in the meantime, and as a way of trying to make ends meet, we have taken over a vegan cafe in cape town which we want to turn into an infoshop, called bolo’bolo (www.bolobolo.co.za). if you ever make it out this way, make sure to pop in and say hi. we have tried to learn from all the amazing infoshops we have visited around the world :-)

we promise to release a trailer very, very soon. we know that we are at a decisive moment in history and that we have to release this documentary asap.

thanks everyone for your support and patience! :-)

Now that it’s over, we’re busy working on the documentary again. We intended to release the trailer at the bookfair but have realized that for an amazing trailer – and we’re committed to nothing less – we really need a professional editor. Fortunately, however, one of our friends has the requisite skills and has agreed to help us with it, and this will be our primary task for the rest of the year. We’ve also lined up a few interviews with three awesome black South African anarchists and poets over the next few weeks.

In response to our call for help in our last blog entry, a whole bunch of people offered to help us with translations and transcriptions. So far we have received three fully transcribed and translated interviews, all of which are awesome and all of which will find their way into the documentary. We’re very excited by these newly translated interviews, all of which underscore the global scope – and awesomeness – of contemporary anarchism!

On another note, we have, like so many of you, been sidetracked by the occupations. While Cape Town isn’t quite Wall Street or Oakland, it is nonetheless inspiring to see the same forms and principles emerging locally; we’ve also thoroughly enjoyed following the trajectory of the international movement through some of the people and places we’ve encountered on this trip, especially our friends and comrades in Oakland! In this time of global upheaval we are proud to be working on this documentary, which feels more and more relevant with each passing day.

Finally, we would like to extend our deepest appreciation to Mario Remedios, Pedro Pablo Santa Maria, Justin Windett and Leif Johnson for their help with transcriptions and translation. We don’t know what we would have done without you!

That’s it for now. Hopefully the next time you hear from us we’ll have something to show you!

Aragorn and Steffi

We left Europe disappointed and – because we are anarchists – reminded once again of how much both capitalism (we had to struggle to find work to earn some survival cash) and states (Aragorn’s Schengen visa expired) screw people over. Since we’ve been back in South Africa, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a good narrative for the trailer, the documentary itself and what kind of (non-talking head) footage and aesthetic approach we want to use in the film. We’ve also watched and transcribed many of our interviews and received some much needed help from our friends Jonathan, Pina and Johnny, who looked at and partly translated some of the non-English-speaking interviews for us.

From what we have so far we’ve developed a talk which we first presented at Love and Revolution in Johannesburg about a month ago. We gathered 30 or so people together over coffee and wine to tell them about our travels and our experiences and, most importantly, we finally shared some of the filmed interviews with other people. The feedback was great, and gave us a much-needed morale boost. Attendees were excited and inspired by the 20 or so random short clips we showed; they can’t wait to see the film and neither can we!

Now that our optimism has returned, we hope to (finally!) be able to finish a trailer in the next few months. We know we’ve been promising one for ages, but we want to make sure that when it comes out, it’s perfect. We also hope to be able to use the trailer to raise more money so we can pay for some proper editing and post-production to make this documentary as awesome and professional as possible; if all goes well, we might even be able to raise funds for a few final interviews in Europe, and for our travel costs to check out an awesome anarchist project in Zimbabwe (which we want to do last in case our equipment gets confiscated).

We’d also like to put out another call for mutual aid: if any of you out there want to help us in any way, please contact us at us@anarchismdocumentary.net. We especially need help with non-English speaking transcriptions and translations (especially Spanish and Portuguese). We are also looking for people who want to offer designs and animations (for a few statistics we want to use, and to visually depict certain anarchist concepts).

Finally, we have just relocated to Cape Town where we plan to open our own infoshop/cafe some day soon; we hope that some of the wonderful anarchists we met during our travels will come visit us :-)

And now it’s back to work!

