At number 41 of via del Pratello, an anonymous house door, like many others. A young girl rings the bell and asks for her friend Alice. No one has heard of her. No one knows who she is talking about.
The young girl does not give up, she trusts her memory, so she starts wandering around in search of her wonderful friend or, at least, of someone who has seen her running away. Surely after that intriguing rabbit, wearing a jacket and a fancy pocket watch. At a corner turn she glimpse something glinting and moving fast. There they are! Alice and the rabbit jumping into a manhole. In search of what? The young girl could not bear the doubt and, without hesitation, followed them.
Zut! All of a sudden, as a result of some magic spell, the young girl is thrown in the middle of an unruly party. Naked people dancing in the middle of a public park, in the middle of a punk concert. Drugs flow allover. Bodies rub against each other in search of recondite pleasures.
The young girl is not frightened even though she should, rationally. She knows Alice is in there, she knows Alice is having fun. She is confident Alice will not disappoint her and, once again, will destabilize all of the codes of language and communication they shared thus far, re-signifying their words and gestures, turning them into something radically different and unforeseen.
Radio Alice è oscena! [Radio Alice is obscene!]
“Radio Alice is obscene, just like class struggle. Policemen, judges, journalists have said Radio Alice is obscene. But what is not obscene about our cult of policemen and hacks [unscrupulous commercial journalists], as well as of those who sponsor them? Our needs, the body, sexuality, the desire of sleeping in the morning, desires, the liberation from jobs. All of this has been, through centuries, hidden, swamped, denied, untold. The poverty extortion, the work discipline, the hierarchical order, the sacrifice, the nation, the general interests. All of this shut down the voice of the body. This is why anything that does not fit into such order is obscene, according to cops and judges. Where you can smell the shit, there you can smell being. The desire gained a voice. For them it is obscene. Beyond misery, against jobs, speaks the body, the desire, the appropriation of time.”
[Excerpt from a 1977 text published in the Italian magazine A/traverso]
Fake, détournement, disorientation
Contemporary use of détournement. The poster in the photo uses the same layout of the local conservative newspaper ‘Il Resto del Carlino’ and reports the following message: “We are no longer recruiting assholes: we have already hired the worst ones”, referring to the extremely low quality and morally reproachable journalism the newspaper offers.
‘If I knew how to hack’. Self-produced example of détournement. Modifying the content of web pages is a way to induce disorientation in the reader who did not expect to retrieve certain message contained in a specific place and form.
What is this all about?
The few contents I presented above, drawn from various sources (personal creation, personal photo archive, internet archives on Radio Alice), all refer to the autonomous radio “Radio Alice”. Taking its name from Alice in Wonderland (the reference is to a different dimension where absurd and unexpected things can happen), the radio was founded in Bologna in 1974 (year in which the state monopoly on telecommunications was abolished) by a group of militants part of the collective A/traverso, then authors of the homonym magazine (among which was also Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Inspired by a search for radically independent means of communication and a revolution of the modes of use of such means, they occupied an apartment in Via del Pratello where they restored and installed a military radio transmitter they salvaged from an electronic scrap dumping site. After setting up the radio station they started to broadcast a variety of contents: from music to political talks and even yoga classes. The libertarian roots of the founding collective led to one of the radio’s main rules: no censorship whatsoever was allowed and the ‘creative flow’ must not be stopped. The mic was always open and airtime was available to anyone who, in organized or completely spontaneous ways, wanted to share a message through the means of the radio. This (non-)rule was applied so consistently that at times even fascists, who phone called at the radio’s live phone line to insult who was on air, were let speak.The group used to identify as “MaoDadaist” in order to underline their use of ‘deliriousness’ and ‘irrationality’ as an unorthodox and irreverent way of participation to communist ideologies and movements. Leftist and anarchist militancy in those ages in Bologna was extremely strong but also serious and grave in its posture. Against such way of interpreting social and cultural conflict, Radio Alice, later defined by mainstream media “the creative wing of the movement”, adopted unhindered irony and self-irony as an approach to class struggle and pushed playful and pleasure-oriented practices into the dominant severe militant culture. For instance, they used to throw unauthorized and unruly parties featuring underground politically active musicians and groups in various locations of the city in order to raise money for their project. They also introduced the now common use of live phone calls, either to allow the public to intervene or to make jokes to high profile politicians ( a memorable one is a live-streamed phone call to Giulio Andreotti, the leader of the ruling party ‘Christian Democracy’, in which Franco Berardi pretended to be Umberto Agnelli the CEO of the Fiat car company, and started complaining about the unruliness of the working-class. Andreotti, not realizing it was a joke, expressed his solidarity and agreed that harder repressive methods had to be adopted swiftly). On a similar note, Radio Alice made extensive use of the situationist practice of détournement: the mischievous use of fake news and information, packaged with the same layout and aesthetics of actual mainstream media, in order to generate confusion and disorientation in the readers and, in general, to make fun of mainstream news. Finally, a very central theme in their critique to the capitalist system of production, was the centrality of the body. Waged labour, they believed, devitalized bodies and stifled the extremely vast range of desires that stem