The anarchist collective Mayakov+sky Platform’s (MA.P) main project, since its establishment in 2011, has been the construction of a new methodology in philosophy, economics and poetics called Amphoterics through a series of collaborative Amphoteric Poems. The word Amphoteric derives from the Greek word “αμφότερος”, which translates as “both.” These poems are poly-dimensional compositions informed by various fields of thought and praxis such as critical theory, gestalt psychology, philosophy, landscape architecture, color theory, semiotics, mathematics, urbanism, cinema, political economy, photography, cartography, poetry, and music. In his magnum opus The Imaginary Institution of Society, Greek philosopher and revolutionary Cornelius Castoriadis writes (introducing a first glance of an Amphoteric, that he calls amphi-signified):
“The development of the means of production, as well as the advancement of human behaviors in a capitalist society, generate values that are not simple, not even simply contradictory in the traditional dialectical sense, namely the improvement of the object thru a collision of opposites – values that we shall name, in lack of another term, amphi-signified. Amphi-signified as we define it here, is not the nondescript, indefinite or the “whatever.” These values and meanings are such, as a result of a synthesis of meanings that demand specificity without any of them outweighing the other, momentarily.”
Amphoterics is a theory that endeavors to be a transfiguration of Dialectics. Pushing forward. Dialectics, the Platform posits, is a good analogy to entropy in physics, namely, it can be constructively utilized/found in specific closed systems but not in the broad totalizing way it has been implemented thus far. Entropy is a type of order, not disorder, but a marriage of uncoordinated orders. The vital contemporary question, to be answered, is not “What needs to be done?” but the less abstract “What orders do we need to fight against?”. We have reached a historic moment where this tool of thought and analysis called Dialectics tends to reach multiple socio-political and economic impasses. What Manfredo Tafuri would call idealization(s) of contradiction(s). Dialectics become, unintentionally, an apologist of capital because their theoreticians and practitioners keep justifying the circular attributes of capitalist economy and politics and their apparatuses vis-à-vis their antagonists as a linear cause and effect by idealizing (negative) dialectics that will somehow be enough to produce struggle, in perpetuum.
An analogous idea with the notion of the Amphoteric we find in science -in quantum mechanics- in the phenomenon known as superposition in which an atom can exist in two states/locations at once or in chemistry when a molecule can act both as an acid and as a base. According to these poems, an Amphoteric occurs when multitudes of attributes/states (not necessarily antithetical) exist in a specified idea. In other words, some of these poems are intended to be read as an amalgamation of multiple and evolving gestalts. An Amphoteric Poem, depending on its form and content, can be read simultaneously, for example, as a montage guide, a cartographic representation of the history of epistemology, a sound poem, a graphic score, an architectural representation of a village (as a network), a depiction of the geometrical orders of a molecule, a communal garden, a circuit, an engine.
The following collective films epitomize the extensions and postulations of a dialogical thesis towards Amphoterics with the superimposition of:
a) architecture, science and modernity (Glaukopis against Weltschmerz and Ersatz)
b) decolonisation and soul (LOS 33 Y ELLA)
c) mutual aid and the battle against late capitalism and its polis (Oakland Commune, THE CHILDREN REVOLTS)
d) global solidarity/insurrection and daily life during this COVID-19 era (OVID-20)
The ideas and the multiplicity of revolutionary poetics they enable are meant to be a guide for a non-linear documentation of radical change, an examination of the processes of anarchist/amphoteric praxis and language. Applied synthetic poetics for revolution against the order(s) of state and capital.
The methodology and a more extended apocrystalizing of the anarcho-analytical poetics of Amphoterics can be found in the MA.P epic anarchist manifesto entitled LIPOS-POLIS, published by Demosthenes Agrafiotis’ international Crisiology Project (available here).
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LOS 33 Y ELLA (2022)
LOS 33 Y ELLA is a decolonizing, experimental documentary, with visual/concrete poetry subtitles, in the tradition of el teatro campesino, theater of the absurd, commedia dell’ arte and rasquache aesthetics, inspired by the incident with the 33 miners in Chile, written and performed collectively in the languages Nawat (Pipil), Quechua and Spanish.
