Venezuelan law allows for an entity called the consejo communal (communal council), which empowers citizens to initiate local development projects through neighbourhood-based elected councils. Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler’s film, Comuna under construction (2010), begins with the story of a poor hillside community in Caracas as its inhabitants decide whether they want to organize a consejo communal.

In more than 30.000 Consejos Comunales the Venezuelan inhabitants decide on their concerns collectively via assemblies. Several Consejos Comunales can form a Comuna and finally a communal town.
The film “Comuna Under Construction” follows these developments throughout the hillside of the shantytowns of Caracas and the vast and wet plains of Barinas in the countryside.

Is it even possible to bring together state and autonomy?

A Film by Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler

Kefya! Ya Basta! Enough!

Words shouted by millions against an untenable situation. Simultaneously proposing "Democracia Real Ya! We are the 99!"

Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin address the common forms and practices of the "new" movements and their collective journey for radical social change beyond capitalism.

Sponsored by the New College of Florida Sociology Dept.

We have organized a Congress here. Why? What reason can there be for artists, the freest, most independent people in society; people who live like "the lily of the field", to come together, organize themselves, and undertake theoretical discussions?> -Asger Jorn (1956)

"The purpose of this chapter is to explore practices in the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela linked to the idea of a transition to socialism through the construction of communal production and consumption cycles controlled by workers and communities. The envisioned transition combines local self-administrat on and workers’ control of the means of production. The present work concentrates mainly on the experiences of local self-administration.

In this episode of Forms of Life, host Nato Thompson speaks with documentary filmmaker, writer and political scientist Dario Azzellini about community organizing and social movements.

Wednesday June 19th, 2013, 17:30 -20:00, FACT Liverpool

Comuna under construction, 2010, 96 min., Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, showed in the frame of

PILAS (Postgraduates in Latin American Studies) Conference 2013

RC21 CONFERENCE 2013 - Resourceful cities - 29-31 August 2013

The book Occupying Language is an open conversation. Through it, we invite you to join us to explore insurgent movements that have been organizing in Latin America over the past twenty years, and to connect key concepts and language from those struggles with what is new and beautiful in the social relations being created by people’s movements in the United States today. There are of course many similarities with preceding forms of organization and mobilization, especially with the movement for global justice of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Professional preview: May 23, 2013

President Hugo Chávez was larger than life, stirring hope and controversy while helping to change the political trajectory of Venezuela and Latin America. His death raises pressing and difficult questions: what will become of his political project at home? What are the prospects for regional integration in his wake? How will the United States respond to a post-Chávez landscape?

Listen to the audio of the panelists answering these questions and discussing other topics related to the Venezuelan transition at the roundtable discussion that took place at NYU on March 13.

Why organize on a higher level? How to avoid or reduce informal power structures? Who is organizing? What structure is helpful in order to organize beyond certain social strata and age? What have been successes and failures in the organizing process?

Marcus Graetsch and Dario Azzellini have been long time activists in Berlin. They will share their experiences of organization and coordination as local group (FelS, about 80 activists) and as a nation wide coordination structure (the IL with some 800 activists).