Temporary Autonomous Zone

The Upper Tooting Road Temporary Autonomous Zone is over.

Jon and Henry with the flag

The flag is up, thank you to everyone who took part.

The unfurling

By night ...

and by day

After getting all the results from the poll here, in the gallery and on the Construction Gallery’s site here is the winning design:

Final Design Upper Tooting Road TAZ

The flag will be unfurled on the 8th March at 9pm

After all the feedback on the designs we have narrowed it down to three:

Spiral on palm

Simple repeating pattern

single pattern

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Based on the colours most commonly used on the designs drawn by gallery visitors and on discussions in the workshop we have three possible colour combinations:

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The other shape combination that came out of the workshop was the hand in combination with the spiral – the first of these variations is directly from the workshop, the other is from the discussion about having an ‘open handed’ symbol – as a variation of the flag of Thomas Tew.

Fist emerging from spiral

Spiral on palm

I am going to write up some stuff on the symbolism of the spiral gyph over the next couple of days, but in the meantime please feedback what you think about these two sets of designs below.

Taking the squared-spiral shape as a starting point, here are four variations:

The first two take the shape as a single object and then triple (similar to the flag of Christiania)

Single pattern

Three spirals

With the following two designs I repeated this as a border type pattern similar to those found in many glyph systems throughout the world

Simple repeating pattern

Complex repeating pattern

American Revolutionary flag c. 1770

Drawing based on the description of the flag

The design for this flag is taken from Linebaugh and Rediker’s account of the role of the underclass in the American Revolution, it was an unofficial flag of the revolution – in contrast to the Continental Colors and later the Stars and Stripes of the continental army ‘the revolutionary soldiers and sailors […] fought beneath the banner of the serpent and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,”’ [p.234] to the disgust of both the loyalist Joseph (or James) Chalmers and the revolutionary John Adams – who preferred Hercules to the serpent.  The symbolism here is direct and obvious, the snake being that which crawls underfoot, the lowest and most despised of animals but also ‘more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’ (Gen3:1). However when provoked the snake will turn and bite your heel.

The Continental Colors (1775) - more acceptable

During the 1760’s Britain was finding it increasingly difficult to hold onto its colonies in North America, the emergent colonial mercantile class no longer saw itself as British and the motley crew of sailors, slaves and poor immigrants resented the oppression of both the American merchants and the British forces that had a habit of press-ganging them into the armed forces – a fate little better than slavery. ‘Multiracial mobs under the leadership of maritime workers thus helped simultaneously to create the imperial crisis of the 1770’s and to propose a revolutionary solution to it.’ [p. 234]

In 1770, when resistance to the Stamp Acts brought trade in Boston to a standstill, soldiers were brought in to clear the ships and restore order leading, on the 5^th March, to a riot by the ‘“motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues, and out landish Jack Tarrs.” Their leader was Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave of African American and Native American descent whose home was the small free black community of Providence in the Bahama Islands’ [p.232].

Paul Revere 'The Fatal Fifth of March' (1770)

The pivotal role of the underclass in the normalising of resistance in the run up to the American Revolution was literally whitewashed out of history by the more polite, educated, (rich, slave owning) men who wrote the history of the revolution. As can be seen in the engraving commemorating The Fatal Fifth of March by Paul Revere, where the motley crew are mysteriously replaced by bourgeoise in frock coats and tricorne hats.

I received the following from the Construction Gallery today:

I also wanted to feed back that we had a gallery visitor who was a refugee and had been forced to leave their home country because of the threat of violence. Their response [to the flag of Thomas Tew] was; ‘why the weapon? We’re all living in the same country.’

I suppose the answer is we are not all living in the same ‘country’, I do not mean this in the narrow nationalist sense but rather in an ideological one.  And any attempt to suppress this antagonism within our society is not only dishonest but will lead to the exacerbation of the fault lines and the outpouring of ‘bad’ violence* – as occurred in the riots last summer.  Art, especially in a ‘community’ context, too often tries to present an all inclusive harmony that is at odds with reality and only serves to distance itself from its ostensible aims.  However I do not want to shy away from or gloss over the violence inherent in any declaration of autonomy – or that physical coercion is behind every attempt to restrict autonomy.  We will only have passed beyond this point when violence has passed into play, and the only flags that are seen are waved to demonstrate allegiance to a sports team.  In his initial thoughts Henry asked; ‘[when] the last person on the earth joins, and the flagpole remains empty, we will have real unity?’

