Poverty is Being Stolen

by Diego Chamy, Farzad Farkhooi & Vered Nethe

"Poverty is Being Stolen" is an intervention we made during the festival/conference "Audio Poverty" at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin. We enter the main hall of the theater and we gave away some flyers that criticized some aspects of this conference. You can read the flyer following this link: Poverty is Being Stolen

What happened?

The 8th of February 2009, while we were giving away the flyers at the main hall, and quite peacefully, we have been kicked out from the place by security, in a decision that was allegedly taken by the organizers. These are some things that we want to point out:

- We're still perplexed about the fact that we were kicked out of what is supposed to be the "Haus der Kulturen der Welt" (The House of the Cultures of the World).

- We've heard that the organizers denied have given the order to security to kick us out. This is difficult for us to believe, because we met at least three people of the organization when we were still giving flyers away after being thrown out, at the door of the place. Maybe these people thought that we were freezing out there just for fun...

- Some people (mostly close to the organizers) wanted to argue with us about what was written in the flyer, completely misunderstanding the purpose of it: the text attempted to work as a literary device and not as a statement about which it makes sense to argue with.

- The people who kicked us out made it clear to us that "to give away flyers is allowed, but not this flyer". They also said that they allow us to give away the flyers in the street... Since when we need their permission to do so?

- We want to thank to all the people who wrote to us supporting our action and expressed solidarity with us about this situation.

Press:

TAZ magazine has mentioned our intervention in an article about the conference.

On Monday 16th of Februrary, the situation is explained in Radio On.

The magazine Positionen said it will mention the incident in the issue of May (we hope the article won't be written by the organizers of the conference, which are part of the staff of this magazine...)