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Since the 1980ies the grounds of the Red Factory [1] in Zurich have been a place that was well-known far beyond the city boundaries. Due to the history of its origins it is a legendary place – but also a place that raises many questions. The opening of the Red Factory for youth culture, art and alternative ways of life was imposed by struggles against strong reservations from the side of official city politics, in order to provide a space for a practice of resistance and resistant culture. The inception of this free space in a city like Zurich, which is rather lacking in resistant places, is on the one hand a historical merit – on the other hand the question arises to what extent the original high aims can still be fulfilled in a spatially assigned, subsidized and in the meantime institutionalized situation. The dichotomy of the Red Factory between resistant place and touristy spot becomes apparent if we read the entries in travel guides. For instance, the German life-style and scene magazine MAX writes in its online-city-guide-zurich: “A remainder of the wild 80ies when Zurich’s avant-garde art still had to struggle for its niches with riots. At the time, there were also demonstrations against the demolition of the silk factory built 1892. These were successful: Now a popular alternative cultural center is located in the distinctive brick halls, in self-management: music stage, theater hall, gallery and a number of working groups – from which the Swiss alternative culture scene takes its new recruits. A program every night! The heart of the Factory is the cozy self-service canteen at the lake.” [2] The free space of the Red Factory has in the meantime been incorporated into the interests of the city’s image strategies and tourism industry. It is a touristy spot and a place of alternative culture at the same time. How can the two be reconciled? Just recently there was another nice example of how alternative practices and spectacle can clash. The Red Factory is sprayed with many graffiti, some of them historical almost, others the work of a newer up-coming generation (Picture 1). In June this year the project “Graffiti Jam” invited many international graffiti artists to reshape the grounds. To this end, all the buildings and all the graffiti on the grounds were first painted over in the original brown-red color of the bricks (Picture 2). The company that had been recruited as a sponsor for this event and provided the necessary special paints is specialized in impregnations of buildings and graffiti removal. Graffiti, originally a means of self-empowerment in the urban space, are in this case robbed of their resistant potential. They are being reduced to their aesthetic surface, and in the temporally and spatially limited event they become a gesture, a spectacle that can be institutionalized, steered and commercialized. In this context one could speak of a fake – thematic park anarchism.

The Shedhalle is also located on the grounds of the Red Factory. [3] With the thematic series of projects “Spectacle, the Pleasure Principle and the Carnivalesque?” an exhibition project in three consecutive chapters started in fall 2004. Strategies of activist practice were examined, and the locations where these practices take place analyzed. Activist artists and artistic activist (there is a fine line between them) explored to what extent the “Carnivalesque” can be a creative strategy or an effective method for presenting and articulating political aims, or whether only spectacular surfaces are produced. The starting point of the project on subversive production of meaning was a re-reading of the writings of the Russian literary scholar Michail Bakhtin. In Literature and Carnival, [4] Bakhtin analyzed the influences of the medieval culture of laughter and the Carnivalesque in popular customs on literature. His theory of the novel assumes that the Carnivalesque offers a possibility to “turn the world inside out and thus to repeal the order and all forms of fear, reverence, piety and etiquette arising from it.” Laughter and the Carnivalesque for Bakhtin are forms of protection which allow to undermine at least temporarily external and more importantly internal constraints and censorship, and symbolically to portray a non-hegemonic truth which “opens the world in a new way.” Seen from this angle the Carnivalesque, through the temporary absence of power and the re-conquest of the public space, can be appropriate for articulating something like a “world view from below” and taking on the character of a counter-culture as well as enabling to relativize the established order.

In this context it seemed interesting to us to have a look at the so-called youth uprising [5] of the early 80ies in Zurich, which – as mentioned already – have led to the establishment of the Red Factory. It was in this time that the demonstrators developed forms of protest which in our opinion could well be termed “carnivalesque.” On the one hand they succeeded with playful, subversive provocation to inscribe themselves in mediatic communication cycles. On the other, they have demonstrated a new form of “Streitkultur” (culture of debate). A prominent example of these forms of protest is the “Müller-Sendung,” or Mueller Broadcasting (Picture 3). Due to the youth uprising the CH-Magazin, a televised round-table discussion on Swiss television, invites, next to the chief of police, members of the city council and the president of the city’s Social-Democratic Party, two representatives of the youth movement to its discussion. The two “movementers” enact the upright married couple Anna and Hans Mueller. They demand a tougher police intervention against the rioters. This inversion disrupts the usual controversial pattern of discussion, and robs the representatives of the city of their arguments. Their rhetoric is exposed, and their points of view appear ridiculous. The speakers’ roles are swapped, which turns the round-table discussion into a mass-media farce in front of the running cameras. A further example of a carnivalesque strategy from that time is the “swimming demo”: A demonstration in the streets in the public space of the inner city of Zurich is banned. In answer to this the protesters relocate the demonstration into the water of the Limmat river between the Quai Bridge and the Platzspitz. The public space, in this case a city river, is squatted outside of the established conventions. Camera teams, the police and the population only watch in surprise.

If we look at such examples, or newer ones like the “Global Carnival Against Capitalism” (18 June 1999, on the occasion of a G8 Summit in Cologne, Germany), it becomes evident how in a political context carnivalesque moments are used that on the one hand create commonality, arouse the curiosity and pleasure to deal with a given political approach, occupy public and media space, but on the other are also in danger of being reduced in their reception to a superficial media spectacle. In a society of the spectacle, of many events and festivals, it is at times difficult to distinguish whether a commercialized society of the strong impressions is using carnivalesque strategies or whether the subversive potential is able to articulate clear demands that are received as such. In this field of contention the Carnivalesque is used on the one hand as a resistant practice – on the other, it is instrumentalized as a regulating valve by the capitalist interests through commodification, regulation and institutionalizing of social desires. The general dichotomy of the potential of pop-cultural phenomena for self-empowerment raises the question to what extent our society follows both a consumptive principle and a resistant principle of the Carnivalesque. Presumably, the two concepts draw from each other and influence each other and mix. The fact that the political is increasingly turned into a spectacle demands a positioning. An interesting question is what role art or the aesthetic practice plays in this, given that it is itself concerned by this principle. Reflections on the aesthetization of the Carnivalesque or the carnivalization of the aesthetic are therefore important: To what extent is an artistic practice also carnivalesque in the sense of a resistant practice? The artistic practice is interested in carnivalesque strategies like the ones used in media guerilla and guerilla communication: On the one hand it analyzes them and comments on them, on the other it often finds in them a language with which to call the attention to explosive social themes and initiate discussion.

What now are the places of the Carnivalesque and what are the stages of the spectacle? Or do they overlap completely? Matthias Rothe and Hartmut Schröder [6] propose to read, with Bakhtin, also counter-placements or counter-sites [7] as carnivalesque spaces. From this point of view the Red Factory would be a carnivalesque place. Carnivalesque in the sense that on the one hand it constitutes a counter-place, on the other it cannot do without forms of spectacle in order to be perceived publicly. The place between these two poles needs to be ever again renegotiated. Any standstill bears the danger of institutional stagnancy and the integration of your own repertoire of signs into commercial usage interests (Picture 4). [8]

Notes