L'imagination au pouvoir!

Here in Paris I can breathe creativity all around and I love it very much. Also the political struggle can become art, as it was in May 1968. During that time Paris was literally covered by slogans that, booming out from barricades, became artistic posters that revolutionized the visual way to communicate social requests. In the universities and in the factories as well, imagination ruled!

In a strict France controlled by an antiquated De Gaulle, the students' rebellion pushed a wind of striking creativity. It was as if young persons abstained themselves for too much time from lay claim for their expectations, from cry aloud their dreams, from yell their wishes. And, in the course of few days, a whole generation of girls and boys started to struggle against the reactionary forces of society, trying to shatter the huge severity that imprisoned human relationships of just new consumer society in which the value of money and trade became the center of social life.

The weapons of these young fighters? Not only stones, but also and especially the importance of words and the efficacy of images. This could seems derisive against the force of police's truncheons and tear gases... but their strength was explosive to the extend that some slogans of Mai 1968 are still now used and permanently written in the people consciences.

Their power keeps pace with the wish of a radical transformation of the life and of the world. A hope of change that, even if today seems quite asleep, in reality rests latent in all of us. Because now as then we are in front of that old slogan "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible", which remembers us that this necessity of justice is not dead yet. It is a strong request that survives to everything, even to the growth of more and more crazy individualism, to the indifference and to break-up, to the boredom and to the cutthroat competition of capitalistic system. This hope of change survives because was born from a deep necessity, and that's why the power is worried about. The power knows that, albeit tries to bottle it up by any means, this hope exists and it is ready to boom again because it represents an authentic need; the need to dream a different freedom from the American one, different also from such dirty thing that we're continuing to call democracy. It's the requirement that does not allow us to feel alive and happy if all the others cannot feel the same. It's that spur that we-all have in ourselves toward something new, toward the need of a different morality. And, I want to dedicate this post to that spur, to that impetus, to that dream, to that desire to change the world... and for doing this I've produced a hand carved rubber stamp featuring one of the most knows posters of this Mai 1968:

and this is my comrade who find the way to wear this ideas using the rubber stamp that I've created!

If you like this t-shirt, I can arrange to do it for you for € 20: let me know with an email your size (S, M, L, and XL) and I will make it in a little delay!