In a former JNA army base only 100m from the Hungarian-Slovene border, the second No Border Camp in the former Yugoslavia was organized by Slovenes and
Croats in August, 2002. Part of the loose Noborder Network () the camp was among a global series of protest camps at the borders, detention centers,
airports and even information hubs of the global migration regime with the demand for a freedom of movement for human beings to match that developed for
goods, services and capital over the past twenty years. Goricko, the poorest, most geographically isolated region of Slovenia had become in a matter of
three years a major transit point for ^Óillegal^Ô refugees, migrants and asylum seekers. As the last night of the camp came to a close we expressed a
sense of frustration that more dramatic action should be taken. Activists had visited several centers in the archipelego of detention funded by the EU
in preparation for Slovenia to Schengen. They had seen the desperation in the eyes of those gathered in this unlikely place: Cubans, Iraqis, Chinese,
Afghanis, Roma, and Serbs.
That night we watched a video from earlier that year, shot in the remotest desert of Australia where a Noborder Camp (woomera2002.antimedia.net) had
been held at the Woomera Detention Center. Some 1500 protesters converged there to protest the draconian migration policies of the Conservative Howard
government. The video, despite a moralistic tone and mediocre editing, contained some of the most powerful documentary images I have witnessed. When
the hundreds of inmates inside realized that there were sympathizers outside they rioted. In response the protesters pressed through the police lines
towards the center. By hand the two groups tore through several rings of fence and wall. The video showed the tearful refugees, their bloody hands
clenching the razor wire. The embraces of strangers, when they finally could reach eachother, were as powerful as any by lovers. Fifty escaped.
The next day we set out towards the nearest detention center where we had seen six refugees escape under the fence two days earlier. The majority of
the noborder camp, some 70 of us, anarchist flags unfurled, drums beating, lifted the chainlink fence and entered the compound. We danced, performed,
and spoke with those imprisoned inside. The action was videotaped, edited and distributed onward (www.dostje.org/Gmajna/gmajna.htm).
As the production costs for high quality digital video production have fallen exponentially over the past five years the presence of video among social
movements has greatly expanded. Indeed it was with some reason that the director of This is What Democracy Looks Like (www.bignoisefilms.com), one of
the most successful activist documentaries to date, spoke of movement video surpassing the mainstream media. While CNN could deploy two camera crews in
Seattle, Democracy drew on the footage of over 120 video activists who had been throughout the city during the WTO protests.
The explosion of video production is not simply the product of falling costs in camera and editing equipment, of course, but the multiplicity of uses
that video can be put to as a tactical media. It is worth ennumerating a few of them because they extend well beyond the obvious, documenting social
movement activities.
As those who squatted Avtonomna Cona Molotov (www.acmolotov.org) in Ljubljana last summer are quick to point out it was sometimes only the visible
presence of a camera that constrained the threat of violence by the private security forces and police with whom they struggled for control of the
building for the first few months. Of course, sometimes, as was the case in Genoa (italy.indymedia.org), cameras are an inadequate deterrent and video
becomes the record of police violence and evidence for lawsuits (italy.indymedia.org/news/2003/02/176245.php). Video can also play the role of
fundraising material as is the case with the Antifasiticka Akcija (www.vjecniotpor.vze.com) Video CD by DHP Distribucija, the proceeds of which, in
turn, go towards the printing and distribution of the East European anarchist newsletter, Abolishing the Borders from Below. It is this realization of
the DIY dream of autonomy of cultural production, even in the once prohibitively expensive realm of the moving image that is part of the ideological as
well as practical appeal that has given rise to video activist collectives. It is this production, immanent to the radical communities it seeks to
represent, that permits tactical media to catalyze, amplify and disseminate the seeds of resistance horizontally as we see in the Noborder Camp example.
However one of the much commented on media contradictions of contemporary capitalism is that simultaneous with the increasing accessability of the means
of video production is the marked consolidation of the most important means of the distribution of video. There are, of course, still cracks in the
system. In Croatia, the general corporate centralization of media control has not yet completely closed access to television and Fade In still places
programs on HRT that would be unimaginable in say a US media context. On first glance, though, the self distributed CDs, VHS tapes, and poor quality
streaming or downloadable video do not seem to fulfill the promise of a media revolution. There are some encouraging signs from some of the most
developed movements that traditional broadcast technologies can be reappropriated.
[In Italy there are at least two new levels of radical broadcasting emerging:
1) Telestreet(http://telestreet.it) a spontaneous network of very tactical street s TVs that broadcast lo-fi videos only a few hours a week through
1000 euro 400 m range equipment and
2) 2) Global TV ( ) the satellite channel from "Disobbedienti" and the Communist Youth. They claim to be a militant partisan tv and not an
indipendent tv.] MAKE THIS A FOOTNOTE OR SIDEBAR MAYBE?
But video also plays a more intangeable role than those ennumerated above, as a medium through which new senses of identity are imagined. Despite a
frequent lack of formal creativity, not least a common aping of news and music vide, something more transformative is has been set in motion. At a
recent Subverzije, the regular Zagreb anarchist self-education sesions, a gathering of some 50 people watched a video about the crisis in Argentina. The
path of this tape is itself telling. We can only guess at the first portion of its journey. But at the European Social Forum in Florence it was
purchased by a Croatian activist, and carried back on a bus of of activists from the former Yugoslavia originating in Nis, Serbia. In the video a poor
unemployed physical laborer burned tires at a barricade on a highway near a refinery. He stared out of the screen and said: ^ÓI^Òve heard about the
protests in Seattle and Genoa against corporate globalization. I^Òm part of that struggle.^Ô Activists in a smokey socialist room in Studentski Centar
stared back.
By these fits and starts, impartial and uneven as they are, the most important contribution of tactical video^×like perhaps the movements
themselves^×emerges: the promise of new transnational communities of global resistance to neoliberalism. This linking of grassroots activists directly
through alternate circuits of distribution, emergent as this globalization from below remains, contributes to the first imaginings of a worldwide