Three Nights in Utopia by davidpisani1965

THREE NIGHTS in

UTOPIA

THREE NIGHTS in

UTOPIA

Edited by Elise Billiard

Utopian Nights is a Valletta 2018 project as part of the cultural programme.

Illustration by Guillaume Levacher

"Art and politics each de�ine a form of dissensus, a dissensual re-con�iguration of the common experience of the sensible." Jacques Rancière “Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthethics” “The utopia of togetherness is a lie. Environmental justice means acknowledging that there is no whole earth, no ‘we’, without a ‘them’. That we are not all in this together.” China Miéville The Limits of Utopia After three Utopian Nights and hundreds of production meetings, it is time to look back for a moment and see what has remained. When I try to consider the events we organized and the discussions they generated from a distance, it is very clear to me that the Utopian Nights were, indeed, a utopian endeavour – in the sense of an adventurous exploration of alternative social worlds, which, however, also implies potential failure. In retrospect, it is obvious that this was part of the project itself: exploring the boundaries of the possible; not trying to follow a secure path to success but daring to experiment, to improvise and to fail while attempting to create new spaces for encounter, thought, debate and cooperation. Indeed, failure could be the sign of an open, democratic utopia: not the monolithic blueprint of an ideal world, often associated with totalitarian tendencies of utopian ideas, but the process of communal experimentation with the risky journey towards a different, better world – including dead ends, failed attempts, but also the expansion of what can be considered ‘realistic’. Trying and failing, then, is the only way of leaving behind the �ixed boundaries of the status quo, which are all too often maintained by arguments such as ‘this is not viable’, ‘this is unrealistic’, ‘this is too utopian’…

In this sense, each Utopian Night is essentially a political project. It is not a cultural event nor even an artistic one, certainly not a community project as these appellations all too often (although not always) refer to activities where unheard voices are carefully polished to allow them to speak out without troubling the hegemonic consensus. On the contrary, we believed that politics involves laying bare and making visible the structures of authority, deconstructing the dominant consensus, bringing out an emancipatory dissensus (Jacques Rancière).

Dissensus supposes radical equality between all human beings, which is the core condition for democracy. It is because everyone is allowed to speak out in the assembly that democracy cannot be based on consensus: once we all have access to the public sphere, and once all voices are heard, previously suppressed con�lictual interests are revealed. This is when dissensus takes its more obvious meaning: the confrontation of arguments and perspectives. But it would be too limited to understand dissensus just as a con�lict of opinions since its agency goes further. It would also be wrong to understand dissensus as the management of ‘multicultural’ quotas in the selection of artists, for instance, or the work with what is called ‘communities’ or even as the heated but nevertheless often sterile debate between opposed parties about ready-made issues such as migration or populism. Dissensus goes deeper than positive discrimination and feel-good policies (such as, plastic straw abolition in the face of large-scale environmental issues). In a nutshell, dissensus is the active disruption of the segregational social order itself, it cuts across invisible borders, it sabotages the fake justi�ications of today’s unequal and harmful order.

In planning and organising the Utopian Nights, we encountered those points of failure, those dead ends. We encountered the boundaries of the legal order: sometimes it became clear that the smooth �low of ‘business as usual’ is more important than artistic interventions, sometimes we experienced power in the shape of having to wait for decisions, such as artists’ visas, until the last minute – power relations determine who has to wait for whom. Inviting artists from several African countries also proved, what can – unfortunately – be expected: the power of nation states and their border politics interfering with the potential for human encounters, simply by not granting visas. Sometimes the events failed to attract large crowds of people. However, with time, we built a growing and diverse crowd of supporters, and the exchange with them sparked ideas and collaboration. Of course, retrospectively the complicated negotiations with some authorities and the dif�iculties in reaching larger audiences are not at all surprising for an event whose raison d’être was to disrupt what Chantal Mouffe calls the social - those habits we take for granted and those unchallenged values which rule life in a society, which make up the invisible order of things and perpetuate power relations and inequalities.

The Utopian Nights were imagined in this radical spirit. The aim was to conceive of open, polemical spaces in which dissensus could occur. The choice of locations was the �irst step to disrupt the often unconscious order of cultural management, the second step was the eclecticism of guests and �inally the confusion of audiences. We used venues outside of the consensual cultural mapping, we proposed avant-garde cinema together with family storytelling and a debate on local elections. But the most important was certainly the choice of guests, from the very �irst night, when Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku appeared next to the infamous migration monument in Valletta – a marble knot meant to symbolise the relationship between Europe and Africa – beautifully dressed in gold, impersonating a Yoruba feminine divinity, he walked towards

Castille (the prime minister’s of�ice) to pay tribute to the wheel of life proclaiming the freedom of movement of all humans with his hands full of blood. He came down to embrace a boy in the audience and gave his heavy totemic wheel to the Italian theatre director Domenico Castaldo to share the burden and pass on the duty. Between ritual and art performance, between activists’ protest and street art, we cut across expectations. And this was probably why we failed and where we succeeded at the same time. Our attempts to set-up the festival always faced reactions of disbelief not only from authorities but also from artists, tourists, workers. Facing such refusals was the only way to reveal unquestioned expectations about what art should be, what working-class people should be interested in etc. For instance, it debunked marketing strategies’ limitations in operating exclusively with a precisely targeted group in mind. Who were we looking for? I was asked. The migration-focused activists? The old Maltese bourgeoisie interested in art? The tourists? The youth looking for a good party? The so called ‘migrants’? I could not just organise an event simply for everyone, anyone and no one speci�ically. This attempt and its rejection in itself reveals the underlying structures of inequality at work not only in legal, political and economic contexts but in cultural and social spheres, too, and even in the imagination…

equality to all: economic and political equality in the broadest sense. That is what dissensus is all about, opening the assembly to all of us in order to solve pressing issues in the only sustainable manner, revealing inequalities and different interests in the search for equality and well-being for all. Take the environmental issue for instance, although it is a global issue, we do not all have the same responsibility in this disaster and not the same power to resolve it, nor do we all suffer equally from its painful consequences. We are not all simply living ‘on the same planet’. Environmental justice has for too long been used to justify the displacement of people and the enrichment of investors. A dissensual approach brings out these inequalities to challenge them, not to mask them through the invocation of a ‘community’ which does not, in fact, exist. It reveals unequal power relations and seeks for forms of social life beyond them, creating new ways of sustainable living for all. I am glad that Utopian Nights dared to fail while attempting to leave established patterns. I hope in the coming years we will fail again and we will fail better. Out of this confrontation with the order of things, we will establish improbable relationships, meet great workers, artists and thinkers, learn more and discuss the way to break free and invent a better way of living together.

So, we tried to create a new mixture, to propose an inspiring artist’s work, followed by a generous debate with academics, a space to ask political questions about art, and we always ended the night with music and a good party. That was the formula. It grew and transformed but generally that was the DNA. We aimed to welcome everybody in town so that new connections could be made between minds and bodies.

Elise Billiard

But this was a tall order and I can only hope that the Utopian Nights did help modestly to bring out the two important questions: how is the dominant order reproduced? And how can it be challenged? In the coming years, I would like to keep asking these questions and to do so across disciplines and forms. How does artistic practice privilege certain forms of expression? How does cultural management privilege certain approaches? But also, how is academic discourse reproducing established hierarchies and exclusions or opening to dissensus? What is the university’s role as democratic assembly? Other important topics and contradictions should be tackled. How is it possible that environmentally progressive solutions increase capitalists’ power over vulnerable people? Or, is it possible to use the great potential of IT innovations for something other than population control and consumerism? These issues are essential to creating a critical democratic practice today. Asking these questions is making all of us more imaginative, more lucid as well. This is what we believe is the power of utopia. Not as an ego-trip of one megalomaniac inventor who would have founded a neat and controlled society for all, not as a journey to a predetermined form of success. But as a space for the assembly to gather. Utopia provides a platform to think seriously about the means for changing an imposed consensus, which in reality, is based on excluding democratic contention. A discussion of utopia cannot be constructive if these questions are not raised. And to me the most important discussion is the one that opens

Malick Yahye Issak 4

Contents Three Points for a Map of Utopia Anna Katarrh - Thomas Cuschieri

L’utopie est morte, vive l’utopie! Margerita Pulè aka Lilly Sapiano

Imaginative architectures as spaces for Utopia Alberto Favaro

A Night with Christian Von Borries

Storytelling

Displacement

Solar Cinema

Matters out of Place 14 Elise Billiard

Debate on Borders 86

Jelili Atiku

Emeka Ogboh 23

Inside the Border

The Camp as instrument of Power 36 Francois Zammit Looking Back at an attempted Utopia 38 Jeremy Mangion Sketching the Border 45 Alberto Favaro Georgraphy of Lives 50 Alberto Favaro 63

Fotokabinett des Imaginaires 67 Corps Citoyen The Utopian Photo Studio 70 André Désiré Loutsono

Meeting Fingers 88 Party & DJ Set 89

The Commons

Spectres are Haunting Europe 32 Kathrin Schödel

Workshops Ideal Home

Spoken Word

The Benefit of the Commons 94 Massimo De Angelis - Raisa Galea Commodity, Public Good, or Commons 98 Alex Kowalski Debate 102 Peformance - Save The Peace 113 Workshops 114 Exhibition - Inside The Border 116 Welcome to Heterotopia 117 Within Confined Borders 122 March for Common Memory 123 Closing Party 124

Three Points for a Map of Utopia

Anna Katarrh Thomas Cuschieri

Utopia means an actual, public-political organisation of living together, a democratic approach to human life, to production and care, collaboration and research, interaction and creativity, learning and questioning, community and individuality, participation as well as withdrawal.

of dominant discourses and spaces; it is the creation of a new place, of new political formations and public spaces, a new now here, as yet nowhere.

The Scale of Utopia

Utopia is a large-scale project, it is massive, it concerns the masses, it concerns the world. But, of course, the big is connected to the small, the massive has its tiny components. Utopia is, therefore, big and small.

Utopia, Nowhere

Utopia is a place that is also a no-place (ou-topos: no-place, nowhere). Utopian thought is concerned with material structures, with concrete notions of a better socio-political world, situated in the here and now, ‘placed’ in our world. At the same time, it is directed towards a no-place, that is, a political space of democratic dispute and practices, based on equality, thus, a universal space: open for everyone, accessible from everywhere, itself nowhere. Thomas More’s invention of utopia as an arti�icial island does not mean that political utopia is a self-enclosed and isolated insular space. Rather, it is a political public, not restricted by national belonging or constructions of exclusive identities. It is an island in close correspondence with its surrounding waters; its watery boundaries suggest openness, not closure. Why is utopia nowhere? Utopia will always remain nowhere because it implies the unending critique of all structures which establish and serve exclusion and inequality. It is the continuous practice of democracy. Therefore, it does not refer to an ultimate aim or an absolute state, but it means the creation of new socio-political conditions for new possibilities of equal human beings living together. Utopia is an experimental space—removed, as is More’s literary island, from the constraints of hegemonic ‘realism’. The seemingly neutral, self-evident stance of ‘realism’ is no more than an af�irmation of the status quo: Existing reality doubles as the only realist option. Therefore, current ‘realism’ is the af�irmation of the economic as well as political and ideological system of (neo)liberal capitalism. It is in this sense that utopia is an arti�icial island: in its negative, critical relationship to the existing world at large, it is a man-made, created island outside of dominant constructions of the real and so-called normality and their assumptions of ‘natural’ circumstances and developments. Utopia offers alternative imaginings, counterconstructions. It is a strong reminder that history is man-made, it is change made by us for better or worse—and with vastly different opportunities for in�luential action within the existing framework of power hierarchies and distributions of material means and socio-political access. Utopia signals that a place outside of these hegemonic structures is needed as a starting point for radical change. Utopia is not an ideal state in which all desires are ful�illed—but it is neither the desired state endlessly postponed: utopian thought strives for a realisation of its demands. It starts now here: as a critical no-place outside

In alternative political movements, the importance of local struggles is often emphasised. From a utopian perspective, local struggles are linked to universal struggles. This link is �irst of all created by the global economic-political conditions of capitalism, which establish the connection of local demands to global antagonisms. Secondly, a utopian struggle based on the notion of equality never remains solely local since it transcends the focus on exclusive communities. If it �ights for a speci�ic community, it also �ights for the general possibility of local communities to exist, which means �ighting for a redistribution of material means and socio-political freedom.

Utopia as a political project recognises the importance of large-scale organisation and logistics for using global resources globally, so as not to revert to a limiting dependence on contingent local conditions but to create an interdependence of human beings opposed to the dependence based on exploitation in global capitalism. If the left, as David Harvey suggests, has become bad at “answering the question of how we build massive infrastructures”, utopian thought seeks to redress this omission. In his essay “Utopia as Method”, Fredric Jameson argues for a utopian perspective on large-scale capitalist enterprises. This is an instigation to look at the possibilities of technologies, practices and knowledge—now predominantly shaped by their application within capitalist structures—in the light of a different system. A utopian perspective on globalisation imagines different possible uses of global means of production, communication, transport and exchange on a large scale. Utopia, however, is also small-scale: obviously, fundamental change and a different global organisation depend on local struggles, concrete political formations and possibilities of experiencing different forms of living together in the now and here. Large-scale utopia is made up of small-scale practices and the creation of different utopian communities. These are not based on exclusive identities, but on debate, interaction and collaboration. Utopian politics are small-scale struggles, small-scale everyday life practices which at the same time recognise their connection to large-scale socio-political conditions and ultimately direct their demands towards changing these.

exclusion, and we build new structures and forms of organisation, reinscribing utopia on the map of the world and �ighting for its realisation now here.

Utopia as Common Place Utopian politics is based on ideas of the common, of common property and political publics. It is politics by and for ‘common’ people, not elites; even if these are masked, as is currently the case, as democratic representatives, intellectual or scienti�ic experts and agents of economic ‘growth’—a growth that is based on the often lamented, but systemically induced, and therefore tacitly accepted ‘gap’ between rich and poor, between privileged and ‘common’. Utopian thought starts from the radical disagreement with such a ‘gap’. It foregrounds the vast differences in possibilities for a good life this gap brings about: material, often deadly differences, and the accompanying differences in education, intellectual, cultural and social opportunities. Utopia opposes a negative view of the masses—re�lected, for example, in the negative connotations of the ‘commonplace’. This view is often veiled by references to the empty signi�ier of ‘democracy’, in reality a government that reins in the desires of the ‘common people’ in the name of capitalism and those who pro�it from it. Utopia is not private. It is opposed to the predominant direction which visions of a better future take in current societies: the private realm, the home, the family and private economic success. “Private: No Entry” is a sign often encountered barring access to natural and built places. Yet still, the private sphere is associated widely with individual freedom, even though the usual way of hitting upon it is in the form of restrictions of movement, access and appropriation.

In a system based on private property, freedom within the place of no entry for the other is, obviously, dependent on one’s material means. There is, thus, not a question of freedom versus equality, as it is often posed, but an already existing, tangible material connection between freedom and inequality. In opposition to this, utopia is a common place in a positive sense. It radically rejects the exclusions created by private property and the private economy of capitalism. This does not mean that small, intimate spaces and possessions are non-existent in utopia. But the private as the basis of economic ‘organisation’ is rejected. In this way, utopia means an actual, public-political organisation of living together, a democratic approach to human life, to production and care, collaboration and research, interaction and creativity, learning and questioning, community and individuality, participation as well as withdrawal. The manifold spaces now occupied by private economic agents are reclaimed as democratic common places. If utopia becomes a commonplace, we all speak about it, we all �ight for and contribute to a better political-public world, we meet in utopia—not in consensus and stasis, but in dispute and interaction. We create a no-place beyond the existing structures of material, social and political

Anna Katarrh teaches and researches in the �ields of cultural studies and political theory; she is co-founder of the Institute of Utopian Studies, which is—for the time being—a utopian institution seeking to provide a platform for debate about ideas of radical socio-political change. Thomas Cuschieri is a mathematician who draws comics. He’s sorry about that thing with the cake and the trampoline and promises it’ll never happen again. Twitter: @thomcuschieri Web: thomcuschieri.com This article originally appeared in the June 2016 special Utopia issue (ed. E. Billiard) of Schlock Magazine. It has been published here with permission.

Architecture conï¬&#x201A;ict n.24, etching drypoint

Imaginative architectures as spaces for

Utopia

Alberto Favaro

In the town hall of Siena, inside the Council Room, there is a cycle frescoes painted in 1339 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. They form two allegories, each composed of two representations: the good and the bad government with their relative effects. While in the allegory of good government a personi�ication of the Commune of Siena is depicted sitting between the virtues, in the allegory of the bad one a personi�ication of the Tyranny sits between the vices and �igures of evil. Close to each of them their respective effects are depicted: a vision of a prosperous Siena surrounded by a peaceful landscape, opposed to the one of a derelict Siena encircled by an unsafe and unproductive countryside. One allegory is facing the other in the opposite wall of the room, setting consequently the limits of the world, as it could possibly be imagined. In the middle of it, bordered by those representations, the council of the time was called to decide the future of the city. Whatever future they would chose, it would always stand in between these two allegorical representations. No chosen government would be possibly worse than the one imagined in the bad allegory, neither better than the one depicted in the good one. In fact, if the reality would for some reason exceed the idealization of those two extremes (thing that never happen), then those visions would lose their idealization and goal. The representation of the “bad government” would become paradoxically one of a “good government”, at least when compared with the new real one, or vice versa; then the need to paint a new ideal representation (worse in this case) would arise on top of the old one, to aspire to, or to escape from. A new idealization would be needed, to contain the new reality.

History is packed with examples of how imaginative representations have been used as mediators to investigate or communicate the possible world thought out of its limits. Avoiding ancient examples, I would like instead to invoke some visions closer to us, as the ones conceived at the beginning of the century by the avant-gardes, or in the 60's by the radical movements. Drawings and collages of �ictional architecture became manifestos tapping, as explained, into both the utopian and the dystopian imaginary.