Love & anarchy,
Aragorn and Steffi

In Europe, we received another blow; the cheap Eurorail tickets we were hoping for fell through and we thus needed to buy full price plane and train tickets. We also had a car for a bit, but even petrol and tolls add up quickly in the rich countries of the North. Another unexpected frustration was the lack of feedback from European anarchists; French anarchists especially were really hard to get hold of, even when we spoke French with them. Few reliable places to stay and only a handful of potential interviews made it impossible for us to continue along our planned route from Ireland to France and then onwards to Spain and Greece. The long waiting for replies also made it impossible to book flights far enough in advance; with Easter just around the corner, prices started shooting up rapidly. We just couldn’t afford 300 Euro per person flights to Spain and to Greece.

It hasn’t all been financial calamities though – we received a very generous donation of $1500 from Thoughtcrime Ink just when we needed it most. Even though we still ended up having to cut the Europe trip short, the Thoughtcrime money (as well as the other donations that filtered in to our PayPal account through the website at around the same time) helped us considerably with our travels to Germany, Austria, the UK, Ireland and Switzerland, and we conducted some amazing interviews in each of these places.

Finally, and perhaps most unexpectedly of all, we lost both of our grandmothers within just two weeks of each other. Sometimes bad news really does arrive all at the same time!

We’ve done our very best and stretched ourselves further than we thought we could, but for the next few months at least, our travels are done. Aragorn’s European Visa expires any day now, meaning he has to return to South Africa and cannot apply for a renewal until the end of July. Never fear though: even though this means we didn’t make it to Barcelona, Athens, Paris 0r Italy (or, indeed, Denmark, Amsterdam, Turkey, Indonesia, Russia or any of the other places that were suggested to us), that doesn’t mean we won’t still try our best to interview anarchists in each of these places!

For now, we’re content with the 101 interviews we have filmed so far in Africa, South America, North America and Europe. We didn’t set out to make a comprehensive ethnographic and representative study of anarchism in every country and every city of the world, but instead wanted to have a suitably diverse, internationalist, non-Euro/US-centric look at anarchism, and even if we don’t manage to raise more funding for further primary filming, we feel that we’ve succeeded in this initial task. We interviewed young and old anarchists, men, women and transgendered folks (even though we always struggled to find enough women who would commit to talking in front of a camera), anarchists from very diverse tendencies (although we had to ignore the emails from the occasional anarcho-capitalists and national anarchists enthusiastically offering themselves up for interviews), regions and ethnic groups. We have footage in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

So right now it’s time to sit down and transcribe, translate and edit the many hours of footage we have, to research archival footage, shoot more B-roll, write a narrative and – priority #1 – make a trailer! Once we have the trailer out we intend to use it as part of a second call for funding, which will hopefully allow us to at least get to Spain and Greece. Finally, if all goes well, the exciting 90 minute documentary on anarchism we both always wanted to see will slowly begin to emerge over the course of the next year or so!

We’ll keep you posted…expect a trailer soon :-)

PS: We couldn’t end this post without saying another heartfelt, humble thank you to everyone who helped us along on the journey so far. We wouldn’t have been able to get this far without the generosity and solidarity of the beautifully diverse international community of anti-authoritarians we’re just starting to get to know.

With love and hope,

Aragorn and Steffi

We finished our last blog in Seattle. In the few days we were there, some exciting things happened, including a rare snowfall…The city of Seattle doesn’t know how to deal with snow!

The night of the snowfall, we went to see a talk by a friend of ours from Anarchists Against the Wall from Israel/Palestine. It was held at the local university and we met a bunch of awesome anarchists there; we sought refuge from the cold in a local bar after the talk and shared stories of our travels.

The last day in Seattle was filled with interviews – most of the people we wanted to interview were only free on that one day. We are, however, technically limited to three interviews per day, so we had to miss out on some interesting people. We ended up interviewing the awesome Jen Rogue from WSA and former Common Action. We also interviewed Matt and Tephra from Seattle Solidarity Network, a new but very active group in Seattle (http://seattlesolidarity.net).

