Trying to reverse the tide: Intro: "Bolivia was hailed a model pupil by the IMF in the 1990s for its government’s wholehearted embrace of neo-liberal reforms. But they reckoned without the backlash of the impoverished and largely indigenous majority who have since 2003 increasingly taken to the streets causing governments to fall and multinationals to flee. "While the poor don’t have food, the rich won’t have peace," reads the graffiti scrawled onto the wall adjoining the dual carriageway that sweeps breathlessly from one of the world’s highest airports into Bolivia’s Andean city of La Paz. In front of the graffiti lie six smashed-up toll booths, destroyed by protestors who have marched almost daily in May 2005 from the impoverished city of El Alto towards the seat of Government in the centre of La Paz. Suddenly the traditional centre of power has been full of those excluded from power for centuries – indigenous women with swirling skirts and bowler hats, Aymara men in deep-red ponchos with mouths bulging with coca leaves, rural farmers with weathered faces shaded by faded baseball caps, miners with sticks of dynamite ready to storm the Congress building. The resounding call by the largely indigenous protestors is for nationalization of Bolivia’s gas reserves, currently controlled by six multinational companies including British Gas and B.P." Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