Among the most famous count the highly mechanized and industrialized cities imagined by the futurist Santa Elia; the urban visions developed by the expressionist architects for movies as “The Golem” and “Metropolis” (an interesting case where a utopian and dystopian city coexist, one literally on top of the other); and, later on, among the radical architects of the 60's, it is de�initely worth to remember the “Walking Cities” imagined by Archigram and the “Continuous Monument” by Superstudio. All visions were far from being close to what reality could become (or at least not in short term), yet were aware that their function was the same as the one of the frescoes in the council room of Siena: to increase the possibilities of the real and create idealizations to aspire to. A quip by the expressionist architect Bruno Taut, well summarizes the utopian ambitions that animated visionary drawings during the avant-gardes period: “Today there is almost nothing to build... lets us consciously be imaginary architects!”. It was written as the incipit for his epistolary exchange of architectural visions “Gläserne Kete”, a correspondence that took place during the professional inactivity experienced in the second world war. What makes this imagined architecture the favorite research mediator for all those visionary architects and planners? I will venture an explanation since, drawing imaginary spaces is part of my activity as an architect as well, and I consider it a signi�icant activity, as much as it may seem like a naive representation of purposeless architecture.

Using a term coined later on (XVI century), we can than say that in order to imagine the future of Siena, the councilors had to place themselves between the utopia they wished, and the dystopia they wanted to avoid.

Under this perspective the council room could be seen as an allegory in itself: the frescoes were bordering the council physically (being in fact part of the perimeter walls of the room) as much as imaginatively, representing the limits within which councilors could imagine any potential new world. The wider the distance between the two opposite visions, the broader would the range of possible real worlds to be chosen or escape form. Both visions (utopian and dystopian) although inverse, do in fact share the same objective –the good government, albeit the former through emulation, the other through fear.

First of all, in order to better frame this activity, it is useful to tackle the distinctions between the design �inalized in construction and the one of pure visions. Architecture, as the activity preceding that of construction, exists and is characterized by the presence of a demand. A client (private or public) points out an issue and the architecture is supposed to be the response to it. In contrast, unlike built architecture, drawn visions are not intended as pragmatic and targeted answers to a problem. Rather, their reason for existence is precisely to raise questions about what otherwise seems unproblematic and self-evident. If visionary architecture has, from its conception, the awareness that it will never be build (as the allegories in Siena), it also has the advantage (vis-a-vis built architecture) that, not only does it allow a wider range of answers to emerge due to its not adherence to

Those are probably the reasons why both visions (and not just the utopian one) had been extensively depicted and explored by painters and architects, or narrated by saints, philosophers and novelists (of science �iction and not), despite Plato's injunction that the bad should never be represented.

reality, but actually it empowers itself to question the demands themselves, and possibly reformulate them. It is then evident that developing architectonic visions is not just the freedom to represent what is unfeasible thereby expanding the limits of our thinking, but it is mainly a different modality of thought.

To put it in another way, it is a different attempt to negotiate the future. It is an approach to the future, not just as management of expectations and a unproblematic adaptation to them, but actually a pure creation. Visionary architecture posits a future that is not so much limited by the present (intended as contextual restrictions to which to respond), but mainly by our capacity to imagine it and construct possibilities for it. Let us see then how an imaginative architecture could develop in the absence of demand, with its attendant impediments and compelling issues.

the social and the economic, just to list some of them. Well, I think that today more than ever, with an architecture that becomes more and more self-referential and marginalized, there is still the need for architectonic visions, or better, allegories, as the ones depicted in the council room of Siena. References -“The Golem”, (1915 ), �ilm directed by Paul Wegener, set designed by Hans Poelzig. -“Metropolis”, (1927), �ilm directed by Fritgz Lang, set designed by Eric Kettelhut. -Bruno Taut, “Gläserne Kete”, epistolary exchange that took place between November 1919 and December 1920 published in, Iain Boyd Whyte, (1985), “Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle”, MIT Press. -Eugenio Montale, (1925), "I limoni," Ossi di seppia", Piero

Gobetti Edizioni, Torino.

Beside the obvious fact that non-adherence with reality allows visionary architecture the freedom from physical laws such as gravity, it also identi�ies pure research and speculative thoughts as its only goals. Imaginative architecture should then be seen mainly as coinciding with the process more than the �inal visions delivered. It is an architecture of the possibilities, opposed to the constructive one of exhaustion thereof.

In this context it becomes clear that not all architectonic visions could be considered utopian or dystopian, nor have this as their own scope. Not all visions are intended to represent states of absolute goodness or badness. Instead they should often be intended as a challenge and problematization of the way we understand the present and the idea of the future we have. In line with these intentions, then, imaginary architecture could purposely explore the oddity and the paradoxical as potential fractures in the common understanding of reality we just tacitly accept. As Eugeno Montale put it in a famous poem: “[..] the error in nature, the still point of reality [...] in order to get at the true.” (Montale, 1925)

Last point but not the least: how does the role of architects and planners change when, as Bruno Taut (1985) put it, they become “consciously imaginary architects”? Visionary architecture not only widens the possibilities of architecture but it even widens the role of the architect. The profession of the architect nowadays is mired in a series of specialized �ields, where it is less and less demanded of them to have a complete vision of the circumstances within which they are operating, let alone develop visionary worlds. The development of such imaginative visions in fact does not only need a certain recklessness of thought but mainly the need to engage with and draw on �ields that are quite far form the ones architects usually are asked to haunt: such as the political, 13

Alberto Favaro is an Italian architect currently residing in Malta, where he has lived since 2005. His architectural work has always been accompanied by artistic research. As a part of his artistic work he produces graphic works and drawings of imaginary architecture known as “Architectural Con�licts”. Etching drypoint by Alberto Favaro

This article originally appeared in the June 2016 special Utopia issue (ed. E. Billiard) of Schlock Magazine. It has been published here with permission.

DISPLACEMENT

JELILI ATIKU PAUL CLOUGH DOMENICO CASTALDO EMEKA OGBOH GENT KUMA ABBAS KUBAFF

UTOPIAN NIGHTS DISPLACEMENT 31 July 2017

Matters

Out Of

Place

Elise Billiard

Displacement has nowadays been almost entirely associated with migration, generally forced. This reduction, I thought, could only be detrimental and I endeavor to rescue the various meanings of ‘displacement’ which have drowned deep in the sea. Was there a common node around which all these semantic uses were gravitating? And if there was one, what was it? Could I uncover the unthought core, l’impensé, of displacement? This atomic explosion would probably enrich our understanding of Europeans’ deep-rooted fear of migrants, but it was a tall order. I chose to start with a detour to physics which usually provides a fresh perspective on critical issues. How did physicists look at the displacement of objects? First, Isaac Newton established that all bodies travel in space at a constant velocity. Practically, this means that in space, if you throw a ball in the air it will continue to travel at the same speed and never fall down because all bodies continue travel endlessly as long as nothing stops them. The consequence of the Newton law was even more interesting. Indeed, only when subjected to an external force, did bodies slow down and eventually stop. So movement, or displacement, was a matter of force and place. In order to stop, an object needed to be stopped; and to move, an object also needed to be pushed to move. This was true for objects but equally for persons. Physically and philosophically, one can ask then, what came �irst: place or force?

often at the source of creativity. Does not fashion, as well as poetry, thrive on displacement? But the replacement of items from one category to another, like when stylists associate grungy denims with a Louis Vuitton bag, is not always considered chic or smart. It is a dangerous game and can lead to harsh disapproval.

In a matter of etiquette, the French term déplacé refers to this ‘misplacement’. It can be a gesture or a word that is inappropriate, not politically correct, and sometimes offensive. Society is imposing a strict order of things in which they do not travel from one category (place) to another without being subjected to either praise or rejection. Applied to society, this revealed that the reproduction of social hierarchy indubitably owned a lot to this implicit taboo on displacement. Similarly, speaking about art, it con�irmed Rancière’s idea that artworks can be recognized by their capacity to displace our sensible expectations. Are displaced misplaced?

things

people

automatically

This leads me to focus my attention on the relation between the words displaced and misplaced. The two words are almost homonyms and their de�initions are also very close. To de�ine something as displaced is to imply that it does not belong to its new place. In fact, the emphasis is on the place of origin, as though something displaced could only �it in its original context. The question then is: are displaced things or people automatically misplaced?

Different languages have given more prominence to one or the other. In German, the different translations of the term displacement refer to force more than place. The terms verschiebung (shifting) and verdrangung (repression) differ by the type of force exerted. Here the force goes from a gentle push to an authoritarian expulsion. In psychology, displacement also refers to force. Freud de�ines it as either the repression of tragic memories and emotions in the depth of the unconscious or, the transfer of such emotions onto another object as a way to displace the trauma. For example the hatred towards one’s own father is not acceptable (for the son), and therefore is displaced onto another man, an authoritarian �igure, like the son’s professor. In fact, our brains are constantly placing, displacing and replacing things. Memory is a formidable travel agent — it instantly transports us to faraway places. The place where memories are anchored is, therefore, essential. For example: when you hear a long-forgotten melody, and you instantly remember where you heard it for the �irst time. Even if it was decades ago. You might also be surprised by a new smell while walking on the street, and wonder where this fragrance is suddenly taking you? At this moment, you are literally displaced at the speed of light to a faraway land.

In her book ‘Purity and Danger’, the British anthropologist Mary Douglas explains that every society promotes a particular order of things, in which everything has a de�inite place. For instance, if hair can be a source of pride and aesthetic satisfaction, once one hair is found in your soup, it becomes disgusting.

Similarly, in Maltese, we use the same semantic root to speak about putting things in their place – f’posthom, and to speak about displaced people – spostati. Or again, in English, we feel reassured when “everything falls into place”. In brief, to behave is to behave according to the place. To be clean and proper is to abide by the norms of the place and have “everything in place”. Therefore, place de�ines the identity of things and people. Douglas argues that, since each society has its own order of things, it follows that each society has its own de�inition of dirt, but that the universal principle remains the same: ‘dirt is a matter out of place’. This is not only true for things, but also for actions, as we have seen, or even for people. In this light, I �ind it striking that, repetitively, ‘migrants’ are portrayed in the media as “matters out of place”: they are ‘lost’ at sea, they are made to sleep in forgotten spaces, and they live in makeshift huts, garbage… The traces they leave

Our thinking process can be playful. Isn’t it amusing to change the place of things? …and create in this way a new order of things! Indeed, such transfers are common and are 15

are recurrently portrayed in the same manner: dirty baby nappies, broken phones, single shoes, useless things… objects that have irrevocably crossed the categories that structure the order of things. We are shocked by images of half undressed corpses piled up on the bottom of boats. Migrants today are portrayed as intrinsically misplaced. This is their sole identity. Every day, the �igure of the migrant as a ‘matter out of place’ is told. To counteract this sad image, NGOs like JRS or ADITUS promote communication campaigns to show the ‘integration’ of migrants in strong networks of relationships and portray them as ‘in place’. And why isn’t more attention given to the hundreds of Maltese individuals who came from third (non-EU) countries and who are living peacefully in Malta for decades? To conclude, I will mention another de�inition of displacement pertaining to physics. According to Archimedes’ law of buoyancy, displacement is the volume taken by an object immersed in water. Here we see that displacement automatically implies that a space is left empty when the object is removed, and that an equal space is taken by the same object in its new location. The transposition of this law onto human displacement illustrates the void left by the emigrant in his or her place of origin. It also reminds us that an immigrant always takes space in his or her new location. Since each of us needs space, we must be prepared to leave space for the newcomer to co-exist, to exist alongside us.

Alas, we have seen that our thirst for order, our obsession to assign identities according to the place of birth or the skin color does not follow the laws of physics. Let’s not forget that since, as we have seen with Mary Douglas, entity of someone is to a large extent rede�ined by the place s/he is in, the social dynamics do not follow the law of Archimedes. When a European immigrates to an African country s/he is considered an expatriate, or conversely, when an African immigrates to a European country s/he is considered a migrant. The acceptation to integrate newcomers within society requires, therefore, an effort of imagination and a critical analysis of our cultural automatisms. Migration in this respect represents a chance to critically rethink Europe and citizenship for the better. Let us not be the external repressive force that pushes strangers in corners — away to become the Other, the matter out of place, the �ilth that must be washed out.

This text was �irst written to be read as an introduction to a debate with artists and anthropologists around the notion of displacement First published in The Isles of the Left.

Elise Billiard is an anthropologist and curator. She is a visiting lecturer at the Department of Sociology and at the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of Malta. She publishes in peer reviewed journals, as well as online, in art and anthropology. She is a member of the Institute of Utopian Studies.

Photo by Kathrin Schödel - 9th November 2015

Jelili Atiku Utopian Nights Displacement Castille Place, Valletta 31>07>2017

Jelili Atiku’s Street Performance Paul Clough Jelili Atiku’s fascinating and mysterious street performance featured a masked character presenting human motion on, as I remember, a kind of very large map spread on the ground in front of the Prime Minister’s office, Castille – a dramatic location, and when you think about it, a dramatic representation by the artist in front of the big symbols of power (including the police on guard there). The atmospherics of his ‘event’ call to mind the action of masquerades in the cultures of southern Nigeria. Masquerades are held by the people to be inhabited by the spirits of ancestors or even divine beings. So that they are not in actual fact disguised people but rather powerful spirits moving on earth. Of course, earthly forces were also at stake here: secret societies which acted as enforcers of local ethics and beliefs were the movers of these masquerades. The key reality of such masquerades, however, is that the Divine or the Ancestral was making a particular intervention in human society, moving among humans in time and space. This would raise this question in the minds of local onlookers: why are the spirits intervening now? What is their reason? Are they, perhaps, warning us? Is the performance artist the contemporary impersonification of the Divine and Ancestors? At the same time, in the Yoruba culture from which Jelili Atiku comes, the Divine beings, or orisa, were multiple and manifested in different natural realities – as for instance in the case of the ‘god’ of iron, or of lightening, thunder, water… etc They were many - indeed, as many as arose in the human imagination. For human minds are themselves an intrinsic part of nature and therefore the spirits manifested in nature and by nature can be known to humans through their imagination. Imagination is the medium through which the divine and the human is reconciled. The Divine is a fluid reality in continuous exchange with humans. Indeed, the anthropologist of Yoruba pre-colonial religion, Karin 20

Barber, shows how intimate were the exchanges between humans and their gods (see ‘How Man Makes God in West Africa – Yoruba Attitudes toward the Orisa’). If many people in a locality worshipped at the shrine of an orisa, they became the clients, but at the same time, in a strange way, the patrons of that orisa. This is explained in the way the gods were worshipped: if the god did not satisfy the needs of the people, they would switch their allegiance to another spirit. Since the connections between human minds and the Divine are so intimate, I would argue that Jelili’s performance is meant as a masquerade – calling ‘mute attention’ to the problems of people in motion, migrants – and so Jelili is, knowingly or unknowingly, summoning the gods to bear witness to his testimony through his art. He can do this, because through the masquerade, humans and the Divine become complicit in art.(1) (1).Reference can also be made to the work of Lorand Matory, who shows how in the contemporary Yoruba town of Igboko, women are returning, despite their Muslim or Christian religion, to the shrine of the ancient orisa Shango, god of thunder, and to the rituals of his transvestite priests, as a warning of how political corruption in Nigeria is damaging human nature, and therefore all nature. So the Divine must be evoked to protect humans. See Lorand Matory, J. 1993. ‘Government by Seduction: History and the Tropes of “Mounting” in Oyo-Yoruba Religion’, in Comaroff, J. and J. (eds.) Modernity and its Malcontents”: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Prof. Paul Clough is chief editor of the international Journal of Mediterranean Studies and lectures at the University of Malta’s Department of Anthropology. His ﬁeldwork among the Hausa people of West Africa began thirty years ago and is still ongoing today. He has also been conducting part-time research on the working lives of West African immigrants in Malta since 2009.

...it is what look together that would be perfect

Interview with Jelili Atiku By Elise Billiard You have been asked to perform in a particular public square in Malta where the main authorities - the political power (office of the prime minister), the main national cultural center (Spazju Kreattiv) and the financial power (Central Bank of Malta) - were all facing each other. Additionally, the presence of a sculpture to celebrate the Migration Summit of October 2015 was also standing there. Knowing all this, how did you use the space? The space in itself radiates a strong and influential energy and cognitive stance of presumably core human main authorities and attributes: political power, financial power, cultural power; and immigration and migration. I therefore, use the space as an ontological element in contributing to the issue of immigration and migration. Your performances tend to be re-inventions of traditional Yoruba rituals and cosmology; could you tell us what Iworiwo Wo means? The word is, Iworiwo Wo, it is a Yoruba word that connotes looking at a thing or idea in a critical and deeper sense. It is borrowed from the Ifa divine Oriki (panegyric): Iworiwo Wo, oun a ba ji jo wo, gigun lo’gun… which is literally means ‘it is what look together that would be perfect’. In the context of the performance, it is used as a gesture or efforts to adopt a collective consciousness or attitude of looking at the issue immigration and migration holistically. Could you also tell us about the dress and beautiful hand carved sculptures used during the performance? The dress I wore in the performance is actually influenced by the European women medieval dresses, especially Maltese women and the Yoruba women dress. My intention was to create a hybrid figure of feminine energy which is most deadly affected when the issues of immigration and migration come to the fore. The hand carved sculptures are: (1) the head gear (Ibori/Iboju) is a syncretism of Maltese and Yoruba material culture. The head gear is first influenced by the Yoruba hair-do of Oya, the Yoruba Goddess, but it is also incorporating the Maltese bobbin lace making instruments which I carved in wood; (2) for the walking wheel I was inspired by the history of Homo sapiens migration i.e. the early human migration. I used this as a wheel turning on itself endlessly and stepping on the map during the performance to bring in the complex context trajectory of immigration and migration as a global and humanitarian issues today.

Emeka Ogbohâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s works contemplate broad notions of listening and hearing as its main focus. He transposes, inserts, and installs sounds in diverse locations to contemplate compelling issues surrounding migration, globalization and post-colonialism, amongst other topics. His sound recordings also consider the history and aural infrastructure of cities, Lagos, Nigeria in particular. These Lagos recordings have produced a corpus of work entitled â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lagos Soundscapesâ&#x20AC;?, which he has installed in different contexts. Ogboh has begun to explore audio archives, a recent interest in history, and how nostalgia and memory intersect in the conceptualization of the present.

