Franco ‘Bifo” Berardi

“Berlusconi and the obsession with modernity in contemporary Italian
politics”

Thursday, March 26th at 7:00 pm
Staircase Café Theatre – Bright Room
27 Dundurn Street North (Dundurn at King St.) / Hamilton

Free – All Welcome

Franco Berardi is an italian philosopher, political activist, writer,
and media theorist, who is currently Professor of Social History of
Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan. He has been
known as “Bifo” since he began to sign his abstract paintings at school
with the name.

Bifo was a member of the Italian group Potere operaio (Worker Power).
After Potere operaio broke up into a number of groups between 1973 and
1974, Bifo was a part of this autonomist movement’s more “cultural”
wing, which experimented with media and cultural production. In 1976,
he was one the founders of Radio Alice in Bologna, the first Italian
pirate radio station, which chronicled the insurrectional events of
1977 in the city and was shut down by the authorities. Between 1976 and
1981, Berardi was also one of the editors of the magazine “A/traverse,”
which became the paper of the Bologna creative movement. For Bifo and
other activists of “Creative Autonomia,” the use of media enabled the
constitution of a zone of linguistic self-organisation in alliance with
other areas of auto-organisation, such as the factory or the
University, and especially with non-institutional zones of
experimentation with ways of life.

As a result of the repression of the autonomist movement in Italy in
the late seventies, Bifo fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix
Guattari. During this time he wrote for the Chimeres journal in Paris,
the Semiotext[e] journal in New York, and the Musica 80 journal in
Milan.

Since the 1990’s Bifo has focused on the changing nature of capitalism
and its use of communication technology and culture within a new regime
of production. In 2009, two of his books will be published in English:
Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2009)
and Precarious Rhapsody: Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the
Post-Alpha Generation (forthcoming).

For more information and writings by the author, including his recent
Post-Futurist Manifesto, visit
http://www.generation-online.org/p/pbifo.htm.