The next day was a traveling day: getting up at 3am, taking a plane to Chicago, then Buffalo, then a bus to Toronto to attend the North American Anarchist Studies Network conference.

In Toronto we stayed with Mick from Common Cause (http://linchpin.ca) and interviewed Alex, another Common Cause member. We attended the first social of the NAASN conference – an informal get together and film screening. We watched a new documentary on the G20 and a non-political movie shot during the Spanish Revolution (with novel ‘live’ subtitling by Jesse Cohn).

The next day, braving the snowstorm and freezing temperatures, we made our way to the NAASN conference in central Toronto. The venue was packed with people! In fact, every panel over the two days of the conference was packed and it was extremely hot inside. We’re sure you don’t see people wearing t-shirts during Toronto winters very often.

It was an interesting weekend in many ways. The conference itself was fantastic; we sat through some really inspiring presentations, including a surprisingly good and self-critical workshop by the oft-maligned CrimethInc. You can read more about the conference here: http://naasn.org/news/naasn-toronto-2011-schedule. We met amazing people and had some great discussions about anarchism and about our documentary. We also spoke to some other filmmakers who were using very similar equipment and techniques, and exchanged a lot of ideas. We interviewed Jesse Cohn on the evening of the first day, just before the social gathering at a local gallery, which also served as the launch for the new issue of Upping the Anti (http://uppingtheanti.org). The day after the conference we spoke to Jasmin and Ryan – two of the main organisers of the conference – as well as well known anarchist author and art history professor, Allan Antliff (http://allanantliff.ca).

From the frozen wastelands of Canada, we made our way to the much sunnier city of Phoenix, Arizona, where we stayed with and interviewed Drew from Phoenix Class War Council. We also spoke with Stacy, who runs the big anarcha-feminist website http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/, and Kevin, an O’odham anarchist. It soon became very clear to us that indigenous struggle is the main focus for anarchists in this area. Kevin told us about the new struggles indigenous people are facing, especially along the border between the US and Mexico.

From Phoenix we went to Flagstaff – where it was cold again – to interview two anarchists: the tireless Klee Benally, a Navajo anarchist who helps run the multi-faceted Taala Hooghan infoshop (www.taalahooghan.org), and Joel Olson from Bring back the Ruckus, and the old Love and Rage.

We left Flagstaff for Tucson, where we stayed with an old friend and interviewed Stormy Staats. Stormy, who hails from Northern California, told us about the struggles on the Klamath River and how the environmental destruction affects indigenous people there.

From Tucson we took a really shitty Greyhound bus to El Paso, Texas, where we interviewed the inimitable Steve Best (http://www.drstevebest.org). We stayed with Steve and his five cats for two nights and then spent twelve hours onboard a bus to Austin, Texas.

In Austin we interviewed only two people: Carlos Perez de Alejo, who we met up with at the Monkeywrench Infoshop and who told us about Cuban anarchism, and Abraham DeLeon. Unfortunately we had to cancel two more interviews for personal reasons.

We then took a bus to Dallas (for which we were made to pay twice – fuck you, Greyound!) to meet with and interview Kenyon Zimmer, who shared a fantastic historical overview of North American anarchism. He spoke extensively about Yiddish and Italian immigrant anarchism, about the Haymarket and about Sacco and Vanzetti.

We spent the night in some godforsaken dingy Motel near the Dallas airport, expecting to take a plane to Florida the next morning, but were held up because of an overnight icestorm. Our flight was cancelled and we had to stay another night in Dallas. Dallas really drained our money – first the bus, then the hotel :-(

Anyway, we finally arrived in Florida, the mid-way point of the journey and time to relax. We really needed this break and ended up only having the energy for one interview: Frank Fernandez, a 73 year old Cuban anarchist and author of Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement (http://libcom.org/library/cuba-anarchism-history-of-movement-fernandez).