Emeka Ogboh Oshodi Stock Exchange [6 channels]

Emekaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s installation was set up at the entrance of the main venue of the Utopian Nights. It was intended to invoke an experience of displacement through the sounds of the African cosmopolis of Lagosand its main bus terminus. It consisted of a six-channel sound installation that combined the ambient sounds of Lagos bus parks, with the unique voices and sounds utilized by hawkers to attract potential customers in these parks. The arranged Lagos soundscapes were layered with piano scores by Kristian Kowatsch, to create a minimal and organic listening composition.

Emeka Ogboh participated in numerous international exhibitions, amongst others the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale 2015, Documenta 14 2017, Athens and Kassel and skulptur projekte MĂźnster 2017 24

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Inside the

BORDER

Howard Gardens Mdina 30>07>2018 05>08>2018

Jeremy Mangion Laurent Desiré Loutsono (Kizenguélé) Corps Citoyen Alberto Favaro Solar Cinema Fatima akka Mahra Chakib Zidi Mohamed Ali Agrebi (Dali) Sea Watch Open Arms Life Line Lamine Drame Fattima Mahdi DJ Shays Margerita Pulè Christian Von Borries Maria Pisani Francois Zammit Tom Van Malderen Maria Kourkouta/Niki Giannari Sudanese Community Malick Yahye Issak Katel Delia Ivanna Haag Jess Rymer & Glen Montanaro Cristine Grech Kenneth Scicluna Justin Galea Leanne Ellul Janelle Borg Noura Abdelhafidh Aya and Ahmed Abdelhalim Omer

The ﬁlm ‘Spectres are Haunting Europe’ was projected during the Utopian Nights.

photo by Maria Kourkouta

Spectres are Haunting Europe A Film by Maria Kourkouta/Niki Giannari, Reviewed

Kathrin Schรถdel

If refugees and migrants do not simply ‘become like us’, forgetful of a system which will keep producing its outcasts, the ‘vanguard’ of refugees may become the sign of a new beginning, of the possibility of a different world.

“The Borders are Closed”—“Open the Border” People moving slowly, queuing, waiting, somewhat out of place, something is not right: the clothes are dirty or too large or hardly �it for the weather; the weather is too bad for staying outside, but they are. Many are wearing the same raincoats—long with hoods, sometimes transparent, like a second ghostly skin—spectres in the rainy, muddy darkness of a camp. The scenes were �ilmed in the refugee camp near the Greek village of Idomeni on the border to Macedonia in March 2016 when the European Commission had decided ‘to close the so-called West Balkans route’ and “more than 15000 people found themselves stuck on the greek side of the greek-macedonian border”, as the closing titles of the �ilm explain. During the �irst part of the �ilm, of�icial, calm and functional loudspeaker announcements about the closed border and the provision of minimal aid by the Greek government asking for cooperation ‘with the Greek authorities’ are juxtaposed with the chants of ‘open the border’ by groups of refugees—one of the lines of the �ilm which will haunt the viewer. The resistance to being put up in ‘reception centres’ in Greece and the decision of the refugees to stay near the border in the hope of being able to move on to the countries they intended to reach becomes a symbol of questioning the way in which human beings—not the ‘�low’ of anonymous masses, but the desires, decisions and plans of individuals—become pawns within the political manoeuvring between the different governments and institutions of Europe. Sadly, this is again a pressingly topical issue with people trying to cross the Mediterranean used as pawns in political disputes between and within European states—with deadly consequences.

Filming a Mass of Spectres?

The �ilm’s recurring, haunting images are of lines of people navigating the muddy ground of an inhospitable landscape. But even when the images do not show faces, but focus on the feet or the backs of people, we see individuals, not an undifferentiated mass. The �ilm does not employ the common strategy of narrating the stories of individuals amongst this mass, but it succeeds in portraying the mass itself in a different light: the problem is not the mass. It is not by de�inition that a mass is dehumanising. The problem is the treatment of the mass. The creation of a mass by keeping people from exercising individual freedom. All too often, images of migration show a mass, a so-called ‘�lood’ of people, ‘the migrants’, as if they were a homogenous whole, a mass of spectres threatening ‘us’—a mass in need of being controlled, even exorcised. The �ilm manages to counteract these images by revealing a

different mass, one which should haunt our conscience and our political will, not our fears.

The people in the �ilm are not portrayed as passive victims; the dif�iculty of their situation is not hidden, but their reactions display many small and signi�icant activities of life: washing clothes in spite of the rain and mud, preparing food with makeshift cookers, children playing, looking at the camera, people laughing and talking. The camera is �ixed; while people move and trains cross, the camera does not follow any of them, its angle remains static. This creates a tension between stasis and movement evocative of the many situations in which migration is actually standstill, waiting in spaces in between, being stuck where one does not want to be and did not choose to go. And the camera does not assume a privileged view-point so that its fragmented images are suggestive of the situation of unknowing and being subjected to the decisions of others, at the same time, it conveys the feeling of being part of the crowd, of the limited but direct view of a participant rather than of a distant or elevated observer. Instead of the predominant representation of ‘the migrant’ as an almost inherently silent object—of administration and care but also of rejection and hatred—the ‘spectres’ of the �ilm have voices: we hear them recite, joke, laugh together, forming a soundscape of humanity—and in the centre of the �ilm discussing politics.

Memory: the Haunted Border

Those migrants who are constructed as a mass ‘haunting Europe’ by media images are non-privileged migrants as opposed to those privileged migrants usually referred to as expats—not seen as a mass, not con�ined to a spectral existence, but openly dominant in the economy, politics and society together with their resident counterparts: the rich and powerful. Non-privileged migrants are compelled to a spectral existence, partially hidden from sight by border politics and the spaces migrants are con�ined to during forcibly clandestine journeys, detention, even reception ‘centres’ (mostly keeping their inmates at the periphery of societies), and the usually hidden process of deportation. All too often, migrants are also forced to walk a thin line between life and death; all too often, the borders are haunted by those who were killed in the attempt to cross. The �ilm makes a further connection to the spectres of history: by turning to black and white and a 16mm camera at the end, the images from the refugee camp become reminiscent of past documentaries. In the poetic voice-over, these images are explicitly linked to the history of the Holocaust. The trains become memories of ‘forgotten trains’—a central symbol of the National-Socialist mass deportations to the extermination camps. The text mentions the suicide of Walter Benjamin in Portbou at the French-Spanish border in 1940 “on the day they closed the borders”. 33

Resistance: Inside the Border The trains in the �ilm, however, also become a symbol of the potential for resistance. In Idomeni, the border is closed for migrants but trains delivering goods are passing, their tracks crossing the refugee camp. The �ilm shows the formation of a protest against being trapped by the closed border by sitting on the rail tracks and blocking the trains. The refugees create a human border in protest against the inhumane closure of the border, a border inside the border. They use their mere bodies as a means of resistance in an unexpected reversal of border politics which use the restriction of physical movement, the literal arresting—that is, stopping—of bodies as a form of control and submission.

meaningful: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” The spectre in the Manifesto is one of a political force, of the formation of a new political subject which is able to unsettle no less than the whole set-up of the existing economic-political system. It is the spectre of those structurally suppressed and exploited becoming conscious of their shared aims and getting ready for a radical political struggle. Can we see parallels to the situation in the �ilm, to the situation today? The Manifesto goes on: “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre”. This can be read as a striking parallel to the fact that all the powers of current Europe seem to form an unholy alliance to exorcise the spectre of migration, not by allowing migrants to move in a non-spectral, safe way, but by trying to stop them from moving, by trying to restrict the spectre to its outside, not its borders, but even further removed, where ‘we’ Europeans, ‘we’ privileged non-migrants or migrants, do not have to see them, where they are exorcised.

This act of resistance poignantly demonstrates the contradictions of a world where goods and capital travel freely while human beings can be brutally restricted in their movement. It also hints at the interconnection between these contradictory situations. In the capitalist system, everything and every human being is evaluated according to its economic use. By rendering the trains useless, the system is jarred, and an opening may become visible for a different system, a system where economic concerns are not predominant, where the needs and desires of humans are at the core, not the preservation of national economies whose success is based on the exploitation of the majority by the few. The ‘arrested’ bodies of the refugees in turn arrest the movement of capitalist trade. Thereby, they highlight its cold functionality: the train moves, the person cannot move; trade is ‘free’, human beings are not. Governments decide about immigration on the basis of economic usefulness: when there is a shortage of workers, immigrants are invited; when immigrants are not seen as economically useful, that is, as exploitable for the pro�it of others, they are excluded with the brutal force of border politics with often literally fatal effects. The human blockade of the train is a political moment in a positive sense: those who are excluded, not only from entering certain countries but from the whole sphere of political visibility, manage to create a new political space.* The occupied rail tracks become a scene of political intervention – through physical resistance, but also through signs of protest and, most powerfully, through becoming a space of democratic deliberation in debates and political negotiations: the chanting of “open the border” is stopped in order to listen to and discuss objections against the protest. In this way, the migrants, having been turned into spectres by the border regime, reaf�irm their status as political subjects, not of a speci�ic nation state, but of a new, perhaps utopian, political realm.

Politics: the Spectre of Communism

Spectres of Utopia?

This is where the �ilm’s title as a reference to the famous �irst sentence of the Communist Manifesto becomes

In her poignant text We Refugees, Hannah Arendt provocatively refers to “refugees driven from country to

The Manifesto continues: ‘Two things result from this fact: 1. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. 2. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.’ The aim of the Manifesto, then, is to bring the spectre out into the light, to reveal the actual aims of communism—not as a vague threat haunting everyone, but as a threat to those in power and to a system upholding hierarchical power and economic inequality. A power against the powers of oppression. – Can the spectres of migrants be seen in a similar way? Can the appearance of migrants be considered a power of sorts? Or would this be an idealisation or even an instrumentalisation of the plight of refugees? As the workers at the time of the Manifesto were placed together in the large sites of industrial production as “masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, […] organised like soldiers”, migrants are also pushed together as a mass with the attempt at rigid organisation and control. From an economic perspective, they are the mass of the ‘useless’, the mass of those super�luous as far as the functioning of capitalist exploitation is concerned. As with the proletariat, however, the realisation of the power of this oppressed mass to stop the workings of the system exploiting or—in the case of migrants—excluding them can become a political force: for the workers, this power is the strike, for the migrants in Idomeni, it was the blockade of the trains. The wheels of the system stood still—for a moment at least.

country” as “the vanguard of their peoples—if they keep their identity”. The voice-over text in the �inal part of the �ilm also engages with the question of ‘them’ (migrants, refugees) becoming “like us, quiet and unliberated and lifeless, gradually till they forget who they are and where they came from”. At �irst, it seems problematic to ask refugees not to become “like us” or to retain “their identity” when the predominant call is for ‘integration’ or ‘assimilation’ and maybe even the main desire of migrants is precisely to become ‘like us’, if ‘us’ are the privileged residents of host countries. But as a politicisation of the role of the migrant, a perception of its ‘vanguard’ status, this is an important re�lection. Arendt observes that the system of nation states is unable to deal with the situation of the appearance of stateless—and rightless—people on a large scale. She sees the Jewish people forced to �lee by the National Socialist system and then being left in a precarious state in the countries of exile as a vanguard of a dystopian situation where starting with “the weakest”, everyone is in danger of experiencing such a fundamental loss of rights, of becoming an outcast. If we do not prevent human beings from becoming such outcasts, anyone can ultimately become an outcast, an outcast who is stripped of their humanity, or else they become part of those who cast out, those who give up their humanity through the absence of empathy. A spectral world, indeed. If refugees and migrants do not simply “become like us”, forgetful of a system which will keep producing its outcasts, and if we join them in remembering this scandal of ‘our’ world, the ‘vanguard’ of refugees like the ‘spectre of communism’ may become the sign of a new beginning, of the possibility of a different world.

or as a ‘burden’. Its utopia is a world where the other appears as a human subject, an equal in dialogue and collaboration, a possibility for encounter, exchange and a shared life—a shared political life in a positive sense. The re�lections at the end of the �ilm also emphasise “the political” as a “desire” which “we” seem to have “lost”. The mostly dark tone of the voice-over in these �inal passages of the �ilm and the eerie black and white images are counter-acted by the depiction of the people in the camp who are often laughing, smiling, children are playing, people are sitting together talking—as if to say, humanity is not lost (yet).

Watching this �ilm together in the setting created during “Utopian Nights: Inside the Border” on Thursday, 2nd August, in Howard Gardens, Mdina, promises to be a political moment in a positive sense: the possibility of experiencing and discussing the �ilm with others in an atmosphere which somehow mirrors that of the �ilm—a makeshift political space of encounter, democracy and utopian imaginings.

* For the notion of politics as an act of creating new political spaces and making visible what was invisible within the political sphere before see Jacques Rancière’s works, for example, Ten Theses on Politics. Trans. Davide Panagia/Rachel Bowlby. In:

Theory and Event 5.3 (2001).

First published in Isles of th Left July 2018.

Like the proletariat which represents the structural scandal of the capitalist system, the systemic exploitation of the majority, the situation of refugees in the space inside the border, so to speak, stateless and powerless, reveals the very roots of suffering and suppression in this social world: the fact that the needs, wishes and interests of humans ultimately do not count. Refugees may be seen as the vanguard of an increasing number of super�luous people, for instance of those rendered useless for the capitalist system by automation and the matching planning of capitalists, oriented solely towards a reduction of costs and an increase of pro�it. It is high time that we, migrants, privileged or not, ‘residents’, privileged or not, join the political subject visible in the train blockade in the �ilm: a subject which radically questions the logic of the existing order. This joint political subject challenges the very basis of the global order of inequality: capitalism and its political institution by capitalist nation states. Such a movement points towards the necessary utopia of global equality, internationalist solidarity and democracy. It is a radical opposition against a world in which the other either appears as a competitor

Kathrin Schödel lectures at the Department of German, University of Malta; her research interests are literature and politics, depictions of revolutions, constructions of gender roles, discourses of migration and utopian thought. She is a member of CAUR (Centre for Applied Utopian Research).

The Camp as instrument of power.

Francois Zammit

The camp as a temporary enclosure housing people within it, may well trace its roots to the �irst human nomadic societies. In a nomadic lifestyle the camp represents a place of rest and a temporary repreave from a long road through a widely open world. It is thus only in sedentary societies that the camp took on a more sinister nature. Prior to the establishment of towns and cities, the nomad’s camp offered hospitality and safety. But following the rise of permanent settlements, which led to the establishment of large scale warfare, the camp became an instrument of tyranny and aggression.

remain of authoritarian regimes that will be removed once liberal democracy will be achieved. Refugee camps and holding camps are here to stay; they are essential in maintaining the sovereignty of the state, they are politics by other means. These enclosures strengthen the borders of the modern state.

The state authorities, acting as protective doctors for a dominant part of society, are ‘managing populations’ through their spatial repartition. In a sense the recent camp is no longer a political nor a military tool, it is a medical instrument. Heir of the quarantined enclosure, when the only means of eliminating a pandemic was to con�ine and then eliminate the carrier and the virus itself, the modern camps - asylum hospitals, criminal prisons or refugee detention camps - are considered pockets of pathologies alien to the rest of society.

With great civilisations, came great armies - when Roman legions marched towards their enemies, they set up a camp every night, surrounded by palisades and tents organised in perfect parallel rows. Every night the camp got closer to its destination: a new land, a new town, a new people to be conquered. The camp was the outpost of occupation, in charge of setting up new boundaries, new territorial borders and conquests.

Of course not all camps are modern state constructions participating in the reproduction of power. Some camps are on the contrary, challenging the order of things. There are the spontaneous camps formed by immigrants within European cities, assemblies of precarious tents close to highways or under �lyovers escaping just for a moment the rigid state management of populations before they get literally washed out by the local cleaning services and police force.

The camps that housed the conquering armies of belligerent and dominating civilisations, left a mark on the land. New demarcations were created that clearly identi�ied who was the conqueror and who was the vanquished. New identities were forged, and the divisions were as identi�iable as the palisade or the high concrete walls that surrounded the camp of the oppressor. This type of camp still exists today, it’s the camp of the US military in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such camp is a military technology that de�ines the politics of the land. If war may be considered as politics by other means, then such camp is war using politics as part of its arsenal.

This violent opposition between state and nomads (forced migrants as well as the ancestral nomads) reveals how much borders are the very base of the territorial structure and sovereignity of the modern state. In such context, nomadic camps, although precarious, constitute the grain of sand in the well-oiled mechanics of power.

With the advent of Western imperialism, the use of the camp changed once again; it was no longer a temporary home for the conquering armies but became a space for the imprisonment of subjugated people. It reverted the space of oppression; if previously the conquering camps were ‘civilising’ the outside space, now the �ixed enclaves where subjugating the individuals within.

And indeed the camp can be the very place where power is curtailed, at least for a moment. In the last decade other forms of camps, not associated with nomadism but with utopia and social movement, have also challenged the order. They were built on strong civic will but with fragile material infrastructure ; their inhabitants congregated to imagine a new society. Occupy Wall Street (NY), Taksim square (Istanbul) or the ZAD of Notre Dame des Landes were such camps - heterotopias of resistance. The ability of camps to emerge both at the limits and within the ordered space of nation states, places within them a potential of disruption which may allow the citizenry to challenge the injustices of the current status quo.

The expansion of intra-territorial borders within the colonies and the resulting restriction of movement and access to land and resources which were imposed on the subjugated colonized subjects enabled colonisers, although outnumbered, to control the lives and territory of their subjects. Thus the prison-camp should be understood only as an element within the spatial structure of coercion established by the colonial powers. Borders, camps and human reserves constituted the instruments of a regime of separation and management of populations.

