#May68: from Prague to Mexico City

When we first conceived of this conversation, May 68 emerged as a sort of epistemic detonator, which would allow us to read our contemporary global condition in a world where new political horizons seem lost.

Last year at MUAC, Sol and Amanda de la Garza curated a show called “Grafica of 68: Imagenes Rotundas”, a project that explored the visual repertoire of the 1968 movements in Mexico through its social and artistic articulations on its 50th anniversary. Zbyněk, through your projects Building Archive and History is Possible, you have worked on tracing the political narratives of real defeat and the speculative success of socialism in the Czech Republic, as well as the wider context of Eastern Europe. I find it fascinating how these local narratives both differ from the mainstream Western version of the French 68, while also differing from each other. In the case of Mexico, the movement represented a struggle against a capital oriented dictatorship. In Prague, it was more of an effort to humanize real socialism. Could you each begin by expanding on how the above projects have, 50 years later, helped you to gain perspective regarding these political and aesthetic movements?

Your observation about how these micro-narratives break into the milestone of the French 68 feels very important because, as we know, 68 coincided with diverse mobilizations in other contexts and, well, each one has its particularities and contexts that signify them It’s also interesting to think of a kind of “simultaneity of conflicts” where the youth factor played a fundamental role within them. This brings me to the work of the Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky, who has worked with diverse photographic documents of mobilizations that took place across different countries in 1968.

In the case of Mexico, for the commemoration of the events of the 1968 student movement, it proved impossible to think of these events without also considering recent vile and traumatic events such as the forced disappearance of the 43 normalists of the Escuela Normal Rural Isidro Burgo in Iguala, Guerrero in 2014, an occurrence that sadly received international visibility for its severity. We live in Mexico, a country where mobilizations are as constant as the exercises of power about who can raise a critical voice towards the State, or to any perspective that it involves. The case of Ayotzinapa was so brutal of an occurrence that it was difficult not to make a comparison with the killing of the students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas de Tlatelolco on the 2nd of October in 1968. In both cases, Tlatelolco and Ayotzinapa, the role of the State was to give orders to proceed, cover-up, and hide evidence or block the investigations of third parties, which activated an alarm in many of us. What I'd like to highlight with this is that the commemoration obliged us to ask ourselves where we are today; what has changed? How can brutal events like 68 continue to happen today without firm and direct judicial response? What are we really talking about when we speak of memory?

I feel that the modern organized state under socialism was no so much different from that of today. It was based on the same technocratic patterns, except that property is now distributed more asymmetrically and more unfairly. In the Czech Republic, as in the entire Central European region, it is international capital and its corporations where almost all profits are paid. I would describe it as a kind of colonial vassalism within the wider Western world. Year 68 in Czechoslovakia culminated in a more participatory and open way of governance. The Communist Party almost lost its sovereign power. Compared to today, society is massively vertically reorganized on a wealth basis, i.e. in access to capital and resources. I remember how in the late 1980s it produced a smile when someone coveted money and success. The socialist man thought differently, he was not so heterotrophically individualistic oriented (of course, probably a little exaggerated, but what was natural was perceived differently in the socialist regime than what is natural today).

The visual strategies of resistance and sabotage are similar to those of fifty years ago. In Mexico, it's probably different, but in a country organized as ours is, radical strategies are hard to find. Artists and intellectuals are very well adapted to new circumstances, and radical criticism is a marginal issue without much influence. Certainly, it is related to the fact that it is difficult to imagine a different type of system than the one we have now, and only really as criticism as a correction of the existing system.
In general, everything within the limits of the law, but in the former repressive regime, they relied more on otherness and metaphor.

In the Czech Republic on the way to the neoliberal regime, the perception of what is private property and what represents the state has radically changed. Few perceive violence monopolized by the state as a type of repression that should be fought or criticized. The most striking is the criminalization of anarchists and activists squatting empty buildings in which they mainly create an alternative cultural program. The state, by sending heavy rioters into squats, became the primary protector of private property against anyone who would try to challenge it. In general, the anarchists' behavior is perceived as questioning the status quo and all the freedoms of which private ownership is the flagship in this regime. The conquest of such places by police or court hearings occupies virtual TV and Internet space for a while to leave the arrested activists in prison for a few months without noticing the media. Then Visual Protest Strategies usually move to the Internet, where their reach may be higher, but all the more toothless.