The FC⚡MC is the Media center for critical minds and committed hearts during the G20 summit in Hamburg. From Tuesday, 4 July to Sunday, 9 July you find all the information about the FC⚡MC here. This site will provide access to live streams, press conferences, information about the protests and an archive of produced audio and/or video magazines, interviews and essays.
The FC⚡MC is a collective initiative that emerged from different networks of people. The concept of the Media Center is to offer bloggers and twitterers, editorial collectives and staff, video activists, free radios, precarious media workers and established journalists a media production space that is much cooler than the official G20 Media Center. With this, the FC⚡MC facilitates a change in the media coverage during the G20 summit in Hamburg.
The FC⚡MC is located in the FC St. Pauli stadium. It provides areas for media production and organizes opportunities for interviews with experts and activists from and about the G20 countries. The Media Center offers spacious social corners to discuss and exchange information about the G20 summit and the protests against it. It will produce a constant flow of deviant, critical, distributing news via social media, press conferences and video streams.
The FC⚡MC understands itself as a material-semiotic device to reclaim journalism for social justice and to free it from the suffocating embrace of states, corporate PR and commercial interests. As such, the FC⚡MC is a meta-medium to re-invent critical media, news and reporting.
In the current confusion of meanings and perceptions, the FC⚡MC uses the open cracks that these confusions produce to provide and reject one single meaning of its name. While the MC in FC⚡MC unambiguously means MEDIA CENTER, the FC part will change its meaning depending on a multitude of influences, such as the developments during the G20 summit, or the quality of the coffee served in the Media Center.
Thus, FC might mean Free Critical, For Context, Free Communication, Future Commons, Fruitful Collaborations, Friends of Criticism, Finalize Capitalism, Flowing Capacities, Freedom Care, Flowing Communism, or even Fight Creationism. But remember: these are just suggestions from the outside. The FC⚡MC itself, in its autonomy and autology, might choose different ones.
From the seats of the FC St. Pauli stadium you can partake in its press conferences, from inside the castle you can produce media items and distribute them globally via the networking and streaming capacities that the FC⚡MC provides. But beyond technicalities, the FC⚡MC is about a change of perception. This is why it can be understood as a call for the production of views that go beyond the G20 problem and to instigate broadcast discussions about the worlds we live in, the worlds we want to live in and how to get there.
In sum, the FC⚡MC contains social spaces to work together, to get to know colleagues and to exchange latest information about on-going demonstrations and protests. It will offer space for around one thousand media workers, artists and performers. In addition, correctly sourced coffee and superior food will be served for reasonable prices. The FC⚡MC is free of charge. No fees have to be paid to join. It might accept donations, depending on their origins.
Be part of it! Re-invent critical journalism in times of affective populism! The FC⚡MC is the shared common device to accomplish this!
The FC⚡MC opens its doors on the evening of 4 July and will not close until 9 July 2017.
Access to press conferences is open to all press card holders. See our multilingual press releases.
The FC⚡MC Crew