German colonising forces in Namibia, Italian armies in Libya and the British authorities in Kenya, all set up camps to imprison those who dared challenge their authority. Women, children and the elderly could all be considered enemies and therefore, could be subject to military rule and punishment. It is a well-established fact that the concentration camps were not invented by the Nazi regime, which simply adjusted a previously existing model that was already tried and tested in African colonies by European imperial states. It follows that the camp was and still is an essential tool of modern power within and outside Europe. It is not a sad

Francois Zammit taught philosophy at post-secondary level for over eight years. His latest work, The Camp and Modernity; A Modern Form of Racial Control was presented in May 2018 during a seminar organised by the Anthropology Department at the Univeristy of Malta. He has worked on transhumanism, terrorism, George Bataille, and education. Over the years he has presented papers on: ‘Bataille’s Interpretation of Mauss’ ‘The Gift’, ‘The Concept of the Self in Contemporary Maltese Literature’, and ‘A Colonial Reading of Agamben’ Homo Sacer’ in Engaging the Contemporary 2017. In 2015 he presented a discussion on foreign �ighters for ISIS in the Middle East in terms of theories of social disassociation (Camus and Wilson) and of excess (Bataille) and he is a regular contributor on Isles of the Left.

Looking Back on an Attempted Utopia: The Constructions for Utopian Nights: Inside the Border

Jeremy Mangion

Now that the Utopian Nights event, Inside the Border, has come to an end, no one walking through Howard Gardens, on the outskirts of Rabat, would imagine that this was a stage upon which people were urged to take charge of their political and physical environment. Although the event’s eclectic group of participants have long since returned to their respective worlds and no trace remains of the constructions built in Howard Gardens, the ideas that shaped this event and what it sought to convey are still active in the minds of its organizers. This brief retrospective on the constructions built in Howard Gardens as part of Utopian Nights: Inside the Border serves to document these ideas so that they may one day be recalled and reworked, or perhaps discovered anew.

realm so that it may be acknowledged, debated, and acted upon. In order to represent the world of encampment, the forces of order and control that operate within it and the impermanent, highly standardised forms that it takes, a number of regularly shaped structures formed from steel tubes were designed. These were placed at various points throughout Howard Gardens within eyeshot of any passers-by. These structures, constructed from scaffolding, were intended to gradually grow with the addition of more steel elements with each passing day, and to slowly devour the garden as the week-long event progressed. In the end, an entire scaffolding skeleton would be superimposed onto the garden, restricting the movement and enclosing anyone who walks through it. This aspect of the structures failed to materialise fully, but was manifested to a lesser extent by alternative means, including some constricting barricades, as the event progressed.

The constructions put together in Howard Gardens sought to symbolically superimpose the world of contemporary refugee encampment—a world which continues to exist in the shadows and which is deemed by many to be preferably forgotten—onto our familiar, everyday world. The ‘recipient world’—our ordinary, everyday social reality—is exempli�ied by Howard Gardens itself, the setting of this event. Here we �ind a world in which children freely run around, adolescents avoid growing up, adults search for repose from work, and the elderly reminisce about their past. In line with the intentions of its 1923 design, this garden, as with the social world it represents, is ‘inward-looking’, not interested in what is happening outside its limits. This is the insular, enclosed, island social reality.

But there was another side to these scaffolding structures. Each was given a speci�ic function in their engagement with the public, encouraging them to both think about the world of encampment and to dream their way out of it. One structure was a Temporary Museum which housed a curated exhibition while also serving as a dwelling. Another was a Photo Studio where, for the �irst time in Malta, a professional African photographer would take photographs of Europeans against a dream backdrop. Lastly, another two structures became a Kabinett des Imaginaires and an Interview Room where a collective of artists sought to materialise the dream settings of participants.

The ‘intruding world’—the unfamiliar, disturbing social reality of refugee encampment—is best described as the place in which, using the term of the anthropologist Michel Agier, people categorised as “undesirables” are held. This is a world in which children do not freely run around, adolescents grow up too quickly, adults are not allowed to work, and the elderly, if they can be found at all, are denied their past. This is a world of con�inement at a distance, created for the management of unwanted people, in which entire generations are eaten up by a Ka�kaesque waiting-room. This is the social reality of refugee encampment.

The structures were also envisioned with the aim that the public would be invited to directly modify each of them, and that they would continue to do so as these structures grew into one large skeleton. The public would have been invited to clad them in fabrics and pieces of wood, to dress them with doors and windows, to decorate them with their drawings and writings, to add furniture and ornaments to them, and to inhabit them and make them their own. In the end, over the week-long event, a con�lict would be played out: a restrictive, controlling, impersonal skeleton, slowly engul�ing the whole garden, would collide with a public that acknowledges this skeleton, acts upon it, and transforms it.

But why bring these two worlds together? Why pollute the bliss of our ordinary world with such a monstrous one? The truth is that these two worlds have already been brought together: they exist side-by-side and continue to do so. One does not need to mention the impact of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in Malta and the rest of Europe, and the questionable decisions of certain political actors, to realise that the existence and proliferation of this monstrous world is intimately bound to decisions taken in our ordinary world.

In other words, the constructions in Howard Gardens intended to perform what the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah describes as a ‘magical act’. Tambiah characterises such an act as the persuasive transfer of desired properties onto a recipient object or person through a performative act or a verbal utterance on the basis of analogy. In Western culture, a kiss planted on a photograph of a loved one (which serves as an analogy of that loved one) is believed to reach that person in the photograph, in turn affecting the performer of the act in the process. Much in the same way, the performative act of manipulating these structures—of acknowledging and acting upon the

The constructions erected in Howard Gardens sought to take the perturbing reality of refugee encampment out of the margins of ordinary life and place it within the public

symbolic representation of the world of encampment—sought to enact a change in the participants themselves, namely to make them take charge of their physical and political environment. In the end, it was intended that the entire construction, with all the layers amassed during the week, would be quickly demolished in a “ritual of destruction” so as to mirror the fate of many refugee camps, and also so that the distance between the analogy and reality is collapsed.

References Agier, M. (2011). Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Polity. Borġ, J. (1979). The Public Gardens and Groves of Malta and Gozo. Malta: Men of the Trees. Tambiah, S. J. (2008). Form and Meaning of Magical Acts. In M.

Lambek (Ed.), A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (2nd ed., pp. 340–357). Oxford: Blackwell.

Now that Utopian Nights: Inside the Border has ended, and this attempted utopia has once more become a collection of ideas, it is hoped that by having experienced the event, and perhaps by reading this very brief retrospective, the seed of its ideas, including the embracing of difference, collectively sharing the physical environment, and actively shaping the political one, is planted in the imagination. It is further hoped that this seed will take root and grow, and that it will �lourish into the realisation that anywhere can be the stage for such a vision of utopia.

Jeremy Mangion graduated with a master’s degree in Architectural Design from the University of Malta in 2017 with a thesis on the philosophical origins of architecture. He was employed as the Architectural Designer for the second instalment of Utopian Nights, Inside the Border. Jeremy is interested in a number of subjects ranging from the Latin language to Carl Jung’s Depth Psychology. He is particularly interested in the potential of architecture to address social problems. He is currently reading for a second master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Malta.

The Temporary Museum, Axonometric View

The Temporary Museum, Render

Sketching The Border Alberto Favaro

Photomontage of the Installation “the Mirror”.

View of the Installation “The Cage” (relation between gate and cage). 45

When artist and architect Alberto Favaro started working on a command for the Utopian Night on border, we had identified the main gate of the fortress city of Valletta as the ideal place to build a massive border installation. This proposal required massive production resources, reduced the flow of pedestrians and vehicules, and was not feasible logistically and financially. Although the outcome was never built, I still consider the preliminary sketches of the artist very inspiring and worth to share. This is why we are publishing here extracts of the proposal which Favaro submitted in February 2018.

not happening (because prohibited), or what people are not (or not yet), are usually the categories that deﬁne the nature of the space inside borders, making them the perfect architecture of impediment instead of potentiality.

Favaro first describes his thought-process and general understanding of what borders are and how they work. He then proceeds to explain the two installations that could materialize his definition of borders. « The notion of border, as lines dividing spaces, is hereby questioned, and instead, is replaced by the assumption that a border is, in the broader sense, any device through which the norm is converted into space. Far from being just a physical barrier, the border could be considered as a space in itself and not just the ending limit between spaces. Security zones inside the thickness of national borders, as much as detention camps, shared the same typology of space, where rights for who enters might be suspended and the law of the exception be adopted. These zones, differently from what conventionally defines spaces (the typology of activity carried out within, or the typology of people that inhabit them), seems defined through epithets of negation. What is

3D rendering of the Installation “The Cage”. 46

Inside borders, potentialities appear exhausted or suspended, and, especially through the power ‘to suspend’ (rights, individual status ecc), the other big factor with which control is enforced revels itself: time. In fact the act to suspend a legal right, as much as to slow down the transit or permanence inside a space, exposes the parameters within which control could be imposed: not only disciplining space but time as well. Borders don’t just contain space, but contain time, the two dimensions are strictly connected and an imposition on one inﬂuences and always takes into account the other. Any action on time, as a simple imposition to decelerate, to wait, or, on the contrary, a prohibition to stop for longer than a certain time, works as dilations and constrictions in space. As a matter of fact borders operate more as retarders than as insuperable obstacles, where the suspended possibilities (of transit or permits) de facto end up coinciding with impossibilities for whoever is waiting. The endless waiting process inside the border may for some people be an efﬁcient deterrent and time barriers be more discouraging than physical barriers.

The Mirror and The Cage

Moreover the disorientation provoked within the passerby aims to question the space/time deformations that usually are taking place inside borders (as previously discussed), as much as the function of discouragement always embodied by any kind of barrier.

Both projects described here ground their meanings on similar assumptions: The ﬁrst assumption is that the notion of border is always connected to the one of access; there are no walls without doors, nor doors without walls. Although symbolically the two might carry opposite meanings (closure versus aperture), both are answers to the attempt to control and manage space, both are devices at the disposal of the same system imposing impediments. The two interventions in fact focused the attention on the access of Valletta as the area where all the border apparatus reveals its main scope: control of space through a selective permeability.

The second proposed installation was called The Cage. Still focusing on the main access system of Valletta, this time the gate has been examined; especially the space contained within itself, a volume of void of approximately 8x8x8 meters. The aim of the installation was to give a space to that void, as a perfect mold of the inner gate, constructing its extrusion. The volume of the installation not only had to contain space, but even time. In fact the inner space of the volume was disposed as a labyrinth, an architecture that purposely acts on time as retardant for people’s transit. The entire construction was supposed to be built using conventional concrete reinforcement meshes, a material extremely rareﬁed, being largely constituted of the void between the metal wires. However, with the increasing number of mesh panels used, the transparency of it and therefore the possible interactions between the people inside the labyrinth and the world outside decreases, until, close to the core, the building is impenetrable to the view. It mattered little that the construction was built with a material made almost exclusively by void. The construction was intended to be placed in the main parliament square at few tens of meters from the gate, where, given the proximity, the relation between the two was more evident. The position of the installation inside the city aimed to question the real extension of borders going beyond their merely geographic position.

The second assumption was that both, borders and accesses should be studied as spaces and not just lines between spaces. The entrance of Valletta consists in several access systems in sequence, each of them a resolution to the impediment that is crossed, zones having a certain thickness: a thirty six meters long bridge (to overcome the ditch) and an eight meters thick gate (to overcome the walls). The first proposed installation was the one denominated The Mirror . As indicated by the name, it consists in a 12X12 meters mirror placed at the entrance of Valletta, just two meters after the gate. The mirror occupying the entire visible space was supposed to cover completely the view of the city. The image of Valletta, now disappeared, would be substituted by the reflection of the bridge and the Triton Fountain Square at the end of it. With this installation anyone entering the city would see an endless bridge and have the perception that the Valletta walls contain what is usually outside of the city, instead of the expected inner city. This inversion places every passer-by in the condition of a ‘permanent outsider’, and this whichever side of the mirror/border he finds himself. A condition that is usually experienced by migrants.

Concept model and drawing of the Installation “The Cage”

Concept studies for Geography of Lives

Geography of Lives Photography

Alberto Favaro

Geography of lives consists in a performance and a series of photos aiming to confute the idea of national borders as being just the linear limits surrounding nations. Contemporary borders actually extend themselves outside and inside countries. They might not necessarily be built with bricks or fences but are still very effective. Those are jurisdictional, administrative, economic and ‘cultural’ limitations, real impediments for migrants to construct a life somewhere and become fully recognized individuals. Far from being just physical barriers, borders could be considered as spaces in themselves and not just the ending limit between spaces. That means that a migrant that crossed a geographical border decades ago could still ﬁnd himself without full rights to participate in community life, or worst, to be expelled, realizing

suddenly that, the border, crossed long ago, was never really crossed, but rather it trapped him. Constantly adjusting itself, the border kept ‘the intruder’ outside, even if his body was geographically inside. Imagining the mapping of the real extensions and thickness of these borders, the most likely configuration should not be a fixed geographical one, but an infinitive number of pockets trapping spaces and bodies in a permanent migration through countries, but never really belonging to them. A portion of ‘outside’ taken ‘inside’, but not able to access it. As a matter of fact borders do not only discipline space but time as well, allowing the permanence of ‘the intruder’ at one condition: temporality. A requirement that implies the obligation of permanent movement and the impossibility for a stable settlement.

The performance consists of bringing a bordered space inside the fortiďŹ ed city of Mdina in Malta, through roads and squares letting it cross the entire city from one gate to the other, but paradoxically never really entering the city. Precisely because of the presence of the barriers, a bordered portion of exterior (the non-Mdina) could travel inside the city, but without ever be part of it. The metal barricades, enclosing an exterior space, could with full rights be seen as the limit of Mdina (inside Mdina), and therefore be considered ďŹ&#x201A;exible extensions of the medieval walls of the city, but developing and moving within.

Geography of Lives Performance Alberto Favaro

Utopian Nights Inside the Border Mdina, Malta August 2018 CHOREOGRAPHY Alberto Favaro & Florinda Camilleri

PERFORMERS Niels Plotard, Emma Louise Walker Keith Micallef, Zoe Camilleri Nicola Micallef,Thea Cunningham Cloe Bonello, Luke Bugeja Gauci

VIDEO PRODUCTION Massimo Denaro Alberto Favaro Slavko Vukanovic

VIDEO EDITING Slavko Vukanovic Alberto Favaro

Workshops

Ideal Home

Spring 2018 Sudanese Community Hamrun, Malta

Co-ordinators: Jeremy Mangion Elise Billiard Participants: Gervais Cishahayo Aya Omer Adam Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Elfaroug Regine Psaila Babiker Abdurahman Amanda Eke Abbas Musa Mohammed Ibrahim Gabrielle Pisani Corps Citoyen Elsa Gomis

Fotokabinett Des Imaginaires

Corps Citoyen

Corps citoyen is a young international collective created in 2013 by Tunisian and Italian artists. The aim of the group is to blend together performances, theatre, poetry, video, photography, animation, & anthropological research, into artistic practice as a tool for reflection on citizenship and politics. The collective conveys the idea of working with body, texts and visuals as ways of expression, and as ways of resistance, change, refining consciousness, rethinking public spaces and being together. Due to their special focus on citizenship, through “Corps Citoyen”, the artists want to act artistically in association with their society. Corps Citoyen’s main objective is the activation of social reflection through the expressive potentials of art and the body in particular ; which represents a territory of political battle and a space for creative resistance.

Rabii Brahim Alessandro Rivera Magos Lilia Ben Romdhane Anna Serlenga Francesca Cogni

This photo studio provided the opportunity for visitors to visualise and share their dreams in the form of a self-photo portrait. It was a platform for diverse communities to showcase their ideas and desires and most importantly it provided a moment of encounter between individuals that usually live away from each other. The method involved a glass window to paint a dream situation on. The general public was invited to take a photo behind this painted glass window which was printed on site as a postcard from an ‘ideal city’. The postcard was given to the participants, exhibited in the temporary museum and sent to all EU institutions. Interviews were recorded and written on postcards to reappropriate this symbol of a ﬁrst class method of travel.

Photostudio backdrop by Jeremy Mangion based on the Ideal Home workshop

The Utopian Photo Studio André Désiré Loutsono (Kizenguélé)

André Désiré Loutsono aka Kinzénguélé is an autodidact photographer born in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. He is a founding member of Collectif Génération Elili since 2003. He exhibited in many galleries and art centers in African countries as well as in Europe, Mexico, the United States of America and Russia. He participated in the production of the 'Una vita per Africa’ catalog with the art school of Poto Poto, and in the realization of the Kiébé Kiébé catalogue for the Museum of the Congo Basin. He worked with David Damoison, Héctor Médiavilla Sabaté, Elina Moriya, Philippe Guionie, Thomas Granosky and Edouard Bianotuma. In 2014 he received the Award of Excellence of Arts and Letters and was made Congolese Knight of Merit in 2016.

We are overwhelmed with images of a war torn and epidemic ridden Africa side by side with images of a glamorous jungle which exoticism has not subsided since decolonizations. But how many images do we have of Europeans taken by Africans? This was the opportunity to get your portrait taken by visiting Congolese Photographer André Désiré Loutsono!

He was the ﬁrst African professional photographer to take portraits of people living in Malta. His photo studio, set up in the garden, offered different backdrops of the ideal home imagined by African and European participants living in Malta. One backdrop was a painting by Sudanese artist Malik Yahye Issak, another was a photo montage by Jeremy Mangion.

