Irishvidheads in Genoa_2001

Irishvidheads in Genoa Eamonn Crudden

Irishvidheads in Genoa During the G8 Protests in 2001 / Open Source Video (i) There are about ten people sitting around the breakfast room in the hotel. The hotel is in Genoa, a couple of miles from the city centre. Seven of us are Irish and we’ve been staying here for around ten days now. There’s an Italian woman sitting in front of me. She’s crying and periodically shouting in Italian and gesticulating at the TV. It’s carrying reports of the bloody raid on the Diaz School1 which had taken place just eight or so hours beforehand. Everything is a mess. I’m constantly at the edge of panic. My heart is pounding. My mind is racing uncontrollably. I’m chain-smoking, lighting one cigarette from the end of another, walking in circles, frantic, more terrified than I have ever been before in my adult life. We’re trying to have a rational discussion about what is happening to us and it’s not working out too well. We’re all completely sleep-deprived and physically shattered from days of constant stress and movement. My partner is ‘missing in action’ somewhere outside the hotel. We have a bag full of maybe forty digital videotapes and I am totally convinced by now that the Italian authorities want those tapes. I’m also sure that they know that a group of us, who have been doing a lot of filming, are in the hotel. The fact that we were all pretty drunk a few hours ago isn’t helping. We’ve been drinking a lot over the past few days, in the evenings. We are trying to medicate ourselves I suppose, trying to get away from the constant tension, to get to sleep. It hasn’t been working for me in terms of sleep. Anytime I lie down and close my eyes the sense of panic and urgency becomes even more overwhelming and my mind races. The images I’ve seen on TV and computer screens run together in loops in my mind. Being awake and chattering with others, trying to keep a sense of my bearings, trying to keep focused on what I’m here to do, what we’re here to do as a group, has kept me on the right side of blind panic for days. Now I can feel myself going over that edge. I, through the mounting sense of paranoia I’m experiencing, and through my inability to stop myself expressing it, am making at least some of the others around me panic too. This is bad. I’m meant to be the one who has some experience, however limited, of events like this. I gathered this group together to come here and film and I feel responsible for everyone. Nothing has prepared me for what has taken place over the last two days. All of the

1 The Diaz school housed sleeping demonstrators during the Genoa protests. It was part of a complex of buildings which were also used as a media centre by the Genoa Social Forum and Indymedia during the protests.


worst imaginings that have raced through my brain since Carlo2 was shot dead seem to be entangling me beyond any possibility of disengagement. ‘R’ is as bad as I am after a while. He’s also convinced that it’s too dangerous to step outside of the building. At least we manage to make the decision to split the tapes into three piles and to travel separately when we eventually do bring ourselves to leave. More cigarettes. I stop pacing and my eyes lock onto the TV screen. Footage of tens of people, being carried one by one out of the Diaz school on stretchers. They’re covered in blood. Caught in the glare of TV lights. Some are clearly unconscious. It could so easily have been us. I convince ‘C’ to get on the phone to the media in Ireland. It’s the only thing that I can think of doing to regain any control over what is going on around us, over what is happening to us. I want to let someone know that we’re stuck in a hotel in Genoa and that one of our group has gone missing in the last few hours. I want them to know that we’re scared, scared that if we go out onto the street that we’ll go missing too. It’s iIllogical but I’m undone by the panic. ‘C’ is a lot calmer than I am. That’s why I’ve made sure to stick with him for the last few days. I don’t think I could have handled the situations I’ve found myself in if he hadn’t been there beside me. He’s over six feet tall and a hardbitten kind of person. He’s also one of my best friends and has no problem joining in with me over and over on the wildest of speculative trains of thought. He was in Prague with me too a few months ago. But he’s sick of me now. He’s on the phone, using non verbal signals to forcefully shut me up as he talks to the RTE radio news desk. He doesn’t engage with the paranoia I’m experiencing and the details of what I think might happen. He sticks to the facts of what has already happened over the last ten hours and they’re frightening enough. He wants to go back across town to the Media Centre building3. I think he’s utterly crazy but I also know, on some level, that I’ve lost my sense of judgement. There’s going to be a press conference there. A respected Italian filmmaker is going to show footage he’s shot which he says proves that elements of the Black Bloc were collaborating with the Italian Police two days ago. This would be shattering news if it were definitively true. A strategy of tension4 redux. We get a call from the guy who owns the restaurant a couple of doors down from the hotel. He’s been unbelievably hospitable to us for the past week, staying open late into the night. He’s done this despite the fact that his

2 Carlo Guiliani was shot dead by the Italian security forces on the afternoon of the 20th July in the midst of serious rioting which erupted after the Carabineiri charged the head of the ‘White Overalls’ march as it approached the centre of the city. 3 The Media Centre building was directly across the street from the Diaz School. Indymedia occupied one floor of the building for the duration of the protests. 4 ‘Strategy of tension’ refers to the way in which bombings and assassinations carried out by right wing neo-fascist groups in Italy in the 1970’s and 1980’s were blamed on the left. Many believe a series of ‘false-flag’ attacks at the time were directed at keeping the Italian Communist Party from entering government. Willan, Philip. "US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy'", The Guardian, June 24, 2000.


business is situated right on the edge of the ‘Yellow Zone’5 and despite the fact that any kind of normal business had evaporated over the past few days. When we eventually got a taxi outside the Media Centre the night before last, when all sorts of rumours were floating around about there having been more than one protester killed, when it became clear the Police were not stopping their arrests after dark, we headed straight for his restaurant. He was very concerned for our safety as the streets outside were swarming with Carabinieri looking for protesters. Some of them were attempting, sporadically, to get into the restaurant. As a result he had convinced us to get out of town for the night rather than stay in the hotel. He and some friends had then brought us, and our bag of videotapes, to his apartment in the suburbs. He is calling because my partner has just turned up at his restaurant. He wants us to get down there quickly as she is hysterical. I swallow my fears and head down to meet them on the street. She is drunk, angry and crying. She is upset with me, with everything. Through the anger and upset she explains to me that she’d left the hotel very early in the morning looking for cigarettes, had been snatched off the side of the street by men in plain clothes and forced into their car. They had driven her, on a winding route, through the empty streets for some distance. The car pulled up at an unmarked garage door and they drove in. They’d brought her into an interrogation room, and while refusing to confirm that they were policemen, had interrogated her about her activities in Genoa. They searched her bag and found her passport and, after a period, put her back in the car, returned to the place where they’d picked her up, pushed her out of the car and onto the street. Incredibly she still has the small set of videotapes she shot yesterday in the bottom of her bag. Maybe it was the fact that she was so obviously drunk that led to these characters neglecting to search her fully. She is still drunk when I get her back to the hotel with me. She didn’t want to go back at all. She is traumatised and irrational. I’m not too rational myself but want our group at least to be together and in the one place. I feel guilty about the fact that I was sufficiently worried about the videotapes to check if they were still there. Soon after we get back to the hotel ‘C’ returns from the press conference and the area of the Media Centre. He tells us that almost everyone he’d encountered there was completely panicked also by the events of the past twelve hours. People were packing up as quickly as they could and getting out of Genoa. No one felt safe. Before the press conference he’d gone with ‘F’, another friend of ours, for a look around the Diaz building and filmed the gouts of blood which remained all over the floors and walls of the building. He also filmed activists rifling through all the bags and haversacks which were strewn around. They were trying to recover any important

