Tracking the "illicit"
"Addiction and urge are our possibilities..."
-missquote from Being and time-
Rutas Secretas (Secret Routes)
From who shall we guard them?* Once we emailed an artist who was working on the borders, we were interested on seeing how far and how many he had jumped; how much experience about it was him able to share with us border crossers. After few exchanged emails it seemed that he was not interested. We got no reply to our requests for knowbase sharing. We closed the subject guessing that the reason why he didn´t wanted to open source "his" base to an open community was perhaps cause he was well aware of the delicate issues that the topic at hand raised regarding the fact that making this kind of info public was going to bring in some new more border control measures from the hands of the "authorities of control". We well know that exchanging emails, was not crucially relevant since being we have been actual characters crossing borders for money, food and dreams with methods wisely inherited, it simply meaned au contraire, it is a matter of real existences, not to be unsafely unveiled by artists or conceive it as a truth to be conceiled but not revealed. At the end of the thread border crossing knowledge was kept in both sides but a suspicious question about this artistic approach arised: Where is the place where "our" secrets were to be open and shared?, at art venues or just as usual, in any public park of any capital city in the developed world, those places where you can really feel the flows from the named "ilegal beings" or/deals. Where is our commitment to it?
Non-Fiction
Yesterday was one of those clean sky sunny sundays, as usual i ended up in "Needle Park", i was there looking for the pleasure of eating Colombian Empanadas, but as always, at dusk we were bartering about some not to mention, post cold war leftover. It remind me well the 2600 meetings in Medellin where we spent hours on ideas on how to hack the transnationals...it was a hot summer day and im sure the same pace, the same rythm was spent in parallel in both 12.000km distant places. Beers, marihuana splifs, potato empanadas, where is home?.
Third-Question
Where are those potatos you eat coming from? Belguim??. Ours come from a desert like region in Colombia, a place 2 hours far from Bogota. coordinates: 5º 47' de Latitud Norte; 0º 57' 17'' longitud Este. Anyways they where taken long time ago from the Andes mountains in Southamerica, smuggled into Europe. There are more than 500 different potato varieties the ones from Boyaca are made of the same ground that made up my friend Manuel, a fellow in crime from Needle Park, officialy deported from Europe twice though the guy knows well his way back in, again (a pie) on foot, to Switzerland where he makes "clean" switz francs working underground doing dishes for a restaurant were bankers that move "dirty" money from country to country come to eat Rösti (tipical swiss potato based dish) with their bussiness partners. Manuel makes dishes 10hours per day, hes backache is well known by many so called chamanes that steal the money from western mistical europeans (long live this tradition). I met Manuel 5 years ago since each day at night he visits religiuosly the telephone shop were other inmigrants gather around jammed phone lines to try to coordinate a 12.000km distant family. To get them acquainted about the money they are going to receive via moneygram, western union or a close friend who´s going to pick up some good kilogram of high quality cocaine to port in his stomach for a special delivery service on another trendy party to come. By phone is spread the word of what is there to be done with the devaluated pesos that appear at the end of the long cicle of life. Buy new shoes for your brother, buy the book you need for school, pay the quirurgical operation of mother..., in Manuel case, passing the order to buy more red bricks for the house (or better, La Villa, as he prefers to call it) he´s building through the strengh of the body and mind of his brother, a partner with whom he worked before in construction(???) in Colombia and who will rightly follow all the remotely emited building instructions. (many other calls were done this same night, few of them dealt with kindnap and extorsion payments and were done by Bank wire transfers confirmations released by many of the comensales(???) of the fancy restaurant where my good friend cleans).
DataFlows
Forms of addictive chemical composition of cocaine (Formula: C17H21NO4 Molecular Weight: 303.35), that produces on me the same rush as the taste of the andean potato empanada (foto empanada), both make part of the same system of waypoints, guiding likewise other inmigrants to safely cross an european border. Squatting Needle park in rich colors, sounds and odors, even polizei is present admiring to hate our kids and the way we fastly reproduce and (superseed) ourselves in this "their" lands. New borns raise the power of the inmigrant population in Europe. Our organization is disorganization and high dB in hot latin american tunes of ragga, vallenato, merengue and good old school salsa. Gathered around ideas that have continue to reappropiate and use technology in our particular way and for our interests ans deals, might be named as low-tech by many but we add some uniqueness related to a malicious mind that will higher the main use concept. Like the curves and lines that illicit inmigration produces a (image of gps switz-italian border) vectorial map that comes down to earth when using a cheap garmin GPS called geko and the muddy high heels in arms, sleeping in Bivouacs at 2.852meters above sea level, little tool that has help many of cour friends find their way through the alpes mountains and across central european borders. Like it has also served to trace the routes for cocaine, heroine and marihuana to arrive to Bricklane, Les Marais or Red Line Distric in Hamburg to name a few common places. Probing networks that have inverted the capitalistic cultural cruzade, reappropiation of methods and technics to liberate and propagate ourselfs.
Final
When Europe or the Americans import drugs, they also import us, porters that carry and hand the deal. This world belives it can dispose humans elsewhere, they believe that the latin american takeover of won´t happen? they belive that all inmigrants including Black Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Arabs, Asiatic and Africans will never be able to organize themselves into Banks, Traders and Brokers. We have been testing our networking abilities in Neddle Park and long since the american colonization our ancestors have done the deals we still do. A small scale economical practice that will probe correct as soon as the information networks grow a bit more, in few years we will lead a revolution that will take many by surprise, not us since we know it began long ago in slow moves, we have seen how to potentialize the military leftovers of the first world.
*Public Eye is as a moral entity, the same one that shares the motto: "Making Our Neighborhood Safer"
Las coordenadas exactas del lugar: N 070 43'00" W 0730 56'21".
El sitio es un paraje rural de la vereda Santo Domingo, corregimiento La Ahuyama, jurisdicción del municipio de Simití en el sur de Bolívar.
Demilitarized zone the size of switzerland:
Decimal Lat: 2.147481 Decimal Long: -74.764136 Description: SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN
a model for border crossing:
gps data
Mathurin Milan
By mathurin milan
2005-02-28 04:02:41