L’utopie est morte, vive l’utopie! Reclaiming Malta for a new Utopia Margerita Pulè aka Lilly Sapiano

Characters CEO of the United Capitals of Utopia Agents of the UCoU (a subcontracted mercenary team) Costume Blonde Wig “I Really Don’t Care Do U?” Jacket Lots of Eyeliner Stilettos (Agents wear armbands or something similar) Props Loudspeaker Pigeon Champagne bottle Narrative Starts aggressively Warning & threatening - dismissing current Utopia Offers consolation - mes amis, mes enfants and eventually becomes more comforting Sells a better version of Utopia & pretends to be visionary 75

Friends Do not be fooled.  Do not be fooled by this empty rhetoric.  Do not be deceived by promises of Utopia I stand before you tonight, the Iron Lady of the Mediterranean. Utopia is a dream!  You are all asleep, dreaming about something that does not exist. You are living in a cave, living through shadows on the wall; wake up!  Look around you! These trees are standing in the way of your development!  You could be eating cake, and you are eating bread.  Join me to develop and to make Malta great again! As the great, great Margaret Thatcher said: “There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”  Come and join our developed family. Utopia can be real, but not like this.  L’utopie est morte, vive l’utopie! You are in my care; I love every single one of you.  And I will take care of you.  Did you know, this land, thankfully, is soon to be developed.  No more people sitting around on the ground, camping, pretending to be happy and free.  They will be charged with Loitering. Spreading fake news. Insubordination. Disobeying an official.  Treason. Sedition.  Make sure you are not among them. Do not worry Trust me - I am not the Thought Police  Big Brother is not watching you  We will not force you to agree to leave.  But we will capture your hearts and minds.  And we will persuade you. You must have noticed The Agents’ work.  Trust them.  The Agents have been directing you, bringing us closer together. And so, I am asking you all to take a journey with us to an enhanced, developed civilisation.  We will not force you to agree to leave your current so-called utopia.  But listen, and it will become clear what path you should take. You ask, what is our policy? I say it is development. Development by land, sea, and air. Development with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to develop against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is development. Development at all costs - development in spite of all terrors – Development, however long and hard the road may be, for without development there is no survival. Ħaninis,  I love each and every one of you.  I am one of you.  Ich bin ein Malteser.  Je vous ai compris You all deserve better than this, much, much better than this.  Look around you. Do you have running water? Look at the insects, and the dirt!  You don’t even have A/C. 76

We will protect you from foreign invasions.  And from predatory Species. It doesn’t matter mes enfants how you got here. What matters is what you do from now, from today.  Don’t you want to live lives with purpose? Don’t you want to wake up each morning knowing that you have to go to work to earn money?  Don’t you want to have A/C? Mes enfants, believe me when I say that I come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my Malta, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of Malta too, and think foul scorn that any prince should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the odious apparatus of this deluded utopia, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall develop in Malta, we shall develop on the seas and oceans, we shall develop with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall develop our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall develop on the beaches, we shall develop on the landing grounds, we shall develop in the fields and in the streets, we shall develop in the hills; we shall never surrender. This is a prime piece of land.  It should be developed.  The apartments that will be built here will be yours  Your opportunity.  You can earn a livelihood from them  You will be proud of what is built here.  Because Being is Building and Building is Being. And if you have no bread to eat, we will give you cake. If you have no cake, we will give you bread.  Of course you can be socialist, but we will give you champagne.  And the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. We will be the new Monaco of the Mediterranean.  Your Utopia can’t last  You can see it’s impossible. And I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Maltese dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and develop itself. You can remember this as an innocent time. But mes enfants, it’s time to grow up  And walk with me towards development. "Developed at last! Developed at last! Thank God Almighty, we are developed at last!"

The above text was read during the disruptive performance which ended abruptly the debate on borders. During this performance the audience and speakers where encircled in security ribbons whilst the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Agents of the Utopian Nightsâ&#x20AC;? rapidly dismantled the camp. A token of the camp was distributed as a souvenir to the audience. At the end of the performance a white dove was symbolically freed from its cage (but preferred to perch itself on the PA system).

A Night with Christian Von Borries

Film Screenings and Debate

Christian Von Borries came to Malta to present his short film based on his experience on board during a sea rescue operation in the Mediterranean. For the first time shown to an English speaking audience, the film « The suffering of others », played with Susan Sontag’s words, critically assessing the responsibilities of broad media in France, UK and Germany which images give a partial view of the rescue. Von Borries was adamant that such TV news were producing a negative image of Africans as a desperate mass of people deprived of any subjectivity. After the Q&A lead by Maria Theuma, an interesting and heated argument followed the projection, in which members of sea-rescue crew seated with the public expressed their strong opposition to Von Borries’s criticism. A member of the Sea-Watch communication team, explained that they were also very careful in their choice of images shared online and were constantly rethinking their guidelines. The display of the suffering of rescued people seemed to have crystallized the core of the argument. Showing the reality of sufferance could be seen as a way to get benefit from it, by provoking compassion and thus leading to more donations.

In the second part, Von Borries and Maria Theuma introduced an older and now classic film on Dubai as the ultimate society of Spectacle: ‘The Dubai in Me’. Mixing images of Dubai he filmed and extracts of the 'Second Life’ game, the film is a successful attempt to glean some new intelligence on real estate bubbles. Undoubtedly the surreal google street view video filmed in the repetitive and endless roads of the new city haunted the dreams of most of the spectators that night.

screening “The suffering of others”

ﬁlm still from ‘The Dubai in Me’ (Google street view)

Storytelling

Cristine Grech

Katel Delia

Kids and adults joined us for a night of incredible stories told in the garden by expert storytellers. They listened to scary fairytales as well as real stories of Maltese travelers. They heard legends that told of trust and ďŹ shes, they listened to the true life stories of exiled people in Malta, and once the night had fallen, they were transported in the somehow unpredictable world of the allmighty goddess of nature. Once most kids had left to go to bed, the adults enjoyed the ride given by a talented duo of musicians away from the Mediterranean Sea and across English channel. That night we were able to observe the magic of storytelling, when all adults are transformed into mesmerized children once again, forgetting work and worries, and more importantly, when children transform themselves into wise and happy grown-ups. Truly, this night conďŹ rmed that there is nothing like a good story to imagine a better future together.

Ivanna Haag

Jess Rymer & Glen Montanaro 82

Solar Cinema

Solar Cinema is a solar powered mobile cinema that brings unseen ďŹ lms to unusual places. All equipment is powered by 100% solar energy. The screening was introduced by a reading from poet Fatima akka Mahra.

Fatima akka Mahra

on being mixed race/the colour as a separate entity

if it’s so hard to understand that my colour is my own, whatever baggage it carries, it carries by itself; my being refuses to contort in the name of belonging anywhere at all.

it does not carry my spirit with it – no, the burden of that knowledge weighs upon the exoskeletal: if our being is shaped through our flesh, mine takes place beyond the colour as a partition; my heritage diffuses under the blood cells that create the “tan”. call me “exotic” picture rhinestones etched on my hipbones lilies painted on my fingertips, flowers growing behind my skull onto my ears upon which your words fell; “exotic”/like the dropping of a pin in an empty hall the ticking of a bomb at the edge of my lips, an echo in the indentions of me -my colour is a separate entity that belongs far away from prying eyes; could i possibly ever be “whitepassing”? i apologise, i will acknowledge the colour of my skin, the paleness of my backside & the contrasting darker hands, the dark circles around my neck tell me, what do i look like now? am i dark enough? do i belong? am i white enough to belong? my colour is a separate entity that attaches itself to my bones and bears a lingering question facing the unbeknownst; the melody of the Other deities drumming away into the horizons of the night into the ears of a decaying ancestry – darling cleopatra clutches the venom vessel and turns to dust, darling barbara squats in prisons away from guards that clasped her body & begged for ownership – tell me, what do i look like now? am i strange enough? do i not fill the criteria of “exotic other”? am i not to be compared with the precious remains of the underground? am i not sheer discomfort? i’m sorry

epilogue/to be reborn that night, i thought of what it would be like to be weightless; to have my skin speak to me in a language only the blood in the spaces underneath could understand i thought of my tongue as ancient as wood, humming, still, to the orbit of the earth i thought of my spirit as tender as silk, & what salvation lies for those without a land. Fatima akka Mahra

In these days of globalisation, our world does not exist anymore. Next to speedways and airports, we ďŹ nd high fences and enclaves. The new global nomads travel fast and far on different routes than the majority of the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inhabitants, contrived to go through numerous administratives obstacles and a whole array of checkpoints. Borders and enclaves are fragmenting our spaces. Golden gated communities, leisure theme parks and expensive historical city centers are in high demand as much as detention centers and refugee camps. Enclaves are generally on the rise. Smuggling people, smuggling bank accounts. Our guest speakers, Christian Von Borries, Tom Van Malderen, Maria Pisani, Francois Zammit, Alberto Favaro discussed these issues with the public, merging art and politics.

Debate on Borders

An impromptu debate was held with the members of sea rescue NGOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s: Sea Watch, Life Line and Open Arms who kindly explained the restrictions they face within the maritime European laws.

Spoken Word

We stand on opposing shores our minds, outstretched, sparking a bright cloud suspended in dark anticipation. An umbilical rope on which we pull holding it tight, sending thoughts along it like two cable cars crossing each other swaying above a stormy sea, shards of wind, shrieking: a harpy sliding picking at travelling hopes.

Lilia Ben Romdhane

Leaving a home. Finding a home. Searching, looking through the dusty windows of a locked-up forlorn hope; heaving walls sweating patches of acid yearning. Pipes are bled, rusted. Flames are snuffed, cold. Food has turned sour, and I am too old.

Kenneth Scicluna

Let's unpick the bricks. Let's air the must. Let's speak the words that ignite a light by which to swim to each other's side; with each swing of each arm let's prick sharp holes that illuminate the thickness of the night. Kenneth Scicluna

Justin Galea

Meeting Fingers Meeting Fingers is a dance performance created by Tunisian choreographer Chakib Zidi performed by himself and Mohamed Ali (Dali) Agrebii. Meetings Fingers will take place as part of a “utopian” event night entitled Inside the Border. The choreography aims to create a utopia, a safe space and an encounter between the audience and the performers’ bodies. It is a study of national borders as well as of borders that are forced onto the body in the form of oppression and shame. As Arabs, we carry in our bodies our crushed hope, our ongoing defeats and the memories of Palestinian towns being forcibly depopulated by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. As dancers, we resist the demonisation of dance and pay tribute to our Iranian friend Myajia Hojabri who was recently detained for sharing a video of her dance. As LGBTQI+ people, we survive on a daily basis the shame of being raised in a country that penalises homosexuality with three years in prison. This is for the broken. Not just the heartbroken—this is for the tongue broken, the wrist broken the belly-full-of-gin broken. This is for the tired, the left behind. This is for the ones who are still waiting to return. Curator: Elise Billiard Choreography : Chakib Zidi Dancers: Chakib Zidi & Mohamed Ali (Dali) Agrebi Artistic direction: Mohamed Ali (Dali) Agrebi Text: Chakib Zidi

Meeting Fingers was performed during the Utopian Nights: Borders in July 2018 and again in November 2018 during the Utopian Nights:Commons

Party + DJ set DJ Shay Who channels his diverse experience across several cultures and continents including Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, to add texture, and mood to the sounds that he plays. His blend of music is heavily inﬂuenced by Soul, Funk, Afrobeat (old and New) and Hiphop. DJ Shay Who’s approach to deejaying is to simply create the mood that makes people want to move. He has played in clubs and events from Malaysia, France, China, through Latvia and Lagos to Malta. His Musical Inﬂuences: Ebo Taylor, Fela Kuti, Menahan Street Band, Madlib, Budos Band, Nujabes.

Fattima Mahdi is a British author, musician, mentor and professional roller-skater. She was born and raised in London and moved to Malta with her partner in 2016. Since 2014, Fattima has self-released two EP’s (The Mahdi and The Mahdi II). All of her songs are fuelled with powerful social commentary, have a clear message and are thought provoking in nature. Fattima has been described as having a “true musical talent” and is best known for her inspirational video “No Limits” which has over 30,000 views on Facebook. In February 2018 she headlined at Marley Fest - a reggae festival that took place in Sliema, she then went on to win Underground Sound's Freestyle rap tournament and has since performed at Rock The South Festival and other venues in Malta.

SoninkĂŠ musical performance

Lamine Drame playing the Kora and singing in Mandinke on haunting melodies. He spoke of love and the destiny of an artist as bestowed by the will of god.

MONS THE COM

23, 24, 25 November 2018

Jana Tsoneva Massimo De Angelis Paul Clough Peter Mayo Alexandra Kowalski Anna Curcio Francesca Weber Newth Manoël Pénicaud Mario Gerada Nathalie Grima Kurt Borg Time’s Up André Callus Rachel Scicluna Martin Galea De Giovanni Charlene Galea Reuben Abela Ibtisam Sadegh Menekşe Samanci Chakib Zidi Mohamed Ali (Dali) Agrebi Kenneth Scicluna DJ Coinx Sephora Francalanza

Workshop: Abbas Musa Josephine Burden Zarifa Datch Joanna Delia Aya and Ahmed Abdelhalim Omer Mohammed Ibrahim Jeremy Mangion Christine Xuereb Lara Zammit Mohab Alreeshi Adam GismAlla Abbas Mussa Jameah

Banner from the workshop project ‘Banners Forever’.

The Beneďż˝it of the Commons: Strategies for a Brighter Future

Interview

Massimo De Angelis Raisa Galea

“The commons could be a means of breaking away from the reign of global markets.” Isles of the Left speaks with Massimo De Angelis about the inspiring experiences of commons in South America and Europe. Raisa Galea: ‘Commons’ is a word on many lips, yet not everyone has a clear understanding of the concept. What is commons? Massimo De Angelis: Commons is about sharing resources, collaborating and making decisions together without a top-down dictate. There is a variety of de�initions which delve into what and how should be shared. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize laureate awarded the prize precisely for her extensive work on the commons, de�ined it as common-pool �inite resources such as grazing grounds, forests, coastal areas, rivers and so on. She argued that the best way to manage these natural ecosystems would be through a collective action of the people who use these resources, and not through state or market mechanisms. Unfortunately, today these common-pool resources are increasingly threatened by economic development that bene�its only the few. One of the limitations of Ostrom’s work is that, to her, only these types of resources could be de�ined as commons. However, there are plenty of examples demonstrating that people can collectively manage all sorts of things, not just the natural resources. At the People’s Library set up by the Occupy movement in New York, books—what Ostrom would call resources units—are also organised as commons. In principle, everything—natural and man-made resources and services—can be communalised, meaning they can be shared and governed by the community that handles them. Another frequently mentioned concept of commons focuses on common goods—things that should be shared. Let’s take a speci�ic example: in Italy we had a great movement demanding water to be declared as a common good. In 2011, the referendum to overturn the laws promoting water privatisation had an overwhelming success, but the movement was not prepared to take the matter further. The big question of how we manage a common good thus remained unanswered. The third widespread related term is the common. In a nutshell, it is a principle of governance whereby we collectively set the rules and participate in decision-making.

My take on commons is engaged with all the three de�initions, but is broader. To me, commons are social systems based on three essential principles. The �irst is common goods which include physical resources, knowledge and skills to be shared; the second is a group of people who are ready to govern these assets and apply the skills collectively. These two elements are brought together by the process of ‘commoning’—doing things together, de�ining objectives and values, making decisions. Commons, therefore, have a radically democratic principle at heart: they are organised bottom-up; all members have a

say on how to relate to one another, how the available resources should be managed, what project to take next and what social or environmental justice issues to tackle. In commons, decisions are generally made by consensus. This form of governance enables them to formulate a common position without creating majority and minority camps. Clearly, this takes time, but diversity within the commons contributes to its resilience and vitality.

What is the difference between public and common? Say, there is a public garden next to my house. What would a common garden be like? The major difference between public and common assets lies in who governs them. A public park or a street are managed by the state which has its own political priorities. For example, not only do the UK laws restrict or forbid foraging in a public park, but the state authorities do not even plant fruit trees there. Taking streets in London as an example of public space, we can observe that the pedestrian movements are restricted because the roads are taken up by car traf�ic, due to the rules de�ined by the authorities. The commons are not governed by the state. They are administered by a community of people who collectively decide what, how and when to produce within a given space. This community can have relatively open boundaries to allow public access to their space. These free access areas then become a space for brief communication and encounters—an introduction to the commons. Free access implies that a space is open to the public, but it does not involve taking care of it or any form of social participation in managing it. That is why every free access space needs to be overseen by a commons responsible for taking care of it. When you talk about communities, what do you mean, exactly? By community I mean a group of people united around a common project, de�ining objectives and values, making decisions and thus developing the commons systems. The ability of communities to be both autonomous and resilient in relation to the pressure from the state and corporate interests is of strategic importance. For instance, radical commons, seeking to produce affordable organic food while sustaining an income for small-scale farmers, have to adapt to the legislation designed to suit the interests of large-scale farmers and agribusiness. What about a society which might be already segregated along class and racial lines? There are wealthy gated communities on the one hand and ghettos on the other. It goes without saying that the assets of these communities, their capacity to manage resources and their political power are incomparable. Correct. But the point of democratic organisation is to start from where you are and, by pooling resources together and collaborating, improve your condition. No matter how grave is the level of class and racial segregation, if

everybody just stays passive, our collective power would be diminishing further. The commons is our chance to organise our struggle, improve our livelihood and take the decision-making power in our hands. Here is a stark example. Back in 2004, I visited a few towns in South America and witnessed some of their anti-privatisation struggles. It was a massive movement! I could observe the difference between those people at the bottom of society who accepted any state authority’s initiative and those who decided to organise and reclaim their resources. The latter had an immediate advantage. Rallying against the privatisation of electricity and the increase in electricity tariffs was a radical mass movement in South America. Simultaneously, there were initiatives for water privatisation and installation of water meters. The movement literally reclaimed access to these resources—it involved electricians and hydraulic engineers who helped the communities to reconnect to electricity and water supplies. And on this basis, they began broader collaborations. I met women who established an orange grove on land irrigated with reclaimed water. In an extremely poor town with 80% unemployment, these women were able to cultivate their �ields and produce vegetables. They rejected racial and class segregation. They developed recycling commons, food commons, cooperative nurseries and so on. Their well-being improved. Conclusion? Start from where you are, pool in the resources, engage different skills, make decisions strategically to empower your case further and move forward. The fundamental question is how do we reclaim the resources and change the system from below. My travels to the Andes in 2010 coincided with the tenth anniversary of Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia. Similar scenario: the government attempted to privatise the water supply infrastructure and was planning to outsource its management to multinationals, who were about to install meters in the poorer districts. The pipes in those areas were constructed by the residents themselves since they did not have access to the public water system—that is the commons. The people organised water associations by neighbourhoods and then established a joint association as a political response to the state. So the private companies’ intentions to put meters on the pipes and wells and ban collection of rainwater sparked a big movement. After four months of protests, the movement was able to force the government to make a U-turn on privatisation policies. This led to the constitutional change recognising communal economy and to electing the �irst indigenous president in South America—Evo Morales. A few years later, however, he began another phase of enclosures and extractivism of raw materials in the name of economic growth due to political pressure. We need to devise strategies for sustaining the efforts of the commons. And this can be achieved by organising more commons: a radically democratic alternative to state- or market-administered societies and a platform for building a movement for broader cooperation.