5 The security forces set up a ‘Red Zone’ and a ‘Yellow Zone’ in Genoa during the protests there. The ‘Red Zone’ was an area in the centre of the city which was surrounded by 5 meter high fences. Only residents and those attending the G8 summit could enter the zone during the summit. The ‘Yellow Zone’ was an area surrounding the ‘Red Zone’ where the right to protest was limited during the summit. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1452725.stm


personal documents, notebooks and films so as to keep them safe for a time when the mass of people who had been dragged and carried out of the building would be in a position to reclaim them. The press conference took place in the marquee which had hosted the ill-attended counter-summit that was totally disrupted in the end. He described vividly to me a huge crowd of journalists pointing their cameras at the small TV which Gillo Pontecorvo6 was using to show the footage he’d shot and how he had even become involved in helping the filmmaker set up for the conference. The footage which was shown, according to ‘C’, was very suggestive but not very conclusive7. People at the press conference were desperate for a simple and straightforward explanation for the utter chaos which had erupted during the protest two days ago. But this wasn’t to be it. By now I was recovering my composure enough to grill him on how he’d shot it and could congratulate him on managing to film the footage through the camera screen of one of the journalists who was in turn filming the small TV screen. Crucially he shot from a vantage point just above and behind the TV with the huge crowd of cameras all pointing at the screen. We had to get all this footage home safe. Some of our material had gone missing already, stolen from a tent that one of our group had stayed in. I couldn’t bear the thought that we had all gone through this for nothing. (ii) We were just leaving the Media Centre the previous evening to go to a pizzeria around the corner for something to eat when the raid on the two buildings began. If we’d delayed even for another half an hour we would have been there when the police had made everyone on the Indymedia floor sit along the walls of the corridor while they ransacked the place. They went around smashing computers after taking the memory chips from them and confiscated every videotape they could get their hands on. Within minutes police were lined up outside the pizzeria, arresting and frisking protesters within five feet of where I was sitting. I was in a corner just inside the door at the time. Rumours swirled around the pizzeria. Someone said that the police who had raided the Media Centre had been looking for ‘Irish Indymedia’. Terrified I went through my pockets systematically, taking out and ripping up any paper I had on me that referred to the protests. By that point we knew that the police had also raided the Diaz School which was positioned across the street from the Media Centre. For the last week we had been spending a lot of our time on the Indymedia floor of the Media Centre building. People had been sleeping in the Diaz School across the street en masse. Now they were being brought out of there on stretchers, in handcuffs, covered in blood. I

6 Gillo Pontecorvo was among a group of 32 Italian directors who collaborated on the making of ‘Another World is Possible’ a 60 minute long documentary on the events in Genoa which was screened on Italian television in 2002. 7 This footage, combined with footage of the press conference, is used as the final scene/credit sequence in Berlusconi’s Mousetrap (2002).


convinced ‘C’ to try to find somewhere safe to hide the bag of videotapes that I had carried with me relentlessly for days. He managed to get the proprietor to allow him out the back door so he could stash them in the grounds behind the building. My partner and ‘A’, another member of our group, decided to leave the pizzeria and take a small handycam with us around the corner to see what was happening. I didn’t know until much later, when I reviewed the tapes back in Ireland, that my partner had first gone into the bathroom, turned the camera on and, whispering, recorded herself explaining the situation. Video diary meets war diary. I was far too unnerved even to consider going out on the street with them. There were so many riot police and uniformed Carabinieri around that it absolutely felt like being under occupation. All of us were drinking as much beer as we could get our hands on, as we had done every evening for the last few evenings. It had even less of an effect on me this time and the adrenalin flowing through me completely overpowered the alcohol. ‘S’ from Indymedia UK was also there. He had been acting as a kind of co-ordinator for the video people. He was frantically ringing UK journalists, letting them know what was going on. No-one in the pizzeria was in a position to know what, if any, information was making it out of Genoa about the situation going on around the corner. I went to him repeatedly, trying to get any kind of grasp on the situation. All of the news he was getting was bad. Thousands of the Tute Bianche were deserting Carlini Stadium because they had information that the police would attack them if they didn’t leave. I didn’t want to be arrested. I didn’t want to be separated from the brown leather bag which was, at this stage, full of our mini DV tapes. One piece of good news was that, as the day had progressed and the helicopters and security forces had moved closer and closer to the Media Centre, the decision was taken to collect all of the videotapes that were on the Indymedia floor of the building, put them into a flight case and have them sent to a ‘safe house’. The police who had just raided the centre would not be able to get their hands on the bulk of video shot by activists associated with Indymedia. I didn’t entrust my tapes to this security operation. I wasn’t even aware that it was taking place. Our interaction with Indymedia as an entity had been fragmented and disorganised and this was partially the result of that. (iii) We, as an ‘Irish Indymedia’ sub-group, had worked in pairs over the past few days, trying to go about things in some sort of coordinated manner. It wasn’t easy. Our mobile phones, when we could hear them ring or hear the person on the other end, were not working properly. Any credit we had was being eaten up in short, confused calls. There was no way we would have been able to get anything like an overview of the events on our own, despite the fact that we comprised five stripped down camera crews. The rationale for working in pairs was simple and had nothing to do with a


division of technical tasks. All of our gear was being used in a point and shoot way. No tripods. No shotgun microphones. Just handheld ‘Mini DV’ cameras. One member of each pairing shot footage and the other was there, basically and necessarily, to watch their back. ‘C’ and I worked together in this way but with one difference. On Saturday I was still attempting to place myself in the centre of events in the style of a video diary. I wanted to have something at the end of the filming that might help in the narration of the event as well as tying the film together. I also wanted to capture the way I was thinking about the event and the flow of information and media that was threaded through it. Tiny bits of this approach made it into the end product, but I was barely ever composed enough, once the tear gas, rioting and police violence had kicked in, to do this in any kind of coherent way. We did however manage, at least in flashes, to capture this aspect of the event. We had shot footage through the viewfinder of an MTV camera interviewing protesters at the convergence centre. We continually mounted a wide angle lens on a ‘Mini DV’ camera and filmed some of the live TV coverage as we watched it in our hotel. I had filmed my partner attempting to report to, and interact with, Irish newspapers about the event. One of the papers took advantage of this by completely misrepresenting her. She was telling them about one jovial group we knew from Ireland who, on the first day of the protests, carried a banner with ‘Culchies8 Against Capitalism’ written on it. She also told them that the symbol on the banner was a wellington boot crossed with a hurley9 stick. The next day we read a report on the newspaper’s website which said that Irish protesters were standing out from the crowd in Genoa because they were marching with hurley sticks in hand. We were reading this at the same time as we were seeing reports on Italian TV talking about ‘deadly weapons’ that had been found in the cars of protesters entering Genoa. These deadly weapons were baseball bats. I filmed her remonstrating on the telephone with the reporter whose name appeared on the article. These were just gestures but they would prove useful for me later. My constant attentiveness to them helped me feel at a visceral or experiential level that my own developing understanding of these events as something being contested live in the media, as well as on the ground was, at least to some extent, valid. A lot of experiences like this weren’t caught on tape. At one point ‘C’ and I went to the marquee where the ‘counter-summit’10 was taking place. People from the Global South were talking while simultaneous translations into a number of languages were being made available through a sound system and headphones. We wanted to connect our camera to the English language translator output but were refused permission by those manning the translation service. The reason given was that the company providing the service owned the copyright for these translations. We

