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What is a Whirl-Mart?
The action is comprised of a group of anti-shoppers ranging in size from 1 to 50 members. The ritual consists of activists/actors arriving at a Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us or another chain superstore at 12-noon on the first Saturday or Sunday of the month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the store for about an hour. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology.
'Whirl-Mart' is an experiment that can be approached from several different angles. As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle. As a ceremony, it is a counter-ritual to shopping that transforms the super-store and its wall-to-wall array of products into a surreal and colorful cathedral. And what the heck-- it's just darned fun!
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coincidence. It's a movement ... of bicycles, in the streets. Rev Billy's Church of Stop Shopping Lots of great scripts from/for performance interventions
with a heavy focus on Starbucks. Commerce
Jamming Commerce Jamming source page. AdBusters A global network of those who want to advance the new social
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its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting
the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
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PLUS the News Dissector's Weblog. CorpWatch.org counters corporate-led globalization through education,
network-building and activism.
1.We admitted we had been overpowered by the spectacle-- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.Came to believe that only by empowering ourselves could we restore ourselves to sanity.
3.Made a decision to reclaim our will and our lives from the spectacle as we understand it.
4.Made a searching and fearless personal and social inventory of ourselves.
5.Admitted to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our subjugation.
6.Were entirely ready to get off our asses and subvert.
7.Humbly asked others for mutual aid in our struggle against the spectacle.
8.Made a list of all accomodations we had made to the dominant culture,
and became willing to strive to create better ways to organize our
lives.
9.Made direct action to subvert the spectacle wherever possible, except when to do so would injure ourselves or others.
10.Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11.Sought through meditation, agitation, relaxation, masturbation,
gyration, demonstrations, defacement, parody, subversion and satire, to
improve our conscious contact with the world around us as we understand
it, preying only on the spectacle, and not on it's individual slaves.
12.Having had a personal and social awakening as the result of those
steps we tried to carry this message to other poor suckers (of whom
there is one born every minute), and to practice these principles in
all our affairs.
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