Unintended Nostalgia Delays Revolution

Win­ston Churchill once observed that first, we make our build­ings, and then they make us. By which he meant, quite sen­si­bly, that the spaces in which we live and work con­di­tion and deter­mine our behavior.

With Mario Car­Barn, our desire was to reap­pro­pri­ate the space, if ten­ta­tively, on behalf of the ludic.

The Sit­u­a­tion­ists were famous for their desire to lud­ify the worka­day envi­ron­ment of the pro­le­tariat. Har­bin­gers of the irra­tional and the anar­chic, they saw play as more than just respite from work: Play — as a site beyond cap­i­tal­ist labor’s alien­at­ing action — was the only space in which lib­er­a­tion was truly possible.

“The cen­tral dis­tinc­tion that must be tran­scended,” we read in “Con­tri­bu­tion to the Sit­u­a­tion­ist Def­i­n­i­tion of Play,” “is that [which is] estab­lished between play and ordi­nary life, [wherein] play [is] kept as an iso­lated and pro­vi­sory excep­tion.” Instead, “ordi­nary life, pre­vi­ously con­di­tioned by the prob­lem of sur­vival, can be dom­i­nated ratio­nally… — and play, rad­i­cally bro­ken from a con­fined ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life.” [emphases mine]

And so: Mario and com­pany were to lud­ify the space.

But was it a suc­cess? Did we trig­ger an event? Impos­si­ble to know. Ini­tially, I couldn’t help but feel that we’d only suc­ceeded in evok­ing a cer­tain nos­tal­gia. Now, how­ever, a more men­ac­ing feel­ing sets in, as the images — first pasted to the walls in the mid­dle of Decem­ber — still remain tacked to the walls: They’ve lasted nearly a month.

The only pos­si­ble con­clu­sion: We are the very they we hoped to sub­vert.