(tratto dall'articolo di Michael Kimmelman,
in "The New York Times" - la Repubblica, Monday, October 24, 2011)
visualizzazioni totali - 40
THE POWER OF PLACE in a protest - from Tahrir to Zuccotti
Protesters, and Cities, Find Unity by Sharing Common Ground
The ever expanding "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which started in
Lower Manhattan last month and reached more than 900 cities world=
wide last weekend, proves among other things that no matter how
instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days,
nothing replaces people taking to the streets.
We tend to underestimate the political power of Physical Places. Then
Tahrir Square (Tunisia) comes along. Now it's Zuccotti Park, until
September 17 an utterly obscure downtown plaza, around the corner
from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway.
A few hundred peopke with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it
on the map.
Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locates,
edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy.
Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.
So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to
Antietam, Auschwitz and Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days
of Pericles.
Living in Europe for the past few years, I often came across parks
and squares, in Barcelona and Madrid, Athens and Milan, Paris and
Rome, occupied by tent communities of protesters. Public protest and
assembly are part of the European social compact.
Maybe the difference in America has something to do with Americans'
long-standing obsessions with automobiles and autonomy, with our
predilection for isolationism, or our preference just for watching, more
than participating.
In Europe the protests were about jobs, government cuts and debt. In
Zuccotti Park, the encampment itself is the point.
In his "Politics", Aristotele argued that "the size of an ideal polis extended
to the limits of a herald's cry". He believed that the human voice was directly
linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry required face-to-face conversation.
When the police banned megaphones at Zuccotti Park, they obliged demonstartors
to come up with an alternative. "Mic checks" became the consensus method, spread
through the crowd by people repeating, phrase by phrase, what a speaker had said
compelling everyone, as it were, to speak in one voice. It is painstakingly slow.
"But so is democracy" as Jay Gaussoin, 46, an unemployed actor and carpenter,
said. "We're so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus".
"It requires an architecture of consciousness," was Mr. Gaussoin's apt phrase.
Zuccotti Park has in fact become a miniature polis. That it happens also to be
a private park is one of the most revealing subtexts of the story. An old zoning
variance requires that the park, unlike a public, city-owned one, remains open
day and night. This has turnrd an unexpected spotlight on the bankruptcy of
so much of what has passed for public space in America. Most of it is token
gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger buildings. These 'public'
spaces are not really public at all but controlled by their landlords.
Zuccotti is subject to the owner's rules prohibiting tarps, sleepeing bags and
the storage of personal property on the site. The whole situation illustrates
just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift
to a commercial sop.
"We come to get a sense of being part of a larger community," said Brian
Pickett, 33, an adjunct professor of theatre and speech at City University
of New York. "It's important to see this in the context of alienation today.
We do Facebook alone. But people are not alone here." - And as a result,
demonstrators also reveal themselves to each other. Egyptians described
this phenomenon at Tahrir Square. The park is literally common ground.
And it was obvious that the Wall Street demonstrators find unity in community.
The governing process they choose is itself a bedrock message of the protest.
It produces the outlines of a city, as I said. The protesters have set up a kitchen
for serving food, a legal desk and a sanitation department, a library, a medical
station, a media center, and even a general store, where everything is free.
Be continued..............
Italian version
La continua espansione del movimento "Occupare Wall Street", che
è iniziato nella Lower Manhattan lo scorso mese e ha raggiunto più
di 900 città in tutto il mondo lo scorso fine settimana, dimostra tra le
altre cose che non importa tanto quanto strumentali siano diventate
le nuove comunicazioni mediatiche per diffondere la protesta in questi
giorni, quanto il fatto che nulla può sostituire le persone stesse che
occupano le strade (e le piazze).
Tendiamo quindi a sottovalutare il potere politico dei Luoghi Fisici.
Poi arriva Piazza Tahrir. Ora è il Parco Zuccotti, fino al 17 settembre
una piazza del centro Manhattan del tutto sconosciuta, a due passi da
ground zero e a due isolati a nord di Wall Street, a Broadway. Poche
centinaia di persone con ponchos e sacchi a pelo lo hanno adesso posto
sulla mappa della city.
Kent State, Piazza Tiananmen, il Muro di Berlino: è chiaro che noi usiamo
luoghi precisi, edifici, strutture architettoniche per incasellare le nostre
memorie e l'effervescenza politica relativa. La politica mette a scompiglio
le nostre coscienze. Ma i luoghi ossessionano le nostre immaginazioni.
C O N T I N U A............
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