#1 | #2 | IFFR#33 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 Munchen | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10 The Interviews | #11 | #12 Berlin | #13 Dresden | #14 | #15 | #16 Copenhagen | #17 IFFR | #18 Riga | #19 Conceptual Art | #20 The Swiss Issue | #21 Aktie! | #22 Rotterdam Art Map 1.0 | #23 Bruxelles | #24 Maasvlakte 2 | #25 Douala | #26 Rotterdam Art Map 2.0 | #27 Tbilisi | #28 Budget Cuts NL | #29 Italian Issue | #Side by Side | #30 Rotterdam Art Map 3.0 | #31 It’s Playtime | #32 Rennes Free Edition | #33 Rotterdam Art Map 4.0 | #34 Arnhem Art Map | #35 Existentialism | #36 Pascal Gielen | #37 The Swiss Issue revisited | #38 What Life Could Be | #39 The Void | #40 Over ziek zijn/On Being Ill | #41 Side by Side (2020-2021) | #42 Shelter for Daydreams | Colofon

FGA#16-domestic edition: Editorial / Walking with Nis Rømer / Cultural Canon / Mjølnerparken / Freedom: Track 2 / Tramps like us / email from Jesper Fabricius / Pist Protta / Airplay Street Gallery / Freedomism / Freestyling Christiania / Mad as Hell / Note / Colophon

Editorial (domestic edition)
Denmark for a Dutch person is not really a that strange a country, more of a confrontational mirror. Except that you can’t understand a word people say. People do seem to do more to counter the (cultural) political reality.
On 6 January we went to Cph for 3 days . Ungdomshuset was still there. When we returned from 7 to 11 March, it had already been demolished and cleared away. Burned tarmac, boarded up shops and slogans on the walls made it clear that this was war: “You cannot kill us, because we’re part of you”. One of the Dutch newspapers wrote: “In Copenhagen there was initially sympathy for the youth. But this has changed in the last few days.” We saw a different picture: on Saturday we took part in a demonstration alongside punks, grandmothers and people with children. There are 850 people in prison. We heard little talk of art these days and much about the city.
Overgaden was 21 years old and celebrated the fact while we were there: 21 years 21 days. It also marked the transition from an artist-run to a curator-led organisation, a change that is taking place in 2 other exhibition venues: Charlottenborg and Den Frie. Meanwhile young Danish painters are earning lots of money in the gleaming new galleries in Valby. Many of them have launched themselves on the market before graduating from art school.
Above our bed in the B&B in Christianshavn hangs a reproduction of a painting of a Brazilian female slave by the Dutch painter Albert Eckhout. Eckhout and Zacharias Wagner were seventeenth-century artists in the service of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. He hired them during his 7-year rule in Brazil to produce illustrations of the New World. We did not know that Copenhagen’s Nationalmuseum has 24 paintings by Eckhout. Maurice gave the paintings to Frederik III, King of Denmark.
This issue was made at the invitation by Katarina Stenbeck and Johanne Loegstrup of Publik for the project: How do you belong? With contributions by: Kristina Ask, Michael Baers, Søren Berner, Matilde Digmann, Jesper Fabricius, Christian Falsnaes, Nicoline van Harskamp, Lise Harlev, Niels Henriksen, Jakob Jakobsen, Åse Eg Jørgensen, Iben Krause, Maibritt Pederson, Nis Rømer, Thibaut de Ruyter, Judith Schwarzbart, Erik Steffensen.

