Caravan Diary: Wednesday, July 18 <->
A day full of preparations for the noborder-demonstration scheduled for the 19th. Furthermore, we woke up at 8.30am when between 20-30 civil policemen (quite hard to tell) invaded the camp and searched the cars and busses and also sent the passport-data to the authorities in Austria. According to one of the policemen, the Austrian police had told them, that we would be terrorists, trying to smuggle weapons for the G8 summit. Of course, no weapons were found and obviously no caravanists had terrorism-etries in the Austrian database. Therefore, we discovered, that all our jumping-balls and tires must have been sliced already at the controls at La Spezia. Still, nobody here can understand the danger of jumping balls, tires (the inner parts, not the profile) and orange cloths. However, we decided to produce noborder-tshirts for the demonstration, but still, according to a law, released by Berlusconi himself, we must not hang the shirts out to dry them - that's actually forbidden in Genova during the week the summit is taking place: the city is supposed to look "clean".
In the afternoon, the caravan met with other theatre-groups to prepare the demonstration for J19. Here are pictures from the costumes, there you can see them in action.
In the evening, a group of around 10 "warriors" (male and female), equipped with orange overalls, water-guns, banners and leaflets, fought their way to a concert by Manu Chao, that took place at the Convergence Center of the Genoa Social Forum (GSF). On their way, they had to face two problems: they not only had to pass through a crowd of journalists and had to try to convince the GSF-people with "theatrical brut-force" that they are definitly not willed to pay the 10.000 Lira entrance fee. Also, it was nessesary to play theatre the whole way from the mediacenter to the concert and on the way back. Due to a law, that defines ordinary helmets, like those used by construction workers, as weapons, it would not even have been allowed to walk on the streets just carrying them in the hands. Only if they were part of a street-theatre, so a Swiss lawyer said, and also only during this performance, they could legaly be used - but not even on the way to or from the theatre!
More about the events in genova are available at IMC Italy, live-updates in German can be found at IMC Germany.
| La Policía nos levantó esta manana muy temprano, chequeó nuestros documentos y artículos personales, ningun percance, ninguna persona detenida. Ahora estamos coordinando las actividades para la manifestación de manana, (19 de Julio), llamada Manifestación de l@s migrantes. <Atrás> |