Until a few years ago, I heard about commons mostly in relation to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, according to which, in a shared resource system, individuals would act sel�ishly in the name of their self-interest. Thus, their behaviour would be contrary to the common good of all users. How does the concept of commons respond to the ‘tragedy of the commons’? ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was the title of the paper by Garrett Hardin, published in 1968 in Science. He explored a hypothetical scenario: a �ield is used by several herdsmen and, obviously, each of them seeks to maximise the number of herd grazing in the pasture. After a while, the piece of land is depleted. But Elinor Ostrom pointed out that such a scenario does not meet the criteria of commons. It lacks the community setting the norms of access, taking decisions in a participatory way and having an awareness of environmental sustainability.‘The tragedy of the commons’ is, in fact, about the detriment of free access outside the commons. Free access to resources must necessarily co-exist with a commons; otherwise, a space—be it land, river, lake or sea—that is used by individuals with no relation to each other and no responsibility towards it would depleted. Can commons thrive in the conditions of the global market? No, the commons cannot thrive in the global market. But neither you or I can thrive in these conditions. Do we need to list all major crises around the globe caused by the activity of global markets? The commons, however, could be a means of breaking away from the reign of such a system. The commons could help us transform our social practices and our relationship with the biosphere towards prioritising dignity over pro�it, living meaningfully over living fast, and being in sync with the environment rather than balancing the books of multinational corporations.

You are currently living in London. What is the progress of commons there? Are there any sprouts of such social systems? London is a global �inancial centre. Its framework, therefore, is the opposite of commons. Expropriating of common resources is happening on many levels there—from installation of benches that preclude homeless people from staying on them to criminalisation of squatting in many empty properties. There are, however, many commons developing on the fringes of the metropolis: community centres, land allotments, community gardens and housing cooperatives, just to name a few. I believe that London can learn from other European cities. A particularly motivating example is the experience of Campi Aperti in Bologna: small scale farmers—who otherwise would have been threatened by the capitalist markets—came together and established a completely different type of market which is embedded within the commons. The Bologna association, which the markets are

part of, decides on the prices and the quality of produce. In most cases, small scale farmers become completely dependent on the global markets and large distributors who buy their produce at a very low price and resell it to supermarkets at a higher price. In a more conventional setting, these farmers would have been marginalised and segregated. Vis-Ă -vis the global market, they would have been the small players, yet, through the commons they provide good organic produce and sell it at a low price, affordable to the residents of poor neighbourhoods. By doing so, they bring together social and environmental justice. First published in Isles Of The Left online magazine.

Massimo De Angelis is Professor of Political Economy and Social Change and co-director of the Centre for Social Justice and Change at University of East London. He has a Degree in Political Sciences (Milan, 1985) and a PhD in Economics (Salth Lake City, 1995). His current research is on Commons as social systems, their design, resilience, sustainability and strategy of development within the context of multimodal crises of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

Commodity, Public Good, or Commons?

Radical insights from the 19th Century Heritage Movement

Alex Kowalski

Heritage as commodity Heritage has become a commodity, and heritage-making is today a well-tried recipe for commodi�ication, pro�it-making, and privatization. It all started in the 1970s, when tourism showed the �irst signs of its turning into the mass industry that it has since become—an engine of economic growth, spatial control, and ecological transformation, the profoundly destructive potential of which has only recently appeared in bold relief, in a decade of low cost �lights, single-use plastic, and universal airbnb-�ication. From our end of global history, heritage and the conservation laws that embody it are legitimately perceived and cast as tools in the kit of “neoliberal governmentality” (Coombe and Weiss 2015) and a major form of “enclosure of human being” (Collins 2011) or at the very least a variety of “club commodities” the use of which is restricted to the relatively privileged. (Benhamou 2012) Such was not always the case, however. Before the symbolic and cultural capital of old stones became easily convertible into economic capital, ancient buildings and old city centers were often obstacles to the commodi�ication of land, economic appreciation, and easy pro�its. Unless the ancient housing stock was some gentry’s family property, it was left for a variety of working class, destitute, migrant, and other craftspeople’s populations to use in exchange for low rents and no comfort. We have forgotten that it was only 60 years since our dear “old towns” and the “ancient centers” of our cities were called “slums,” all pretty much slated for destruction by various brands of modernizers: mayors, planners, or industry moguls, or a combination thereof.

Heritage as public good

Before ‘heritage’ became the commodity we know (that is, in fact, for the largest part of the modern period: roughly between the decades of 1830 and 1970), preservationist groups and the conservation laws they advocated were themselves a thorn in the side of a budding capitalist order. They antagonized liberal defenders of property rights. The preservation movements of the 1960s were oppositional movements based in alliances of local residents at risk of eviction, social activists, liberals, and “friends of old stones” who all got in the way of capitalist development, at least temporarily. Even in the late neoliberal age, heritage mobilizations still often re�lect this kind of alliances against commodi�ication on the ground. (De Cesari and Hertzfeld 2015) Nowhere was the battle more ferocious than in the parliaments of France, England, and the United States when, in the late 19th century, laws protecting ancient buildings and natural sites were proposed by an increasingly powerful, educated, and organized preservationist camp, against the opinion of defenders of property rights and industries’ interests. The con�lict

between the two segments of the bourgeoisie (the socially concerned and the industrial parties) explains that the richest countries were among the latest to adopt conservationist protections for ancient and natural sites and buildings—mostly after 1900, when poorer states like the ones in Greece and the Ottoman empire, Romania and Bulgaria, Tunisia, Egypt, and India, were all innovators or early adopters of international legal standards in matters of conservation, as early as the 1830s. Elaborated collectively by transnational elites and academic communities in the second half of the 19th century on behalf of their respective national governments, laws protecting heritage regulating the destruction or transformation of certain types of buildings and sites. The model was roughly the same everywhere: sites were placed on lists of “national landmarks,” under the watch of state experts and culture bureaucrats. This typically meant that their destruction was prohibited, and that any alteration or modernization had to de vetted by the administration’s experts (historians of architecture, urbanists, ethnographers, architects, depending on countries and cases). Laws on cultural heritage effectively interfered with the smooth circulation of capital. Conservation laws slowed down the pace of commodi�ication in cities, increasing the costs involved in the transformation of a site into a real-estate commodity. Sometimes, especially in the case of national park designations, they removed large portions of territory from the circuits of commodity circulation, amounting to plain and simple de-commodi�ication.

Behind preservation laws lies a broader cultural fact: the collective belief that some works of historical and artistic value are inalienable and that their true value is over and above any exchange value they may acquire on markets. This belief sees heritage sites as a common good to be defended against private property rights, and against their reduction to commodities for exchange and speculation. It is this belief that was expressed and maintained throughout the modern and contemporary period through the concept of ‘heritage’. As Victor Hugo put it in 1834: “The use value of a monument belongs to its owner; its beauty belongs to everyone; it is thus no one’s right to destroy it.” (in Benhamou 2012, p. 34) A heritage good is regulated by a regime that is distinct from the basic regime of common property and commercial law. It is a good that can never be fully appropriated privately, as its designation as heritage means that it is subject de facto to constraints about its use and manipulation. It is also in terms of an exceptional property regime that preservationist and art historian John Ruskin de�ined historic places: they “don’t belong to us. They belong in part to the generations that created them, and in part to future generations.” (in Benhamou 2012, p. 35) The symbolic value of heritage de�ines it as a public good. As such it is commonly owned by an imagined community of past, present, and future members. As the word heritage suggests, it is a bequeathal of which the

present members have custody rather than own it.

Heritage as commons

It is thus important to remember that some contemporaries of the early heritage movement were not content to consider “ancient monuments” (the 19th Century name for heritage) as a form of public property to be regulated and protected through adequate laws and regulations. This was especially the case in 19th Century England, where an avant-garde of artists, historians and thinkers took the theory a notch further, casting ancient sites as a radical incarnation of the commons—that is, of a regime of enjoyment and use that was the precise opposite of commodity consumption.

We often think of the pre-Raphaelites, of the Arts and Crafts movement, of Ruskin, Morris, and others, as theorists of decorative arts and of historic conservation, all particularly interested in medieval architecture. In fact, these craftsmen, artists, writers, and the �lurry of organizations that they created in order to represent their views effectively in an age of great societal transformation (the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Federation of Artists, the Arts and Crafts [Society]) were not interested in ‘monuments’ for monuments’ sake or in just “pioneering modern design” (to paraphrase the title of Nicolaus Pevsner’s 1960 classic). Monuments of art and architecture only mattered for them because of their use and place in social space—past and present. Monuments were appreciated as part of a broader human and natural ecology that gave them their meaning, as creations of a shared culture of the past.

Heritage (art) was for this movement an expression of culture—not in any distinguished sense of the term, but rather in the sense of a set of shared skills and know-how, serving everyday functions and uses. In spite of the anthropological leanings of some of these theorists (Ross 2015), culture for them meant less a Durkheimian kind of consciousness binding the social body together, or as some Hegelian “spirit” of a time or of a people, than a phenomenological principle of interaction and connection between people doing things to and for each other. This principle, crucially, was based in the provision and experience of pleasure; pleasure, it should be added, in, for, and from labor. All of the words we use to talk about heritage, about history, art, beauty, taste, were rede�ined by the Arts and Crafts crowd as functions of a collective enjoyment principle. Per Ruskin: “Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection. He who receives little pleasure from these sources wants taste; he who receives pleasure from any other sources has false or bad taste.” (Cook and Wedderburn 1912, Vol. 3, p.110) Art according to this view is the pleasure of producing beauty for every day, for the quotidian, for common people; it is also, on the user’s side, the pleasure of using beautiful things in everyday life. It was in this sense that, for these “radical

100

Victorians” (Ellis, Barringer, and Osborne 2018), heritage (art) was part of the commons; and that art was to participate in the advent of a more egalitarian and more just society. Theoretically and practically, this theory of art went against the grain of two views (and sociological realities) that were becoming dominant at the time. One of them was the bourgeois understanding of the beautiful and the enjoyable as a costly commodity that can be appropriated in the form of private real estate and decorative bibelots. Making art a function of beauty and beauty a function of pleasure fundamentally democratized art. “Beautiful things are useful to men because they are beautiful, and for the sake of their beauty only; and not to sell, or, in other way, turn into money.” (Ruskin Works, 17, p.4)

Radical Victorians contradicted another view, this second one held more speci�ically among professional artists and craftsmen: the view according to which craft and art were two distinct activities producing different sorts of objects, the second more noble than the former. Only in the modern age did the division of labor separate, in minds and practice, art from craft. (Ellis, Barringer, and Osborne 2018) Only in the modern age did ornamentation become a super�luous quality, one monopolized by privileged classes. In this sense, the pre-Raphaelites’ and other Ruskinian focus on Middle Age culture was far from the nostalgic gimmick to which it has often been reduced. Middle Age art and culture, religious motifs and architecture were imminently respectable, not as a thing of the past or as some foregone aesthetic golden age, but as a total societal, pre-modern counter-model in which art (craft, beauty) served life and life respected art and the labor that produces it. (see e.g. Ball 1931, p. 81-92) The Middle Ages was the age of art before art was separated from craft by industrial capitalism and its division of labor. The radicalism of the early heritage movement rested on and fed back into a strong critique of industrial capitalist society. Some sociological insights may be needed to explain such convergence of art and radical critique in the 19th Century preservation movement. At the core of this movement were craftsmen (like Morris and Ruskin themselves), which is to say professional “decorative artists”, whose skills and inclinations were offended by industrial mass production, and whose work conditions were threatened by it. The political radicalism of some of these professionals can be understood as a reaction against the corporatization of art which, on the one hand, created symbolic boundaries that excluded some of them from the most prestigious and most legitimate practices (art for art excluding craft and decorative arts, especially); and which, on the other, alienated labor in general from its legitimate claim to meaning and enjoyment. This explains the importance of craftsmen, skilled workers, as well as of artists such as Courbet, Corot, and even Manet in the

French Commune experiment. (Ross 2014) They naturally joined a revolution that sought to reclaim the “communal luxury” of beauty and pleasure for all.

The social, cultural, and political history of heritage invites us to consider heritage as a complex, dialectical, contradictory historical reality. Heritage is not, or at least has not always been, a tool in the kit of late-capitalist, neoliberal governance. The ethics, politics and policy of the kind of cultural property that we call heritage are, culturally and historically, moral features de�ining a symbolic regime that, in practice, more often than not, is mobilized by actors to critique the commodi�ication of social space, as well as to effectively decommodify social space through laws and regulations. The notion of heritage can even, on occasion, be part of a radical imagination of the commons, as undivided spaces of beauty produced and managed collectively for everyone’s enjoyment. References -Ball, A. H. R, ed. 1931. Selections from the Prose Work of William Morris. London: Cambridge University Press. -Coombe, Rosemary and Weiss. 2015. “Neoliberalism, Heritage Regimes and Human Rights” in Lynn. -Ellis, Martin, Victoria Barringer, and Thomas Osborne. 2018. Victorian Radicals. From the Pre-Raphaelistes to the Arts and Crafts Movement. American Federation of Arts. -Meskell, ed., Global Heritage: A Reader. Hooboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

-De Cesari, Chiara and Michael Hertzfeld. 2015. “Urban Heritage and Social Movements” in Lynn Meskell, ed., Global Heritage: A Reader. Hooboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. -Collins, John F. 2011. “Culture, Content and the Enclosure of Human Being: UNESCO’s ‘Intangible’ Heritage in the New Millennium,” Radical History Review #109, pp. 121-35. -Benhamou, Françoise. 2012. Economie du Patrimoine Culturel. Paris: La Découverte Editions. -Ross, Kristin. 2015. Communal Luxury. The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso. -Cook, E. T. and Alexander Wedderburn, eds. 1903-1912. The Works of John Ruskin (39 Vol). London: George Allen.

Alexandra Kowalski is Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Central European University, Budapest. She is also teaching faculty and board member in CEU’s new Cultural Heritage program (MA). She holds a PhD and an MA in Sociology (New York University), and an MA in Philosophy and Epistemology of the Social Sciences (Sorbonne-Paris-IV). She was most recently a Fung Fellow at the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princet

Utopian Nights: Commons Debate

The Utopian Night on the Commons provided the opportunity to envisage the sharing of resources as a potential escape-route out of neoliberalism. This series of public debates was an attempt to define the Commons by way of pointing out their practicality and addressing their pitfalls. International and local speakers sat around a table to discuss the idea of the Commons and identify what elements could or could not be implemented in Malta. What are the Commons? What kind of Commons can we aspire to achieve? Who owns the Commons? Who writes the laws? Who can join in? These round-table dialogues were an occasion for academics and activists, both local and international, to share their views regarding three themes: Work, Environment and Heritage, as well as to engage in discussion about the definition of community and the important distinction between public and common. Importantly the question of Common/community was further explored as it is a particularly challenging issue in light of our contemporary predicament marked by the so-called ‘crisis of migration’. Who is in and who is out? How can we, on the one hand, develop technologies for belonging and inclusion that transcend the narrow frames of the racial-culturalist identities produced and perpetuated by the nation-state, while, on the other, avoiding the pitfalls of simplistic liberal cosmopolitanism which, in treating the world in purely abstract and flexible terms, aggrieves situated majorities ?