8 A ‘culchie’, in Ireland, refers to a person from a rural area. It has some of the same connotations as ‘redneck’. 9 A hurley stick resembles a hockey stick and is used in the Irish game of Hurley. 10 Many summit protests staged ‘counter summits’ during this period. These took the form of organised events with panels of speakers addressing issues to do with the negative effects of the multilateral institutions being protested.


enquired further and worked out that the upstream owner of the company was part of one of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s companies. This seemed like the ultimate level of sickness to me at the time and we made a point of telling as many of the Italian Indymedia people about it as we could. While filming initially we did also try to fit in with the dispatch system at the Indymedia centre but this had pretty much completely broken down the moment the rioting broke out on Saturday afternoon. The dispatch system was meant to allocate video activists to the sites of particular events as the protests progressed but it failed as the general chaos on the streets was compounded by communication difficulties and linguistic barriers. However it became clear later that the sheer number of videographers associated with Indymedia had made up for this failure. By the time the rioting erupted members of our group were arrayed in pairs all over the city. We had divided ourselves up by deciding, on the morning of the direct action protests, which protest groups we would like to accompany. The only ongoing method of coordination that actually seemed to be working for us was physical meetings back at the Indymedia centre. We were out of contact with each other for the majority of the day. Phone call after phone call from my mobile just created more confusion. ‘A’ spent his time, solo, with the Genoa Social Forum ambulance crews. ’L’ and ‘M’ decided to take part in the ‘Pink and Silver’ Bloc. ‘W’ and ‘R’ opted for attempting to track down and accompany the ‘Black Bloc’, and myself and ‘C’ decided to travel through the dead areas of the city before connecting with the Tute Bianche11. Myself and ‘C’ made our way through some streets which the Black Bloc12 had obviously passed through earlier in the day. Office and bank buildings had been ransacked and on one street we saw a number of smashed up PCs on the tarmac. Someone had taken the time to splatter them, Pollock13-style, with bright yellow paint. We avoided the lines of Carabinieri who were blocking off entire streets and made our way towards the Tute Bianche parade which was approaching the city. I asked ‘C’ to film me in one of the empty streets we passed through and I ranted about the way in which Berlusconi’s channels14 on the TV had appeared to be advertising or previewing a kind of gladiatorial combat. Footage of the Black Bloc from Gothenburg15, rioting against the police, was used endlessly on the private TV channels, accompanied by driving rock music, pumping up fear and excitement simultaneously.

11 The Tute Bianche or White Overalls were a militant Italian social movement active from the mid 90’s until 2001. They were associated with Italian social centres and had roots in Italy’s autonomist Marxist tradition. They emerged from a loose network of anti-globalisation activists called Ya Basta! 12 Though the Black Bloc is often described as a coherent grouping within AGM protests, it is, in fact a tactic adopted by anarchists and automomists at demonstrations. Participants wear black and disguise their identities using masks and scarves. They appear en masse at protests and take part in property destruction and street fighting with security forces. The tactic has its roots in Northern Europe, particularly Germany. (Katsiaficas 1997) 13 Refers to American painter Jackson Pollock and his technique of pouring and dripping paint onto his canvases. 14 Silvio Berlusconi is the proprietor of a number of private TV channels in Italy and was so at the time. 15 There had been significant rioting during the Gothenburg EU Summit which had taken place in late June 2001.


Here in the dead zones the Debord book16 I’d been reading, rereading and quoting to the bemused crew that accompanied me again made some kind of surreal sense of the situation. Anytime we ventured into these streets behind the police lines, blocked as many of them were at one end by shipping containers, we found an absolute desert. There was nobody there, nothing happening. Activity only seemed to exist where there were literally hundreds of cameras around. There was no space between these extreme spaces. Well except, perhaps, for the Indymedia Centre where filming was generally frowned upon17, particularly if not agreed to in advance by those who were being filmed. These dead zones in the streets felt like the areas you encounter when you ignore the obvious prompts in a videogame and go off to explore the scenery. We made it to the Tute Bianche march after an hour of wandering around ‘backstage’. They made an awesome sight, seeming to stretch back to the horizon as we looked to the right, up the hill, back in the direction of the stadium where they had gathered over the previous few days. We were somewhere at the midpoint of the parade, surrounded by young Italians who were literally dressed from head to foot in improvised body armour mostly made up of a combination of masking tape and the empty plastic water bottles which filled every bin in the scorching city. They were all the same in one sense yet each had customised these suits of armour in some way or another. Panels on the front made up of masking tape over the bottles gave space for inscriptions of various kinds. It was a riot of improvisation and creativity not unlike a fashion show. They paraded and snapped pictures of each other promiscuously with digital cameras and phones. It was quite apparent that a large proportion of the crowd were doing this for the first time. Their excitement was very different from the blasé attitude of the much smaller group we’d seen in action in Prague18 less than a year earlier. It was an enormous and overpowering spectacle. This looked like an ad-hoc army. It felt playful but also as if the spectacle was balanced at that point where playing at a war might just tip over into the thing itself. We moved forward toward the truck from which periodic announcements of the situation throughout the city were issuing in English, Italian and Spanish. We saw ‘E’ there. She in turn saw us and acknowledged us. We had visited Carlini Stadium19 a few days earlier and bumped into her there. I wanted to give a copy of the documentary I had made about the events in Prague to someone in the Tute Bianche as they were the ones whom ‘C’ and myself had accompanied on the day of action there. We found her in the control room, high above the stadium and gave her the tape. She was the person on the microphone on the Ya Basta truck in Prague. Now she was in Genoa making announcements to this huge parade. She told the crowd that the Police were now stopping and attacking the head of the procession, despite the fact that they were still a long way from the centre of the city.

16 Society of the Spectacle. 17 A handwritten sign on door which led onto the Indymedia floor: ‘The Real Red Zone’ 18 The Tute Bianche had taken part in protests against the IMF and World Bank in Prague in September of 2000. Our encounter with them in Prague is documented in ‘We are not Warriors: S26 Y2K’ (2001) 19 Carlini Stadium is the main soccer stadium in Genoa. It was turned into a massive campsite for the duration of the protests.


