Reclaim The Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest, by Julia Ramírez Blanco

This paper by Julia Ramírez Blanco first appeared in THIRD TEXT, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, July 2013.

In this text, Julia employs the terms spatial disobedience or disobedient places, where a series of desires that have normally been repressed are set in motion. According to her, these notions that have particular relevance to the practice of the British group Reclaim the Streets which, starting in the second half of the nineties, organized illegal raves of a political character. Its playful forms drew on the idea of generating a TAZ, of creating practical, utopian, paradoxical moments situated between social dreams and conflict. The group was to play a fundamental role in the reformulation of the aesthetics of protest that took place in the 1990s.