After 11 days in Florida we took a plane to Baltimore, where we stayed with Flint Arthur and his partner Rebecca, both of whom were really welcoming and helpful. Baltimore is home to a number of cool projects, perhaps the most notable being the Red Emma’s bookstore and coffeeshop. We interviewed John Duda and Kate Khatib from Red Emma’s. Kate is also part of the AK Press collective (http://www.akpress.org) and she gave us a guided tour of the warehouse. We filmed her in a very liberal Methodist church that works together with the anarchists there. Quite a surprise, as was the fact that their former pastor was transsexual.

We were particularly excited about meeting the venerable Howard J. Ehrlich, editor of the long-running journal “Social Anarchism” and author of numerous books on anarchism (including Reinventing Anarchy and, oddly enough, a book on baking bread – Howard gave us a signed copy of this latter work). We also interviewed our host Flint Arthur, a founding member of NEFAC, the North East Federation of Anarchist Communists (http://nefac.net).

Our final interview in Baltimore was with Kevin Tucker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Tucker), an anarcho-primitivist author and activist; we filmed Kevin in a beautiful park on a warm winter’s day in Baltimore, who spoke to us about green anarchy and the wild while squirrels cavorted in the background.

We then took a bus to New York - our final US destination – where we stayed with an awesome anarchist woman, who wants to remain anonymous (although her vegan cooking deserves wide recognition!) We interviewed her, but it remains to be seen whether we can use the footage, given her desire to remain anonymous.

We met up with Suzy Subways, a member of Love and Rage. Suzy generously travelled all the way from Philadelphia to meet with us and spoke to us about anarchism in a wonderfully clear and common-sense way.

The next day we interviewed Cindy Milstein again (our first interview in the Bay Area got cut short), in between their IAS (Institute for Anarchist Studies – http://www.anarchist-studies.org) congress. Poor Cindy was very tired after a long weekend full of meetings, but she still managed to give another great interview :-)

We also stopped in on Jim Fleming from long-time anarchist / counterculture publisher Autonomedia (http://www.autonomedia.org), and spent some time speaking to him in his amazing apartment in Brooklyn that looks over the Manhattan skyline.

The next evening we drove to the Bronx to interview two members of NEFAC: Christine Karatnytsky and Wayne Price. Both were amazing interviews and we can’t wait to share them!

The morning after, we interviewed Joshua Stephens from the IAS in a quiet healthfood cafe, before taking a bus to Hartford, Connecticut. In Hartford we stayed with and interviewed Deric Shannon and his friend Chris Spannos. Deric and Chris shared their compelling critiques of capitalism and talked to us at length about anarchist economics, intersectionality and queer theory.

We returned to NY on the 24^th; we were hoping to interview the post-structuralist anarchist Todd May, but time simply wasn’t on our side. Early on the morning of the 25^th, we boarded our plane at JFK airport and said farewell to the US. We were both really sad to leave – we had a great time there, met many amazing people – lots of anarchists from every possible anarchist tendency – and saw some inspiring projects. We definitely hope to return there one day!

Right now, we’re wrapping up some interviews in the UK, before embarking on the final leg of our tour: mainland Europe…we’ll tell you all about it in our next blog entry!

PS: If you’d like to see some interview photos from this blog entry, visit our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=113880171992624&aid=25839

So, what’s happened since we wrote that last entry from Hotel Bauen? After we left the Bauen we spent another five days or so in Argentina and met with a number of different anarchists around Buenos Aires  (unfortunately, we were not able to interview the famous historian Osvaldo Beyer due to him being sick), of which we ended up interviewing two. First, Edgar from the FLA (Federación Libertária Argentina), a Tango teacher and archivist who talked to us about how important it is to dance to our revolution :-) We interviewed him in the amazing FLA archive, a collection of tens of thousands of books, magazines and other assorted anarchist publications from around the world, some of them as old as 1880.