We moved forward to the front lines. The huge plexiglas shields that the demonstrators were carrying initially were now gone and the crowd thinned as we approached the front. The suits of armour being worn by the demonstrators we found here, while still obviously improvised, were far more functional than the peacock designs which we had observed further back in the parade. These people were wearing crash helmets, dressed in fully elaborated body armour and carrying functional individual, transparent, plastic shields. As we stood there filming, overwhelmed by the sheer visual power of this group, large tear gas canisters started to land amongst us. We ran from these missiles which were coming from a helicopter hovering above us, got some help from those around us with relieving the effects of the gas, and moved with many others into the side streets. People were beginning to riot against the police who were by now trying to ram people with large police vans travelling at high speed. We ran behind the crowds as they attacked and retreated, filming what we could, but remaining mindful of our safety. This was totally exhausting and absolutely nerve-wracking. At some stage I commented, while ‘C’ filmed me, that I felt like I was in the middle of a science fiction movie. I very much did feel thrown into the future, surrounded as I was by this ragtag army who had gone from being something symbolic one minute to something caught up in a play of physical forces the next. We retreated on to the main thoroughfare and through the parade which was being forced back the way it had come. We found a side street where protesters were relaxing en masse outside a tiny café. We were hungry and thirsty and decided to stay and try to eat something, have a beer, get out of the sun and also stock up on water. Inside, in a tiny backroom, we found some older Italian men glued to a TV which was mounted high on the wall. On it we saw footage, which appeared to be live, from a camera mounted on a roof looking down at the edge of the Red Zone. It wasn’t a handheld camera. It seemed more like a remotely operated security camera. It was locked into position, looking directly down, at a ninety degree angle, to the ground far below. The protesters looked tiny, almost like ants, and maybe twenty or thirty of them were pushing against the spray of water cannon trying to get to the fence. Some were at the fence hitting it, throwing things. There were no police around them. Those who were visible were all behind the fences. It looked like a full-on siege but it didn’t make logical sense from our perspective. We were a couple of miles from the Red Zone and the police were proactively attacking the biggest single group of demonstrators, numbering tens of thousands. The TV was making it seem as if the summit were under serious attack. We sat down in the front room of the café to eat. It was really tiny with only two tables. Some Italians who were obviously part of the Tute Bianche parade sat beside us. Some of the men were wearing improvised armour. The women present were not. We indicated that they should make use of any of the space at our table which they needed and some did so. As we ate


tear gas began to float in the door from the street outside. The small crowd which had been on the pavement began to disperse and it was obvious that the police were making their way up the side street towards the thoroughfare on which the Tute Bianche were gathered. Through pretty much non-verbal means we all agreed to stay where we were. We didn’t want to abandon our small meal and a chance for a little sociability. The proprietor, as it became apparent that everyone was being seriously affected by the tear gas, moved to shut the front door and pull down the shutters. We continued to eat, exchanging smiles with the Italians, wiping the tears from our eyes. Suddenly the shutters were lifted and all of the available space in the cafe was abruptly filled by helmeted, fully armoured riot police. They roared in Italian, raising their batons. ‘C’ swept the video camera, which was lying on the table in front of him, into the bag on his lap. One of the young Italian men remonstrated with these riot policemen who, crowded together and surreally large, now completely filled my field of vision. He got a blow from a baton for his troubles, fell to his knees and got back up again, still remonstrating with them. At this point ‘C’ and I were crouched behind the table within a couple of feet of these armoured men. One of them shoved some kind of an aerosol in the face of the remonstrating protester. I could see him inadvertently inhaling the foamy substance as it hit him in the face at point blank range. It disappeared up his nose and a moment later he collapsed to the floor unconscious and vomiting. It was like a nightmare in slow motion. The old man who ran the café intervened and managed to convince the police to leave the café and wait outside, but he also indicated that everyone inside must leave immediately. Some of the young Italians went ahead of us and we could see them being grabbed by the hair as they go out the door. We had to go too but we were not grabbed. Both of us were dressed quite respectably, devoid of black or masks or home-made body armour. I was wearing chinos and a clean blue shirt and ‘C’ was in similarly casual gear. He’d also cut off his waist length dreadlocks just before leaving Ireland. We were deliberately smart-casual in the hope this would make us invisible to the police. It worked. We walked, as fast as we could without running, across the small piazza outside the café. Halfway across we turn to see several of the young Italians who we had just sat with lying on the ground against the wall outside the café, each being beaten mercilessly with batons by groups of the riot police. We looked at each other and continued walking with our heads down. We were far too afraid to film anything. We made our way as fast as we could back to the Media Centre. This incident really unnerved us and we had had enough of the streets. When we arrived I was anxious to use the website to try to report on the incident. An older Italian protester was very understanding when we explained what has happened. He calmed me down and brought me to a computer set up in the room where some of the German Indymedia people were broadcasting from a temporary radio station. He handed me a map so I could work out where it


was exactly that the incident took place. I tried to type up as coherent a report as possible, despite the fact that I could feel myself going into a kind of shock as the adrenalin from the incident began to wear off. As I was finishing word began to circulate that a protester had been killed and that images of this were already circulating on newspaper websites. Rumours were also floating around us that other protesters, including a woman, had been killed by the police. I spent a little time on the web and was gratified to see that some material which ‘W’ had filmed was already available online. He was, unknown to me and ‘C’, just behind the police lines which had attacked the front of the Tute Bianche parade and had had filmed some of the vicious assaults they had inflicted on those unlucky enough to get dragged behind their front lines. ‘S’ from Indymedia UK was manning the ‘Global Mix’ desk in the hallway at this point. Activists arriving there with video they had shot on the streets were using a couple of firewires linked to small DV decks to make quick dubs on to separate tapes of the most important things they had filmed. At the time these tapes were intended to become the basis of an archive which would later be distributed to all those who had contributed to it. Meanwhile some Indymedia Italy activists were editing short snippets from these compilations and uploading them as a numbered series onto the site. These, rather than focusing on the initial size and vibrancy of the protests on the day, focused inevitably on the rampant brutality of the police. One scene which they uploaded was unforgettable. Through the lens of an already heavily damaged camera, visible in wavering black and white, a phalanx of riot police in a small courtyard was laying into a small crowd of perhaps twenty people with their batons, trapping them, as they tried to retreat from the blows, in the narrow space between a row of cars and a wall. In the footage we could see them continuing to batter people who were already on their knees or sitting between these cars. The cameraperson was also under attack and he could be heard reacting to a series of blows. He shouted ‘Press! Press!’ in Italian. They kept on attacking him. The camera shuddered as it too was hit. Then the image blacked out completely20. Images of the dead protester, his masked head in a pool of blood, were suddenly visible everywhere there was a computer screen. The rioting and protests were over for the day and the coincidence of the appearance and circulation of the images and the end of the rioting was strange but inevitable. There was no appetite for this kind of conflict among the demonstrators. The image circulated almost in real time. As it circulated, so too did a wave of emotion, fear and anger. We felt as if what started as a festival was now, quite suddenly, something else, something more serious than people wanted or expected it to be. Within a very short period I was not able to bring myself to look at the site, or the video or the pictures.

