Disobbedienti (2002)

The Disobbedienti emerged from the Tute Bianche during the demonstrations against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001. The "Tute Bianche" were the white-clad Italian activists who used their bodies - protected by foam rubber, tires, helmets, gas masks, and homemade shields - in direct acts and demonstrations as weapons of civil disobedience. The Tute Bianche first appeared in Italy in 1994 in the midst of a social setting in which the "mass laborer," who had played a central role in the 1970s in production and in labor struggles, was gradually replaced in the transition to precarious post-Fordist means of production. By forcing the closing of detention camps through specially developed acts of dismantling the Tute Bianche became involved in protests against precarious working conditions and the immigrants' struggle for freedom of movement. The Tute Bianche were part of the demonstration against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and the IMF in Prague in 2000. They sent delegates to the Lakandon rain-forest in Chiapas and accompanied the Zapatist Comandantes 3,000 kilometers to Mexico City.