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Session 1: Universal or dissident commons? Commoning can only be a conflictual process. Sharing common values and rules is as important as allowing dissent. It is thus crucial to discuss the articulation or translation of difference in the common. We must think of ways to create a political process able to interrupt the capitalist valorisation of difference, given that race, and gender as well, structures the entire capitalist system and its functioning. In this perspective considering education as a common good is essential. Guest Speaker: Anna Curcio Local Speakers: Peter Mayo, Tina Auer & Tim Boykett (Time’s up). Chair: Kurt Borg Difference and the Common After rejoicing at the perspective of debating in a non-academic setting, Anna Curcio presented a well-needed critical perspective on the Commons. For Curcio the issue resided in the fact that commons are generally based on a clear distinction between private and public domains thus reproducing the distinction between us and them as well as a whole series of connected oppositions in different domains such as gender or race. Because commoning entailed a certain closure, the Commons could not be used uncritically. Following these first introductory remarks, Curcio went on to discuss how social difference is expressed and articulated in the context of Commons, pointing out that this question of difference or distinction was particularly relevant in our times, given that race, and gender as well, structured the entire capitalist system and its functioning. This capitalistic management of the so-called migration issue for instance demonstrated such problematic articulation of differences. How could the Common be the organisational political process that could interrupt the capitalist valorisation of difference if it was itself based on a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’? Even within existing communes, the articulation of difference was not a smooth process. Curcio remarked that generally difference was dealt either by homogenising and leveling differences, or by remaining stuck in the same hierarchies that they are meant to be fighting. Looking to the so-called migration crisis in Italy, she found in some forms of antiracist struggle that the strong focus on the humanitarian dimension and the recourse to a rhetoric of emergency risk was reproducing the same race hierarchies on which the accumulation and valorisation of capital is based. Fighting ideologies was not sufficient, one should also challenge the material (socio-economic) differences. After all, thinking that Obama, as the first racialised

All photo collages by Charlene Galea 103

president in the white house could by his sheer presence as a black man, change the political system in the US, was naive. For Curcio the crux of the problem was that predominance was given to correct ideologies and not to abolishing the socio-economic forces which are producing inequalities among people being workers or/and migrants Reacting to Curcio’s presentation, Massimo De Angelis joined the discussion to point out the distinction between the Common (singular) and the Commons (plural). He defined the Common as a political program, whilst in the plural, the Commons referred to the reunion of a variety of different circumstances, different backgrounds, being material or social, which translated into a movement towards cohesion. With this remark, De Angelis attempted to avoid the us and them distinction, which Curcio had expertly criticized. Quoting Raymond Williams and Peter Matvejevic he stressed that one should distinguish between the identity of people working and doing things together, from the identity of people being identical. The Commons is a platform where non-identical people would meet to work together contributing to a common good. Occupy Higher Education and Knowledge The second presentation was about the penetration of neoliberal imperatives and languages in the education system in Malta presented by the former head of the faculty of education studies of the University of Malta. Peter Mayo started his presentation with an official printed note given to academics in the University of Malta to guide them when preparing the course description. Mayo pointed out the contradictions in such document which instructed academics to refrain from using verbs such as “to understand”, “to be familiar with”, “to analyse”, “to know”. The administration’s reason for this instruction was that such verbs precluded the quantitative assessment of the student’s achievements. Mayo criticized the use of business language to define academic aims, a quantitative language which is even employed uncritically by academics in the arts and humanities. He wished that instead, the University of Malta would find inspiration in the work of Bonaventure de Santos whose works influenced interesting projects in Central and South America for the free education of the people. He also spoke highly of the Cooperative Institute for Transnational Studies (CITS) a recent international initiative, run by its members (professors) where research, teaching and learning were integrated and dedicated to the cause of radical social transformation. Fast Futures. Dissent and common ground in developing shared imaginations. Lastly Tina Auer and Tim Boykett, two Austrian artists and founders of the organisation Time’s Up, spoke about their project in Malta, Cabinet of the Futures,

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which consists of presenting art in public spaces in order to interact with people. Through this exhibition, they tried to understand what the locals wish for and dream of. For them art can be political and an agent of social change, but they also pointed out that they had been instructed in the ﬁrst stages of their project not to bring politics into their workshop debates, so they focused mainly on environmental issues (considering them as somehow non-political). They organized dozens of workshops in Malta and built a projection of what the future could be proposing technical solutions to reduce environmental impacts and political ones for a more integrative society. To conclude they pointed out a worrying issue for local democracy when saying that most locals in their workshops agreed that they never took part in such public discussions.

Kurt Borg is a PhD candidate at Staffordshire University, working on a thesis analysing the ethics and politics of narrating trauma in institutional contexts, he is a fond specialist of Foucault. Anna Curcio is an Italy based militant scholar in the ﬁeld of critical marxism. Her work is mainly focused on the functiong of race and gender in social composition and struggles. She has published in Italy and internationally. Peter Mayo is Professor in the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at th University of Malta. He is the author of over 22 books including the forthcoming Higher Education in a Globalising Context. Community Engagement and Lifelong Learning: Europe and Beyond, currently in production at Manchester University Press.. Founded in 1996, Time's Up has its principal locus in the Linz harbour of Austria. Its mission is to investigate the ways in which people interact with and explore their physical surroundings as a complete context, discovering, learning and communicating as they do.

Session 2: The commons at work What more competitive than a market place? De Angelis showed that it can be otherwise, that markets can in fact be a place for commons where sharing and joining resources lead towards a post-capitalist society, retracing a continuity with the ancient Greek agora market. So how could we unlock the exclusion of certain people fostered by the liberal democracies in Europe? Can the job market be more inclusive? Taking again common sense aback, we also discussed why claiming economic rights for all migrants, far from introducing unfair competition to the native working classes, is a way to join forces and resist capitalist dispossession together. Organising the commons will be our mantra! Guest Speaker: Massimo De Angelis Local Speakers: Mario Gerada (JRS), Nathalie Grima (LEAP) Chair: Jana Tsoneva Panel moderator Jana Tsoneva introduced the second session of the debate by insisting in the need for utopias as a political tools that propose other imaginaries than the dominant one. She remarked that although politics are supposed to be the art of the possible, it has somehow ruined peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination when most alternatives including environmental ones are not challenging the neo-liberal consensus.

Nowhere but Now Here: Is there such a thing as a market commons? Massimo de Angelis deďŹ ned the Commons as a social system in which objects and means of production were shared, but in which there also must be a type of common wealth put up from the people and not from the state, an association which brings people together though the process of commoning. In the debate he investigated what could be prima facie an oxymoron: the market with the commons. The market is a system of competing agents supplying goods to consumers aiming at minimise costs and maximise utility, while in opposition the commons are systems in which commoners share resources together and collectively design rules of use and access and/or engage in some type of commoning, while creating a power ďŹ elds vis-a-vis the state. His curiosity on this subject arose in 2010 when he visited an indigenous market in Saquisili, 80Km from Quito (Equador). There he noticed some surprising patterns. For example, the prices were the same for the same type of goods and communication was going on continuously among stall vendors and many buyers. It seems like there was no harsh competition between the sellers.

Later on, De Angelis, found a similar market structure in Bologna, in a farmers’ market called Campi Aperto. This, he explained, is part of the food commons,common food spaces based on food sovereignty. In Campi Aperto the farmers and coproducers come together and form an assembly to decide on the price and standard of organic food. The aim of this association is that the farmers get the income that they deserve, and that they are free to decide on the product price themselves, without any interference from large companies. The assembly of consumers and producers (farmers) decided on prices, controlled the agricultural methods used, but also shared ideas, promoted ‘good food’ through recipes, meals etc… A brief overview of absolute and relative poverty which we encounter on the ground in Malta. Speaker Nathalie Grima, also hailing from a sociological background, is a regional development agent in the LEAP Resource Centre. Taking a less hopeful stance, she spoke of the poverty she encounters each day in her job, reminding us that though the Maltese economy may be thriving, poverty still exists. Indeed the Maltese population saw the biggest increase in Europe in 2018 due to its impressive GDP increase. European workers were attracted by the almost null unemployment rate (only 1% of the active population). Amongst the situations she mentioned, the first cause of poverty were health accidents, then the impossibility to fulfill house loans, and the dependance of families on one bread winner. When a drug addict or an convict were not able to support their families, the consequences were often dramatic. She insisted that the maltese family could not be the sole guarantee for individuals and that the state also needs to support this in vulnerable conditions. Interestingly if the cause of absolute poverty did not change, the rise of relative poverty especially in a context of economic boom was worrying. The main cause of relative poverty was found to be the rise of rents. Grima’s first hand experience enable her to share real situations which she encountered in her work, where for example, a whole family depended on the minimum wage obtained by the only working person in the family, making it extremely difficult to find an affordable place. While previously certain areas of Malta were cheaper, Grima commented, there isn’t anymore a clear distinction between places with high and low rent. This situation causes the insecurity of vulnerable individuals: single parents, disabled people, asylum seekers, elderly widows. Consequently young families were moving back with their parents, affecting their children’s educational progress and relationships in general. For Grima the highest priority was to be given to reforming the rent and housing sector to reduce its insecurity. 106

Where is hope? The last speaker for the second session was Mario Gerada, who works with the Jesuit Refugee Service and helps asylum-seekers. He brought attention towards the fact that although the Maltese economy is heavily using foreign labor, we rarely discuss the conditions in which asylum-seekers or refugees work, and their salaries. We rarely consider the individuals doing the work and they are rarely considered as taking an active part in our society. Gerada focused on the language barrier that the asylum-seekers face when trying to integrate themselves within a society. He believes that learning Maltese and English gives a better chance of not ending up with the worst jobs in the industry. Gerada mentioned a particular man who apart from speaking Maltese and English, spoke ﬂuently four African languages; and someone else who had two PhDs but found himself having to start from scratch in Malta, as though all his previous accomplishments amounted to nothing. Taking into account all of this, Gerada concluded by stressing the need to create a space where foreigners’ previously-earned knowledge was recognised and valued, he stressed as well that locals should be open to the possibility of learning from foreigners, and not acting in a superior way towards them.This was the only way to build community. Ana Curcio commented that the space to express oneself outside of the limits of professional curriculum vitae should be guaranteed also to non-migrants. They both agreed that the creation of spaces for everyone to develop a political language through active discussion was essential to overcome sterile differences and inequalities. Gerada concluded: ''So, where is hope? Hope is in the (non-violent) struggle, in dreaming and envisioning a different world order, in learning about the local historical struggles of the working poor, and in ﬁnding ways to struggle together.”

Jana Tsoneva is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at CEU, Budapest. She works in the ﬁelds of political and economic sociology and is a member of the Collective for Social Interventions, Soﬁa. Nathalie Grima (1968) graduated in Masters in Sociology at the University of Malta. Her academic interests include political transnationalism and migration. She is currently working as a regional development agent at the LEAP Northern Harbour, family resource centres in Valletta and Msida.

Massimo De Angelis is Professor of Political Economy and Social Change at the University of East London, and co-director of the Centre for Social Justice and Change. He is also the founder and editor of the web journal The Commoner (www.thecommoner.org). His previous books include The Beginning of History (2007).His current research is on Commons as social systems. In 2017 he published Omnia sunt communia. On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. Mario Gerada works at JRS Malta. He has a Master in Christian Spirituality from the University of Malta and is one of the founding members of Drachma LGBTI and Drachma Parents’ group.

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The Commons and Relationships: Shared Housing and Shared Lives

Session 3 : Urban Commons The privatisation of land has been eating up our public spaces. In Malta this phenomenum is probably more visible than in any other European country. Why are public spaces important? What are common spaces as opposed to public ones? More generally do we know how to co-habit in a space that belongs to all practitioners? Inside and outside walls? Is it possible to couple self-sufﬁciency and environmental practices with an egalitarian utopia? Guest Speaker: Francesca Weber-Newth Local Speakers: Andre Callus, Rachael Scicluna, Martin Galea De Giovanni, Charlene Galea Chair: Paul Clough Urban commons from Berlin — collective appropriations The ﬁrst speaker was Francesca Weber-Newth, a British-German sociologist based in Berlin. In her talk, she focuses on urban commons and what we can learn from Berlin — a city that has experienced aggressive investor speculation, privatisation, but also forms of collective appropriation that can be interpreted as commoning. She illustrated this point with two interesting regeneration projects in Berlin, Princess Gardens and House of Statistics. Weber-Newth also presented the Berlin airport Tempelhof, which is her place of work, and said that she’d like to see how projects like the ones she spoke about can be applied to the airport. The famous airport was built in the 1930s, and its architecture represents well this modernist and yet fascist area. It was closed down in 2008, and 10 years of lack of investment in it were to follow. However it is now protected after a public referendum asked to open it up as a public garden, and for it not to have any other building in its proximity. It is also used as a refugee camp, but Weber-Newth thinks the plans are that as from next year, no refugees will reside there anymore. Weber-Newth explained that she works with a state company, and she would like to try and integrate the Commons into their projects. It’s not a project coming from the people, she further explained, but it’s coming from the institutions, and so, has a lot of political pressure around it. She questioned how we can move from theory to practice and how experienced theorists can use their critical abilities to analyse and create sustainable dialogue.

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Social anthropologist Rachael Scicluna spoke about her post-doctoral study on rental housing in the United Kingdom, focusing on some case studies of small cooperatives. She made it a point that in her talk she wanted to deconstruct what it means to share one’s accommodation. To live in community requires that each person gives his/her input, even if it’s a few hours each month. Co-housing is not without its hardships, and Scicluna mentioned a comment of a woman she had interviewed, who stated that co-housing is no utopia, but rather is like being married to 24 people at the same time. Scicluna also pointed out that there are many decisions to be made before kickstarting a co-housing scheme, and that the process is lengthy, as in the case of the Older Women Co-Housing (OWCH) which took between 25 years. There are also certain downsides to co-housing, such as getting lost in the process and losing sight of one’s actual life. That being said, there are also great economic beneﬁts, which permit one to spend more on creativity: on hobbies, passions, travelling, etc. Community gardens: creating spaces for discussions and networking but also possibly offer a challenge to the dominant food production system The next speaker, Martin Galea De Giovanni, chairperson of Friends of the Earth, asked whether the public is given the space to voice its needs and opinions on the design of public gardens that are often left abandoned or which maintenance is privatized. Galea De Giovanni presented alternative projects to reclaim such gardens, starting with Ġnien Naqra Qatra in Mosta primary school, where a food garden was created for the whole community, the students and the general public alike. De Giovanni also mentioned the natural therapy-based project in Villa Chelsea in Birkirkara, a place for those with mental issues preparing themselves to re-enter society. Friends of the Earth was also working on a resource centre for communities, an urban garden, to be changed into a safe place for bees in Floriana. He observed that Friends of the Earth was trying to introduce people to local farmers so that farming may be better respected in Malta. Local farmers were not collaborating amongst themselves, but that Galea De Giovanni was conﬁdent that competition was subject to change as a new association of farmers had just been set up.

The underlying dynamics in the privatization of public land in Malta within wider political and economic processes.

Paul Clough is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Malta. He has conducted anthropological ﬁeldwork for over thirty years among the Hausa people of West Africa.

Andre Callus, a well-known member of the local NGO Moviment Graffitti, spoke about the history of privatisation of public land in Malta. Callus confessed that he had never thought about the significance of space much, not until he started developing relationships with immigrants in Malta who lived in Marsa. His anthropological studies made him look at public and private spaces critically. He spoke fondly of the open centre in Marsa in the 2000s (managed by the late and regretted Terry Gosden), where immigrants had developed a small community, running their own restaurants and shops. The center was open to the general public and anyone could come and eat at these restaurants. Thus making this space a center of activities open to the outside. This was until the government decided to change it into a very controlled space. Callus made a parallel with the privatisation of Maltese public land from the 1990s up until today, where large stretches of land were handed to large companies, who in turn, converted them to luxurious apartments, promising the continuation of economic activity, such as what happened to Fort Chambray in Gozo and Portomaso in Malta. Callus speculated that this happens because of the mentality of the authorities that if land is not used for administrative reasons, it is being wasted. There is also a practical side to it, he said, which is that large companies are the ones who finance the two main political parties.

Francesca Weber-Newth is a British-German urban sociologist based in Berlin. Currently she is responsible for public participation in the redevelopment of the former Tempelhof Airport.

Visual Presentation: the sense of space in a fragmented coastal town The next local speaker was artist Charlene Galea who started her presentation by showing a very persona and ironical video where she indirectly blamed herself for what’s happening to the Maltese environment. She confessed to being part of the consumeristic society up until she was 28 years old, when she started becoming more conscious of the environment around her. She likes to research her own locality, St Paul’s Bay, by going around the streets, speaking to people and being sensitive to what’s happening. In the interviews she conducted with inhabitants, it was clear that the majority commented negatively on the ever-increasing rental prices, as well as on the rubbish invading public spaces. In spite of this, people were still content to live in their locality because of the proximity with the sea. This led to Galea presenting a composite and highly situationist video of the beach during summer, which led to distinguishing between the sea and the streets. Prinzessinnengärten (Princess Gardens) was founded in Berlin in 2009 as a pilot project with the aim of bringing children, neighbours and experts together to explore alternative vision for the city. Photo: Francesca Weber-Newth

Rachael Scicluna is a social anthropologist. Her research interests are sexuality and gender, alternative family formations, housing, home and the built environment, and policy. Her recent publications are: Shared Housing, Shared Lives: Everyday Experiences Across the Lifecourse (co-authored, 2018, Routledge) and Home and Sexuality: the 'Other' Side of the Kitchen (2017, Palgrave Macmillan). Martin Galea De Giovanni is a long time environmental activist and current chairperson of Friends of the Earth Malta. André Callus has an MA in Anthropology from the University of Malta with a thesis addressing the theme of space, place and migration. He joined Moviment Grafﬁti ﬁfteen years ago. Charlene Galea is currently reading a Masters in Digital Fine Arts in Malta. Her research mostly involves the body and how is it living, and the various spaces in which this is all happening.

Haus der Statistik in Berlin Photo:Francesca Weber-Newth

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Session 4: Building a common Heritage

started from community support to his initiative to respect the cultural, national and environmental heritage, to protect it, give it value and pass it on to later generations. The vision was to motivate people from Żejtun to recognise the need to appreciate and respect the ethnographic and archeological heritage of the village. Today the NGO’s activities are diverse ranging from educational events to petitioning against industrial development. They have succeeded to limit the expansion of an industrial company that would have occupied ﬁelds and a small historical remains. This was a clear exemple that a community could defend positively their common heritage.

Although heritage is increasingly commodified by the state or private companies, reclaiming our right to heritage is an important part of building less gentrified urbanities. Heavily influenced by the Mediterranean cases, we discussed how religion and national identities can play a role in the sharing of commons as well as the exclusion of pre-formated « others". Guest Speaker: Alexandra Kowalski and Manoel Penicaud Local Speakers: Ruben Abela, Ibtisam Sadegh Chair: Elise Billiard

Sharing Sacred Spaces And Interreligious Hospitality French anthropologist Manöel Pénicaud discussed whether religious places could also be places of inclusion. With numerous examples he showed that even in a monotheistic world, religious places could welcome different practices, especially in the Mediterranean, where it is common for people of different beliefs to frequent the same places. With case-studies taken from Israel, Turkey or Cyprus, Pénicaud reminded us that the Mediterranean is a place of both inclusion and division although that distinct religions have a lot in common. Prophets, rituals and architecture could be a place for communion as well as, a place for distinction. Here the religious commons were at once uniting and dividing. Several such examples shown hospitable places that seemed to act as a utopias, peaceful places outside of the earthly religious wars. He spoke fondly of a Rabbi in Chania (Crete) who had gone to a Catholic school but chosen to convert to Judaism. When, in 1999, he returned to the island, he opened a synagogue for the Judaic community, but where all religions were allowed in, be they Christians, Orthodox, Muslims etc. In this synagogue, glimpses of other religious traditions, such as Buddhism could be seen. His video entitled ‘the last rabbi of Crete' (2017) illustrated this point. For the anthropologist, such places provided the necessary space of encounter for different religious communities to cohabit.

