November 2001. The second encounter in Kupa Piti. I’ve been given a brilliant opportunity to return here thanks to trans/Actions, a pilot project initiated by Aizura Hankin and Sam de Silva of CIDE in Melbourne, and funded by the New Media Fund of the Australia Council.

trans/Actions’ aim is to connect artists with activist and media groups in a series of residencies, to exchange skills and knowledge and ways of working, to create innovative forms of tactical intervention in community-based projects. Perhaps some of the interventions which will arise from the nexus of Indigenous/ Activist/ Art will be experienced as “art”, in the same way as Dada experiments with language, or Situationist detournements, or the punk lyrics of X-Ray Spex or Adelaide’s own Purple Vulture Shit, or the collapsing and reconstituting of queer, sex-work and cabaret in Sydney’s Club Bent, all could be construed as having something to do with “art”. That would be a kind of bonus prize or value-added non-toxic t/A byproduct. Maybe. If one considers art a “good thing” per se. Art for art’s sake.

But heh, those zany Italian Futurists were artists and writers, and even if they wrote more manifestos on more topics than any other crew, it didn’t mean that their prolific art outpourings with all its inherent nationalism, misogyny, racism, and sexual repression, was necessarily a good thing.

In the East poets are sometimes thrown into prison – a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all – a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence – shadow-realm of print, or of abstract thought – world without risk or eros.

If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. At any cost re-connect poetry to the body. Not crimes against bodies, but against Ideas (and Ideas-in-things) which are deadly and suffocating. Not stupid libertinage but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes for love.
Hakim Bey