We also interviewed Sebastian from the Red Libertaria de Buenos Aires, a very active especifist group with a great infoshop space. In fact, Buenos Aires has quite a few anarchist bookshops, infoshops and social spaces.

Our next stop – after a horrendous drive over the Andes on what we think must be the most dangerous road in the world – was Santiago de Chile, where we stayed with Pablo Abufom in his great social space in the centre of town. The space is home to the Libreria Proyeccion bookshop and also serves as a meeting place for lots, if not all, anarchist groups – and even some unions – in Santiago. We interviewed seven people in this house, sometimes struggling to find a new setting. Besides Pablo we interviewed Ignacio from Estrategia Libertaria, Silvana (a Mapuche anarchist), two members of the FeL (a big libertarian socialist student organisation famous for their amazing murals: http://feluchile.blogspot.com/), Pamela, and Mario from El Surco newspaper. http://srhostil.org/elsurco/.

After Santiago we decided to take a week off for a break in Peru; after so many interviews we desperately needed some time off. We ended up spending a few days in Cusco and Machu Picchu, which was amazing, albeit exceedingly touristy!

We left South America energized and inspired, and ready for the three quarters of the trip that still lay ahead!

Next stop, Los Angeles, USA. The anarchists in L.A. didn’t give us any reason to curb our optimism – there are many groups and individuals doing great work, and we met and stayed with some really nice people! We interviewed members from Copwatch L.A. and RAC (Revolutionary Autonomous Communities): Joaquin Cienfuegos, D’Angelo (both on Xmas day!) and John A. Imani at their weekly “RAC Mutual Aid Food Programme” in Downtown L.A. where they feed about 100 families every week! We also met a dynamic group of young women who help organise the L.A. Anarchist bookfair, but unfortunately couldn’t convince them to appear on camera :-)

After only a few days in L.A. we headed North towards the Bay Area., stopping over in Santa Barbara to spend a night at our friend Zack’s. Apart from feeding and housing us, Zack was kind enough to receive two parcels of stuff we still needed for the documentary: better lights and a rack for our camera which makes mobile filming easier. Zack told us about all the stuff that’s going on in Santa Barbara and we were impressed. We really hope everything is working out for them there!

The Bay Area was mindblowing! Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco are home to hundreds, or more likely thousands of anarchists. We met with and interviewed people from many different groups and projects and were surprised by each one of them. It was a crazy time for us (and it was New Year’s) and we interviewed as many as three people one after the other on a few of the days we were there! Interviewees included Cindy Milstein from the IAS (http://www.anarchist-studies.org) Tom Wetzel from WSA (http://workersolidarity.org), Lawrence Jarach from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed magazine (http://www.anarchymag.org) and two inspiring old anarchist ladies: Jean Pauline (age 87) and Audrey Goodfriend (age 90). Audrey, who is called a ‘black diaper baby within the local community’ was born into an anarchist family and met Emma Goldman when she was a teenager! We also briefly interviewed Tom Older from the long-standing Bound Together Bookshop on Haight Street (http://www.boundtogetherbooks.com) and the well-known Ramsey Kanaan, founder of AK Press (http://www.akpress.org – probably the biggest anarchist publisher in the world) and now with PM Press (http://www.pmpress.org/content/index.php).

We also got to meet up with “the other Aragorn!” of AJODA / www.littleblackcart.com / www.ardentpress.org fame :-) That’s right – for a brief time the Bay Area was home two Aragorn’s, both named Aragorn by their hippie parents and both vegan anarchists! There must be something about this name. All you anarchist breeders out there: name your children after LOTR characters ;-)

Aragorn!, a longtime staple of the Bay Area scene, graciously showed us around and introduced us to local folks. He also invited us to attend the Berkeley anarchist reading group, which has been meeting every week for 13 years! The reading group attracts people between the ages of 19 and 90 and it was great to see such diversity amongst the 20-odd people gathered in the room on a rainy Tuesday night.