Do not use my culture to wage your war!
Cultural Canon

Why at the beginning of the twenty-first century is it again so important to construct a national culture? And are we at risk of losing the autonomy we have won from the Church, royalty and the Nation State? Such questions seem particularly urgent following the aftermath of the publication of The Danish Cultural Canon in January 2006.
While the canon discussion in the English-speaking and academic contexts has been ongoing since the publication of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon in 1994, it took a national canon to focus and escalate the discussion in Denmark. And it seems, in the end, that the discussion revolves less around who and what should be represented, than what function the canon plays within the current cultural and political context. Harold Bloom’s words that the canon exists “in order to impose limits, to set a standard of measurement that is anything but political or moral” was echoed in the statement by the chairman of the Danish Ministry of Culture’s visual arts committee, Hein Heisen, in which he stressed the timeless and apolitical nature of the selection of the Danish canon.
It is, however, hard not to read this entire project in relation to current politics and to read the selection of art works as supporting a specific agenda. According to the Minister of Culture, we are engaged in a cultural war “about the confrontation we feel when immigrants from Muslim countries refuse to acknowledge Danish culture and European norms. In the middle of our country – our own country – a parallel society is being developed where minorities are practicing their medieval norms and undemocratic ways of thinking. This we cannot accept”.
In his article in the Finish magazine Framework the Danish critic Simon Sheikh points at the current culturalisation of politics in Denmark. This is, of course, not a uniquely Danish phenomenon – it appears in many European political contexts – but in Denmark it seeks a specific essentialist notion of ‘Danishness’. “Both the political left and right in Denmark have adopted a language of minoritarian identity politics, claiming Danishness as a particular cultural position under threat in a globalised world, necessitating protectionist cultural policies and a fixed rather than permeable national border.”
It is hard to ignore the function of the canon as a tool in the construction of this hegemonic Danishness, a cultural essence and an ideological construction according to which immigration will always and only be a problem. Bloom is right that the canon exists to “impose limits” and “to set a standard of measurement” but it is not the standards and limits he imagines but rather those that divide a population – residents and citizens – into two categories: in this case the right and the wrong Danes.
Without disputing the artistic qualities of the selected works, it is obvious that they have not been chosen according to a chain of progressive stylistic developments leading toward contemporary practices, for that would necessarily stress the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Rather the selection reminds us of Adam Oehlenschläger’s poem from 1802 Guldhornene (The Golden Horns), about the ancient horns extracted from the black soil, which tells us about where we come from culturally and spiritually but leaves us without hope for our own time, let alone the future. The past is forever lost and there is only a ruin left for us to contemplate and in which to reflect upon past glory.
Will there ever exist a canon that can tell us about the potential of our own time? Or which acknowledges the fact that there are moments where we relate more directly to contemporary art from Beirut or Beijing than to an early medieval wall painting closer to home? It simply isn’t our war and an apartheid State is simply not our nation!

Mjølnerparken.
Don’t point your arty finger at us!



In August 2006 a neon sign in the form of an arrow and the word ’Mjølnerparken’ was erected directly opposite the Mjølnerparken residential area in Copenhagen. Mjølnerparken is what you could call a ghetto and has very bad reputation amongst those who does not live there. It has its fair share of social problems and crime; the inhabitants generally have low incomes and uninspiring surroundings. Of the residents 93.7% are from ethnic minorities and 6.3% are native Danes. As such, the neon sign points at something problematic in society (seen from the outside) using an aesthetic that is also employed by American motels and casinos.
Mjølnerparken has been the subject of much negative attention in the media and many different initiatives, including CCTV surveillance and neighbourhood watch schemes, have been introduced in order to improve the area. The neon sign pointing at Mjølnerparken was created by the artists’ group Superflex, which wanted to change residents and outsiders’ perceptions of the ghetto. Many of Mjølnerparken’s residents welcomed the sign and felt it added something luxurious and cool to their neighbourhood. However, in the end, the residents committee decided to refuse the offer of the sign as a gift to the area, arguing that it as was essentially negative. According to Superflex, the important point is why the committee felt the art work signified something negative. Superflex stated that their intention was not simply to point out Mjølnerparken as a bad place, but also to question the public’s stereotypical preconceptions and the area’s bad media reputation.
But good intentions aren’t always enough. Essentially, the sign points at Mjølnerparken, thus spotlighting it. In terms of the psychology of pointing and being pointed at, the artists can be viewed as being rather elitist, as they are pointing from the outside. And what are they pointing out? The wonderful community feeling? The media’s one-sided coverage of the area? Hardly. The fact remains that when it comes to pointing, it is usually the majority or the ‘normal’ that points at the minority or the ‘abnormal’. I know this because I’ve been pointed at before (and I didn’t like it either). Sure, people could be pointing at me because I am amazingly beautiful, but let’s face it  – when people point at you they usually do so because your pants are ripped, you have something in the corner of your mouth or toilet paper stuck to your shoe. If you were to point at yourself, say because you were a motel, you would have a legitimate commercial reason to do so. But Mjølnerparken is neither a motel nor a casino, and certainly not a zoo.
But what if Superflex is pointing at ‘the act of pointing’ itself in some sort of meta-reflection? Well, that would be another ballgame entirely. But has the art work failed if the inhabitants of Mjølnerparken fail to see this meta layer? This highlights very important issues within public art and touches upon a highly sensitive Achilles’ heel of What and How and For Whom public art exists. Is public art created for the elitist art environment or is it for ‘the people’ in a broader sense? In order to answer this question, of course, you must first figure out who ‘the people’ are. A former teacher of mine at the institute of art history once said that, ”If we leave decisions about public art up to the people, our streets would be filled with utter crap”. In his conception ‘the people’ obviously had no taste, no class, no aesthetic judgment (of any real value), and were suckers for kitsch. According to Kant, however, we all share a common aesthetic sense and according to Plato it is pointless to discuss matters of taste. Personally I have always felt that good art is the type of work that manages to touch something in people, which relates more to content than to form. In the case of the Mjølnerparken sign there is a big difference between appreciating the aesthetics of it and getting the point. Looking at the Mjølnerparken arrow it becomes very clear that in order to really get the piece you need to understand that it does not only point at the ghetto but also points at the very act of pointing – if you get my point.

