I stumbled upon this on the back of a door at Victoria University the other day, one of the original stickers from the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum back in 2000.

With all that’s happened in the last nine years, the S11 protest seems, in retrospect, entirely fantastical. Not just the huge numbers that attended (though that too is a source of wonder) but the optimism that permeated the whole event, a sentiment encapsulated in the slogan ‘Another world is possible’. Compare with the zeitgeist of today, manifested most depressingly at the shenanigans at Copenhagen where, with the fate of the planet very possibly hanging in the balance, the statesman’s art consists of manufacturing bogus enthusiasm for various permutations of the status quo.

The explosion of creativity that accompanied S11 has now been largely forgotten. The regular film screenings; the photo exhibitions; the new journals and publications; the various political groupings that, for a while, held huge meetings every week: the memory of all it has been effaced. Yet it all happened, and not so very long ago.