Just before leaving the bay we took a day trip to Starhawk’s ranch somewhere in the middle of nowhere and conducted an amazing interview with this well-known activist, anarchist novelist and pagan.

We could have stayed another week in the Bay Area to interview more inspiring anarchists but alas our schedule did not allow for it. We are very sorry to have missed out on some of the people, groups and projects there and hope we can return sometime.

After we left the Bay Area we made our way to Grass Valley to interview veteran anarchist Barry Pateman, a walking encyclopedia of anarchist history and ideas who houses the Kate Sharpley Library (http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net); Barry was an amazing (and really humorous) interview subject and a generous host.

We left Grass Valley in the early morning light and drove north to Crescent City to speak to renowned ecological activist and writer Derrick Jensen (http://www.derrickjensen.org). Derrick was exceedingly accommodating in helping us find the perfect location for the interview, which we ended up filming at sunset on the beach :-) We know that Derrick is a highly controversial figure, even within anarchist circles, but we felt we had to include his voice in this documentary because of his powerful and sweeping analysis of contemporary environmental issues and their causes. Even though he might not always call himself an anarchist (although, after speaking to him, he’s certainly comfortably close to anarchism in our minds), his message is of profound consequence.

After Crescent City we drove up to Eugene, Oregon, to meet with and interview John Zerzan (http://www.johnzerzan.net), another controversial yet important figure in the anarchist movement. We were relieved when John and Alice offered to put us up for the night (even cheap hotels are pretty expensive when you’re paying in South African Rands) and thoroughly enjoyed being guests on his radio show, Anarchy Radio, even though one of the call-ins was a bit strange!

Packed peanut butter and jam sandwiches in hand, we left Eugene for Portland the next morning to spend a few days with David Rovics (http://www.davidrovics.com), an anarchist singer and songwriter who is sometimes affectionately called ‘the musical version of Democracy Now’. David shared some of his seemingly endless knowledge of labour history and even played a few songs for us, which we hope to use in the film.

Our time in Portland felt as short as our time in the Bay – we checked out Red and Black Cafe (http://www.redandblackcafe.com), drove past Black Rose Infoshop to discover it closed, and spent some time trying not to spend money at the world’s only vegan ‘mini-mall’ (home to Herbivore, Food Fight, Sweetpea Bakery and a vegan tattoo shop) around the corner from the Red and Black.

While in Portland we also interviewed Lara Messersmith-Glavin from the Institute for Anarchist Studies (http://www.anarchist-studies.org) and the Parasol Climate Collective. Lara, a lifelong adventurer involved in a whole string of projects, did a great job at explaining core anarchist principles in a powerful, no-nonsense way that would have surely made them seem like simple common sense to almost anyone listening :-)

This brings us to today, the 11th of January 2011. We’re currently in Seattle, staying with some ex-Common Action folks and planning to speak to people from Seasol (http://seattlesolidarity.net), Left Bank books (http://www.leftbankbooks.com – an amazing worker-run bookstore) and former members of Common Action. Yesterday we met Zimya, a veteran anti-nuke / civil rights campaigner who shot a short film called Older = Bolder: Anarchist Elders in the early 90′s. The film features interviews with Utah Phillips and five other longtime anarchists, including two people we interviewed in the Bay – Audrey Goodfriend and Jean Pauline. Watching the film, it was really heartening to see that Jean and Audrey are still as passionate and eloquent now as they were twenty years ago.

Today is a day of decision: we’re not sure where we’re headed next – perhaps Toronto, perhaps Arizona. We’ll keep you all posted though and promise to update our blog more frequently now that we’re back in the swing of things.

Aluta Continua!

We were sad to leave Sao Paulo; we met some really inspiring people who do lots of great work and conducted some really good interviews there. We also got to know and love the city even though it’s way too big for us.