Freedom In tune with institutional self-critique?(Track Two)

What are words worth
The culture of do-it-yourself (DIY) at the end of the 20th century worked with notions of freedom to claim space – for thinking, acting, loving and fighting – in a society of the spectacle completed, or rather tripled, gone mad, entering every part of the life world. An ongoing structural slaughter of utopias and their potentialities has paved the ground on which we now walk.
We still have to do it ourselves, not because no one else will, but because the socio-political climate has become a direct threat to everyone and everything not in line with the crusade of ‘normalisation undefined’ spreading into new territories by the hour. This is not imagined space, this is the art institution employing self-criticism, normalising the city of Copenhagen and disguising the war as a process of democratisation as a transformation of real spaces.
This offensive threat – showing its face in warfare and welfare for the few and the privileged in a situation where capitalism is the only free traveller, not accepting any kinds of borders and barriers – is formulated as a defence in the name of freedom against things out of control.
Standing in the way of control
The control of whom? And who are we, anyway? ‘We’ used to be civil society, ‘The People’, the workers and the unions, users, abusers and producers in and of democratic societies.
The energies in claiming a room of one’s own and indignation triggering DIY is the historical ground for self-organising with the self as a collective subject. This kind of structural manipulation is in itself subversive, disobedient, a disturbance and interruption; noise where the representative, single subject used to stand in a silent centre. Self-organising is to a large extend dependent on the randomness of collective thinking and on the potentialities in a lack of control. The randomness in lacking control is what feeds movements yet to come, capable of ignoring borders of nation states and barriers of distorted notions of democracy and freedom.
Freak out
– And stop accepting, repeating and reproducing the structures of the present climate making contemporary art political partout. Art is either affirmative or subversive. It is impossible to separate art from the context in which it is produced and displayed. The artist is herself a role model to a market in need of a flexible workforce. Flexicurity is a definition of labour making the employee eat his hat, jump into a pair of loose jeans and reflect in the mirror of the creative class. These are the ones that are never off, the ones that carry the full responsibility, and the ones that have no place to go claiming any kinds of rights. Just like the old bohemian artist under the eaves, who worked because he just couldn’t stop. It is about language and the words invented to dress up old structures in new seductive garments. But this doesn’t change the structure beneath, only the construction of subjectivity while demolishing collectivity.
Hello, is it me you’re looking for?
Art has a cause in itself, a language of its own. For this language to be heard – also as a political message, a question or a statement – a distance has to be created to art as an institution with the expectations of an audience attached, which is taught the codes of conduct in the spaces of art. Do we have to keep lying in order to adapt to institutionalised expectations?
To lie has become a legitimate political tool, as unveiled racism is aired in parliaments and on the TV screen. It has become clear to everyone that politics is full of lies – the process of democratising Iraq again serves as a smashing international example.
Critical art is not separating the terms of production and the context of display from the work itself. To escape the vacuum of contradictions that has arisen between intention and what is communicated as art, maybe we should rotate the perspective from the inside/outside dialectics and talk about downwards and upwards. Not as a new dialectic, but as a structural term by which to think and act. In this respect there is a lot to learn from movements such as those of feminism, as a strategy for dealing with problematics through organising and producing theory and actions.
But, uh!, upside down, boy you turn me, inside out and round and round. Feminism is a thought phenomenon to put in the limelight – ‘we’ have still not recovered from the sight of burning bras and bare tits in public space (in the raw appearance that is). Nonetheless – in feminism there is a treasure of conflicts and their possible solution, a lesson for everyone to learn if we dare to stop lying. And let’s also stop reproducing, repeating and affirming structures that limit acting and thinking, potentialities in and notions of freedom and responsibility. That feminism is carefully mentioned is not only to place the image of bare tits (a powerful tool) in the mind of the reader, but also because the patriarchal is the source of many evils. Let’s stop making sense in those terms.
Have you found me yet or am I still wondering around in the imaginable textscape?

