1 - Proposal
Jeaux Sans Frontières JFS #2 at Sound Development city summer expedition
2007 was the year of the publication of Jogos Sem Fronteiras #1(JSF#1) on the camps of europe. Its main subjects were south-north migrations and „the others“ produced by the mechanisms of exclusion represented by the Schengen borders. In 2007, when Jogos Sem Fronteiras #1 was produced, the global financial crisis was just starting. Today, more than five years later, this crisis has evolved into a deep crisis of representational democracy and new borders seem to be born inside Europe and even inside each country.
2011 was the year of the occupations of the squares (OWS in the US, Plaza del Sol in Spain, Rossio in Lisbon) and we think that that which gave rise to those occupations was already going on and is not finished yet- at the contrary. We are thinking of a multiplicity of practices of resistance that can be materialized in bodies, songs, gestures, actions, videos, or in the everyday work of actual seminal places (websites, associations, galleries, cafés), practices that all of a sudden have joined or come together in another configuration, the space of the square, a space that wouldn’t be possible with the intensity it achieved if these previous practices weren’t already there, at work.
As they were already there, they also continue in multiple forms in many places and molecular aggregations.
In our opinion it is imperative to not look at recent events in a epiphenomenal way, focusing exclusively on the squares themselves, as if these events were “irrational”, came out of nowhere and went back to noplace (the very name “Arab Spring” seems to imply that the Spring is outside the historical time). We should instead try to understand them in continuity, alongside a myriad of encounters, practices, actions – that we call ’zones of resistance and practices of invention’. That’s why we have asked artists, theoreticians and activists to contribute to our magazine and to use their own languages to address these issues.
With Jeaux Sans Frontières #2 (JFS #2 ) we intend to point out the singularity of local practices, the interwovenness of struggles in a globalized world, and to emphasize the continuity between what was going on before 2011 and what is going on now. The magazine will therefore have a local focus regrouping contributions from one city plus a part with contributions from different countries such as Morocco, USA, Italy, Switzerland etc. The magazine as a physical object will be made to travel, to bring those experiences from one place to another and to discuss them.