Squat Didot (1994) - Archive N°4

Anarchy is a business to sell low-fi t-shirts to well-born losers who will enter the class fold without ever having left it, and who will turn this period of their lives into a source of bravado, explaining in turn to the younger ones that this path – which they never took – is a false one. What can be done with them? Nothing can be done with them. At least if we keep the idea of the emancipation of man by man in our hearts, and if, despite the disgust that this world inspires in us, we keep the flame, the embers of hope. These images of the Didot Squat, taken in 1994, are as good an illustration as any. The punk movement in its first rise is New York and before 1976; in England, it is immediately a fashion product; in France, it is the prerogative of modern young people who frequent the Palace and return to the golden fold at dawn. It is already 15 years later in these photos and France, avant-garde for its elites and eternally backward for the rest, is in the middle of the Alternative wave. It is appropriate here to define this movement, and by the same token all the aversion that a revolutionary can have to this cancer of the being. For it is common to hear this word confused with the underground, with which it has nothing in common. When one is part of a process of effective construction within a framework that it contests and intends to destroy with its entrails, the other is just a proposal to consume differently, draped in the stolen clothes of sincerity. Look at them, these funereal clowns, as macabre scarecrows, repulsors of healthy people. It’s all there: drug addiction, fascination with weapons, claimed alcoholism… what has become of the lost people who have fallen into their clutches?