Featuring (in order of appearance): George Michael, Michael Jackson, Snap, Laura Branigan, Grace Jones, Madonna, Johnny Logan, Sade, AC/DC, Cindy Lauper, Chicks on Speed, The Gossip, Chic, Lionel Ritchie, Diana Ross and Talking Heads.

Tramps Like Us
by Michael Baers
Collective Statement A Day at the Riots or The Social Democratic Carnivalesque (domestic version)


Footnote
1. It made us think of Ulrike Meinhof’s saying, “to set fire to one car is a crime, to burn a hundred is political action.”
2.The glorious oppression of real needs.
3. Even the omnipresent Politi wagons couldn’t dispel the feeling, though later the police presence came to assume a more prominent position in our recollections.
4. We’re forever discovering the same thing: The totality of capital conceals the impoverishment of daily life behind ideological structures, giving the everyday a smooth appearance. Ungodmshuset and Christiania, on the contrary, are ‘rough’, a synoptic fissure in the smooth totality of capital. Far from its much touted flexibility, capital seems signally incapable of tolerating difference*. Otherwise why would a derelict labor hall, or the squatting of a former military base otherwise be met with such persistent hostility from the “establishment”, to use an antiquated term?
* In Holland there are low-level riots right now. "News coverage here tries to isolate protesters, turning them into the “other”. Government proposals circulating call for the authority to arrest people on the pretext of planning “something criminal”. We were reassured> that in Copenhagen the government response to the rioting is viewed by many as symptomatic: one example of a larger tendency towards the three R’s—reification, rationalization, and recuperation.
†Native informants later corrected this impression, calling our attention to the negativity of the television coverage, which we, ignorant of the Danish language, had neglected to watch††.
††news coverage outside Denmark, had also focused on the violence, and uniformly mischaracterized the protesters as “squatters”, but were we wrong for detecting in the news readers a subdued note of appreciation for the daring and ingenuity of the rioter? 5. Like: when considering socially engaged practice, what is the real nature of the art institution in social terms? We cannot deny that art has the potential to generate critical thought and create new audiences. Nevertheless, in many States where institution of the three R’s occurred earlier and in a more thoroughgoing manner, the functioning of the art institution has been well policed to guard against its assuming real political agency. This is not to deny that in certain institutions critical voices have operated, but to remark on how brief the tenure of such voices frequently is.
6. testified by the influx of activists who participated in the street battles and protests*, or the many international demonstrations of solidarity, such as the group of youths in Lyon who, after occupying the Danish consulate, sent dozens of faxes to the offices of Copenhagen Kommune urging a stop to eviction proceedings.
*On the same sunday we left Copenhagen, a week following the riots, police raided three squats in Amsterdam, all of which were found denuded of occupants, who, we suspect, were at the time ensconced in Danish jail cells as a result of the indiscriminate police sweeps†.
†One native informant spoke of an acquaintance, a college professor, who having been arrested at a demonstration, was released (while his les respectable-appearing co-defendants were incarcerated), only to be re-arrested later at his residence, in front—as our native informant emphasized—of his wife and child, after a judge had reviewed his case and determined he should have been remanded to police custody.
7. The quickest route to anomie, is by removing the markers which people use to symbolically orient themselves in urban space—near Ungdomshuset, away from Charlottenborg. The loss of such markers, like the erasure or surveillance of public space itself, is part of a program which Henri Lefebvre might describe as the withdrawal of the “right to the city”.
8. Ungdomshuset would fulfill the criteria Victor Turner set out for a liminal site, or what Foucault termed “heterotopia”—a site at the margins that reflects social relations from the perspective of a carnavalesque exteriority. One can only infrequently describe institutional art space in similar terms.
9. In other words, one which functions as a node of resistance.
10. With regard to individual artists, the arm’s length principle may still be operative. State funding still enables artists to produce critical work without fear of government censure*. Whether this extends to Danish institutions, we aren’t qualified to say.
* This may take some of the sting out of being neutralized in terms of political agency by a government too philistine to concern itself with thinking about art or artists, except how their existence might be better rationalized. A lot of artists we know question why they still live in Copenhagen, precisely because one lives in society and not simply an “artworld”. We tell them, it’s alright, we understand.
This is part of a constrictive process , the outcome of which would be the curtailment of the “rights to the city”, described by Lefebvre as urban tolerance for the marginal and dispossessed.*