That said, we were also excited about who we would meet next. A friend in Sao Paulo had told us that we should stop over in Curitiba on our way to Porto Alegre to visit ‘Anarcho’, an Italian restaurant/wine shop that keeps alive the memory of Colonia Cecilia, an anarchist free love commune! Founded by Italian anarchist immigrants in around 1890, Cecilia lasted about five years before succumbing to numerous pressures from within and without. The remnants of the colony are located about 50kms outside of Curitiba, but the space belongs to a private owner with little time for history or politics, making it difficult to visit.

At first we were a bit wary of the contradiction Anarco represented – after all, it’s primarily a commercial endeavour marketed through its association with anarchism. However, as soon as we met Ilsa, the owner, we changed our minds. She’s the granddaughter of two of the original Cecilia inhabitants and it seems as though she retains some of the revolutionary spirit in her genes.

There are two shops: a small one in which you can buy lots of wine and some chocolates, and another one block down the road, that sells everything from clothes (including ‘Anarco sports’ male underwear!) to kitchen utensils and is full of pictures and newspaper articles related to Cecilia, making it a kind of museum.

Our interview with Ilsa was short but good; when we asked her whether anyone involved in the shop still holds anarchist views, she answered, “I think everyone should be an anarchist”.

Contradictions or not, we feel the stop-over in Curitiba was worth it and we might well include a brief insert on Anarco in the film, even if just for levity-sake.

The next day we left for Porto Alegre, where we stayed with friends at the vibrant Black Mill cultural center (http://moinhonegro.blogspot.com), a brand new space in the gay district of Porto Alegre. The Mill was inaugurated just two weeks before we arrived, with the successful – and the first – Porto Alegre Anarchist Bookfair. We got to interview Vicente, one of the guys behind the center. Vicente was also a generous host and translator and gave up a lot of time to show us around and introduce us to other anarchists.

Porto Alegre seemed like a great hive of activity, with many different kinds of anarchists putting aside their minor ideological differences and getting on with it. While we were there we attended the 15^th anniversary meeting of the FAG (Federación Anarquista Gaúcha – http://www.vermelhoenegro.co.cc/), an especifist group, and interviewed Bruno, one of their long-time members.

We also met and interviewed Aline, a smart and friendly anarcha-feminist who, along with her partner Igor, works with a small but dynamic anarcha-feminist collective.

One of the most inspirational things we discovered in Porto Alegre was the Deriva publishing collective (aka “Editoria Deriva” – http://www.deriva.com.br/) – Deriva translate and publish a wide range of anarchist literature in Portuguese, including the classics bolo ‘bolo and Days of War Nights of Love and seminal works by Bey, Zerzan and more. More importantly, they produce beautiful, professional looking editions of these books (approximately 20 titles in five years) using a small home setup consisting of just a PC, a laser printer, a guillotine and a glue machine! We were able to film the (five minute) process of producing a book – from beginning to end – and hope to share it with you all soon :-)

All in all, we conducted four interviews in Porto Alegre, which means 13 interviews in Brazil!

Next stop, Montevideo, Uruguay, primarily to meet the FAU (Federación Anarquista Uruguaya - http://www.nodo50.org/fau/) , the organisation that came up with the Especifismo model of anarchist organisation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especifismo) a few decades ago.

A couple of hours after completing our slightly harrowing high-speed overnight bus ride, we headed over to the FAU headquarters, easily visible via both the big “Federación Anarquista Uruguaya” sign outside and the FAU-run “Aragon” collective printing workshop next door, where they print their newspaper as well as lots of other Leftie material. A big and busy space!

While waiting for the FAU to decide who we should speak to from their organisation, we interviewed Dremko from Ateneo Herbert Nieto, a loose group of non-aligned anarchists who all seemed very sweet despite the language barrier. Luckily our good friend Jonathan from South Africa was there to translate for us. AHN publish a really stunning magazine on a wide range of anarchist subject matter – we wish we could read more of the content in the pile of back issues they generously gave to us.