20 This scene is included in Berlusconi’s Mousetrap (2002)


I gave up even on thinking about filming and wandered through the corridors barely talking to anyone. I was exhausted. My mind was beginning to race in all directions. ‘A’, who was dubbing tapes onto the Global Mix in the corridor, told me about filming medics humming the ‘March of the Death Star’21 in the back of an ambulance speeding toward the area where the police had attacked the Tute Bianche. ‘W’ and ‘R’ were similarly dubbing material. All three of them had never been in a situation like this before and were responding to it in a way which I could not. ‘W’ and ‘R’ worked together earlier and, despite members of the Black Bloc intervening in their filming on several occasions, had a lot of footage of the attacks on banks and businesses which took place early in the afternoon. They also filmed in great detail the unprovoked attack on the front of the Tute Bianche march in real time with two cameras. ‘L’ had incredible footage of the Pink and Silver Bloc approaching and attempting to pull down a section of the Red Zone fence. I watched this stuff in short bursts but it was impossible to process it and achieve a coherent understanding of it. There was too much of it. What happened when? It was all so incredibly heightened by it being a part of what was happening to us now. We heard that one of the Italian TV stations had actually tried to set up a TV studio on a stage in the middle of the very large convergence point beside the water. That’s where all the information stalls were. Lots of protesters were retreating there for the night as people were too scared to stay in the smaller dispersed campsites. This ‘spectacular’ invasion did not last long and the broadcast was rapidly shut down by sections of the protesters. (iv) Finally we were ready to leave the hotel. We were going to a hostel in a small town a couple of hundred miles away. ‘A’, who left before us, had friends living there and he had booked us a large room in a hostel for the next few days. We went directly to the train station and on the train I made contact with ‘S’ from Indymedia UK. We’ve lost tapes. ‘R’ left them in a tent in one of the smaller campsites and they went missing. Other tapes have gone missing sporadically over the weekend and we discussed the possibility of putting up posters in Genoa asking that people, if they can, find a way to return them to Indymedia. We were somewhere between dreaming and crisis mode. It wouldn’t happen. On the train I got a call from a mainstream radio news show back in Ireland. Could I do an interview at 6pm about what has been happening? I told them I would get back to them. I couldn’t keep my thoughts together for 30 seconds, let alone talk on the radio. I decided that I would say yes, hoping I would feel better in a few hours. I knew that, if necessary, I could cancel it at the last minute.

21 ‘March of the Death Star’ is a particularly well known part of the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back


While on the train I thought back to the most opaque part of the last few days; Sunday afternoon. Our friend from the restaurant beside our hotel woke us on Sunday morning. I’ve been asleep for maybe two hours. We drank wine and smoked some joints in his company until the very early morning. I woke up and slammed straight into a state of hypervigilance. My nerves were extremely frayed. The TV was on and there were images of traffic jams clogging a highway. I misinterpreted these images as showing cars flowing out of Genoa because of the riots and the death of a protester yesterday. We, despite everything, were excited to see what was happening in the city. The plan was for a mass demonstration and we agreed to head to the Media Centre to regroup before setting out to try to work for the day. I jokingly asked our host for a crash helmet to wear on the demo and he casually handed one to me. I carried it with me after he dropped us off near our hotel. We took a bus into the centre of the city. On the streets there was a strange, defiant atmosphere that I did not recognize. There were lots of people around all mingling and talking. The usual anonymity with one and all in their own small bubbles had disappeared. Everywhere people were talking animatedly. The bus driver refused to take a fare from us. This atmosphere remained until we got closer to the centre of the city. There we got off the bus and joined the crowds making their way on foot to the gathering point for the big march. I was still carrying my helmet, noting with disbelief and relief the huge number of people on the streets everywhere. It felt really good after the oppressive atmosphere we had encountered after the rioting broke out yesterday. Suddenly a car drove into the ranks of protesters walking the route down towards the shore. Men emerged from it and snatched a member of the crowd. We started running. Suddenly something which resembled a tank came at speed through the crowd. I bent and put the helmet down. Then we ran until we were at the bottom of the long steep set of steps leading up to the Media Centre. When we got to the top we could see police everywhere, far more than were in the area we had just passed through, even though this was further from the city. We made it to the Media Centre and it was at this point that the haziness I was trying to sort through on the train began. I remembered fragments. Trying to grab an hour of sleep in the corridors. Realising I couldn’t keep down the flood of thoughts which raced through my head. The others departed for the march. Spending time on the phone. Calling some friends. Asking a researcher friend to arrange for a Beatles tune to be played on national radio in Ireland for the Genoa protesters. Reading some of the reports from the previous day. Looking again at the sets of images of Carlo. Talking to my father who tells me that Genoa is live on Sky News and that an audience poll shows 50% of the audience in favour of the protesters and 51% against. We now heard that the huge demonstration had been attacked and we could smell a hint of tear gas in the air. I spent time hanging out with ‘S’.


‘S’ was on his own in a big room on the Indymedia floor which had a few computers online. He was monitoring the goings on in an IRC22 chatroom. We exchanged Coke (the soft drink!) and cigarettes. He’s was wearing a glow in the dark kind of ‘raver’ necklace which I hadn’t seen him wear before and he padded around restlessly in his bare feet. It was hot. He was constantly refreshing the Indymedia screen that was open on his laptop. He repeated a few times that something really bad was going to happen. I felt the same at this stage. A rumour flashed around that the G8 summit had been called off. I believed it for a few minutes. I suddenly imagined the G8 and security forces leaving the city but my state of mind was such that I couldn’t even think of that eventuality as a good thing. ‘If we were on our own in the city’, I thought, ‘they could drop a bomb on us’. Three days ago myself and ‘C’ had deliberately walked straight up to the point where a bombscare was in progress to film, up close, the ‘bomb’ being disposed of in the sea. We were convinced it was fictitious. Now everything was, in my mind, resolving itself into a series of dystopic images, none of which felt very fictitious. Then there was a series of jumps. Helicopters very loud and constant overhead. ‘C’ was asking me to get up on the roof of the building where an acquaintance was trying to observe police activity around the building. I refused. In the hallway, people were sitting, huddled in groups. All of the euphoria was gone. Injured people here and there. Some were being interviewed by videographers. ‘S’ was still manning the Global Mix desk. Then I was gathering everyone in our group together and heading for the pizza place around the corner. (v) Later, after we’ve got to the hostel, I drank a couple of beers and wrote down what I wanted to tell the host of the radio program. I gathered my thoughts and did the interview while sitting in the yard. I concentrated on recounting in detail what I saw in and outside the small café a short period before the death of Carlo Giuliani. I mentioned the fact that, before we left Genoa, everyone had been talking about the possibility that some of the demonstrators were agents provocateurs. The interviewer was surprisingly receptive to what I was saying and gave me time to discuss the events at length and in some detail. We stayed in the small town for a number of days. We drank and drank and argued amongst ourselves. The state of hyperalertness never quite went away while we were there. I’d collected mounds of flyers and other printed material while in Genoa and I was now sorting through it over and over. I was filled with the horrible feeling that something important would go missing. We eventually left in pairs. We had booked flights from Milan to

22 An IRC chatroom is an Internet Relay Chat program. This kind of software allows people to congregate, use text to chat in a public room which all can see and to have private one to one conversations. These are used intensively by Indymedia as a way of organising work.


