[Note: The bulk of this was originally posted on indymedia in July.]

What is Re:Activism?

It’s a game/tactic/model of public engagement, interaction, and spectacle that seeks to both educate the public about the histories of local struggles and empower participants. It was developed by folks in NYC and has been staged, in context-specific formulations, in multiple places both in the states and in Europe.

A few of us who organized before, during, and after the RNC are bringing a smaller version of it to the Twin Cities … now we need you to play!

Check out a link to the original game here. In a nutshell, as one person who worked on a previous incarnation has written, the game

revisited locations of historic protests and taught game participants about the events and related social causes. In order to progress through the game, the participants raised awareness of protest events by creating present day interventions and public interactions. Teams of game-players raced from location to location to complete challenges and use activist tactics to increase their score. The teams also used mobile phones to send and receive text messages as they progressed through the game and completed challenges.

The game was built around a participatory model that provided a structure through which spontaneous or directed interactions could occur in the public realm.

We’re excited about bringing it here, and think it’s a good fit for the Twin Cities, for several reasons:

1. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the RNC, it offers an interesting – and hopefully fun and empowering – way to commemorate the events of last September before they’re shunted down the collective memory hole;

2. The focus on text-messaging and, perhaps, other emerging technologies that played such a primary role during the RNC can be metaphorically invoked in the way the game is played;

3. By placing the RNC and its attendant repression within the context of historical – and ongoing – local struggles, we can create for ourselves an opportunity to draw important parallels and bring these to the front of public discourse. We’d argue that for many, if not most, RNC activists, the point has always been that state oppression is the norm, that police brutality is systemic, that the sanctioned violence experienced by activists on the streets last September was simply a microcosm of the daily violence experienced by diverse communities every single day, and so on: Re:Activism, in whatever form we collectively shape it, contains within it a way to make these connections between struggles explicit, a way for us to learn about each other and further strengthen our solidarity; and

4. It’s probably a good excuse to bike around town, make noise, and generally disrupt business-as-usual, in a particularly theatrical fashion.

So, if you’re interested in playing, keep yr eyes on this page for details over the next week.

And we still need all kinds of help getting it off the ground, so if you’re one of those organiz-y types, hit us up: reactivismtwincities@gmail.com

We want a bunch of voices, a bunch of perspectives, and anyone interested in the history of radical struggle in Minnesota to be involved!