Our blog is mostly in german. Sometimes the different pages to the projects are in german and english. Just to be on the safe side: here is a brief english description. If you have questions please contact us via dringlichkeit (at) systemausfall (dot) org or through other channels as described in „Kontakt“. We also speak french, portuguese and spanish. Here is a brief english description:
The indignation over the acceptance of the „Ausschaffungsinitiative“ (deportation initiative), a SVP-initiative whose billboard campain we percieved as openly xenophobic, lead us to initiate the „Aktion 28. November“ a spontaneous festival against xenophobia in Switzerland, which took place at the Theater der Künste a few days after the vote. Anyone could contribute a short performance or video and afterwards there was a long discussion. The discussion articulated the need to establish a platform where urgent political issues can be publicly addressed. As a result the collective NEUE DRINGLICHKEIT (new urgency) emerged.
One day later we started the blog of the collective http://www.nD-blog.org which has turned into a diverse platform for planing and documentation of the collective‘s activities and a pool for information about related artistic activism and urgent political issues, which now has several sub-blog‘s and over 400 articles and videos.
Together we developed and realized several projects on the border between art and activism: we sang anti-racist christmas songs as invisible choirs in the trams of Zurich, sent disposable cameras to young Egyptians and in performances and exhibitions shared their view on the country after the revolution (http://kameradirecta.org). As the Occupy Movement reached Switzerland, we organized the festival Globus:Besetzt (http://globusbesetzt.wordpress.com/) and together with the Cabaret Voltaire started the „AktionsAdventsKalender“ a plattform for public performances which was used by the Occupy movement to address their issues. A galery of videos revolving around the question „What is the system and how can we fuck it?“ emerged from an online-shortfilm-contest (http://fuckfuckfuckdotorg.wordpress.com/). Our last big project was the curation of the Südbühne of Gessnerallee Zürich, where we – in the festival „let’s talk about money, honey!“ (money-honey.org) – discussed how money affects us, why we use it, what it is etc.
(nD) 