Particular Collective Faces: New Clandestine, Playful and Direct Comm...

The paper explores new communication practices that began to emerge throughout Europe with the student movement of 1968 – with connections in the US and Latin America. These communication practices materialised in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the form of hundreds of new magazine and journal publications, newly founded publishers and independent radio stations, and around a transformed urban events culture, but also in the form of a new way of gaining public presence, as explored by film-makers, by artists and by art collectives such as the Living Theatre. The paper focuses especially on collective faces coined through these practices, which indicate a transformed “transversal” and sometimes even “neo-Dada” way of addressing the audience, highlighting otherness as well as the marginal and the particular. Finally, the iconography of such collective faces between 1968 and today and the involvement of these practices in generating a globalised politics of difference – “cultural” in a new way – is investigated.