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General information on Missed Encounters
Missed Encounters is an open project by The Buggers developed for Pelin Tan's Luggage From Another Climate, one of the projects of the joint presentation Tracer of Tent. and Witte de With.
Missed Encounters realises collaborations between artists, revolutionaries, visionaries, and musicians from the sixties and seventies that never happened in reality but would have been interesting contributions to the counterculture if they had taken place. The fictitious collaborations get shape in soundtracks, pamphlets, the formation of fictitious revolutionary groups, flags for these groups, and this website.
The counterculture was a mixture of ideologies, visions, alternative ways of life, non-Christian beliefs, psychedelica, arts, music, literature, and publications that had various historical roots and was aimed at overthrowing repressive, racist, capitalist societies. Generally speaking the counterculture - a typically Western phenomenon - had its political roots in Marxism, anarchism, and liberation, emancipation and anti-war movements. Artistically and musically the counterculture had its roots in the 20th-century avant-garde, Afro-American music, and non-Western music. What united the various groups, currents, and individuals were the common goals of overthrowing existing political systems and developing more humane, just, and free societies. They were revolutionary goals shared by workers, intellectuals, students, artists, and 'freaks' (a collective name for all sorts of individuals who didn't fit in the rigid, white, male, heterosexual, Christian societies of those days). |
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Towards the end of the sixties the counterculture posed a serious threat to existing power structures in the West but it never managed to achieve its goals. It brought about positive changes in capitalist societies but it failed to undo the capitalist systems themselves. Partly this was due to internal conflicts, undermining the strength of the counterculture, partly to the failure of Marxism as a revolutionary ideology, and partly to the effective capitalist strategy of commercialising exponents of the counterculture (music, magazines, life styles, etc.), thereby absorbing and annihilating their moral force. In response to those historical developments The Buggers attempt to reposition revolutionary art. Our method is rooted in psychoanalysis, which - in our view - has remained a sound base for subversive and revolutionary thought and art since the days of early surrealism. Missed Encounters looks for lacunae in the counterculture, hoping to stumble upon significant lapses in revolutionary history and thought.
We don't pretend to have created a complete survey of missed opportunities in the counterculture. We realise that Missed Encounters contains only a handful of the possible fictitious collaborations. Our selection was determined by limitations of personal taste and availability of material. Many other fictitious collaborations are conceivable and some of those will be brought about in the future, as Missed Encounters will be continued after the TRACER shows.
To the soundtracks of fictitious groups and factions we have added an authentic, unaltered recording that we consider a successful encounter between politics and art. We have also added a speech by Robert F. Williams at the second Black Panther Party rally.
We would like to thank Pelin Tan for having given us the opportunity to develop Missed Encounters, Cary Loren for generously having provided some of the material used in the soundtracks, and Anneke Auer for doing a terrific job on the website.
The Buggers, Rotterdam, September 2004. |
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