Dublin and myself and my partner made it home with the tapes without any further incident. Very soon after getting back to Ireland we attend an evening in a pub in the centre of Dublin where some of the group that had travelled with us has organised a ‘reportback’ on Genoa. ‘W’ and ‘R’ had already cut some of the material they shot into a series of very raw sequences which document the three days of protests. The place was absolutely packed with people, maybe 250 in all, anxious to really see and hear what had happened. This is the first time I have had an opportunity to see a lot of this material and it is quite incredible. The joyous crowds in the underpass on the first day of the demonstrations. Always the bright sunshine. The Black Bloc, seemingly unmolested by the police, systematically smashing up branches of banks as the second day of protests begin. The organised, clinical, military style attack on the front of the Tute Bianche procession. The brutal way in which the demonstrators, who they peel off from the front of the procession, are treated behind police lines. ‘W’ has turned the camera on himself during some of the most chaotic moments, addressing it in the style of a video diary. The absolute intensity of the streetfighting leading up to Carlo’s death. I make a contribution to the screening after ‘W’ and ‘R’ have finished. Their material has been upbeat and mostly celebratory, accompanied by electronic music, focusing on the power and diversity of the protests. I play the unedited footage my partner had shot outside the Diaz School through a camera. Simultaneously I load up a minidisc recorder with a recording of a BBC Radio interview with a UK IMC activist. I play this through the sound system. It’s ‘S’, who I had spent that blurred, tense, fragmented afternoon with on the last day of the protests. The unedited footage of the aftermath of the raid, showing the ambulances, the bloodied protesters under arrest, the extremely tense standoff on the thoroughly militarised street, my partner looking into the camera while gesticulating towards the Diaz school, plays silently, accompanied by S’s voice, cracking with emotion. By the time the BBC got to interview him he had woken up from a coma in an Italian hospital to find himself under arrest. He had attempted to leave the Media Centre building just as the Carabinieri were massing outside to conduct the bloody raid on the school opposite. He describes how he was repeatedly assaulted, kicked while on the ground by groups of them. He describes feeling his ribcage collapsing under the weight of the blows. “A carabinieri whacked me in the neck and with his shield pushed me against the wall. I fell to the ground and four or five carabinieri started kicking me, really hard, in the chest, legs, back. I had my arms up, saying 'don't hit me, I'm not resisting arrest'. I could say it only in English so I suppose they couldn't understand that. There was this extraordinary sound as they beat their shields and charged. I heard my ribs break, like snapping matchsticks. I was still conscious at this stage. They take a running jump at you like kicking a football. I thought, my God, this is it, I'm going to die. I


knew if I turned over I would die. And I thought that if I could just keep one eye open I would stay alive." I spend days at home trawling as fast as I can through our tapes, copying anything I think might be important onto another, smaller set of tapes and indexing these as accurately as I can. Lots of the interviewees are speaking Italian and I can’t understand it. Indymedia are asking for anyone who has material to get it to them as soon as humanly possible. I want to be involved in the Global Mix so that I can draw material from it later for the film I’m already referring to as ‘Berlusconi’s Mousetrap’. I compile these tapes and send them to the address as requested. I neglect to work through the batch of VHS tapes I’ve got. Several people in Italy, Spain and Ireland recorded as much of the coverage which was being broadcast as they could for me as the events transpired. It will be months before I even watch these tapes. All through this period I consume as much of the material in English being published by Indymedia and the mainstream press as I can. ‘W’ makes a point of collecting every newspaper from the period which covers the Genoa protests and I am doing the same. It feels like the event is unbounded. There is so much information that it seems like a self-contained world that can be explored endlessly. People are still in custody there despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly clear that people are being tortured in the jails. An Italian woman who is working with the Genoa Social Forum gets in touch through our contacts in Indymedia. There’s an Irish protester still in jail in Genoa. It’s ten days since the event took place and little seems to be happening to get this guy out of jail. My partner and I decide to try and pressure the Irish government do something about this. We rapidly arrange a press conference for August 1st and a protest for August 2nd. Friends in an audio visual services company agree to get us a projector and sound system for the press event. The partner of the Irish protester agrees to take part as do two other Irish protesters who were brutalised in the jails there in the immediate aftermath of the protests. The press conference is well attended by journalists. The brothers who were arrested and brought to Bolzaneto23 describe the nightmarish brutality they experienced there. The partner of the protester who is still in jail explains his situation and the extreme difficulties he is experiencing. The woman who handed him the Swiss army knife, which is the only evidence against him, is there and she explains that it was given to him for the purposes of uncorking a bottle of wine. My partner stands up and we project her footage from outside the Diaz school over her as she explains in detail the nature of the raid on the sleeping protesters. It is a strange sight to see her pointing to herself on the screen, explaining what she saw then and what she now knows.

23 Bolzaneto was a detention facility operated during the protests in Genoa. On 14 July 2008, 15 people were found guilty of ill-treating protestors detained in the Bolzaneto detention facility during the G8 summit. http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/fifteen-officials-found-guilty-of-abusing-genoa-g8-protesters-20080715


The journalists seem generally shocked by what they’re seeing. We let them know that a demonstration, demanding that the Department of Foreign Affairs take some action, will be held the next day. Straight after the press conference a small group of us head for the Department with the intention of demanding that a member of staff speak to the protester’s partner. Suddenly the Irish newspapers are full of reports about the protester and about the brutality in Genoa. Mainstream politicians turn up at the protest the next day. One protester is arrested. The tabloids, surprisingly, have begun their own campaign to make sure that the Irish demonstrator in the Italian prison is known about. Suddenly it becomes much easier for his family and his partner to communicate with him. He is treated well by the Irish embassy in Italy from then on. The Genoa story has generally been growing and growing internationally as it becomes clear that, in many ways, a state of exception24 had developed during, and in the aftermath of, the protests there. He is released a week later and a phalanx of photographers and TV cameras greets him in Dublin airport on his return. (vi) A month has passed since the Genoa protests and a day of protest and action is taking place all over Europe. Indymedia Italy, together with a small group of international activists, has begun distributing the first finished piece of documentary film made from the Global Mix archive. I get a DV tape in the post shortly before the international day of action and, together with some of the other Irish activists who had been in Genoa, begin organising a screening of it on the street outside the Italian Embassy for the same evening as this Europe-wide series of protests. We get a van, a video projector, a small sound system, a generator, a shopping trolley. We park the van around the corner from the embassy, on a side street. We assemble the equipment. The projector sits on top of the sound system in the trolley. I attach my camera to both. ‘F’ has a really long power cable and we set the generator on the ground just around the corner form the front of the embassy. Two others have a white sheet. As we’re doing this a small crowd gathers. Maybe 40 people in total. Some were in Genoa, some weren’t. We test the equipment. It works. The two people with the white sheet hold it between them, arms raised, stretching out across the pavement, blocking it. The image can be seen on both sides of the sheet and people spread out so that everyone can see. The streets are quiet. It’s after dark, well after 9pm. It feels like a ceremony to me. People are subdued. I feel as if our small group who went to Genoa to film are becoming part of something bigger. We’re doing Indymedia in our own city now. It’s not a website but it is part of Indymedia, Indymedia Ireland. Over the next few months many of

