> M.E.K.A.N. stands for Ministerio Estraneo di Kultura Agro-Nichilista (The Extraneous Ministry of Agro-Nihilist Kulture).
> We announce ourselves as a dispositif for the production of counter-propaganda. By this we mean that the stuff we produce aims to counter the productions of the Spectacle that is, to counter the dominant apparatuses that produce identity, imagination, desires and enjoyment.
> We could argue that humans are creatures of language and meaning and therefore unable to produce unbiased (“objective”) knowledge; that all our statements come out of particular symbolic or interpretative frameworks and obey the rules of truth-production established by a particular group in a specific time and space. And that, as such, all forms of knowledge are actually propaganda. However, we shall carefully avoid scholastic arguments, having discarded such fossilised pleasures some time ago. All that matters is that, for a variety of reasons, we like describing ourselves as propagandists.
> If we make use of certain tools from philosophy, critical analysis, etc. it is not for excreting academic abstractions: everything we produce is directly related to our life practices, social relations and intensities of affect. We write about what we do for the people we are doing it with (or hoping to do it with at some point…)
> Our names are parodies of the titles that authoritarian organisations give themselves – ministry, bureau, directorate etc.- because we find it amusing to weld together our fantasies of horizontality, self-determination, iconoclasm, mutiny and anomie with the ironclad vocabulary of governing, hierarchical order and centralisation. This ugly suture mirrors the hybrid nature of our practices and selves: we long for escape, new forms-of-life and bizarre ecstasies; but are still haunted by the obsessive loops of the bourgeois psyche, puppets made to dance by the strings of narcissism, guilt, submissiveness, idolatry and the desire to subdue the other. It’s inevitable, we’ve all been raised in the dressage institutes of the bourgeois world (family, school, workplace, etc.); but this is no excuse. We assume responsibility for everything we are and do, even when it is not directly our fault; and we deride the staunch resolve of statements like the preceding one through the oxymora of our names.
> We want to unglue our eyes from the soothing screens of the Spectacle. We leave the guardians of order, uniformed and not, to their sad mission of trying to suffocate anything exciting, for they repulse us. We have no sympathy for the loyal followers of the dominant reality for they are pitiful excrescences of the forces of order. We try to eliminate any curiosity for this dominant reality’s offerings. We aim for schism, because we think that only by deserting one can discover exciting new worlds.
> We do not proselytise or educate. We do not aim to change “bourgeois reality”. We only care about our own (counter-) realities, the micro-worlds we are playfully trying to invent. We are talking to our friends and accomplices, the heterogeneous, lawless, godless and without country that erratically criss-cross the murky imperial waters in improvised boats, using weird maps and secret routes, dropping anchor in hidden coves.
> We have no interest in purity, absolute truths or unyielding lines of action: we know we are contaminated, uncertain and anxious.
> Contaminated, sure; but also contaminating. Not with ideas or ideologies, truths or beauty; we hope to contaminate and be contaminated by the anxious desire to start new adventures, to jump off the lit up pavement and start fumbling in the dark and, if needed, why not, with the resolve to defend the territories that we liberate, even if for a moment, from the imperial logic and control.
> And so, to those that we have met or shall meet sometime and to those that we shall never meet, to all that sail in silence, hiding from guards and patrols, ready for the strange events that only navigating without a clear destination can promise, a call: let’s contaminate!