Synopsis: A group of workers, proletarians and indigenous poets, all men, is trapped underground, facing certain death. Only she can save them. Only she will save them. She, has many names. Light. Logic. Parents. Hubris. Arete. Revolution. Woman.
Available on Vimeo here and on Youtube here.
THE CHILDREN REVOLTS (2013)
A poetic experimental documentary that chronicles the occupation – that the Platform was part of – of a building and its back yard, which was once a free school for Black and Brown youth called Emiliano Zapata Street Academy High School. It foregrounds the struggles for free public education in Oakland through the lens of this autonomous space and its remarkable architectural metamorphosis into a 24-hour library and community garden that we lovingly named Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez as a homage to the Chicano poet.
More info on the occupation can be found here.
The film is available on Vimeo here and Youtube here.
OVID-20 (2020)
OVID-20 is a call for action, a collaboration with Japanese poet Kohei Masuda, a cinepamphlet poem of the ID(s) and id of contemporary society struck by COVID-19 but also of the broader struggle against the state and capital and their apparatuses. Language as positive virus, memory and weapon for emancipation and autonomy.
It was commissioned by Small Press Traffic as part of a collection of cinepoetry films, which can be viewed here. The film is dedicated to Ibrahim Gökçek and Helin Bölek of revolutionary band Grup Yorum and in solidarity with the rest of the members and their uncompromising continuous fight against the repression of the Turkish State. Both Ibrahim Gökçek and Helin Bölek died after a hunger strike that lasted almost a year.
The film is available on Vimeo here and Youtube here.
Glaukopis against Weltschmerz and Ersatz (2017)
Still from Glaukopis against Weltschmerz and Ersatz
The architectural film, a collaboration with performance electronica group Raspberry Fields, is constructed as a negentropic equation with 4 variables, a cinesymphony in 4 movements:
1. Animation – stages of the design of a communal garden. The architectural design was first presented at the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture.2. An investigation of color and its use in urban planning. 35mm photography.3. Permutations of gender in cinema under Capital. How is the couple form aestheticized under Capital? 16mm found footage montage.4. The emergence of Surrogate/Amphoteric Value in urbanism and in Late Capitalism, and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Oakland Commune (2012)
The only revolutionary film of the legendary Battle of Oak Street and J28 MOVE IN DAY, documenting the Oakland Commune offensive/initiative to occupy the Kaiser Center Auditorium, from the vantage point of the militants and the movement (as opposed to the “activist” documentarians who filmed footage from the safe vantage point of the sidelines). A collaboration with avant-garde jazz band Noertker’s Moxie.
The film is available to view on Vimeo here and Youtube here.
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We wish to extend our gratitude to the Mayakov+sky Platform for taking the time to introduce the collective’s political and aesthetic commitments and for putting together this thought-provoking playlist.
Mayakov+sky Platform is an anarchist/autonomist collective working in the fields/poetics of filmmaking/photography, architectural design and music. The Platform has performed as a duo or trio in the Bay Area and abroad and in the fall of 2019 it performed, first time as a jazz quartet at the conference Unit Structures: The Art of Cecil Taylor that was organized by The Graduate Center and the Hitchcock Institute for the Study of American Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. In 2023, Mayakov+sky Platform performed at the LAB in San Francisco with Sholeh Asgary and other musicians and also screened its 3 hour cinepic videopoem for Asgary’s MAJLES project.
MA.P films have been screened at the Emma Goldman Anarchist Film Festival (NYC Anarchist Book Fair), Festival De Films Anarchistes (Projections Insurgées) in Montreal, FOTOGENIA Cinepoetry Festival in Mexico City, the Radical Film Network’s unconference in Genoa, Italy, and various anarchist spaces in Greece and the Bay Area.
Architectural designs, poetries and photo essays from the Platform have been published in journals The Reservoir, Tripwire, textsound.org, Armed Cell, in Demosthenes Agrafiotis’ international Crisiology project and the publication “#This Is A Co-op” of the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2023, Mayakov+sky Platform launched Marusya Press, an architecture/design studio, as part of its MA.P rubric where they publish books, pamphlets, posters and designs of radical architecture, mutual aid and poetry.