(voices of resistance from occupied london)

Antonis V, antonymous[at]riseup.net

"She closes her eyes and brings Algeria to mind; Some Algeria she never saw"^[*]

She tries to shake off her confusion. Can this be right? That little message fixed on the lamppost doesn't seem to be lying, that's for sure. According to it she is now standing in a designated good behaviour zone. While reading on, she takes her hands out of her pockets, half-nervously holding them behind her back, at the same time trying to look as innocent, sweet and well-behaved as possible. It seems to be working: She does feel ever-so-slightly more proper. She proudly looks around only to realise there is no-one to witness this positive behavioural change of hers, no tapping on the back, no well-done cheers, not tonight, not here. She hangs around a bit longer all well-mannerly, secretly hoping some police car will drive by, slow down, the driver to roll down the window, extend his hand and offer her a sweetie: Who's a good girl? But the police never come, that must mean we are all behaving well tonight, no need for them to intervene, it is the bonfire night, lights and banging sounds all around but believe her officer, she would never lie to you, not while standing in a Good Behaviour Zone anyway: it's all well-behaved and very, very quiet on the Hackney front.

Quiet on the Hackney front... Somewhere in between one moment of peace and another, she cannot help but wonder where exactly that front actually is. Amidst the dense clustering of present and future shiny live/work complexes it would take some large unbuilt space (a street, a park, a square) to separate parts increasingly mingling together. Victoria Park. This is also a front, a momentary scene of an omnipresent, ongoing battle - even if a winner was obnoxiously pronounced upon the park's naming. But no, no-one can declare victory at Victoria Park. Surrounded by four different neighbourhoods and two boroughs, she walks to its North-East corner. Warm: she's now close enough to the industrial funfair of Hackney Wick, the new hotspot of gentrification, kindly sponsored by the forthcoming Olympic so-called Games. But this, the middle the park, is hard for any borough and any neighbourhood to claim. A neutral zone of sorts, the police sirens heard somewhere far, far away.

She now stands there, in the middle of the park, and the permanent feeling of being intruded upon starts to wear off; pre-defined routes gradually evaporate, possibilities open up, they call for some unnecessary, some badly needed perambulation. She stops and looks up: the faint figure of a person sitting on a rooftop smoking somewhere in the distance...

The wide-open urban space is the front: The street, the park, the square. To its aid, backing it up from afar, are newly-found pockets of resistance. For all their relative freedom, open urban spaces are still very much on the ground: metaphorically (that's where the struggle still is, where it will always be) and also literally: public urban space remains fixed on the ground level. Yet our city-wandering practice might have something to learn from the swarming manoeuvre. For Weizman (2006), the swarm exemplifies the principle of non-linearity apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. He explains: For a Palestinian fighter caught up in this battle, Israelis seem 'to be everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?'. Invert this perspective, flip around the position of the dominant with that of the dominated, project (if you can) the reality of Palestinian occupation to that of everyday London and there you have it: Our pockets of resistance are not just behind enemy lines, they are above, beneath and in between them. The fragmented |c|i|t|y| breaks (us) up in a million parts; resistance is to be found in every single one of these - and every single one of us.

"For the consciousness of the nation...

...the sounds/ of the/ Asian/ Dub/ Foundation". Words and tunes blasting brusquely through her earphones making for an appropriate aural symbolism - what with her senses and experiences cut apart, separating what she sees, what she hears, what she eats, smells, thinks and feels... Until all feelings are set apart while she's finally cut off from her surroundings all together.

Baudrillard's words come to mind. "A man eating alone in the heart of the city. You see people doing that, (...) the human flotsam of conviviality, no longer even concealing themselves to eat leftovers in public." She eats and she walks, a diner and a dweller. She's broken in parts and once so, each part comes together with the rest to recompose her self. In this alone she is not alone. Eleven million people in this city; eleven million fragments broken apart and recomposed spontaneously; eleven million fragments anguishly holding together a fragile, delirious mosaic: London's façade.

The façade keeps changing itself, from the colonial to the post-colonial, from the modern to the post-modern. Change is linear and gradual inasmuch as spontaneous and explosive. Each explosion is simultaneous to an implosion: When broken the image of the city is replaced by a replica depicting the original, in turn becoming an original itself. In reality, of course, little changes... The same subconscious rhythm runs through the urban, the same need to map it out, to conceptualise and understand it in order to control it - or maybe, to disrupt this very control. The battle for the city is, it has always been about understanding - like in the the Casbah (the walled citadel) in colonial Algeria:

"...to outsiders, (it) appears to be a confusing labyrinth of lanes and dead-end allies flanked by picturesque houses; however if one loses oneself there, it is enough to go down again towards the sea to reposition themselves."

If the urban is the battlefield positioning oneself within it is (literally!) of strategic importance. Positioning and repositioning: To acutely conceptualise evolving patterns within the urban fabric and to accurately respond.

Midnight at Regent's Canal. Surrounded by many of her previous addresses, she's facing the so-called Bridge Academy, a school that when open will be run by one of the biggest financial firms in the world. She resists the temptation to think about something so blatantly outrageous and succumbs to another thought. The school's main building, its structure slowly shaping up over the months, is mimicking the architecture of an ancient theatre, yet spectators are not to be positioned on the stands like their ancient counterparts. Instead, the luminous interior, seen through the glass façade now seems the stage, its inhabitants the new actors. The re-arrangement of the spatial layout and its inverted uses might appear disorientating "yet it is enough to go down again towards the sea to reposition oneself."

She is walking by the canal and by now she knows: one day, the permanent feeling of being intruded upon will wear off. Uncaptured by omnipresent CCTV cameras, playing bad in good behaviour zones she will, for once, define her own route, she will be the dweller, the walker, the diner, the person sitting on the rooftop smoking.

She opens her eyes and from here she finally sees it, that Algeria she never saw._

Baudrillard, J. (1998): "America", London and New York: Verso

Weizman, E. (2006): "The Art of War", Frieze Magazine (99)