We never made a Paris issue of Pist Protta

Dear Nienke and Rob,
The Berlin issue, Pist Protta #25 we made in 1995. Frans Jacobi and Lise Nellemann were living in Berlin at that time. Lise is still there doing a lot of work with the art project gallery Sparwasser HQ. They asked us (the Pist Protta staff Jesper Fabricius, Jesper Rasmussen and Åse Eg Jørgensen) if we should make an issue about the art scene in Berlin, which they had come to know quite well, but probably also use the magazine to make new contacts and friends. They collected a lot of stuff and sent it to us. We edited it, actually only a few things were not in the issue when finished. I was quite happy with it. Åse was trying a lot of new things in typography inspired by the American magazine Emigre. I myself did a kind of stupid cover with ‘Berliner Pfannkuchen’. It’s maybe not the right word for it, any way it’s a kind of pastry which is called Berliner in Denmark and the title and issue were drawn in Gothic typography in think-bubbles and printed in green and red which actually made the ‘Berliner’ brown in a quite realistic way. There is a lot of very good stuff in, a lot of it made directly for us. Adib Fricke did some stamps for us so that there could be 2 words stamped in originally in each copy. In a quite long interview Maria Eichhorn did, we spelled her name with only one h, and she didn’t like us for that.
The London issue, Pist Protta #30 was done 2 years later. Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise (who later formed Copenhagen Free University) asked if they could collect some artists and projects for an issue about London, where they were living at that time. Similar to how the Berlin issue was done. This issue contains a much more text-oriented content with only 6 contributors. We did text in both English and Danish except for Fiona Banner’s Point Break, which is a 15-page long typographical installation for Pist Protta. It’s a very good work, which I still love very much. We also did an insert Say NO to the Millennium from the East London Section of the Psychogeographical Association.
The design of this issue is quite minimal, if there were pictures they were printed in the same colour for each article (purple, blue, orange and green, and the cover was yellow and red typography). We had a very good article by David Burrows about his chewing-gum sculptures: “An astonishing sight. Glued with Spittle to the window pane was the bubble gum head of Sir Thomas More; gnarled and chewed, it was unmistakably Holborn’s utopian priest and philosopher, rendered in colored sugar and saliva. For the next five days I chewed vast quantities of gum, 18 kilos in all, hoping to produce an array of historical figures: Hegel, Luther, Freud, Erasmus...”
The New York issue, Pist Protta #47 was made in 2001. Frans Jacobi had moved to New York. He was very impressed by our London issue, which he said was much better than the Berlin issue, which he took part in then. This time he selected some artists from NY to participate and then asked them to choose some more artists for the magazine. In all 12 artists participated. In this issue everything was printed in 4-colour printing, except for the cover which is dark red paper with a hole through which you can see: Pist Protta 47. Specially made for this issue is real chewing gum gluing the last page and the cover together as a part of a project made especially for this issue by Norwegian artist Cecilie Dahl.
Personally I feel that this issue is not so concentrated and clear as #25 and #30, though it contains very good contributions by Mary Beth Edelson and A.S. Bessa. Frans did a lot of the lay-out this time and I think he didn’t managed to get a whole out of the good but also very varied material, and the 4-colour printing does not make it easier.
All the best, see you next week

