To mark the closing of The Broken Pitcher Forum and exhibition, two publication launches unfold through activations that bring together a newly released publication, film, sound, and performance. The book centers grassroots struggle, urban transformation, and collective agency, engaging questions of gentrification, neo-colonial planning and bureaucratic infrastructures in the suburbs of Paris. Accompanied by a film screening and a conversation, the authors and interlocutors share insights into their movement. Afterwards, the Amsterdam record release of The Broken Pitcher: A Soundbank by Cyprus-based record label MONEDA will be accompanied by a listening performance that fabulates documentary and sonic practices around embodied labour as tools for witnessing, organising, and reimagining forms of presence and resonance.

LE GALION EN MODE RÉVOLUTION: A Story of Media and Territorial Resistance Against the Erasure of the Banlieues is a publication edited by the artist and filmmaker Erika Roux, and published by Building Fictions, which centers on a pivotal struggle led by the grassroot organisation La Révolution est en Marche (LREEM) between 2017 and 2019 to preserve the Galion, a significant community building in Aulnay-sous-Bois in the Parisian banlieue. Drawing on cellphone footage shared by LREEM, the publication retells the collective’s struggle while critically engaging with issues of gentrification, the neo-colonial dimensions of urban planning in France, and LREEM’s efforts to reclaim agency over their territory and representation through social media.

The publication represents the continuation of a long term collaboration between Erika and LREEM. In her video Aujourd’hui, on est là (2021) which will be screened in combination with the book launch, Roux accompanies the group to rallies, protests, meetings, and assemblies as they sought to transform what began as a Facebook page into a broad-based social movement.

The Broken Pitcher: A Soundbank is a sound-performance, during which the artwork of the release was created by replicating the repetitive and mundane “corporate-fordist” labour that sits at the basis of financial capital. By repeating actions like stamping and signing, bureaucracy, legal frameworks and infrastructures emerge as the semiotic abstractions that bind material bodies and lives.

This third (and final) iteration of the performance arrives well into a two-year hiatus. This performance will feature Emiddio Vasquez, the label’s founder and fictional bank CEO, in a sonic material exploration of the instruments used at every office desktop. The sound experiments presented in the performance will complement the digital soundbank of the vinyl release.