antipopper

Oh yeah, about that Videopower screening. There were two sessions: a set of shorts about the anti-WTO actions in December 2005, and their fabulous documentary about the Lee Tung St residents’ action campaign against their eviction by the Urban Renewal Authority, which was shot by the residents themselves.

The most amazing thing about both sessions was their palpable sense of a capacity to mourn, an ability to express dignified, collective sadness that is usually absent in activist culture, especially in its more Anglocentric instances. One of the WTO shorts was about a young Hong Kong man who was disturbed and eventually emotionally overcome by the Korean Peasants League’s tactic of getting down on their knees and touching their foreheads to the ground every three steps of the slow march from Victoria Park to the Convention Centre where the WTO ministerial meeting was taking place.

At first, this Chinese onlooker was disappointed; was this gesture not a sign of submission, of weakness? But after a while, in tears, he decided to join them. Because he’d realised that this performance couldn’t be reduced to a communication by the Korean farmers of their own (extremely unlikely) supplication, but was instead something else — a “wildcard” invocation of sadness that cracked open the world. It also created an atmosphere of generalised respect — of collective, almost “environmental” dignity, rather than its opposite. (Interestingly, for the actual shots of this mass kow-towing, the camera appears to find it impossible to focus on the farmers themselves, who always appear at the edge of frame, and instead centres on the onlookers. It’s as if this radical sadness is unable to be directly represented.)

Thinking back, I later realised that this was prophetically framed by the first short film, about a tiny group of local radicals who visited the Convention Centre the day before the WTO meeting took place, in order to ritualistically open a period of mourning for the carnage of capital’s global consolidation. Carrying a black banner that read “The WTO Kills — Mourn the Death” and carrying burning sticks of incense and an insistently tolling bell, this group slowly backed away from the Convention Centre, bowing every three steps. No, not a submissive gesture at all. Also, against the grain, I wouldn’t dismiss the slightly “Chinglish” grammar — mourning “the (systemic) death” can mean mourning without limits, rather than just for a particular, quantifiable “dead”.

The Lee Tung St documentary was also incredibly touching. I mentioned the huge, seamless photomural of the street previously, but the film makes its role in the affective process of recollection much more clear. At its exhibition, and aware that they were probably about to be evicted, residents could walk the length of the photomural, using it as a spatialising touchstone for memorialisation. With tears in her eyes, one woman touched various points of the reproduced streetfront. “This is where I got my wedding invitations printed,” she said. “And this is where I bought the jewellery.” Whatever one’s preconceptions about the tendencies of Not-In-My-Backyard petit-bourgeois local action groups, this film was a tribute to small moments of everyday life on one hand, and the indefatigability of these people’s collective engagement with space on the other. In response to the Urban Renewal Authority’s plans, they created their own amazingly extensive, fuck-off redevelopment proposal — one that actually included them. It was rejected. But in the pre-credits “where are they now?” sequence, we learn that their proposal later won an independent prize for town planning. Sigh.

[ tags: activism, affect, hong-kong, lee-tung-street, mourning, protest, urban-renewal-authority, videopower, wan-chai, wto ]