from office in 2004, shortly after the celebration of the bicentenary of the revolution.

“The fate of the revolution shows just how far we have to go. But the fact of the revolution indicates what is possible. 

“The oppressed have always had, and will always have, the capacity to liberate themselves.” 

“The revolutionary promise of New Year’s Day” New Frame, 1/1/21

14 Hong Kong
Img. by: Studio Incendo/ Katie Brinn
https://www.flickr.com/photos/studiokanu/15514572425/in/photostream/

VOLUME 2

Normal Never Was

Sources

“It is this possibility – the capacity of a city to make a history, a culture, and so much more – that is today threatened by large scale corporate redevelopment.” Saskia Sassen

“This proliferating urban gigantism has been strengthened and enabled by privatization and deregulation...”Saskia Sassen

“Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways...an architectural language warning off the underclass.” Mike Davis, “Fortress Los Angeles, The Militarization of Urban Space” [internet]

“...their abuse of scale and composition...their denigration of street life...their confiscation of the vital energy of the center...” Mike Davis

Reflections

emptied not by the unimaginable idea

of the pandemic

(normal never was)

Beijing’s cold roadway

and gigantic elevated pedway --

(normal never was)

Did we build this city for ogres and giants

who have stepped away

(normal never was)

and left us to this dusk, this murk

this near dissolution?

(normal never was)

what was demolished

the sound of a voice

grasses forcing up

a crevice in cement 

the moon

at the window

(normal never was)

communal, accidental

necessary world

what was here/still underneath

Volume 3

Future Perfect Tense

/Ould Become a Battlefield

Sources

“Indeed, the pop apocalypticism of Hollywood movies and pulp science fiction has been…politically perceptive in representing the hardening of the urban landscape…images of prisonlike inner cities…high tech police death squads…sentient skyscrapers…and guerilla warfare in the streets…are not fantasies, but merely extrapolations from the present. Mike Davis, Fortress Los Angeles, the Militarization of Urban Space p.154

We do indeed live in “fortress cities” brutally divided into “fortified cells” of affluence and “places of terror” where the police battle the criminalized poor. Mike Davis p. 155

_____________________________

“The more people are driven by narrow private interests, the more they are determined by mass instincts [that are] increasingly alienated from life…

“Benjamin is mostly referring…to people’s lack of a revolutionary instinct in conditions of economic and political crisis.

“The sense of any right to live individually has disappeared.

“If the bourgeosie is not defeated before a certain point of technological development, all is lost. Mastery has become a goal in itself. Technology should not be mastery of nature, but the relationship between technology and nature…this relationship should be substantive, ecstatic and creative. Living substance should once more conquer the frenzy of destruction.

“According to Benjamin, fascism inevitably leads to war. War is the only way to channel mass movements and intense emotions, 

without challenging the property system. It simultaneously serves, in classic Marxist fashion, to channel the forces of production which are blocked by the property system.

“Modern war footage imitates the aetheticisation of war in cinema, parading the geometrical beauty of technology and hiding human effects of war.”

Ceasefire Magazine, “An A to Z of Theory: Walter Benjamin: Fascism and Crisis 8/14/2013

“There's a new world comin'
And it's just around the bend
There's a new world comin' 

This one is comin to an end…

There's a new voice callin'
And you can hear it if you try…”

Nina Simone

_______________________

“I just want to ask a question:
…
Who really cares?
There'll come a time
When the world won't be singing 

Flowers won't grow 

Bells won't be ringing
To save the world, (to save the world)
That’s destined to die

When I look at the world
It fills me with sorrow 

Little children today
Are really going to suffer tomorrow

…  

Live life for the children 

Oh, for the Children
You see, let's...let's save the children
Let's...let's save all the children…

Marvin Gaye, Save The Children

…We've got to do something to save the children
Soon it will be their turn to try and save the world
We've got to do something yeah, to save the children
To save the children
To save the children

Gil Scott Heron, Save The Children

Reflections

we are going to have to fight for socialism

the way we fight for survival

Fannie Lou Hamer’s mother

sharecropper 1930

had to bind the feet of her children

rags 

to walk

the icy ruts and frozen fields

to ask for the scrap cotton

left behind by the harvesters

bolls caught still 

in the thorns of ruined stalks

gather a bale

like that we have to fight

in the winter of these days

who lives, who decides, who dies

who has shoes

on the bloody roads 

we have to fight as mothers

that hard 

take the abundance

feed the kids

whose hunger starts at birth