We ended up interviewing three members of the FAU, including 75-year old Juan Carlos Mechoso, one of their founding members (they’ve been around for over 50 years!) who has written several books on their nuanced history. Juan Carlos relayed a sprawling history of the anarchist struggle of the FAU in the last few decades, the sometimes surprisingly prominent history of anarchism in Uruguay and its surrounding countries and the history of anarchism in general. We were inspired by his breadth and depth of knowledge, as well as his infectious sense of humour and his generosity – not many near-octogenarians in the country with the largest per-capita meat consumption on the planet would have prepared a full vegan lunch for us fussy young anarchists :-)

…which brings us up to the present; we’re writing this blog on our second day in Buenos Aires from our room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Bauen, a worker-run hotel in the centre of Buenos Aires that (as far as we remember) was featured in the Naomi Klein film ‘The Take’. The hotel originally closed its doors during the economic crisis of 2001, leaving the former workers unemployed. A short while later, these same workers decided to take over the hotel and run it themselves. Today it serves as a successful and durable model of a recuperated business. While it’s not in any sense anarchist, all the workers (from management to cleaners) get the same income and participate (to at least some degree) in the decision-making process.

We spent the afternoon with Marie Trigona (http://mujereslibres.blogspot.com), a film maker, radio producer and journalist reporting on the factory recuperations and on social movements in Argentina. Marie took us on a whirlwind tour of Bauen and a couple of other spaces and explained the ins and outs of the recuperations to us in great detail, as well as sharing some great insights into what’s happened in the country since the 2001 collapse. We also met with Fabian, an anarchist working at a federation of co-ops with offices on the 4^th floor of the hotel. Marie and Fabian are part of a video collective: http://www.agoratv.org/

In the next few days, we are planning on interviewing members of groups as diverse as Red Libertaria de Buenos Aires http://www.redlibertaria.com.ar/), Federación Libertária Argentina and Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (http://fora-ait.com.ar/blog/). We will also hopefully interview the famous historian of anarchism, Osvaldo Bayer.

We’ll keep you posted!

Steffi and Aragon

Yesterday we attended a meeting at an “occupation”, a term for an inner-city squat which is occupied by homeless people.

Today we filmed Jose Carlos Morel, who has been an anarchist for 41 years, in his little house that is packed with interesting books, including some beautiful old anarchist publications. It was a very inspiring interview and we can’t wait to share it :-)

After the interview we went with other anarchists to an educational workshop with the MST (http://www.mst.org.br/mst/home.php), the landless movement which is also the largest social movement in the world, at least so we were told.

We interviewed long-time anarchist Josimas from Espaço Improprio, Felipe (of Federação Anarquista de São Paulo) at Espaço Ay Carmela! (which is also home to a local Indymedia collective) and are currently staying at the lovely Casa da Lagartixa Preta. Lagartixa Preta (which roughly translates as House of the Black Gecko) hosts various events and is home to an anarchist library and a thriving permaculture garden – we hope to interview some members of the dynamic young group Ativismo ABC in the lush tranquility of the garden sometime tomorrow :-)

Just as exciting as all this, however, was the awesome ice-cream parlour we found, which had about ten different types of vegan ice-creams. Yesterday´s lunch at Lotus – a Chinese buffet restaurant with tons of vegan options – was also well worth the mission.

We´re staying at Lagartixa Preta until Tuesday, then it´s off to Rio de Janeiro. We´ll post some pictures soon!

São Paulo is a vast and vibrant city and we’ve already spotted enough anarchist posters and graffiti during our short walk today to feel confident that there are many interesting groups and individuals to talk to. We’ll upload some clips of interviews if we’re able to.

PS: As vegans we were also delighted to discover that vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants are plentiful; the ones we’ve tried so far – Vegethus and Vegacy - each serve a range of delicious, well-priced meals (that said, we certainly won’t be eating at restaurants often – we’ve already accepted a number of kind offers from fellow anarchists for home made food and accommodation).