In that circumstance I would like to think that at least one person would raise a new flag.

This leads on to another point, should we be concerned about the offence that symbols cause?  I used to live in a high-rise in Salford where the residents often hung flags from their balconies either of sports teams or indicating their nationalities.  On one occasion the old apartheid era South African flag appeared off a balcony and I remember speculating on why one would do that; what was it that was done under that flag that the resident of that flat was proud of?

This reminds me of Žižek’s analysis the taboo on Nazi symbolism compared to the continuing acceptance of Soviet iconography, focussing on the intention behind the symbolism:

We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one in Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’. (LRB vol.27 no.6)

A similar argument could be used with pirate flags within western European culture – the pirate has been romanticised as a social bandit right from his emergence (see Defoe), because of what he stands against.  More on this can be found on this blog here and here.  On a final side note the connection between Love and War (sex and violence) was recognised in the Market Estate incarnation of the Temporary Autonomous Zone where the flag chosen was the star of Ishtar.

*The notion that there is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence initially sounds perverse especially to the sensibilities of the liberal west where all violence is sublimated and ordered by the structures of the State.  However this distinction is at the heart of the festival and the sacrifice where ‘good’ violence binds the community.  To simplify; in a sense sport is an expression of ‘good’ violence that can overspill into ‘bad’ violence with crowd hooliganism.  This entry is long enough as it is so I will not extend it further on the history of violence, but alongside Clastres writing on this see also Giorgio Agamben ‘State of Exception’ (2005), George Bataille ‘The Accursed Share’ (1988), Barbera Erenreich ‘Blood Rites’ (1998), René Girard ‘Violence and the Sacred’ (1986) and Slavoj Žižek ‘Violence’ (2008).

Libyan flags

One of the side issues of the recent civil war in Libya was the flags used by the two sides. The Gaddafi regime used the green flag that he had introduced in 1977 when he designated Libya as the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the National Transitional Council (NTC) used the flag of the former regime; the Kingdom of Libya that was overthrown in the military coup in 1969.

Flag of Libya 1977-2011

The green flag of Gaddafi was part of his revolutionary bombast – a rag-bag merging of socialist, Islamic and tribal ideas. Within Islamic history green is the colour of the Fatimid Caliphate, and is commonly used to signify religious devotion and support of the concept of Muslim unity across the Islamic world. It is also traditionally the colour of the Tripoli region of Libya where the Gaddafi tribe had its power base. Gaddafi, while obviously playing on these symbolic resonances, deployed it as the revolutionary left has historically deployed red on its banners, in a similar way he produced a Green Book, a collection of political aphorisms similar to Mao’s Little Red Book.

Flag of Libya 1951-69 and 2011-present

By contrast the flag of the NTC engages with a different tradition. The central stripe – black with a white crescent moon and star – is the flag of the Senussi emirs of Cyrenaica, a tribal/sectarian dynastic that followed a heterodox form of Islam and who took a leading role in the independence struggle against the various colonial powers who occupied Libya. The power base of the Senussi was the city of Benghazi, where the revolt against Gaddafi had its centre. I do not know the extent to which this choice was driven by anything other than nostalgia and a choice by local leaders, but the resurrecting of the symbol of a traditional conservative limited monarchy (closer to the more constitutional monarchy of Morocco than the autocracy of the gulf states) perhaps plays to a similar desire to the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 after the revolutionary autocracy of the Commonwealth or the Spanish monarchy after the death of Franco in 1978.

In a sense the Kingdom of Libya was distant enough from either the revolutionary rhetoric of pan-Arabism that brought about the regimes that were overthrown in the Arab Spring or the militant Islam of the Jihad that would only alienate Western support and fracture a delicate coalition of various partners not all of whom were motivated primarily by religious sentiments. Crucially militant Islam also uses Green as a revolutionary colour. If this hypothesis is correct the flag used by the NTC was an emblem of convenience, effectively symbolising nothing other than Not-Gaddafi