24 Juris, drawing from Agamben describes Genoa during the protests as a ‘zone of indistinction’. (Juris 162)


those present will assist in various ways in the setting up of an Irish node of the network. I still have no idea what is on the tape as I cue it up and start it rolling, only that it’s a half-hour long and has English subtitles where required25. It begins and it shocks everyone to the core. We knew the policing had been brutal but mostly knew it in an abstract way. We knew it through glimpses, text reports and still images. We’d mostly travelled through the event with the more confrontational protesters and had little idea of the viciousness with which the more resolutely pacifist protesters had been treated. The short film is less than coherent and shifts abruptly from event to event. We all know the general shape of the events already. We’ve already read our way through the incredibly detailed ‘newsblasts’ compiled by the Indymedia people in the UK and Italy in the days following the protests. The short documentary doesn’t really narrate the events in any kind of developed way. During the screening I note that some of the footage shot by ‘W’ and ‘R’ is included early on in the piece. What the video does do, what it’s obviously intended to do, is convey to us very forcefully the extreme pitch of brutality reached by the security forces. The incredible systematic violence meted out casually, almost randomly. It’s difficult to watch. A protester lying on the ground out of sight behind a wall is filmed from a distance being beaten repeatedly and sadistically by a huge riot cop leaning over him or her. Cameras are repeatedly attacked with batons. From the point of a view of a mini-camera one gruelling sequence documents the cameraperson being shoved into undergrowth at the side of a street and being viciously and repeatedly beaten. After the screening we leave quietly, without encountering anyone from the embassy, without any sign of the police. I feel extremely lucky that we all made it through the event without being subjected to this kind of treatment. I also feel pretty sure that I’ll never again travel to such an event in a European city. The veneer of democracy and civilised policing norms in the EU is stripped bare by the video. There is something leering and obscene about this level of violence. It’s meant to terrorise and it does. The fact that Indymedia have succeeded in conveying how systematic it was seems like some kind of victory over the black heart that had beaten at the centre of the event. The next day I make sure that Dublin is included on the Indymedia list of cities where protest events were held. (vii) Months later I arrive in Bologna and meet at the airport with ‘S’ and ‘H’ from the UK. ‘S’ and I have been in contact ever since he mailed me the video report which was screened outside the Italian Embassy in Dublin. We are both absolutely determined to make sure that an English language film about Genoa comes out of the Global Mix. We’ve regularly spent time on IRC chat with some of the Indymedia Italy crew brainstorming about how we are going to tell the story. I’ve been completely stressed, before this trip,

25 Report No. 1 (Indymedia Italy, 2001)


about some of our tapes which I sent to Italy without having first copied them. They were meant to come back immediately after having been dubbed in Italy but they have not. We have pushed the Italians to distribute the material they have widely, as was intended when the Global Mix was started at the protests. However they have been reluctant to do so. They seem to want Indymedia to make one definitive film, as a collective, in one place. Making a film in two weeks, knowing the volume of material that is there, and considering the complexity of the event, seems like a big ‘ask’ to me. However I do realise that all of us being in the same place at the same time will at least allow for a start to be made. At least I’ll get to evaluate the materials and put forward my conviction that the editing will need to be done in a distributed way, and that this will inevitably result in a number of films being produced. I’m in a college by now, doing an MA in Fine Art, and have decided that I want my thesis project to be a film about the protests. It’s practical. I have the time to do it and since being in Genoa I haven’t been interested in anything else. It still seems like a hugely important event to me but it’s been overshadowed by events elsewhere. Things have become very confusing in the last few months. Less than three weeks after we had screened the video outside of the Italian Embassy in Dublin the World Trade Centre was destroyed. My friend ‘J’ had mailed me pretty immediately afterwards and said that ‘the Black Bloc have gone too far this time’. It was a joke of course but a nervous one. Politicians here and there in Europe and the US, most notably Berlusconi, have been conflating the aims and methods of the anti-globalisation protests with those of the terrorists who flew the planes into the towers. Repression was in the air everywhere. There was talk of the Shengen Information System being broadened to include ‘suspected protesters’ on its databases. New anti-terrorism laws were being drafted and discussed by the EU which seemed to define terrorism in such a way as to include the anti-globalisation movement. "offenses intentionally committed by an individual or a group against one or more countries, their institutions or people, with the aim of intimidating them and seriously altering or destroying the political, economic, or social structures of a country." Now we’re in Italy and we make our way to a Social Centre called ‘TPO’ on the outskirts of Bologna. ‘S’ managed to get us some funding by convincing Anita Roddick to give some support to the making of an Indymedia documentary about the events in Genoa. He approached her in an airport a few weeks back and she wrote out a cheque on the spot for a reasonable sum. It was enough to pay for a gathering of video activists in Bologna. It paid for the various flights and train tickets we needed. It also paid for a chef and the raw materials he needed for dinners for all of us over a two-week period.


