Space & Activism inaugurates the 2019 issues, which will insist on various forms of strategies deployed by the political struggles with which we stand in solidarity. We begin this series with a fundamental component of The Funambulist’s editorial line: space. We usually describe at lengths how space is designed and built in order to control the location, behaviors and relationships of bodies with each other. But in the spirit described above, we would like to propose an issue fully dedicated to the way these logics of control are subverted by insurrectional movements and activists in order to make the space of the struggle an asset rather than a constraint.
The strategies deployed by these movements involve different speeds of organizing. From the slowly constructed activist geographies of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Sónia Vaz Borges), the Zapatista reclaimed territories (Juan López Intzín), France’s banlieue anti-racists (Mogniss H. Abdallah) or California’s prison abolitionists (Ruth Wilson Gilmore) to the surges of Kashimiri youth (Mohamad Junaid), the UK student occupiers (Charlotte Grace & Charlie Clemoes) or the Kanak National Liberation Front militants (Anthony Tutugoro), emerge a spatial understanding of how we do/can/should/may organize politically. These articles and interviews are complemented by the cinematographic brief (Anaïs Farine) and two students projects (Jennifer Minjee Son & Suwan Park, and Floortje Van Sandick). As usual, the issue opens on the News from the Fronts section with articles about the curfew declared against Yellow Vests in Reunion Island (Françoise Vergès), Italy’s current antifascist movements (Annalisa Cannito), and Marseille citizens’ struggle for dignified housing (Rafik Chekkat).