Jailhouse Rock

For a world without borders and jails.

As a generation that only knows the domination of capital, every day we roam the landscapes of a world that constantly declares its own justification. While the ubiquity of the commodity seems to repress poverty (as lack of the means of survival,) misery spreads (as dispossession of our dreams.) How can one lose oneself, how can one invent another life in a world whose domination penetrates even the most obscure corners? From the first prison to modern urbanism, the architect has always already assisted with the work of the police; and even when the false joys of the commodity’s domain seek to lure us away, we are trapped in a world that no longer knows an outside.

“So long as you stay quiet, nothing will happen to you.” For this cheap blackmail we are supposed to exchange the adventure of freedom for a world of boredom. Social satisfactions chain us to wage labor, while politicians administer a state of general resignation. Whoever wards off societal pressures and seeks another world is threatened by that detention center that ultimately represents the image of an entire society based on authority and control. But still, along with the humiliation of locking us up in housing developments and office complexes until we perish in social and individual atomization, there remains the possibility of revolt: to dare to break out of this social prison together.

A number of uprisings have torn through European jails and metropoles in recent years. The often inarticulate cries plainly express our relation to a world that has become completely foreign. We have nothing to demand, because there’s nothing we wish to preserve. If we decide on revolt, then it is in order to get in touch with the unknown, to open up endless space for questions that elude politics. In spite of all the world’s complexity, it is still the exploited themselves who can stop this machinery from running. And to the extent that we recognize ourselves as such, we already possess right now the possibility of starting something new. If the will still lives within us, not to waste away behind walls that confine our thought and action, then let us attack those who build and defend them. If we still sense the urge for freedom, then let us rip those walls down in order to think of another world, one for which it’s worth fighting!

Let us begin the revolt!

GRAFFITI SCRAWLED BELOW THE FLYER:

Pro-Homo!

The cool boys girlz

Translated from the German by Charlie Bertsch. Photographed in Berlin by Joel Schalit.