Myself and ‘S’ are very determined to make progress. Initially things happen very slowly. There are fifteen of us. We talk and talk with some difficulty with the Italian Indymedia people through a lone female translator. One of the Italians, during our discussions, begins reading parts of Society of the Spectacle in Italian and suggests involving a communal writing group called Wu Ming in the process. It’s obvious as the discussions proceed that the event has assumed mythical proportions in the minds of those who have gathered to undertake the task of digesting all of the material. There are hundreds of hours of footage. Some of it is logged in detail. Some is only partially logged. It sits in a strongbox in the middle of the large studio space where we gather. There are plenty of computers with which to edit and so, after initial discussions, we break into pairs and agree that each pair will simply follow their intuition and begin working on whatever aspect of the protests interests them most. As someone with at least some experience of making documentary-style pieces, I quickly realise that there is very little in the way of the organising skills involved in the post-production of such a complex piece of film available in the room. In the beginning people are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task. It doesn’t help that we have no headphones or splitters. The room quickly becomes a chaos of competing soundtracks. I find it impossible to concentrate and notice myself becoming the one who complains most frequently about the noise and the chaos. I’m used to an edit suite being a kind of temple of unidirectional, organised attentiveness. One screen, one director, one editor, and, later, if you’re unlucky, one producer. This is something else entirely. People here wander around freely, looking over each others shoulders, showing each other discoveries they’ve made in the footage. Strange little flashes. Police manoeuvres. People smoke and not only tobacco. We take meal breaks at around five each evening which go on for hours. Someone points out a piece of footage which shows a person in a journalist’s vest running through the crowds on the streets at an unknown time or location, in the middle of the chaos, brandishing a gun in the air. Someone else shows me footage of a masked protester throwing what I recognise as a beta camera into a burning car. I have thrown my hours and hours of footage recorded from TV in Italy, Spain and Ireland into the mix. I haven’t even watched it myself. This too is consumed avidly as most of the people here were ‘in’ the event and didn’t see it from this angle. The sense of heightened affect or panic on the tapes is sustained and scary. The media made it seem more like a war than it had seemed on the ground. Except their version feels like an inversion of our experiences. The affective charge is built up around a fear/horror of the rampaging protesters. All sense of context, sequence and duration vanishes and only a sense of liveness and panic remains on the tapes. The banal stretches on the tapes in the archive we are working through are absent. There is something sinister in the way in which images of property destruction and rioting are looped and multiplied to monopolise the ‘live’ time of the event. Someone notes a police scrim appearing and then disappearing on top of footage shot from a


helicopter. We are mesmerised, immersed in this vast, peculiar and seemingly endless object. Laughter breaks out. I look up. Someone points at me. One of the Italians has come across footage of me walking through the heart of the empty red zone, where the G8 would later hold their press call in front of an artificial façade framed by fake lemon trees. It was filmed just before the pass controls came into operation, in the days immediately before the protest. I’m framed with an almost fish-eye lens, dressed neatly, glancing nervously around, an intruder performing in the empty, cleared space at the centre of the event. I had put myself there deliberately. I remember the trip back from that venture. My partner was with me. We walked from the square where I had filmed my piece to camera. As we walked up the thoroughfare, a high street reminiscent of Oxford Street in London, we watched in a kind of awe as groups of workers systematically draped the brand signs on the shops in white coverings. Who was this for? For the G8, so they would not be afflicted with the feeling of being in just another commercial street? For the protesters? No red rags for the bulls? After a while I start to realise that as a group we are becoming familiar with the object. We can start to help each other navigate within it. ‘This happened, then this happened’. ‘They went there, then they went there’. I would never have been able to grasp even the simple chronology of events on the day of direct action protests without taking part in this process. As people work through the mounds of tapes they digitize what they consider to be of any significance. Later we begin editing in a chaotic way. People focus on whatever they are interested in. The fascination which the material holds for us does not wear off. I work on the Diaz School material I can find with ‘H’. Time races, every day like the last, except with new images. There are at least ten screens in the room and I have to tell myself that we are experiencing this event in an unprecedented way. I piece together multi-camera edits in my head, from memory, and hope that I will get a chance to perform them. Everyone is exhausted by the end of the process. The Italians seem determined to go away, relax and come back to the work in a few weeks or months. Myself and ‘S’ know that we probably won’t be in a position to do this. We agree that we want the footage that has been digitized during the process to be dumped onto tape as some kind of dilution of the archive. Some more Italians, who have already made a rapidly produced film called ‘Supervideo’ from the archive, arrive during the later stages of the process and object to this. They seem to want there to be a definitive film - a single, definitive product of the process. ‘S’ and I can see that this process could be almost endless considering the insistence on consensus decision-making within the Indymedia culture. We argue for a multiplication of the archive, for the production of many provisional views of the events rather than one fixed view. We want that we follow through on the original idea of an archive of materials, open to all


who contributed to it. Our discussions are inconclusive. At least we agree to begin the process of transferring the fifteen or so hours of material that have been captured onto the computers on to tape. A couple of days later the UK people have to leave. I have two days remaining and I again tell the Italians who remain that I want to make duplicates of the boiled down version of the archive, drop off copies in the UK on my way through, and take a set to Ireland. They shrug their shoulders and decide to leave me to it. I spend the following days in a fever of copying. I fill eighteen tapes with material from the computers and the raw tapes and then I reduplicate these tapes. I sit drinking whisky and eating walnuts with the only Italian activist who remains. There are a couple of masters of already completed, pretty raw documentaries in the archive. These contain footage shot by the group which travelled to Genoa with me. On this basis I make master copies of these too. I want it all but am limited by time and the number of blank tapes I have available to me. Eventually it’s done. I’m exhausted, hungry and almost totally broke. I make it to the airport. In Stanstead I hook up with ‘H’ to give her a set of the tapes. I wish her luck before continuing on to Dublin. In the coming months the UK people worked on and completed a sixty-minute long documentary titled ‘Red Zone’. The archive in Bologna was also used by many Italians to construct a series of particular accounts of the protests. This process goes on for years in Italy, only coming to an end around the beginning of 2009. Some of the most sophisticated and striking films which the archive is eventually used for are extremely forensic, real time examinations of particular events during the protests. These are made through the Genoa Legal Forum, a group which undertook to support defendants in trials in Italy. Six months later I completed ‘Berlusconi’s Mousetrap’ in Dublin and released it. It remains the most comprehensive account in the English language of the Genoa protests.It is listed on the Processig8 website alongside over eighty other videos made about the summit. What is interesting in retrospect about the experiences I had during the post-production of the film is the way in which two differing ideas of how the communal production of video by Indymedia should operate. The Italians who we worked with were quite adamant that the process should operate completely through consensus. Myself and ‘S’, however, through our ongoing conversations on the issue, realised quite early on in the process that consensus was an extremely difficult thing to define in the circumstances. Should it be a consensus among those who spent time working on editing? A consensus among those who had shot footage? A broader ‘movement’ consensus? I saw any reliance on a consensus model as a contradiction of the overall orientation of Indymedia. To me Indymedia was an open publishing project. Its websites allowed for many accounts of any given event to be published and I thought about video working in the same manner. My idea of video and Indymedia was that video would consensually be made part of a commons, and that commons would be available as raw materials for individual or group expressions ‘after’ that basic consensus had been achieved. I didn’t see the


necessity for a ‘party line’. In fact I saw a fundamental contradiction between the overall Indymedia ethos and this type of approach. The experiences in Italy brought the practicalities of this type of filmmaking into sharp focus at a very particular point in the history of video production. It was, at the end of the day, extremely impractical for one large group to attempt to make one text from such a massive archive. It was expensive to maintain such a group in one place over an extended period of time. A lack of consensus could derail the project. It could become bland as a result. The implicit argument for duplicating the mini-archive, as I did, was that it was better that a commons of Raw material, and the indexing needed to orient oneself in it, be communally produced, and that this commons would then be opened up to those who wanted to speak with it – whether they be an individual or a grouping. This seemed to me the most practically efficient way to proceed. Open source video.

Documents

Irishvidheads in Genoa_2001