Enclosure or Commons? “Heritage” in History, Theory, and Political Practice. The ﬁrst speaker was Alexandra Kowalski, who lectures in sociology and social anthropology at the CEU in Budapest and Vienna. She spoke of her wish for the renewal of heritage. The common theory about heritage, she said, is that it is the bourgeoisie’s nostalgia, which in the contemporary era, became the government’s weapon in controlling space. However Kowalski recounted the heritage movement, particularly vivid in the United Kingdom between 1873 and 1914. During this time, there were issues with accessing space in the city. This was when activism began to ﬂourish, due to people wanting to reclaim green spaces in the cities, defending beauty and heritage considered as beautiful. This theory of British conservation gave value not only to the object, but also to the person who created the object. Therefore, this movement fell into the bourgeoisie stratum of society, with socialists protagonists such as William Morris and John Ruskin. Kowalski concluded by saying that utopia makes sense if the real present conditions are taken into consideration, if community is renewed. We have misinterpreted utopia as a fantastic nostalgia, and in this interpretation, we have misunderstood William Morris. The reality is, Kowalski said, that the socialists around him were thinking of future communities.

X’hinu Aslek? What are your roots? Ibtisam Sadegh was the last speaker of the debate. Sadegh wanted to generate discussion on the articulation of identities in an increasingly open Maltese society where minority identities came to challenge the rhetoric of ‘Malta: a Roman Catholic Country.’ She spoke of her personal experience as muslim Maltese woman. She recalled what she was recurrently asked by the Moroccan guards at the

The success of a grassroot NGO protecting common heritage in a Maltese locality Following Kowalski, it was local architect Ruben Abela’s turn, a manager of Heritage Malta. His presentation focused on an NGO he founded, named Wirt iż-Żejtun, which promotes the heritage of the Maltese village Żejtun. He explained how the NGO 111

infamous Moroccan-Spanish border when she was attempting to cross the frontier to set foot on the contested Spanish enclave, Ceuta. ‘X’hinu Aslek? What are your roots?’. Across the streets of Gibraltar, and the peripherals of ‘fortress Europe,’ questions such as ‘who am I?’, ‘what religion am I?’ and ‘what are my roots?’ were part of her daily interactions with Ceutans, Moroccans and other residents of the enclave. Throughout the 14 months of fieldwork, Ceuta’s heterogeneous population presented itself through the concept of convivencia to explain the environment of four cultures - four religious communities that of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus living relatively peaceful together within the enclave. The political discourse of convivencia, today permeates the various sectors of Ceuta’s political, economic and social life. It is mobilized by Ceutans to bridge ethno-religious differences through the overarching, regional (as Ceutans) and national (as Spanish), identity. Across the Mediterranean sea discussions on my national and religious identity were often suppressed and limited. Growing up in Malta I learnt from a young age the necessity for me to strategize in my daily life in an attempt to emphasize my Maltese-ness going beyond my Arabic name and Muslim background. Based on personal reflections as a Maltese Muslim, in my talk I aim to generate discussion on future Malta being an open, common space for minority identities that do not quite fit in the rhetoric of ‘Malta is a Roman Catholic Country’ Raisa Galea intervened in the audience to insist on the arbitrariness of national or religious identities. The danger was not only in the non-acceptance of alterity within the Maltese context but also in the crystallization of identities as if there were natural and fixed.

Alexandra Kowalski is Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Central European University, Budapest.. Ruben Abela is a manager at Heritage Malta where he was responsible the conservation and restoration of Fort St Angelo, during which he served as Project Leader. Ibtisam Sadegh is a PhD researcher in the ERC project hosted at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently writing an ethnographic dissertation on interfaith couples in Ceuta. Manoël Pénicaud is a French anthropologist. He is a specialist of pilgrimages, shared holy places, interreligious dialogue and Abrahamic hospitality.

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Performance

Save the peace

Turkish artist Menekse Samanci presented her interactive installation entitled 'Save the Peace'. Samanci words resonates with the actual Kurdish context. She repeats that “making peace is more difﬁcult than making war. There are always too much reasons for war and too much obstacles for peace”. But she concluded with a more utopian objective: "true peace will come not only when wars will end but also when we will have imagined how to cohabite together peacefully. In this work I announce the First World Peace, then I try to save it”. She did so by inviting the audience to interact and distract and even destroy her pastry installation. Every time a letter is eaten, Samanci patiently replaces it with a new one.

Samancı’s objects do not last. They are not archives for a distant future, they are not relics of corpses nor evidence for legal cases. On the contrary, their presence is ephemeral and as such they cannot erase the presence of the people and stories they represent. Samancı’s artefacts are not to be looked at from a distance, but they are to be broken into crumbs, eaten with satisfaction, incorporated in the body of strangers or any visitors of her exhibition. They participate to the transmutation that governs life.

Samancı used an old popular recipe of bread called Çörek, an everyday delicacy that workers eat with tea during their break, a festival pastry that is prepared by women for the poor. Çörek is the matter of life in Samancı’s Kurdish hometown Dyarbakan which has known many internal waves of migration and integration of refugees, including Syrians, till today. One is also reminded of the vast symbolism of bread across religions and societies. In all its varied shapes, bread is the food, the ﬂesh, the life. The food shared with one’s ‘com-panion’ (literally, the one with whom we share our loaf of bread). The bread exhibited here are commensality invitations to share a meal and become companions.

Is-Siġġu

The installation Is-Siġġu by Charlene Galea consisted of various chairs composing the piece as if they had been abandoned in the streets amongst other junk thrown out by the locals. The chair is rusty, completely broken or slightly damaged. The chair sees us spending more time indoors, disconnecting from the life outside and escaping into individual worlds. Can the chair instead bring us back together, us who have become strangers to one another?

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Workshops

Banners forever

Banners are essential within Maltese society. From clubs to parishes, everyone has got to have their banner or flag! A Utopian community could therefore not exist without its own. This is why we have organised workshops involving individuals from a variety of birth places to define what we would wish for our utopian society. Collective making is the basis of communing. Listening to each other’s thoughts and hopes, finding together the right word, the perfect colour, the sharing of skills and good spirit. The banners are displayed around the round tables to dress the walls with utopian claims.

Smartphone ﬁlms from afar

Photo by Aya Omer (Cairo).

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“The inspiration for this project,” explains Elise Billiard, came when a friend was visiting her family in Cairo and Khartoum and started sending me snippets of her life filmed with her smartphone, speaking to me through the same type of device through which I could hear her funny and spontaneous descriptions of her street, the taxis, the camels, the parties . . . Bored and annoyed by the carefully edited TV documentaries and news bulletins that pretend to show the world, I felt a sudden fresh appeal for my friend’s smartphone films. I wanted to see more of her world, to ask her a thousand questions about Khartoum, as I felt as though I was with her as she drove in the car to the airport, or when she went window-shopping in Cairo, or as she got stuck in Dubai Airport . . . I spoke about this at the workshop and the participants quickly roped in their friends to send visual snippets of their own respective worlds. Through the connexions spanning our respective networks of friends, we tried to remap a totally different view of the world. Kenneth Scicluna stepped in to design an ingenuous rendering of these films in the spirit of communing. He set up a game in which two users had to choose together the two key words that would automatically show one of the dozens of videos (sent by friends of friends).

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Exhibition

Inside the Border Elise Billiard Alberto Favaro Inside the border is a collective installation revealing the fragmentation of our common spaces. Looking at maritime borders as well as urban borders, the endless bureaucratic efforts to draw lines between people become evident. Borders are getting less and less permeable and are increasing their thickness, sometimes incorporating entire states or seas within them. We get trapped within borders, either willingly or by force. We forget ourselves in the fantasy worlds of commodiďŹ ed leisure. We seek refuge in golden gated communities. But panoptic prisons and detentions camps equally belong to the contemporary management of space. Even the sea is a fragmented space, and a boat can be forbidden to reach any close port of refuge. Sadly our dreams have been seduced by the endless possibilities which enclosure provides to control people and commodities alike. We live in a world where the rise of corporate heterotopias has replaced the hospitable utopia of the 19th century. What does it say about us? Can we imagine another world? This installation was initially designed for the Temporary Museum of the Utopian Nights Festival.

In collaboration with the Mahalla Festival Fortress Builders, Valletta November 2018

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Welcome to Heterotopia We live in a fragmented world, trapped in between liminal spaces and camp sites. When looking at space today the main question should be about who is entitled to design and regulate life in the enclaves in which we live. Can we re-imagine collective heterotopias as opposed to private ones? Heterotopias are deďŹ ned by Michel Foucault as enclaves built in opposition to their surroundings, all societies have and have had such spatial exceptions. As exceptions they reveal by contrast the kind of social relations at work in their time. He described XIX century brothels as heterotopias because for men they were spaces of sexual freedom in a world where sex was regulated within the limits of marriage. Gardens of eden have been for centuries the ultimate aesthetic heterotopia; the Persian and Arabic civilisations imagined intricate geometrical designs to perfect nature, while insuring an abundance of water and fragrant plants. Today Disneyland and shopping malls have replaced the romantic arcadias of natural abundance. What does it reveal about our social imagination? The XX century brought different heterotopias. Colonies, which are till today forcibly occupying territories, exploiting all human and natural ressources, while establishing a rational order in opposition to what is perceived as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;wildâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. They have both capitalist and national agendas, like mining concessions in Belgian Congo or Israeli settlements in Palestine. In the USA, the puritan colonies (less economically driven but obsessed with control) re-invent the autonomous garden-city and impose strict rules considered to be the only way to achieve earthly paradise. Eyal Wiseman and Lieven de Cauter remind us that such enclaves cannot exist without their exclusive networks. Walls and fences need check-points and highways. These connections continue to cut through social and natural spaces, preventing people and animals from crossing them. The ultimate heterotopia might be the airport or the highway service stations.

Employee home with Garden at Belterra Rubber Plantation, Brazil ca. 1939 - thehenryford.org

Road Construction, Fordlandia Brazil ca. 1932 - thehenryford.org

Fordlandia Fordlandia is called today a Paraiso Perdido in Brazil. It was an industrial and neo-colonial utopia. It epitomized the heterotopia of the early XX century, privately owned and productive. The famous industrialist Henry Ford built it in order to produce cheap rubber needed for his car-factories to compete with the British Rubber. However his efforts were not only towards economic proﬁts but also aimed to bring civilisation to land and people. Fors thought that the Puritan settlers who had built America had failed in their efforts to build ideal cities away from the old Europe. He therefore hoped to build a modern, rationally regulated and industrial city in the heart of the Brazilian jungle, away from America. Ford wanted to tame the amazonian jungle, buying hundred of acres of wild land and burning it down to give place to a giant rubber plantation and a small town called after him. Ford endeavored to transform the jungle into a proﬁtable ressource and to educate the Brazilian workers to become modern salary men. Ford considered it a « work of civilisation ». Nothing else would explain the lavish expenditure of money; probably ten millions dollars, in laying the foundation of what is evidently planned to become a city of 2 or 3 hundred thousands inhabitants. The model of the perfect American town, with its central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospital for all, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, gold courses and of course Model T car, rolling down the paved streets. From food diet to leisure activities, the lives of the Brazilian workers were strictly following Ford’s view of the ideal society. A city he owned but in whichhe never went. Fordlandia was an economic failure and it never exported rubber.

Aerial View, Fordlandia Brazil ca. 1933 - thehenryford.org Seed Beds being Prepared at Fordlandia Brazil ca. 1929 - thehenryford.org

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La Cité du Fleuve At the turn of the XX century, the Congo (RDC) became the private property of a single man, King Leopold II of Belgium. In this perspective it was a private heterotopia where all human activities and natural ressources were controlled for the proﬁt of one man. This one-man’s ownership did not last long (from 1885 to 1908) and the Congo soon became a colony of the Belgian State giving out mining concessions to European investors. The song Ebale Ya Congo tells us another story about the country. Interpreted by many Congolese singers, (Franco and the T. P. O. K. Jazz, Papa Wemba, Lutumba Simaro...) it has been a central melody for decades, at the heart of Congolese collective memory and attachement to their river from both sides. The river indeed has come to separate the united kingdom of the Congo people into two colonies ‘discovered’ by explorers working for two distinct colonial powers: Savorgnan de Brazza (France) and Henry Morton Stanley (UK). The lyrics remind us what the Congo (as country and river) actually is for the inhabitants living close by. The ﬁrst and repeated words « Ebale ya Congo ezali lopango te ezali nzela » which are known by all Congolese, can be translated as : « the Congo river is not the property of an individual, but a passage for everyone » or alternatively “The Congo river is not a plot of land, it is an avenue”.

to be the soundtrack of the promotional video for his real-estate heterotopia, La Cité du Fleuve (see TV screen here). La Cité du Fleuve is described as «an oasis of tranquility» although it is an artiﬁcial island reclaimed on the river and not in an arid desert. But the term ‘oasis’ refers to its heterotopian aspect in opposition to Congo’s giant capital city, Kinshasa, close to which it is rising. Known for its black economy and fragile peace, the megapolis is sold as a ‘beacon of commerce’ not mentioning that it is characterized by an infrastructure of failure where tap-water, electricity, roads or petrol are difﬁcult to secure on a daily basis (Filip De Boeck). Like any gated community, La Cité du Fleuve asks its inhabitants to follow strict rules arbitrarily imposed by the corporation Hawkwood Properties Congo led by French-Lebanese developper Robert Choudury. Its real-estate value is achieved through this anti-democratic code of behaviour.

Ironically this is the song that a developer has chosen

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Fort Chambray

Screenshots from the video ‘Inside the Border’ by Elise Billiard https://www.facebook.com/utopiannights/videos/335384953761430/

Fort Chambray represents heterotopia’s evolution across time. Originally built as a fortress to protect the Gozitan inhabitants living around, it became, centuries later, yet another palm-tree-and-swimming-pool-gated-community for the very few. A city built “by gentlemen for gentlemen”. Its name comes from a French knight, Jacques de Chambray (1687-1756) who decided, once retired, to invest a large part of the wealth he had accumulated as a buccaneer into this gigantic project. Designed as a fortress protecting Gozo’s main harbour, it was also built to attract commercial activity and new residents on Gozo. Similarly to Forlandia, the project was however never to live up to its plan. It never thrived in the hustle and bustle of a town, but hosted only armed men from the knights of Saint John, a napoleonic garnison and finally a few British soldiers occupying the barracks. Interestingly though in the XX century the fort was used as an institution isolating outcasts. It was a mental institution and a military hospital with a special section for those afflicted with Leprosy thus turning upside down the original purpose of a public place of refuge and activity for the general population of Gozo. After independence the Maltese government allocated the fort for tourism purposes. It is only recently that the hospitality and real estate industry turned it into a gated community. This public land was leased to real-estate developers who transformed it into a commodified golden prison with magical sea views.

Within Conﬁned Borders Alberto Favaro

Nothing seems a better example of undifferentiated space than the sea, usually considered the end of our inhabited reality, a stretch of space free from limits and divisions. Instead, there are many jurisdictional borders dividing water form water within a complex normative parceling of the sea, albeit invisible on its surface, and which define ownership and uses. The map represented here was constructed from overlapping some of these boundaries, interwoven and almost never matching, drawing the complex jurisdictional geography of the Mediterranean Sea. Foucault defined boats as “heterotopia par excellence”, and indeed they are floating spaces that have to move across this intricate scenery. The recent misadventures of NGO ships showed how tangible this partition of the sea is. These floating jails, where the access to space and time is restricted, are forced to stop at high sea or move between borders at the margins of forbidden territorial waters. NGO vessels thus suggest the existence of special heterotopias (perhaps ‘super-heterotopias’). In fact these are spaces where several heterotopias, such as the boat, the jail and the border space, co-exist concurrently.

The Boat “Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a ﬂoating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the inﬁnity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (…), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates”. Of Other Spaces Michel Foucault (1984) 1986.

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“Sea Borders”

Maps used to elaborate Alberto Favaro’s map “Sea Borders”

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March for a Common Memory Since 2015, the corpses of 20 people who died at sea, traveling in a boat carrying about 600 people attempting to reach Europe, are buried in a common grave in Adoloratta cemetery. We believe that this tragedy is part of the Maltese history and should be recognized by the state as such. Till this day, no plaque identiﬁes this grave. The corpses have not been identiﬁed and to our knowledge no attempt to do so have been made by the Maltese authorities. We believe that these deaths at sea are not an external accident, and the primary objective of this march is to reclaim a history that is ours. History and heritage are political narratives that are too often putting aside the tragedies of the’undesirables’. We want a more inclusive society, and therefore we want a society that responsibly looks at its past. These deaths happened in our seas, they are therefore part of Maltese history.

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Closing Party DJ Coinx

The encyclopedic musical knowledge of DJ Coinx has sealed the success of his ten year long show Coinxomatik Sound Electronic on the waves of a French campus radio. The eclecticism of his mix is inspired by the likes of Paul Kalkbrenner, Julian Jeweil, Parov Stelar and Adam Beyer. To close the Utopian Nightst the sounds of the mix fused traditional African music with electronics without forgetting the now well-established Electro-tarab.

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Credits Photography

Thanks to the most Utopian Team:

Displacement: Jacob Sammut

Andrea Pullicino Sarah Mallia Sarah Farrugia Janelle Borg Jeremy Mangion

Inside the Border: Alessandro Rivera Magos Francesca Cogni André Désiré Loutsono, (Kizenguélé) Commons: Antoine Coignard Photo collages by Charlene Galea

as well as: The Sudanese Community Centre (Hamrun) Tal-Kultura Volunteers Karl of Kultura News The Isles of the Left The Local Councils of Floriana, Mdina and Sta. Lucia

A special thanks to: The Maltese Embassy in Rome for asisting in bringing artist Jelili Atiku to Malta, Dominique Malaquais, Kathrin Schödel, Jana Tsoneva.

CAUR Centre for Applied Utopian Research

UTOPIANNIGHTS https://www.facebook.com/utopiannights

CAUR Centre for Applied Utopian Research

UTOPIANNIGHTS