Bernadette Corporation
Whatever-Block

Behind the blank exterior of its name, its magazines, its videos, its fiction of business, the Bernadette Corporation has worked towards producing a threshold of desubjectification not unlike the non-spaces of primitive societies where those undergoing the rites of initiation must wander. This threshold does not exist and yet exists enough to expose us to events and forces that have the potential to continuously make and un-make us. This is what happens as our images wander between the museum, the fashion show, and the riot - not necessarily with increased ease, but with less restraint and a minimum of explanation. We can't say we feel at home in any of these places, but having given up the ghost of the artistic subject, having become this other ghost, we find ourselves open to risks and splits that no critical or professional voice can smooth over. We are a corporation full of cracks, now more than ever.

This past summer, Bernadette Corporation went on a business trip (a political vacation) to pursue an experimental merger with Le Parti Imaginaire, an invisible network of militants and intellectuals from Paris and Milan. At the anti-globalization protest scenario in Genoa (police armed to the teeth, walls, security zones, Bono -the dictates of how one should protest) we were introduced to the production of a presence that defies programmed notions of citizenship and critical gesture. There, we began shooting a film called Get Rid of Yourself (featuring Chloë Sevigny, Giorgio Agamben, Werner Von Delmont), which proposes the potential of community based on a radical refusal of political identity, a new horizon where aesthetics and politics find themselves once again.

Anonymous, critical bodies mostly dressed in black-is the "Black Block" a contemporary mode of conceptual and performance art? They do as much with stones and holes as Smithson and Matta-Clark ever did, leave Weiner-esque texts on the walls, and take to the streets in a way not unsimilar to Acconci under his floor boards. The tactics which fall under this label combine illegality and mobility in order to subvert the collective absence and sad solitude which constitute the traditional poles of alternative community. It is a process-based art, an adamantly un-romantic return of the concrete through a musical destruction of the symbols and mechanisms that produce the dream-state of citizenship under the current Empire. It is about opening up momentary spaces for living, of stealing and producing images freely, replacing the signs of global domination with an ungraspable hole or shadow. We can call these spaces and moments Zones of Offensive Opacity (Z.O.O.).

In Genoa we quickly realized that the Black Block does not exist. It is not a real organization, it is a term employed by the police and the media to identify what they fear above all else: Agamben's "quelconque" (whatever), or subjectless singularity. And also that the Black Block exists too much: each counter-summit is visited by increasing numbers of these intense, unidentified bodies. Bernadette Corporation does not exist either, but we recognize the potential of what a fashion magazine might call this season's "noir radical," a contagious and glamorous nakedness we found in the streets of Genoa this July. What follows are excerpts from anonymous interviews conducted during the shooting of Get Rid of Yourself.

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" In the middle of the first day, a beautiful thing happened. I ran into an old friend of mine I hadn't seen in months. I saw her all by herself, smashing up an ATM machine with a hammer. She seemed completely in another world. A year ago we had an argument about street violence, and she was hesitating, really resisting the idea. Now here she was, next to the bank, apart from the others, hammering away. She spent like 10 or 15 minutes destroying the ATM's screen, really out of control. She looked happy. She looked crazy. It was a kind of joyful insanity. "

" There was a choice to exit this framework of protest that had been set up for us in advance -to reappropriate the city in a dangerous way, to advance a sort of fluidity in what power says you can or cannot do. Immediately, we all saw that the police " dispostif " was very solid and very entrenched. They were there to make sure there was going to be no rock throwing, no other option besides marching along. So there was already this kind of separation between us and the mass of people who were stuck in the illusion that peaceful protest was worthwhile, who refused to see the conditions of absolute civil war ... those people who were walking together like a herd of cows. For us it was absolutely clear that we had to go into the streets with certain materials, to organize ourselves differently, to confront all these oppressive dispositifs that the police had set up around Genoa. "

" We began by smashing all the video cameras, the journalists' and surveillance cameras. I saw a journalist, several of us rushed him, took his camera, and broke it. He reacted in a panicked way, screaming, trying to stop people from taking his gear. We smashed his camera on the ground and stomped on it, ripping apart all its cables and wires-and then the journalist took off running. "

" Then we moved through the city, not knowing exactly where we were going. We set up barricades so the cops couldn't get near us, overturning dumpsters, dragging them into the middle of the street, setting them on fire, continuing to loot and destroy all the stores we could-tabacs, real estate offices-smashing windows, setting fire to cars. After we took everything we wanted, we'd torch the place, then move on and break more things. "

