Yomango - leodecerca

CASE STUDY:
Yomango
WHEN
July 2002—present
WHERE
Spain, then global
PRACTITIONERS
Yomango
FURTHER INSIGHT
Yomango
http://yomango.net
Wired, “Shoplifting as Social
Commentary,” August 25, 2005
http://trb.la/yqtQFj
CONTRIBUTED BY
Leónidas Martín Saura
400
On July 5, 2002, a strange new brand began cropping up
in the streets of Barcelona. That day, at the height of sales
season, more than fifty people rushed through the center of
Barcelona to the Bershka clothing store to perform the very
first Yomango fashion show.
The show lived up to its “magical” billing: a simple object
was turned into a symbol of another way of living. To be
more precise, a ten-euro dress was spirited from the store,
later to show up as a work of art at one of the most important
art museums in the city. All the activities of Yomango were
open, public and publicized.
The name “Yomango” and the lifestyle it celebrates refers
to mangar, a Spanish slang term meaning “to shoplift,” particularly from multinational corporations. The concept of
ethical shoplifting had suddenly acquired public visibility.
The Yomango brand is itself a reappropriation, or détournement, of the wildly popular Mango brand see TACTIC:
Détournement/Culture jamming. By adding a pronominal prefix (yo, or “I” in Spanish) to the clothing company’s name,
the modified brand takes on a different meaning entirely:
I swipe. Yomango disrupts the primary goal of the original
brand, turning it into a new direct-action practice based on
the widespread habit of shoplifting.
At first glance, this may seem like a simple surrender to
the greedy logic of capitalism, but nothing could be further
from the truth. As Yomango states on its website, its only
interest in commodities is “to make something new happen
in their midst, to push them to the point of turning them
into something else, something that has nothing to do with
producing a way of life that is dedicated to consumption, but
rather moves toward inventing new possible ways of living.”
Through its actions and its philosophy, but also through
its style and design, Yomango turns the impulse to shoplift
into a movement, a method, an art. For instance, Yomango
introduced designs that were not only cool, but also served
as gear for shoplifting, such as a “ jacket of a thousand pockets,” in which all the many pockets were interconnected.
When an object is surreptitiously placed in the jacket, it simply disappears, only to be discovered again sometime later,
CASE: Yomango
Related:
THEORIES
Ethical spectacle p. 230
Action logic p. 20
The tactics of everyday life p. 268
The commons p. 220
Capitalism p. 216
The Cookie Bag (Yomago Fashion)
perhaps in the safety of your own home.
Thanks to a proliferation of workshops in arts institutions and social organizations in cities around the world,
Yomango’s actions have expanded since the anti-brand
first debuted. The website — built on an open-publishing
framework enabling people to exchange information and
experiences with anyone else captivated by the Yomango
brand — also contributed to its spread. Various Yomango
communities began appearing in different parts of the
CASE: Yomango
401
world: Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Germany, Italy, as well as
other Spanish cities including Madrid and Bilbao.
Though it celebrates individual acts of self-liberation, the
Yomango brand also gestures toward mass political action,
with actions targeting various multinational corporations,
such as the “Yomango-Tango,” in which a crowd of Yomango
dancers in Argentina liberated hundreds of bottles of Champagne from a Carrefour supermarket, and then uncorked
and drank them in a branch of Banco Santander — both entities directly implicated in the Argentinian economic crisis.
These actions have served as brand advertisements as
enticing as the glittering billboards in the heart of the metropolis. In this way, the Yomango brand spreads through
direct-action events and highly diverse avenues of communication: from the alternative media to the official press, from
supermarkets to activist meetings, and from art catalogs to
the Internet. The anti-brand is designed so that any person
or group can reappropriate it in whatever manner he/she/it
chooses, transforming it, plagiarizing it, elaborating on it.
Yomango. You want it? You got it!
WHY IT WORKED
Before Yomango, shoplifting was a clandestine practice.
Yomango’s actions, designs, and advertisements made the
action visible, celebrating it as a way of life. Yomango worked
both on a personal level by offering practical tools to liberate products from the multinationals, and on a collective
level by creating an international community united by collective actions and workshops.
KEY TACTIC
ETHICAL SHOPLIFTING: Yomango celebrates stealing — not from
people, but from large transnational corporations which
show no respect for workers’ rights, the environment, or anything other than their bottom line. In many cases Yomango’s
actions have been supported or directly fostered by employees of these large chains, some of whom have become active
members of Yomango chapters.
Stealing (labor, time, ideas, lives) is what transnationals do.
What Yomango does is ethical shoplifting: returning to the people what the transnationals have stolen.
used
OTHER TACTICS USED:
Détournement/Culture jamming
Distributed action
Direct action
Identity correction
Flash mob
402
p. 28
p. 36
p. 32
p. 60
p. 46
CASE: Yomango
BRAND OR BE BRANDED: Yomango is a brand that appropriates
and undermines other brands. Yomango captures the desires
these brands harness and liberates them from the power of
the market. Like other brands, it promises a lifestyle, except
what Yomango is “selling” costs nothing at all. Yomango is a
brand that exists outside the market.
CREATE LEVELS OF PARTICIPATION: Yomango opens up a broad
and diverse participatory process. All the ideas and tools,
as well as the Yomango brand itself, were created with the
anonymous participation of many people. In this sense, Yomango is what organizers call a “social brand.” By making
its tools freely available, Yomango offers a kind of participation that may be less visible than your average multinational brand, but much more extensive and integrated into
the day-to-day lives of participants.
KEY PRINCIPLE
at work
OTHER PRINCIPLES AT WORK:
Everyone has balls/ovaries of steel p. 136
Know your cultural terrain p. 142
Turn the tables p. 190
Use your radical fringe to slide
the Overton window p. 200
Take risks, but take care p. 182
Enable, don’t command p. 132
Balance art and message p. 100
Make your actions both concrete
and communicative p. 154
MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE: Shoplifting is widespread, but re-
mains largely invisible. Yomango makes shoplifting visible,
transforming a clandestine gesture of non-cooperation with
consumer culture into a brand, a fashion and a lifestyle that
embodies a critique of consumer capitalism.
CASE: Yomango
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