Our Police Raid: The Clandestine Publics Research Group at Fusion Festival 2026

About this set

• Talk
• Others

Two members of our research group threw christmas decorations filled with paint on the wall of a police station. What followed might sound like a bad film: a car versus bike chase, arrests, body searches, incarcerations, police raids, confiscations and court cases. In this lecture performance, we will reconstruct and analyse these real events, using documents that the police had to release, activists’ thought protocols, and objects that were stored by the police for three years until part of the legal processes got settled. “Bureaucrats with guns” (David Graeber) meet queer activists. Together with you, we ask: What the hell happened? And what can we learn from it? The Clandestine Publics Research Group explores situations and practices in which two seemingly contradictory goals are entangled: making things public and keeping things secret. We extract methods from various fields, ranging from everyday situations, artworks and radical activism all the way to surveillance, elite exclusivity, police operations, or fascist communication. We do this to make such methods available in leftist activism, art, anthropology & play, mirroring our differing respective backgrounds and fields of practice.