" Everybody agreed to forget this idea of crossing into the red zone because that's exactly where we were expected to go... and on that first day the beautiful thing was that we were hardly even chased by the police. It was offensive from the start to the finish. There were people banging drums around us while we smashed things and it was really joyful. It was like a field trip. We were walking along in a group and not crossing paths with a single cop. Wherever we were, we were unexpected. We broke windows, looted stores, and it was beautiful...completely ecstatic. "

" There's a real difference between what is a citizen and those who don't believe in this social-democratic joke. This was clear and struck me over and over again. And the helicopters circling endlessly above our heads...this nervous soundtrack. A weird mix between this Woodstock feeling - the concerts, the food stands, t-shirts, all the classic leftist or indie stuff - and all around it this totally crazy police apparatus, all these cops staring at people from their trucks with such palpable hostility. So there was something so absurd in this desire to be docile, to get along... in a climate of total hostility. I think we were the only ones who understood this. "

" The black block, when you view it from the media, seems like an organized group because they all dress the same and they all move together. And the papers and the police say they're very well organized. But what you realize when you are part of it is that it's just some sort of spontaneous motion. You dress in black so you can more easily know who you are walking with. And if everybody looks the same, the cops aren't able to identify individuals. I don't see anonymity as a strategy, more as a tactical reaction. You just dress so that you can gain ease when you're moving. "

" Sometimes, when the police would charge us, we'd be forced back onto these densely-packed, static crowds of peaceful demonstrators, which was really annoying. This terrible, compact mass of immobile bodies crushing us from one side, and the cops advancing from the other. It was the first time in my life where I thought I was dying, that I'd be crushed by this crowd, but somehow we found an opening and slipped through. "

" When that immobile pacifist crowd panicked, it was like a race, 10 bodies per square meter running as fast as they could, becoming like animals on a race track or in a stampede. It was terrible. The organized groups-Tute Bianchi, etc.-have this thing about staying grouped together. But if you stay grouped together you can't do much, you become your own trap. The cops have no problems dealing with slow, scared groups. And when they try to run, they've already lost, they can't shift directions, they become predictable in their movements. 15 cops can easily handle 200 demonstators who act like that. They can easily psyche them out, massacre them. "

" You have to be realistic about the whole thing. You're moving in the streets with your face hidden, in this pack of blackness, under this hood, and you know that what makes the freedom of your movement possible is momentum. So you've got to think about what's going to happen next. How to get that momentum. And also what to do when the momentum dies. So you've got these extra clothes in your bag so you can change your appearance and look like something else when you have to, so you can go through the streets in a different way. At a certain moment we put these Attac stickers on our shirts - Attac is a social democratic organization which hopes to change the way the world is managed through peaceful demonstrations and think tanks and reflection groups... a very passive, structured organization that books coaches and shows up at all the anti-globalization events. And they give away a lot of stickers. This is how they recognize themselves, make their identity, and identify themselves as harmless. So we took their stickers because at a certain moment it was useful to snatch this identity, this neutrality, this nothingness. You put on these stickers and you become like a zero. There is some pleasure in disappearing. I was an open face now, as opposed to a covered, black face. And this is how I walked through lines and lines of police. It was quite funny to experience, in the same afternoon, walking in the streets like a conscious and happy animal, and then to walk like a shocked citizen troubled by the obscenity of the destruction of our banks and supermarkets. "

" We dispersed a lot. Not only were we not all in black, we weren't a block. We weren't one thing and we weren't always together. "

" It was a free zone precisely because it was an offensive zone. It was really a desire for war that was released in us. There was something miraculous about this burning bank 15 meters from a police battalion and from the social democratic parade. It was a successful moment and rarely in my life have I felt so in my place. I wasn't even afraid, I was happy. It was strange. Just the physical feeling of being there...of taking place. "

" The Germans had a great system for uprooting paving stones with a lead pole while some loaded them into rucksacks and others were keeping a look-out. It was a kind of completely undisciplined but extremely functional assembly line... astonishing to see. We were a little more disorganized and a little more elastic, so we worked in an almost artisan style. I gathered stones, I put them in my pockets... but I don't know, a metal pole is not bad for bashing in a window. And for self-defense what's really good is chains. You can steal them off traffic poles. They're discreet because you can hide them in your pocket and they work great, if only as an instrument of dissuasion. For a woman in the streets that's really important. Also, you can break open the gas tanks of motor bikes and make molotov cocktails... there's usually enough to fill at least one bottle. These you can throw into banks or into cars if you want to make a barricade with a burning car. Or throw them at cops. But the best molotov cocktails are the ones you make with acid, a mix of gas and acid. They burn better and cause more damage to cops because they eat through riot gear when they burn. "

