Art | Artivism

Ctrl-i refuses the Macba*

 The MacBa, museum of contemporary precariousness of Barcelona, doesn't need
more words, it needs actions.

 Today, our first action is to make public our refusal to give a "talk"
there. Because there is nothing you can say about precariousness in that
Macdonald's of culture, that won't turn into "flatus vocis", an empty voice,
asthmatic fart, mental flatulence. As they say, *talking about
precariousness in the McBa is like a nutrition seminar at MacDonald's. *

 The MacBa doesn't need more words, it needs actions. The Ctrl-i girls turn
down the *Faculty of Radical Aesthetics*' invitation to participate in a
workshop about "the new relationality" at the Museum of contemporary Art of
Barcelona (MacBa).

We were invited to give a talk about our critical work dealing with
precariousness and culture in the new metropolis: work which is always
incipient and exploratory, which wishes to examine the multiple relations
and ramifications which said problems unravel. Work which began experiencing
firsthand the precariousness in the institutional cultural space of
Barcelona (1), and continues both in opposing the total precarization
offensive launched by the institution (with special mention for the Macba),
as well as in political practices that challenge the ongoing threat of
expulsion and attempted criminalization of the city's dissident cultural
spaces sufficiently autonomous to strike wherever and whenever they please.

The Macba doesn't need more words, it needs a kick in the face. As Mr.
Ribalta rightly says, the institution does not neutralize the manifestations
that currently criticize order and resist power (see Brumaria nº5, p.49).
That, ironically, is so true. The institution does not neutralize but rather
participates in the political struggle. Today, the entire MacBa is completely
on the side opposed to the active critical practices in Barcelona, on the
side of Power which tries to make our lives precarious, right there with the
worst of them. - Though on one count we've got to hand it to the museum,
that in times like these, with so much confusion and ambivalence, they have
managed such clarity of position.

 Since "las Agencias" were kicked out, nothing really political, meaning
active and transformational, has happened in the MacBa. On the contrary, it
has only offered space to representation as the flipside of the
precariousness which expands from the museum´s very center.

 According to our analysis, there are two vectorial lines which unfold the
range of problems surrounding precariousness and culture, and the MacBa is
the very model of both.

_ on the one hand, politics of economic, social and cultural apartheid: the
museum as a driving force of the political segregation of urban space:
internal borders are raised for migrants, *precariates*, and the entire
heterogeny raised by those intertwined terms. Internal borders that "define
ones as respectable citizens, and invisibalize others as criminalized
difference" (2). The museum as a reference point for the check points of *
civility,* a field of experimentation for the new, neofascist civic norm, a
norm which is a desperate and aberrant attempt to subject to an
administrative and police regime everything that constantly escapes the
attempted normalization dictated from above (from those who a *Barcelona -
the world's best store*). The museum impelling the gentrification
transforming the center of the city into the cultural motor of 1) the real
estate business, 2) the city-company (in the business of slot-machine
culture); 3) kicking out low rent and the most vulnerable collectives as a
direct consequence. Meaning, "get out of your house!", you won't be able to
pay for housing within 100 km of the center, uprooted from whatever your
social fabric was, because you are bad for business with your practices and
images, habits and networks, they make the cultural territory yield less
then what it could. The common sense of Capital finds no answer within the
museum, but for the empty echo of what was once said, while on all other
fronts the Macba continues being the driving force of precariousness,
gentrification, neofascism, real estate violence and urbanistic violence: a
driving force of politics of economic, social and cultural apartheid.

 _ On the other hand, the Fast Culture model: "The rainbow may have many
colours, but multicultural culture has only one: the colour of money." (3),
as the map of *What's Forum really about *proclaimes, pointing a finger at
the MacBa and other precariousness generating spaces.

 This fast culture model takes the form of a company and the model of
maximizing profit as its raison d'etre. In first place, cultural and
artistic production: we won't go into the capitalization of art, which might
take us a long way, but as a cultural producer wishing to integrate critical
tendencies, the museum offers precariousness to its collaborators, both in
the economic conditions and in the imposition of draconian regimes of
intellectual property on what they produce. It seeks contact with
individuals rather then collectives, which is how, in the words of Guy
Debord, the critical tendencies "ripped away from the collective that could
sustain them" are neutralized and trivialized. Once that active dimension is
canceled, the whole weight is shifted to representation, subjecting
processes to problems of media redundancy and message overload.

 In second place, the work force, where the museum seeks, again, to maximize
profit. The culture of money, the money of culture, intermediate companies
appear and take half the wages of the museum workers: the
subcontracting/outsourcing model, expands through the cultural universe. Its
consequences – the continuous desarticulation of the workplace as a place of
political conflict and political control over a group of workers. One
museum, four sub-companies. And its effects: enforced maximum mobility,
imposed misery wages, menacing temporariness, internal distrust and mutual
ignorance: Barcelona's museum of contemporary precariousness.

 And we conclude. If the museum is all of this, it would be better if it
didn't pretend to be something else. If it wants to put into representation
what a moment ago was action (same, p.49, another voice) then it shouldn't
pretend to make politics, action, cooperation, challenge, struggle. The
politics we should be practicing are against the Macba: we should attack it,
interrupt it, deconstruct it, with the idea of transforming or destroying
it. The Macba is no space for enunciation, it is the driving force of
precarization and gentrification, of economic, social and cultural
apartheid. Many years ago Guy Debord explained in the "Report on the
Construction of Situations" what happens in this museum of precariousness
"The ruling ideology sees to it that subversive discoveries are trivialized
and sterilized, after which they can be safely spectacularized. It even
manages to make use of subversive individuals" and I quote from memory "by
falsifying their works after their death, or, while they are still alive, by
taking advantage of the general ideological confusion and drugging them with
one or another of the many mystiques at their disposal." [here he is maybe
he goes too far, about truth and illusion, actor and spectator, and yet...]

 And yet, the cultural institution continues to integrate critical
tendencies in this way: critical tendencies "are cut off from the segments
of society that could support them," accepting people generally on an
individual basis, "on the condition that they accept various renunciations"

 The Macba is our political enemy. In Barcelona the global civil war for
culture continues. In this city there are pirates. Because there is nothing
left to liberate, only things to operate on, to manhandle, to hack. To
combat precariousness, I hack my instinct.

 I make ends meet because my life has no price. I practice piracy.

 "Weakness had, as it ever does, taken refuge in the wonderful; it believed
the enemy was overcome if, in its imagination, it hocus-pocused him away;"
(4) words don't transform things magically, so this text, being a "talk",
contains its own failure. But this failure is inseparably connected to its
expansion as a refusal.

 This city is not a ripe cinnamon-apple which will fall from the tree by
itself. It must be ripped from the branch.

 Ctrl-i

(1) An extreme example: two of us used to work in information and guided
visits in the Macba, until we were kicked out, in a process of work related
mobbing/bullying, for publicly presenting our precarious situation in the
museum in a "talk" about precariousness (held) in the museum (2004). But a
similar extreme precarious situation exists in the Tapies museum, Miro
museum, Picasso museum, TNC, UB, UAB etc...

*(2) http://chabolear.blogspot.com* <http://chabolear.blogspot.com/>

*(3) http://www.sindominio.net/mapas* <http://www.sindominio.net/mapas>

(4) Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx

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