Freestyling in Christiania
I met Lise Autogena in the summer of 2005 during a residency in Berlin. The curator Georgia Ward had urged me to apply for a new research programme in Christiania, which Lise had initiated. I knew of the free town from my days working in a left-wing bookshop while at art school in The Hague. I did not take it as a compliment when Georgia said: “It’s really something for you.” Hadn’t I since outgrown that squat culture?
I was not having such a great time in Berlin. I had the Project Studio of the Fonds BKVB, a wonderful apartment and lots of money at my disposal, and yet I did not enjoy my work. I had developed ‘residency fatigue’; the hit-and-run mentality of writing a proposal, executing the work and exhibiting it within a few months was starting to wear me down.
The meeting with Lise was somehow unforgettable and I was immediately convinced by what she was doing. She was not the dreadlocked type that I had expected, but a petite London professional. She was full of stories about the free town where she had spent her early years. Like me, she had exchanged her life as a squatter in a small country to study in London. And like me too, she had continued to live and work there, but also maintained contact with her hometown. Lise could see that ‘her’ Christiania was coming under increasing pressure from Denmark’s new rightwing government and feared that it would soon be closed down.
So, she and fellow Christianite Emmerik Warburg set up the Christiania Researcher in Residence Program (CRIR). Before it was too late, researchers, architects and artists from around the world would be able to benefit from the thirty-five years of experience built up within Christiania. The participants would also be able to breathe new life into the discussion about Christiania, both internally and externally.
A condition of taking part in the CRIR was that you had to make your research public, both within and outside Christiania. In return, the researcher was given a house in one of the free town’s prettiest courtyards called ‘Melkebotten’ (dandelion) and assistance from Emmerik. The thousand other Christianians were available as a source of information. There was no budget, no travel expenses, no partner institution, no exhibition, no protocol and no fixed tenure. It was a residency in the purest sense of the term: simply a roof over your head.
At the time I was producing, amongst other things, booklets in the Little Guide to Guards series, inventories of different law enforcers on the streets of European cities. I had done quite a bit of research into the social and political aspects of law enforcement, focusing on the personal side of surveillance. Lise’s invitation to Christiania was a great opportunity to study a security system based on social control and informality that grew out of a voluntary, independent social experiment of thirty-five years duration, and to find out more about self-government and self-policing in the free town.
Christiania is better in reality than it is on paper or in the stories you hear. I remember almost nothing specific about my first four weeks there. Each day I did a little DIY on my house (a house in Christiania is never finished), did some videocam interviews and went to the shared bathhouse. I left Christiania very rarely and learned almost nothing about the rest of Copenhagen. I met a few local artists who seemed, like most other Danes, a bit blasé about Christiania. But Elisabeth Delin Hansen, director of Kunsthallen Nikolaj, invited me to present the results of my residency at the gallery.
Living in Christiania is the way to discover that ‘freedom’ in a free town means above all responsibility and self-motivation. Emmerik helped me find my way but then it was down to me. I was sometimes painfully aware that my neighbours had to pay the ‘Christiania tax’ for my house and had to teach me to chop firewood. I felt a great pressure to do something in return. But the temptation to do some sort of ‘Christiania promotion’ was knocked on the head by the CRIR. I had a responsibility to maintain a critical distance.
The members of Christiania’s community finance a house for an outsider in order to criticise them. This contrasts sharply with the city of Copenhagen where, until six months after the CRIR was set up, there was no official residency. More money is spent sending Danish artists abroad than on bringing foreigners to Denmark. The Danish Arts Council tried to place some of the artists from their residency programme within the CRIR, but Christiania refused as it does not accept government funds on principle.
To fulfil to the conditions of the residency I returned in the summer of 2006 to show the edited interviews to eighty-odd people from Christiania and the Danish art world. The Christianites criticised me for presenting such a ‘troubled’ image of their free town. The artists thought that I was brave to defend my work outside the trusted realm of the art world. Later the challenge came precisely from within that realm: in lectures and conversations about the project I had to defend Christiania against criticism. Sometimes I felt like an ambassador.
I had taken the Eurolines bus to Denmark in November 2005 with an open ticket, no money and no concrete plan. I had no idea how long I would stay or what I would do. But everything went so well that it was as if I had planned it that way. The nature of the CRIR programme suited me well: its mix of freedom and responsibility, engagement and the lack of the hit-and-run. In the autumn of 2006 my finances were also sorted out when the Fonds BKVB agreed to sponsor the production of a new video.
Around Christmas 2006 I took a small film crew to Christiania. I could now permit myself a good steadycam operator, who was sympathetic towards Christiania. Emmerik acted as sound technician and our go-between during the filming. We could work wherever we wished, even in Pusher Street where hash deals are done and where cameras are normally strictly forbidden.
In March the work was shown at Casco and I organised the discussion ‘Freedomism’. Still in ‘freestyle mode’ I interviewed Dutch people involved in anti-parliamentary politics. I asked each respondent to describe an envisaged society without a State. I found anarcho-capitalists and libertarians via the internet and the anarchists through my old network of leftwing bookshops. Bringing them together within the art world, I understood even more why Lise had wanted to set up the CRIR.