" I helped blow up a gas station. Everyone discovers their own gestures, and I was surprised by some of them. The flight of a metal bar through a window, the seductive noise of it, the pure seduction of a fire. What was great was this relentless, purely symbolic destruction of a supermarket cash register that seemed so indestructible at first. These intensely charged moments. I think that's what orients the perceptions and the actions of each of us. "

" Little inspired lootings. There's a contagious aspect to them. I jumped on the whisky first. Of course I felt like drinking it, but it's also useful as an antiseptic in the streets because in the streets there are a lot of cuts and scrapes. And some people really get into symbolic destruction. In the banks this is very clear. And in the supermarkets too. This destruction of the cash register, which is a kind of a center of capitalist calculation. "

" The supermarket was extremely peaceful. Inside and outside it was very calm. And this was something very strange to me, almost scary... this kind of calm in the middle of civil war. We stopped and had a real picnic there, took our time, stopped worrying. It was totally incongruous. You had the impression that anything could happen. The language barriers between people were completely abolished, people offered you things to eat and drink, you were in this absolute calm, this kind of suspension... something shattered now and then, a window, a bottle... but not hysterically. It was very calm. There was plenty to go around, maybe the best picnic I ever went to. It was a completely open supermarket in a deserted city. All these masked people coming out of the store with plastic bags full of food as if they were grocery shopping. Very tranquil. I thought that was beautiful. It wasn't consumerism, just doing what you want. An exploded door is no longer a door. Inside you had the impression of walking in a territory that was familiar and at the same time completely bizarre. It was like...I don't know, walking into a movie theater when the lights are still dim and not knowing if something's about to begin or if something's just ended. Not one cop, not one security guard, no cashiers, nobody but us. And dark. And all these products you couldn't see so well in the dimness. When you go into a supermarket normally you might get these little flashes that this could all be different, that it doesn't have to be like this. Maybe you shoplift something because it's too unfair to have to submit yourself to this kind of system. And this really was what you'd been dreaming of... this beautiful exploded supermarket. "

" It's not more free to be in the countryside than in your room in Paris. Sure, in the country you breathe good air, you're calm, and nobody bothers you (there's less cops per square meter), you can surround yourself with nature and think there's a freedom and peace in that. But there isn't more freedom there than there was in the riots. We had this feeling of defiance that we posed against armed power : I'm here, I'm in the city, I'm free, and I say fuck you. At one point I was cutting this big block of cheese with a saw, in the middle of the street-I was like a butcher with this enormous saw. The cheese was really hard and I was using all my concentration to cut it into smaller pieces for everyone else to eat. So there, in the middle of the riots, I was experiencing a kind of countryside picnic feeling like no other that you can have today, when you buy your food, load up the picnic basket, take the bus to the country, and try to find a nice spot where you can sit and have your picnic. "

" To smash in a bank is a very nice feeling. That's when you really start laughing for once. Burning desks and cubicles, all these pathetically humanized work spaces. A moment of clarity helps you do it... you understand that this life is shit and you choose to burn it up. "

" I accidentally found myself separated from my friends and lost in this Reclaim the Streets crowd. I didn't see this moment coming, and there was a certain freedom about it. I split off and went through a tunnel, and then there was this long moment of wandering. And you're trying to get back to the front line, asking people which way everybody went. And one says this way, and another says that way, and you feel an extreme solitude because you've lost the intensity. It's sad and unbearable. You come upon these dead times which are unbearable. But at the same time you catch your breath, and you know something will happen later. But this is the moment you understand the difference between being 'quelconque' (whatever) and being someone who's become a nowhere. These are really two different things. To be quelconque is to be in that moment of improvisation I was talking about. But to be alone in the crowd is a kind of suffering. "

" I saw a cop run through a hundred peaceful demonstrators to smash in the head of a boy dressed in black. And they all just sat there in silence and watched. They are violent against us but not against the cops. They say: get the fuck out of our protest, this is our protest, you don't belong here! It's a perverse logic. And they can be insanely aggressive. They say: we've been protesting since before you were born and it's thanks to us you have protest culture at all. And I say: thanks so much for your lame protest culture, I'm so grateful. And thanks for making a space for me in your beautiful alternative world. "