from them. Sexual exploration and openness, the rejection of hetero-normativity were seen as intimately connected to the rejection of labour. “Everyone must work, but very little, extremely slowly and with no strain whatsoever” was one of the radio’s main claims and slogans.The absence of formal hierarchies within the group led to a quick expansion of the militant group who fueled the radio’s activity in those years. So much so that by 1977 the radio had become a reference point for several extra-parliamentary political groups (the “extreme left”). The radio served, in many instances, as a channel for live sharing of information concerning police actions during demonstrations. This was particularly visible during the 1977 uprising, during which Francesco Lorusso, student and militant of Lotta Continua, was shot in his back while running away from the police in the context of an armed confrontation between the demonstrators and the police. Radio Alice played a fundamental role of coordination and information throughout the uprising and was therefore repeatedly evicted and its core members arrested with charges of subversive and terrorist activity. The recording of the last few minutes of Radio Alice’s transmission, which became quite famous in Bologna and more broadly in Italy, captured the violent irruption of the police in the occupied flat in Via del Pratello 41, where the radio station was located.Via del Pratello 41 is, for many, a place of memory. However, such memory is mostly inscribed in people’s minds and is largely transmitted orally and through personal knowledge sharing. Almost no memorialization of Radio Alice is done by the municipal institutions and, it goes without saying, not a single teacher would even see a reason to mention Radio Alice in school (except from Franco Berardi who currently works as a secondary school teacher…). Most of the people who know about Radio Alice are those who were young in the 70s and willing or not came across its deliriousness. The transmission of such knowledge to younger generations is mostly limited to politicized families and groups who took part and supported Radio Alice during its short existence. For instance, I first heard of Radio Alice when I was in high school thanks to the strong political commitment that many of my fellow students had. I remember I found it surprising and exciting to discover that my mom knew a lot about it and that one of my best friend’s parents were directly involved in the radio. I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by several fragments of a history that more often than not goes untold. I fondly recall the relentless and passionate research I dedicated myself to in order to find out anything I could about Radio Alice and the immense amount of related stories and facts about revolutionary movements it made me come across. But that was me.Anyone who does not have access to direct sources of such memory could easily never hear of Radio Alice. A part from a piece of street art on the shutter of the shop next to the entrance of the radio’s base, nothing in the surroundings, nor in other parts of the city, bears memory of it. Adopting a plainly institutional lens, Radio Alice is simply excluded from the realm of official history and memory. If not openly forgotten, at most, it is remembered as a mob of criminals and political extremists who were rightly evicted and arrested.Since the violent end of Radio Alice and the repressive wave that hit the ’77 movement, several independent media committed to keep its memory alive. For instance many free radio stations kept on reproducing daily the recording of the last few minutes of Radio Alice. Some of them still do. A lively cultural center and an independent street TV station that largely built on the experience of Radio Alice were active in the 80s and 90s, in close connection with the squatted buildings of Via del Pratello 76 and 78 where some fifty people lived for about a decade. Since 1977, many books, articles and movies have been realized that retrace, analyse and project into the present the experience of Radio Alice. An internet archive that was recently renewed functions as a repository of materials related to or produced by the radio. For its 40th anniversary, a host of institutional voices and mainstream media joined the program of events organized by informal and independent groups who still struggle to keep alive the history of Radio Alice and, in doing so manifest their belonging to and identification with it.Interestingly, but also sadly, the more Radio Alice gets chronologically distant from the present, the easier it is to come across merely aesthetic and shallow forms of recalling of its name: in a recent case, a couple of brothers from Calabria (southern italy) -who studied economics in Bologna- opened a handful of pizzerias in Italy and, lately even in Hoxton square in London which they named ‘Radio Alice’. In this instance the reference to the subversive radio of the 70s is sugar-coated and simply mentioned as a vestige of the exotic and far-removed italian underground political past. The misappropriated radio’s name serves here as a narrative expedient in the construction of a marketable product. Possibly the exact opposite of what Radio Alice struggled for.
Hipster ‘culture’ and aesthetics seem to be taking over Via del Pratello as well. While symbols and practices that recall the leftist soul of this street are still very visible -and at times ostentatiously exhibited-, many of the people who used to inhabit and enliven the street have gradually been pushed out through evictions and the increase in the space value and thus rents. A number of new bars and restaurants -that most students cannot afford- have sprung up all over the street and its population is visibly shifting towards young families and professionals with a stable source of income. On the other hand, small and hardly visible pockets of resistance who try to retain true and non-commodified connections with the street’s political history and to Radio Alice’s spirit. These range from groups of elders who continue to make plans to squat underutilized public buildings in the area to promote independent cultural activity, to group of youngsters who try to ‘sneak’ into existing bars and recreational centers present in the street as employees or members and give birth with their friends and peers to spaces of sociability and engaged political discussion.
