Zemos98 Hackcamp. Julio Albarrán. Some rights reserved.When I returned to London in the summer of 2013, the UK Home Office was busy laying the groundwork for a new immigration enforcement crusade. Operation Vaken was geared at encouraging illegal immigrants to volunteer for repatriation. As vans toured the streets, with the slogan “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest”, the Home Office tweeted photos of migrants being arrested. (This was adorned with an #immigrantoffenders hashtag). The online campaign backfired spectacularly, ricocheting across all corners of the social network. A #RacistVan hashtag swiftly made its appearance, alongside spliced images of the vans that drew attention to more pressing issues instead, like tax evasion.
It may have spawned a popular backlash. If Operation Vaken had taken place in a vacuum, then I might have easily brushed it off as a mere misstep. But I remember my parents complaining, of feeling more unwelcome, that “this is not our home”. There was too much to ignore, to favour make-believe, to float care-free. The series of images and tweets that composed Vaken’s online advance had grown out of a very real confluence of violent, racist signifiers that now fill the British media’s imaginary.
What happens when this constant waterfall of slogans, images and sound bites, often weaving a contrapuntal pattern, finds a natural home in our media landscape? People are reduced to a convenient set of stereotypes, removed from lived experience, and the possibilities of dreaming social struggle are flattened. That, I thought, points to the urgent need for a platform from which to launch a dissident audiovisual conversation, one capable of lancing the persistent stream of images that corrupt our networks. And that was the promise of a small activist-led collective, the Zemos98 #reclaimthecommons project held in Seville over three days in April. People joked when I told them that I was going to a festival with a hashtag in its name. But as the indignados make their way from the squares to the gates of power, digital stakes hold more sway over the Spanish imagination.
